I came to know about hackernews through one of my colleagues. He was giving a presentation and HN was the first thing that popped up when he switched to his browser. Out of curiosity, I immediately googled it and that was my first introduction to HN.
In searching about an obscure fact concerning languages I found Paul Graham's essay "Beating the Averages"[0] I found it interesting, and started to read some of the other essays. As a quick hack I then drew a diagram of the obvious connections between them[1]. Similarly, I then used a PageRank-style ranking of the essays[2].
I sent the results to Paul Graham, who said I should submit them to HN, of which I'd never heard. I did so, and they pretty much sunk without trace, as do so many of my submissions. Even so, I read some more, and stayed for a while.
My best friend in high school introduced me. We would both read it on the way to school and then discuss our favorite articles from that morning over lunch.
One of my fondest memomries of him was all the days when he would be so excited about something that he’d read that he’d dash up to me and give me a rushed synopsis before class started.
As member of a support group, I was visiting the workshop of Copenhagen Suborbitals sometime in 2010. Had a long and wide-ranging conversation with a fellow rocket enthusiast. Two things he said, I remember very clearly:
The first about a place called Hacker News. Poul Graham, if I knew who that was. Oh yes I did. "Startups and Lisp, startups and lisp, but he's written interesting stuff too". Well, I'm still here.
The second about the principal rocket builder: "Peter is such a dynamic and forceful character. He's bound to have some dark side we don't know about". And well, Peter isn't really still here. He's serving a lifetime prison sentence for having murdered and dismembered a female journalist onboard his private submarine last year.
It was a comment by someone on some forum. Someone looking for similar sites as reddit (so was I) and another user who had replied had mentioned about HN a forum which is almost as good or as bad as reddit just that people on HN like to believe they are inherently better than reddit. I am not sure which forum it was - maybe reddit itself.
MeFi [0] and OneThingWell [1] are the gems I found in the same thread. Sadly OneThingWell's author took a long break due to RSI. Other forums/communities I found in that thread are/were SA [2], SDF, Barbelith [3] etc.
I guess it was just when I had got access to readily available Internet (before that it was weekly an hour or so in cyber cafes). I had immediately signed up everywhere (there were dozens) and SA is the only I never really got used to, never really stayed there.
This might be funny, but I learned about HN on slashdot I believe, and found it was similar but with a much better signal-to-noise ratio in the comments and actually did a better job of living up to the reputation that slashdot had.
I think I may have come here from /. too, but I can't really remember now. I stopped reading Slashdot a few months later. HN really is news for hackers, stuff that matters. Slashdot had become a bunch of in-jokes, sensationalism, and entertainment news. I don't want that, I want to know what problems people out there are solving.
Also here from slashdot. It was around when they introduced the "Web 2.0"-style redesign and a whole lot of people were complaining about it. One commenter linked to HN as an alternative, and it didn't take me very long to switch over.
I don't remember how I first heard about HN, but I came here from SlashDot, too. At some point, I realized that /. was too many fluff posts (I can't say now exactly what the "fluff" was, but the perception was very strong for me), too few posts that I was interested in, and that I had just grown tired of trying to dig any gems out of comments that had become increasingly toxic, boring, or irrelevant.
I remember when I first visited HN, after an initial bit of confusion, I realized two important things. First, there was no stream to follow...no need to feel like I had to "catch up". Second, I could scan 30 posts in the same time it took me to scan maybe 6 /. posts. The presentation was just so much more clean and efficient.
After about a week, I noticed a third really important thing. For the first time in ages, I felt like I was actually finding out about tech news as it happened instead of being days-to-weeks behind the leading edge. I was spending the same time/effort on HN that I had on /. (and mostly just staying in the top 60 posts), but getting much more for it.
That having been said, HN ain't perfect. Probably my biggest annoyance is the prevalence of links to paywalled and/or adblocker-hostile sites. But as far as news selection, I dumped /. just days after coming here and I've never looked back.
>or the first time in ages, I felt like I was actually finding out about tech news as it happened instead of being days-to-weeks behind the leading edge.
That's exactly why I migrated here from slashdot. I read both for a few months and was finding I'd see something on HN and then see the same exact thing on slashdot days or weeks later.
What eventually made me switch completely was the way comments work here don't encourage the inane, offtopic, uninventive, dead-horse-beating karma-farming injokes and references that slashdot and reddit seem to be inundated with[1]. Not to mention I find it utterly charming how often someone else will post something and the author/creator pops into the comments section to chime in "Hey that's me, would love to answer any questions you guys have". Nowhere else like it on the internet I've ever seen.
[1]Not to say I don't occasionally enjoy the occasionally silly comment, but I find the ones on HN to be a lot more tasteful and actually witty as opposed to the rout cookie cutter memes and references that are found on every single tangentially related reddit or slashdot thread that people can think to post them to.
I was having dinner with Jason Kottke (or Kottke blog fame) and he recommended the site to me.
I was travelling solo through South/North America back in 2009 and the last leg of my journey was in NYC. I wanted to eat at Momofuko and managed to snag a booking for two. I emailed Jason and asked if he wanted to join me for dinner (I had never met or spoken to Jason prior to this) and he agreed. We naturally chatted about technology, the Internet etc and Hacker News ended up in our conversation.
I was introduced by a coder in my previous role. He forwarded this link [1] to me to tell me that it is justified that he was taking time. I was pushing for him to complete 80% of the task so that we can push it in production, see the response and then complete it with testing. (I was heading growth at that time, and he was in product team.) I told him that the cases he was considering might not be encountered by 99% of users, so better launch something quickly, then we would know if we need to spend more time on it based on response. He gave me a timeline of four days, and I ended up doing it myself and making it live on a test branch in a day or so.
Coming back, the argument did not go well, but I liked HN, and started reading it as a knowledge source.
I had this cool new tech around 2011(?), a sony dash.
It was like a tablet before tablets were a big thing, and a web browser and alarm clock and photo frame - that had some apps and a small app store kind of thing.
Whoever made the hacker news app that was supported on the chumby / sony dash - I owe you so much.
I started reading about things I would never have. Started hearing excellent view points and facts and so many things. I read it on the dash almost every night till it got unplugged the last time and I found an HN app in the android thing for a tablet.
The founder of a startup I was doing work for introduced me to Paul’s essays. From there I found out about ycombinator. I was reading every word on every page. Somewhere that lead me to hacker news. I remember seeing a link shared on how to cut a bagel into two linked halves at one point and I’ve been coming back ever since.
Random google searches. This is how I find out about a lot of things actually
I was really interested in learning more about ML and math. I normally run queries like "Best way to Learn X vs ____". Normally, I get a lot of reddit articles. Sometimes quora or stackexchange. But hackernews came up a few times. Was curious and the rest was history
I was in the middle of transitioning to CS from Molecular Biology. My brother in law, who was a professional dev for several years already, asked me something like "you are on HN, right?". As in, there's no way to be a dev and not read HN.
I read an article called "Breaking the Silk Road's Captcha" about 4 years ago which led me to Hacker News. I spend about 1-2 hours per day reading the articles. Is it a terrible waste of time? Who knows?
My father. He found it via digg or his old work intranet/wiki where they shared all the good gossip most managers were either quietly in on or unaware of how juicy the old sybasedocs.workname.com had gotten, at least so he tells me.
Found Scripting.com (1999) searching for a scripting language -> JoS (Joel on software forums) -> pg essays ~> ycombinator a thing ~> Reddit -> news.ycombinator.com (was not called hacker news then)
I was looking for y combinator, of the lambda calculus, and google showed me a link to this site and I clicked. In google's defense, I hadn't used the words "lambda" or "calculus".
I think there must have been a link, or at least a sufficiently-intriguing mention, in one of Paul Graham's essays. I'd been reading those because they showed up in LISP blog aggregators.
A lady at DjangoCon (2011?) was giving a talk about how she brought her site/app to market and made a comment about getting feedback. She mentioned HN, which I’d never heard of.
Reading about some random startup on Tech Crunch during the "new social local native app a week" craze. Found ycombinator. And clicked around and found HN.
Well, I was considering becoming a capitalist to potentially leverage some of my advances, probably related to computer work or some other form of science, like experimentation & discovery.
Somehow ran across a blog post from Sam Altman who seemed like a pretty smart fellow, and soon found he was assocated with YCombinator, both of whom I had never heard of.
HN turned out to be a good compliment to my other efforts at keeping more up-to-date with things outside my area of leadership.
Next thing you know, Sam became President and it looks like YCombinator has indulged in a little experimentation itself.
I sent the results to Paul Graham, who said I should submit them to HN, of which I'd never heard. I did so, and they pretty much sunk without trace, as do so many of my submissions. Even so, I read some more, and stayed for a while.
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
[1] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html?HNrj06
[2] https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?...