Ask HN: How did you discover Hacker News?

I heard about it from a friend while in college.

I'm pretty sure I was trying to figure something out, and searches led me to HN. I certainly don't follow anyone or anything.

Possibly intriguing backlinks from SO to HN.

I was being interviewed by an engineer at Palantir about 3 years ago, and they asked me if I browsed HN. I don't remember exactly how it came up, but it was a rhetorical question aimed at setting up some context.

Wait..you interviewed at Palantir after your freshman year?

I am pretty sure it was a story on Techmeme and an HN discussion was one of the related links and at the time I was getting back in to following tech news and learning how it had changed with ubiquitous broadband. I just treated HN as a news aggregator for what felt like a long time but isn't relative to how long I've been a member.

I didn't really get the weighting of stories over time and finding stories sort of sticking around on page two and three days after rolling off the front page was a bit confusing coming from the Technmeme front page. I think what got me to sign up to make noise was the story about PG crashing the secret what-do-we-do-about-YC dinner for VC's...though it might have been the flatulence simulation iPhone app wars, since it was in days when HN rewarded snark and there were few higher internet pleasures for me than snarking on Apple to piss off its insufferable adorers. In the long run, HN allowed me to find an audience for writing on less lowest-common-denominator topics and pursue more interesting interests than upsetting apple carts.