I wrote a blog post[1] a long time ago. Someone post it on HN and for some reason(?) made it to the frontpage. When I checked by website records (a week later) I saw a HUGE spike in traffic. My blog is very low volume 50-100 visits per day... so that spike in the graph dwarfed every other day displayed. I bit the bullet and joined the community. It has surely paid off as it kick-started my remote career.
About two years ago I stumbled across Paul Graham's essays and started reading my way through them. One of them was "What I've learned from Hacker News" (http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)... That introduced me to HN.
(At the time I was in a Third-World country with very limited Internet. HN, at ~10kb per page load, was one of the few sites I could afford to visit regularly. That helped to get me hooked ;-) )
Man, your post brings back memories. I have opened my account only five days after you. But the story of how I came to it is the same. Thanks for reminding me.
Heard of Paul Graham first circa 2002 via a classmate who had become infatuated with lisp. Rediscovered his stuffs (essays, On Lisp), circa 2007 when lisp was my hobby language of choice (picked up during a brief attempt at grad school before burning out on being a broke student). Found HN via that and/or Reddit about that time, eventually made an account to post something. Scratched an itch (tech-interest-wise) that work was not satisfying at the time.
I can't remember the specific event, but I recall doing a Google search for "hacking news" based on some recent public event.
Naturally this popped up, and it matched with my interests of creating web sites and running a hosting company at the time, so I just ended up sticking around.
I was at the Mountain West Ruby Conference in 2009 and someone mentioned the live feed was submitted here, so I came to check it out! I even have the exact link:
I was bored so I went to the book store, I bought and read the book Founders at Work (twice), was looking for similar books online, found the essays of PG, landed somehow on HN. True story.
[1] https://www.convalesco.org/articles/2013/02/01/the-macosx-wa...