Ask HN: When did you first come across Hacker News?

I was looking at the problem of spam and I came across Paul Graham's essay "A Plan For Spam."

It worked brilliantly - still does now. My email setup is rather esoteric setup because of some unusual requirements, so I do my own spam filtering, and it's still working.

So I went and read some of PG's other essays, and wondered about connections between them. So I did this:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html?HN_20150...

And this:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?H...

Just messing about and I learned a lot, so I emailed PG with the result. He suggested I submit it to HN, and that's when I first heard of it.