
Ask HN: What's the Purpose of Hacker News to You? - DanielBMarkham
I was fascinated by the recent "Hacker Hacker News" post. Looks like a really cool idea. But the poster said that the "real" hacker news was about science, math, and languages.<p>Really? I thought the "real" Hacker News was about startups and things related to the startup culture.<p><i>Without posting the link, or quoting it (you all know the one)</i>, what is Hacker News to you? I know the PG quote, and I'm not interested in repeating it. Obviously HN means a lot of different things to different folks. What with all of the newcomers, I was wondering: why does everybody hang out here?
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edw519
Believe it or not, I'm more interested in the people here than the content.

Sure, content is important, should be high quality, and needs to be somewhat
restricted to what interests us. But AFAIC, the purpose of the content is to
build the community. Almost any article I find here I can find somewhere else.
But I can't find the same quality of discussion as here.

I do use data from hn as a resource in my work, but only minimially. Most of
what I do requires long hours and hard work, not outside input.

I have had the great opportunity to form many friendships here, most on-line,
but quite a few in person too, through meet-ups, etc. I don't make many
friends who are in the same line of work as me, so I really value
relationships here.

Like many hackers, I spend long periods of time alone. Hacker News does a
great job serving as my virtual water cooler/break room. Having cool things to
talk about is a nice bonus.

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emontero1
_Believe it or not, I'm more interested in the people here than the content._

I wholeheartedly agree. As a matter of fact, I was reading the RSS feeds
exclusively until very recently (2 weeks ago). A friend of mine then told me I
should check out the discussions that take place on the site. I'm so happy I
followed his advice. Generally, the discussions are at least an order of
magnitude more interesting than the articles themselves. That's the reason HN
is my browser's homepage now.

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_giu
_Generally, the discussions are at least an order of magnitude more
interesting than the articles themselves_

dito!

I must admit that I've never used the RSS feed (that's partly because I'm not
the big RSS reader type). I always get my daily portion of Hacker News
directly from the homepage :)

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mixmax
There's very little crap here, both in the comments and the links.

Crap is my personal distaste in news, namely celebrity obsession, fluff, non-
informative articles, time-wasters, fashion trends and the like.

I love the occasional article on 14'th. century Venice and biology as much as
the ones related to hacking and startups because they aren't crap if they rise
to the frontpage.

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trezor
While I mostly agree with what you say, I have to admit I find hacker news a
tad heavy when it comes to overhyping whatever language fashionable this
month. Also I have about zero interest in startups and venture capitol etc
etc, unless someone has any cool tech to demo.

Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it get tiring every now and then :)

I'm mostly here for the tech news and civilized discussion really. Call me a
proggit-refugee if you like.

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alnayyir
Proggit has gotten _terrible_ of late.

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mdasen
Generally speaking, there's a level of respect here that you just don't find
on the internet. Cooler heads tend to prevail, people value replies that
explain rather than criticize even if the original poster was simply wrong,
and with rare exception we don't tend to re-post the same thing over and over
every couple of weeks.

It's really shocking that the environment hasn't changed as the site has
gotten larger. I used to be a tad afraid that as more people joined we'd start
getting more of the noise and flame-wars that one sees on other sites.

Sure, it's great that HN has interesting content and often times lets me see
new and interesting technologies that I can apply, but really it's the respect
that we seem to afford each other that keeps me as an engaged member of the
community rather than someone that just lurks. I love discussion, but I have
better things to do than fight with people.

I always try to remember what Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan said at a
commencement at my university, "it is important to express your views, and
sometimes even your anger, but at the same time remember that the noble art of
conversation is not a martial art."

Thank you to everyone here who proves daily that we can respect one another on
the internet.

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uptown
My route to Hacker News was:

Slashdot -> Digg -> Hacker News

Basically each of those stopped serving my purpose as they got cluttered with
what I'd basically describe as irrelevant nonsense. Hacker News has managed to
present content that is unique, fresh, interesting, mature, and useful to
anybody that's more interested in learning something new than watching some
video with cats. To me, Hacker News is a blend of content about technology,
science, business, and startups. It's kinda the website version of the
magazine 'FastCompany', and it's where my interests are right now ...

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hack_edu
I've been thinking a lot about this over the weekend. Any bets on what's next?

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antirez
I think HN will last more. There is a reason, HN is not a business like is
Digg or Reddit, so I bet Paul Graham will try do to his best in order to take
the site useful and don't attract noise here. The other sites can't do too
much if the metric is "more garbage but much more pageviews", here instead
there are no deals to do, nor ADS to serve, so the site can be adjusted just
in order to maximize the quality over the time.

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sqs
I'm the person who made and posted "Hacker Hacker News." I didn't intend to
say that science, math, and programming are really what this site's about, or
even that they are better than anything else. I wasn't trying to make a
statement, just a Web site. I can see how the name would imply that, though,
but you all know how hard it is to find good domains these days. :)

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shiranaihito
I thought it was a good idea. No one would have to say something like "not
programming" anymore.

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TallGuyShort
I think something that's more important to me than HN being an intelligent
community, is that it's a respectful community. People have polite (and
intelligent) discussions (about topics that interest me) - that's become rare
on the Internet.

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tokenadult
I came here from the link on pg's site, repeatedly. For a long time I just
lurked. I started posting comments (for which I had to register) after I
started noticing comment threads on which I had something to say. I like the
start-up culture here, the most. What I also like is the general intellectual
curiosity.

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trickjarrett
HN is a highly focused & highly intelligent community that shares links and
information on topics which interest me. Usually surrounding technology,
science, entrepreneurship and the Internet.

~~~
andrewtj
My thoughts as well though I'll add that I feel there's been an increase in
content that doesn't deal with subjects down to their minutia over the past
few months.

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futuremint
HN has a good combination of content selection and comments. I've honestly
never seen such high quality commenting on articles. I generally find about
half of the links on the front-page interesting, and the comments are always
lucid. If the link is garbage, somebody always points out the errors in the
link in an intelligent way, not an annoying way (like /.).

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jacquesm
It's not what it is, it is what it isn't:

\- political news \- sports news \- 'entertainment' news \- and so on...

There are plenty of places that have all that HN has and more, it's the lack
of the 'more' that makes HN a good place to hang out.

edit:

And of course the people here... there seems to be on the whole less immature
behaviour here than elsewhere (though it does happen).

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swombat
I'm a compulsive arguer. I love to pit my ideas against reality. HN gives me
the opportunity to argue with intelligent, thoughtful, articulate people on a
large scale.

To an extent, this is what I do on my blog too. But it's a lot cheaper to
write a comment like this one than to write a whole blog post.

As a start-up CTO, I also use HN as a "pulse feel" for the start-up/tech
community. It's important to be in touch with the communities that you operate
in or near, and HN largely fulfills that purpose for me.

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cjg
I wouldn't expect hacker news articles to be restriced to technology or
startups or even news. I would expect them to be aimed at a deeper
understanding of a topic.

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anigbrowl
News filtered by people with similar interests to myself. I have never been a
full-time coder and no longer wish to be; I'm a _bricoleur_ -type hacker,
interested in solutions that solve present problems more than in engineering
for the ages (although I greatly respect the latter), even if it does not
always involve computers.

I also like the business/money content, since that's an area where I'm weak
and welcome input that's good for geeks; the business content on HN reminds me
of a pulse wave and generally tends to be either essential or trite.

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HeyLaughingBoy
Odds are, I will never do a software-only startup. I'm an embedded systems guy
and at the least I'll have to release electronic hardware as well. But for me
HN is business from a different perspective. I get to see things from a
primarily web-app, data-driven perspective. And while a lot of the business
models I see here are doomed to failure, I can still learn from them by seeing
what people are _attempting_ to do.

Science, math, languages? Not so much. Tech business is a lot more interesting
and fun.

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akamaka
Among the reasons others have already mentioned, I also regularly google
through old HN articles for advice on which tools are the best.

Searches like "hosting provider" or "server monitoring" will bring up lots of
useful comments from the folks in the trenches.

Edit: Another reason: positivy toward success. In my daily life, I'm
surrounded by people who denigrate those who are more succesful than them. HN
is a place where that rarely happens, even if the subject is as unusual as
jocks or jewel thieves.

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kristiandupont
To a certain degree, HN is a source of procrastination to me - which it is
really bad for because almost every link requires a substantial amount of time
to consume. I still go to Reddit to click on a few [pic] links every now and
then, but HN is much more inspirering. I agree with you though - I generally
consider the interesting topics to be the less technical and more startup-
related ones.

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alex_c
At its best, it's a window into how the world works. Most of the Internet
tells you what is happening - HN is one of the few places online which dives
into the why. This is mostly restricted to the intersection of tech and
business, but that's fine.

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jlees
The closest match of people with the same interests as me - spanning both tech
stuff, brainiac stuff, and business stuff - that I've yet to find on the
Internets.

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alexgartrell
Above all, Hacker News provides a free education.

My path:

Google Search for CS schools -> Joel on Software -> other bloggers -> Paul
Graham -> Hacker News

They don't cover this stuff in Academia

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ErrantX
Because people here generally seem interested in the same things as me.

Or more importantly: everyone here seems to go "oooh shiny" at the same things
as me :)

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raintrees
I see technical news here frequently before I see it elsewhere, and the
comment discussions make the links much more valuable. Many are the times I
find myself following suggested links from the comments long after I've
digested the original article.

I start my day with bbc worldservice, then npr, then hn. Last I add a dash of
dvorak so I am up on my conspiracy theories :)

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mmphosis
Enthusiasm. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubWq-27184U>

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rigwit
I use HN to find the two things that most aggregate sites don't provide.
Thought provoking articles. Thought provoking comments.

Whether it is before I read the article, after, or both; I read the comments
on HN. I rarely do that on <Insert Sitename>.

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narag
I come here to learn what interesting people think and how. The links are also
very entertaining (too much) but I like most to read the comments.

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Mankhool
I'm new to HN and coming to it straight through YC, it is what I expected -
all about startups. Please keep it that way.

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teilo
To me, Hacker News is a more relevant and civilized place than Slashdot.
People are nicer here.

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csomar
I use it to read stories and also to discuss with mind-like people and share
ideas.

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drinian
To gain karma.

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TweedHeads
HN is my newspaper, I read it everyday to be up-to-date in the tech world.

I like interesting news, but I don't care if:

\- gmail is down

\- somebody got shot at the apple store

\- the iphone burns my cheeks

\- yahoo will never recover

\- payperpost

\- propaganda

\- PR submarines

but above all, I hate FUD

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sree_nair
No Junk (in bold). Useful/Interesting articles.

