Ask HN: What’s Your ROI in Browsing Hacker News?
I currently feel like I’m in a place where the cool stuff is something I can’t use because it’s too technical, not fully dependable, or just a cool concept at the end of the day.
What value have you gained from hacker news submissions or comments that has helped you in your life?
This is not meant to make HN look bad. I really like how critical HN can be sometimes. It makes you reflect on what you're writing very carefully. There's also a bunch of subject matter experts lurking here. There's nothing better than when you have lay people discussing say, nuclear reactors and an actual nuclear physicist or engineer chimes in. As far as content, I really read it more for the weird little obscure articles that are terribly interesting, more than I do for keeping up on tech. However, it is interesting to skim the comments of a submission for a particular technology stack: it really helps give insight into where that particular tech is going and how it's actually used in the real world. There's also a lot of deeply personal, candid stories on here that I enjoy reading. HN is a forum run by a startup accelerator after all, so there's no shortage of people who have tried and failed repeatedly here. It's a wealth of knowledge and experience I'm very thankful to have. Discovering patio11, codinghorror, tptacek, ahoyhere etc has made tremendous impact on my career / ways of thinking. I would have never negotiated higher salary or shipped my own apps / books without reading their HN comments / blog. It allowed me to work lesser hours and earn money from products. A random article on hacker news completely changed how I job search. This has led to several jobs I don't think I would have found otherwise. The article was not about job search, it was a post reviewing a tech talk about technology that as you say may have been "too technical" for me at the time This is not to say that I use hacker news for job search Which article was it? It was on a talk about HalVM that was given at Microsoft Research. Had nothing to do with jobs It changed how I find companies to work with Can you tell us more? How did it change the way you look for companies? I found that the hardest part of cold applications was identifying companies. In any major city you can probably think of 20 companies off the top of your head that exist there. Fewer with your expertise or interests in mind, fewer that are currently hiring.
Additionally, identifying companies (without references or a network to pull on) for job search is a labor intensive and often boring process. Since I would rather be "always learning" it is far more fun to watch technical talks at conferences and track any company that sponsors a speech I enjoy. I am doing this constantly (not just during active job search). Since it is the norm for technical conferences to post to youtube, this strategy only costs time. When you have a list of companies large enough, then it is easier to find competitors or get appropriate suggestions from networking platforms like linkedin. I never track large or obvious companies, because I probably already know their name. Now I've been in the field long enough to pull on my network, but don't really find it necessary. I have a list of 300+ companies that I can pull on reflecting my interests/expertise at different points in my career. The only downside to this is it doesn't usually grow proportional to your geographical region, but there are ways to bias your results with other strategies. I might have come across this without HN, but it definitely would have happened later. People post things that interest them on HN, and I find things interesting that others do. Mostly, it keeps me thinking. I see what people are doing, what they have to say about the latest news, what the latest startups are trying to accomplish. Whatever I think of it all, it invokes some critical thought on the bigger picture of this industry. And I thereby avoid getting caught up in the details of my own work and stagnating. My ROI is pretty high considering the changes I've been seeing in myself lately. It's a huge step up from reddit and 4chan - I cut those websites out of my life and started browsing HN exclusively not too long ago. My mood has changed, I'm less cynical/jaded, and when I make a comment, I consider the person on the other side of the computer screen. This site is a bit slower, so I've also been getting more work done. Since you are asking for the 'Return On Invest', I think there are two sides to this medal. I didn't have any large returns, but I like the content that comes up, so I try to limit the resources I invest. I observed that giving my brain new(s) information in the morning makes it harder to concentrate later the same day. So I try to avoid visiting HN in the morning and wait until the afternoon. To improve the noise to signal ratio, I also added a little widget to my new-tab-page showing me the current top 3 news of the 'best' list. That way I don't have to constantly monitor the site and don't miss the big stories either ;-) I've directly found two jobs through HN, so already that's a massive benefit for me. Aside from that, I feel it's given me a much better grasp of both the breadth and depth of the tech industry. It's the only place I ever manage to have substantive discussions of medical science. Given my diagnosis, this positively contributes to my failure to be dead yet. I hope you continue to fail at dying. Diagnosis of what, if I may ask. I have a genetic disorder. Longtime lurker. I owe my entire career to HN. I was always into programming but never understood the business/startup side behind it. Thought you just had to get a job and unless you were super lucky or rich there wasn't any other way. Discovering HN has shattered this notion and allowed me to live my life the way I always wanted to. Sometimes rarely I see something that can help me in my job. The recent announcement of v8 Javascript speed improvements was useful to know, and I’d probably not know without HN. I didn’t read the full article but I know if our performance tests suddenly get better when that browser version comes up it might be them not us. I stick with a saying I came up with: “Make Knowledge Actionable” I gain the most value from Ask HN posts. I used hckrnews.com to identify the top ones. I look at the top comments on these posts. If there are any good insights, I note them and favorite the post. Immeasurable. I don't do any social media, or networking. HN lets me know what's hot, and I can filter whether or not I need it myself. HN brought me Golang, and I wouldn't have found it so early otherwise. My first thought was hn has negative roi for me as it is a time sink. But, like you, I first learned about Go here. A couple of folks at work and I introduced it to our org some maybe seven years ago. The org became a Go shop. I vastly prefer coding in Go compared to AnyEvent Perl or Twisted Python. So, hn has had a very big impact on me; immeasurable. Same as with twitter: negative ROI. I just hate-read it and get pissed off at all the nitpicky assholes going "well, actually" at each other to no end. It's sad, but I don't know how to stop. I got a lot of visitors from Show HN