
Ask HN: How did you get introduced to HN? - samrohn778
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.
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RiderOfGiraffes
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.

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

[1]
[https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html?HNrj06](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html?HNrj06)

[2]
[https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?...](https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssaysRanking.html?HNrj06)

------
elil17
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.

~~~
zer00eyz
This makes me feel old.

If you change high school to college and hacker news to slashdot this story is
familiar.

------
interfixus
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.

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balladeer
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.

[0] [https://www.metafilter.com](https://www.metafilter.com)

[1] [http://onethingwell.org](http://onethingwell.org)

[2] [https://www.somethingawful.com](https://www.somethingawful.com)

[3]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20051024234650/http://www.barbel...](https://web.archive.org/web/20051024234650/http://www.barbelith.com/)

~~~
severine
You just reminded me that I came here through OneThingWell.

Does anyone here know if the author is all right? That site is/was lovely.

~~~
balladeer
No idea. I had mailed ~2 years ago.

------
noobermin
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.

~~~
jfultz
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.

~~~
Zircom
>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.

------
tobtoh
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.

------
ankit219
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.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14410661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14410661)

------
2_listerine_pls
I had seen a few HN articles posted on reddit. Discussions seemed more
interesting and educated.

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stevenicr
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.

------
todd3834
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.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=982249)

------
Kagerjay
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

------
WiseWeasel
Digg died, or went bad or something. The exact process is hazy at this point,
but I’m pretty sure there was a direct switch.

~~~
zygotic12
Yup

------
dotdi
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_complete_me
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?

------
Multicomp
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.

------
andymoe
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)

------
vinayms
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".

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piecu
I was looking for some news aggregator for tech industry (having RSS feed) and
found this on one of the "top 10" websites.

------
ttonkytonk
Probably while doing a Google search on "opinion/editorials".

An article came up by George Will about the opioid epidemic. He comes across
as highly judgemental, and commenters didn't fail to notice.

------
dasmoth
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.

------
LVB
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.

------
nstart
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.

------
telebone_man
There was an article along the lines of ‘100 top developer tips’.

One of them was something like ‘don’t under estimate the value of wasting time
on hacker news’.

Held true!

------
alain_gilbert
I was following some people on twitter that I found extremely interesting...
to later realize that all the articles they were posting were from HN.

------
jphelps
I used to read Spacerogue's Hacker News Network. Googled it one day after it
had been offline for a couple years and ended up here

------
kazinator
HN came up when I was searching for venues where you can announce the
existence of a new programming language.

------
justhw
I think a Mixergy interview of Drew Houston? Lurked several months then made
an account.

------
ry_ry
From people complaining about it on other platforms.

Enjoyed the range of topics though, so I stuck around.

------
murtazabhurgri
From interview of Taylor Otwell (Creator of Laravel Framework) published on a
blog.

------
mohitmun
It was introduced to me by CTO at my previous company.

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fuzzfactor
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.

------
cellis
through digg.com or ... valleywag ( which pg banned, shortly after it was
renamed from Startup News )

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k0t0n0
i don't remember.

~~~
tanseydavid
...and I can quit anytime I feel like it. I just don't feel like it just yet.

