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Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
51–60 of 105 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#52It keeps me informed but it definitely has a few negative qualities. - I seem to spend too much time on it. Obsessively checking it. Reading the comments. I recognize the behavior from when I was frequenting Slashdot back in the day. It definitely has some addictive qualities and I need to force myself to stop reading it so often. - The debate is a lot less fun than Slashdot used to be. I kind of miss the silliness.…
You should see the Blind community. HN is way better, but yes... everything you mention is true.
And law students. HFS.
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#53Yes and no. It can be very counter-productive to engage in difficult discourse, which may interrupt your flow and disturb your productivity for days, knowing that you are incurring a lot of online turmoil for sharing a view counter to mainstream narrative.
But reading HN regularly also can provide daily insight into the workings of an industry that is notoriously obfuscated by all and sundry.
Use it productively: don't spend more than 30 minutes a day on HN, in total, over the course of a day. Open the articles that interest you, participate as you can, and ignore the stuff that isn't relevant. Its a valuable feed.
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#54I still consider HN to have one of the greatest signal/noise ratios out there. It's rare to not find one or two interesting things each day.
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#55I wish HN would hide your karma points because they act as a notification. Whenever they go up I am compelled to click Threads and see why, to get a little dopamine hit from being acknowledged by strangers online.
Other than that HN is miles above any other such website because they KISS.
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#56I'm pretty new here. Less than two months. I've stopped using Facebook so I was looking for some other news outlets that I could use. Now I'm using Twitter, LinkedIn and HN. HN is taking much less of mine time than Facebook. I think that this is due to lack of visual distractions.
Those are pretty awful networks... LinkedIn? There is much to say about that crowd... :) People literally advertising themselves all day long and upvoting politically correct stuff for virtue signalling to their followers. :) I would recommend reddit for real humans, but stay away from the front page. It's awful.
LinkedIn is getting "facebooked" lately but I have a lot of former coworkers there. And since we share a lot of interest I always find some useful content. You are right about self-promotion, "real-life" stories that have nevere happened and other spam content on LinkedIn
I've never tried to stick on reddit... Maybe I should give it a second chance. The pure size of it makes me hard to decide from where to start exploring it.
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#57I think it's great as a link aggregator to stay up to date with what's going on in the world. I don't really follow politics or general news, but if something big enough happens it will be on HN in one way or another, even if it's not related to tech.
As for discussions/comments here, no. There is the occasional comment gem from experts, but it's low quality 99% of the time. There are a few topics I'm an expert in, and whenever a related story appears on HN I check the comments and I can't help but continuously roll my eyes about how uninformed and simplistic they are. Most people have no idea what they're talking about and just repeat what they've heard from someone else or what they believe the popular opinion is. For most topics I'm ignorant enough that I can't tell the difference, but I assume it's the same for those, so it's best to just ignore what people say here.
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#58Almost every sufficiently small unit of time here is a complete waste. However, over a longer timescale I find it useful. I kinda look at it like a webring for discovering points of view I wouldn't otherwise stumble across. And some comments are insightful. My biggest gripes are the endless "rewriting X in Y" stories and the comments from people who are smart in their own field who think that any other field is amena…
> the comments from people who are smart in their own field who think that any other field is amenable to their armchair reasoning.
For me, that's one of the most annoying things about HN. These people would often use a very authoritative tone, so it can be difficult to spot the BS unless you're an expert yourself. Always take everything you read with a grain of salt and remind yourself of Gell-Mann-Amnesia.
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#59yes.
Re: Ask HN: Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?
#60If there is leadership in this world still capable of public debate ill be there to read, perhaps contribute.
Not so much interested in what people say as what it says about them and less interested in individuals than the sum of the parts.