Ask HN: How did you find Hacker News? - rememberlenny
======
patio11
If I remember correctly, somebody who knew me from the Business of Software
forums mentioned my business here, I saw it in my logs, and started reading. I
had no idea any of this startup stuff existed prior. I had heard of pg but
only knew him as the Plan for Spam (Bayesian spam filtering article) author,
and thought he was actually the same person as John Graham-Cumming (who is
also an HN user, also has a cognate for Gram in his name, and also wrote
Popfile, a Bayesian spam filter).

My early impressions of HN were "Oh wow, a place where developers talk about
topics like AdWords? This is relevant to my interests."

That was about ~2,000 days ago.

~~~
T-hawk
I've wanted to share this story for a while and now is as good a place as any.
I found Hacker News from you via the Motley Fool. You wrote a long post on the
Fool and mentioned it was copied from another internet forum. I picked a
particular unusual-looking phrase in it, searched, and found it which turned
out to be on HN. I stalked through your HN comment history and then I was
hooked.

HN clued me in on how technologically backwards my then-employer was, and led
to Stack Overflow Careers from which I found my current job, so yes you've
substantially affected the direction of my life.

~~~
patio11
Hah, awesome. That was me explaining subprime mortgage products by reference
to insurance on disease-prone cow herds, right?

I run into fellow Fools fairly infrequently (and don't spend much time there
anymore) but always fun when two parts of my life intersect like that.

~~~
T-hawk
Yup, that's the one. "Sickly cows" was the key phrase and you're still on the
first page of Google results for it. Link (wow, a 6 digit HN item number):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472985)

I didn't want to give specifics for preserving your Fool anonymity if you
still wanted it, but guess you have a public enough internet persona nowadays
that that ship has sailed. Thanks again for helping direct me into a better
level of software experience and knowledge, as inadvertent and roundabout as
it was. I started stalking you on HN in hopes of more Japanese slice-of-life
stories that you shared on the Fool, and wound up discovering a much greater
world of software instead.

~~~
patio11
I keep a fig leaf of pseudonymity there, but it's a ridiculously thin fig leaf
for anyone who knows me from HN. A few folks have figured it out over the
years, but I appreciate your discretion, as back in my nobody-knew-who-I-was
days I talked about some fairly personal stuff there.

------
tokenadult
I followed the link here from Paul Graham's personal website, where he keeps
his collection of essays.[1] A local friend recommended that I read his essay
"Why Nerds Are Unpopular"[2] back before Hacker News existed, and later an
online friend recommended that I read "What You'll Wish You'd Known."[3] Then
I started keeping an eye out for new essays by Paul Graham, and eventually
while reading one of them I followed the link to what was then known as
Startup News.

I was in lurk mode for a while, not having anything to say about most of the
core topics here, until one day a discussion of linguistics or something else
I actually know about drew me into commenting. An odd coincidence is that
patio11, one of the community's favorite commenters and one of mine, and I
have the same join date. Of course patio11 deservedly has far more karma for
both submissions and comments than I have. I'm very grateful for his efforts
and the efforts of many other participants to keep this a community friendly
to thoughtful, informed, international discussion.

P.S. I found this thread by looking for active threads. I do that sometimes
here on HN to find interesting threads I missed while they were most visible
on the HN front page or new page.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/articles.html](http://paulgraham.com/articles.html)

[2] [http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html](http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html)

[3] [http://paulgraham.com/hs.html](http://paulgraham.com/hs.html)

------
MichaelStubbs
I saw it referenced on Reddit. It was probably /r/programming but I don't
recall fully.

------
brudgers
In 2008, my laptop was insufficiently powerful to produce some of the
renderings I was building and so I had to do some research and that got
reading about computer hardware after more than a decade of just buying stuff
off the shelf. Reading computing articles became a worklike activity as the
the economy tanked and the construction pipeline dried up and with it design
work.

At some point, I started reading Techmeme regularly, and at some point after
that I started following the links to additional coverage of the stories, and
one day there was a link to HN.

The quality of the articles kept me coming back more and more over several
months and gradually I started reading the comments. Eventually almost four
years ago, there was something that so compelled a need in me to shoot off my
mouth that I made an account and posted something. This was more than two
years after my interest in computing had been rekindled.

At the time, it took 200 karma points [which a middling popular submission can
earn in a few hours these days] to get the downvote, and I thought, well maybe
one day. Then as I approached the magic threshold, it was raised to 500 [a
number of karma points that can still be hit with something appealing to
populist sentiment].

What kept me coming back is that HN is all the Really Fucking Smart People™
who write comments and find articles [or write them]. It may not be the center
of the computing universe, but it's pretty damn good. And trying to write in a
way that is similarly engaging turns out to be a lot more rewarding than
trolling ever was.

------
jasonkester
I found it as a referer in my weblogs. The article in question was in the
process of being Meh'd and Die-in-a-fire'd at by the crowd at Reddit, whereas
here there was a small yet intelligent discussion about the technology used to
build the thing the article talked about.

Fishing it out of my history, it seems it was submitted by this user named
"pg".

------
BillyMaize
I googled something like "Paul Software Engineer" to see if I myself would
come up and found Paul Graham's articles which lead to hacker news. I had no
idea what a startup even was but found the content to be of such a higher
quality than anywhere else that I visited often.

------
jqm
It was pre-bookmarked in the Firefox bookmarks on a Linux distro I installed.

------
normloman
It was mentioned in a list of alternatives to Slashdot. That site became trash
the when dice.com took it over. Too bad. I liked it better than here. The
users were way less optimistic.

------
simmons
A blog post of mine was posted to HN a few years ago, and I thought, "where is
all this traffic coming from?" I'm not sure how I missed HN before that.

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cyphax
I was looking for a replacement for Slashdot, which became more childish by
the day it seemed, and someone suggested HN. I haven't seen much of Slashdot
since. :)

------
lazydon
For me the route was via StackOverflow (SO). I looked for a question like what
other sites are there like SO for gaining some real world wisdom.

I've always found good stuff with this technique - It's like poor man's
machine learning algo applied to oneself. People who liked this item also
liked...

One such thread of my current favorites looks like:

SO --> HN --> Reddit --> Less Wrong --> Yudkowsky's blog --> Marginal
Revolution blog

------
randall
I worked at Justin.TV. My impression is early yc companies used it as an
internal reddit that just got more and more external over time.

------
cm2012
A friend had applied to YC and told me about when I mentioned a start-up idea
years and years ago.

------
edj
I found out about about HN after I encountered Paul Graham's essays in the
late 2000s.

I think I first saw a reference to PG on John Gruber's DaringFireball. I think
this[1] may have been the link that first sent me to PG's essays.

I read all of the essays, up to that point, and then became curious about this
thing called YCombinator, and this other thing called Hacker News. I lurked on
HN for a while and finally started an account 1703 days ago, which was Monday,
14 September 2009.

1:
[http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/02/18/graham](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/02/18/graham)

------
moconnor
I think Joel Spolsky mentioned something about "the ycombinator kids" in one
of his blogs many, many years ago. Can't find a link to it but that's where I
first heard the name and investigated.

~~~
decasteve
I came here by way of reddit, by way of Spolsky.

I first heard of reddit from Joel Spolsky when he mentioned it sometime in
late 2005 or early 2006, which is where I discovered of Paul Graham and
ycombinator. For a long time a blog post by Paul Graham was the top up-voted
article, with a few hundred upvotes. I was active on reddit from 2006-2009,
then migrated to Hacker News.

I now frequent HN but reddit has devolved into a image board for memes.

------
jckt
A random Google search. Thought, with a name like "hacker news", I'd come up
with a lame "script kiddie" site full of teenagers or something. Couldn't have
been proven more wrong.

------
wilsonfiifi
When I started searching for serious topics in Google, HN kept appearing in
the 1st page results so I decided to bookmark it lol. But I only joined when I
felt I could post something meaningful.

------
dobbsbob
EDIT: forgot, I found this site much earlier. I was learning Lisp, found the
pg Lisp story of running Yahoo stores, had no idea who he was, found HN
through his page on wikipedia

------
egeozcan
I'd been reading the stories/comments long before I joined. I remember the
motivation to open this account (worst decision in my life in terms of
productivity but I would have still joined in the light of this knowledge =) )
but I don't remember how I first landed on HN. Definitely not a Google search.
Likely a reference to a comment here linked somewhere.

------
Patrick_Devine
I was at PyCon a few years back and pg was one of the keynote speakers. I
actually didn't know who pg was at the time, but I really enjoyed the talk.
There was a Q&A session after the keynote, and a bunch of people got up and
asked pg questions about Hacker News and I remember thinking "wtf is hacker
news?".

------
pflanze
I don't remember the exact ordering of events anymore but I was looking for a
programming language alternative and stumbled upon lisp, and read PG's essays.
Then shortly after, he introduced YC, and then I think HN was linked from the
YC website or so. I didn't create an account for another 1-2 years.

------
jamielee
After playing MineCraft, I got interested in Java. I started reading a Java
textbook. My curiosity for programming grew, and I was curious to read about
all the different kinds of programmers (including the mischievous and law-
breaking ones). Googled "hacker." Stumbled upon hacker news.

------
grayrest
Shared an apartment with a guy in YCS07.

------
neillyons
I found Hacker News via the Stackoverflow podcast. Jeff or Joel mentioned it
in one of the early episodes.

------
Abraln
Mine is a bit less professional, I was playing a MMO (forgot which), and
someone had hacked their way into the company's servers and stole some credit
card numbers. I googled "MMO name" hacker news, and saw some interesting
article a couple of results down.

------
mrdazm
While working my first job out of college as an A/V Tech (I'm a web developer
now - front-end) I had a lot of downtime and was bored. I asked a friend,
another programmer, to recommend good sources for articles/posts and such and
HN made the list.

------
libraryatnight
I found it on r/programming

------
klez
I was looking for security-related news and typed "hacker news" on google.

------
michaeltocci
I have been reading posts for about a year, I only recently (in the past
couple of weeks) got an account.

I heard about HN while talking to my father (we are both software devs) so I
went to check it out, and thats when I heard the angels.

------
joeblau
Moved to San Francisco and saw a few people on the Caltrain reading the site.

------
galfarragem
Surfing the web. I believe that was after reading a PG essay.

 _" The good son always comes back home"_portuguese proverb_

If you belong somewhere you'll get a way of finding it. It is just a matter of
time.

------
septerr
For me it was a colleague when I mentioned I feel so out of date.

------
jtheory
This question seems to be impressively bad at generating discussion.

I have no recollection at all, I'm afraid; I only know it was about 6 years
ago because my profile tells me so.

~~~
rememberlenny
What would make it better?

------
techstroke
Heard about PG essays from a friend in Mumbai , then saw HN for first time and
got addicted to it since , and now it's in my default tab in chrome !

------
PeterWhittaker
I mentioned to a friend an article on /. He said "buh, I mostly read HN, /.
jumped the shark a long time ago".

He was right. Been here ever since.

------
hnal943
Wikipedia binge (programming languages) -> Greenspun's Tenth Rule -> Paul
Graham Essays -> YCombinator.com -> HN

------
nichochar
Fellow, older developer in startup when I was younger I think. He also
introduced me to IRC. It was like losing my virginity

------
Xcelerate
It kept showing up in Google search results so I joined. Kind of sad that it
doesn't really show up as much anymore.

------
gadders
Michael Arrington mentioned it on TechCrunch.

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ragatskynet
Fun because I do not remember exactly, but I remember I was reading the weekly
mail newsletter before the actual site.

------
zura
Found it several times through organic search. Then, I went to the main page
and thought that it was interesting.

------
TurplePurtle
It's one of the sites on [http://www.jimmyr.com](http://www.jimmyr.com)

------
soneca
I heard about YC first. That was just a little more than a year ago, so HN was
already strongly related to it.

------
cliveowen
Strangely I've been here for less than a year but I don't remember how I came
across HN, not a clue.

------
chrismorgan
I haven’t got the faintest recollection.

------
knackers
I _think_ it was through Slashdot.

------
borges
A friend of mine shared some hacker news on Google Reader (the best google's
social network)

------
ibandyop
[http://popurls.com](http://popurls.com)

------
Mankhool
TechCrunch 1771 days ago. Before it became AOLCrunch. Sigh.

------
J_Darnley
I'm fairly sure it was a link someone posted on IRC.

------
lpgauth
2248 days ago I saw a post on Techcrunch, I think..?

~~~
chedigitz
2232 days ago, I also saw a post on Techcrunch... Discovered a whole new
world.

Interesting how a small tiny link can lead to information that can reshape
your entire reality.

------
harrykim
I found it via Flipboard magazine recommendation.

------
zorta
through android application "Pulse". It was (actually is) a suggestion under
"Computer" category

------
bkamapantula
A friend recommended to me.

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qzapaia
i heard about HN in some video of mejorando.la several years ago.

------
drcongo
I found it a bit grumpy.

------
X41
i stumbled upon Kale Davis Hacker Newsletter some time ago

------
steanne
the global shared stories section of newsblur.

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rickyc091
Word of mouth.

------
ankurpatel
Flipboard

------
andrzejsz
By meetup

~~~
andrzejsz
That is HNLondon but the funny thing there was no url on HNLondon page so I
was forced to find it myself

------
skizm
jimmyr.com

