Is visiting HackerNews like Smoking? | Hacker News Reader

Is visiting HackerNews like Smoking?

12 pointspshyco10 comments

Do you feel a little better or does it give you sense of peace while coming to HN? And when you leave after long time, feel regret?

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The inequality can sting if you compare yourself to others.

HN is probably the largest general purpose public forum frequently visited by multi-millionaires and multi-billionaires, so there's always somebody blabbing on about their "investments" or humble bragging about exiting or buying a tesla or some other rich person nonsense.

The onslaught of dumb can sting when you realize most people just forcefully repeat the opinions of others without much original thought.

If you read for "what's new" information, it can be marginally useful. But, the "what's new" is filtered through the bubble of what isolated nerd people think matters (containers! go! san francisco! google upgraded their toilets!) and not necessarily where the biggest opportunities or impacts can be had in the world these days.

But, even with all that, there's still a lot of good information people provide. People will chime in and kindly offer their experiences and personal knowledge about specific or esoteric things with the rest of us who don't know as much as they do.

> there's always somebody blabbing on about their "investments" or humble bragging about exiting or buying a tesla or some other rich person nonsense

Is that true? I don't see much of it.

It's just casual life differences accumulating over time. They may not even notice it's strange to others since it's just how their life works now.

Somebody who has been an employee at 4 successful startups over 10 years has different life patterns ("yeah, I'm an employee, but I'm also an LP in some VC funds and I angel invest on the side and take advisor shares every few months") than someone who has also worked at startups for 10 years but every previous startup they worked for failed or no longer exists.

"Oh, you cashed out some stock during your startup's latest funding round and now you're complaining your Tesla order is being delayed by two months? I'm soooo sorry. What's new with me? Thanks for asking! I got a yearly salary increase of 0.5% again this year, which doesn't in any way cover the 15% yearly rent increase on my apartment. Enjoy your new $100,000 car while I scrape together another $300/month for rent I don't have."

Its not obvious nor is it as common as the GP makes it seem.

For a concrete example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10410723 -- A thread in which some guy asks about renting a Skylake-based server. When I read it originally it already had 3 people telling to build it himself as though a $1000 system is loose change you people in SV find down the back of your couch.

Yes it is addictive, I have an everyday urge to check what's going on HN, I also feel I'm earning some IQ points here, of course I loose these points later, but that has to do with me ;)

I tend to use http://hckrnews.com to get a summary and check ask and new now and then when I am taking a break. It can be addicting

Or even more minimalistic: http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

Is it addictive? For me yes, because I get to read about such a plethora of topics. It's fun to read people's views about a lot of things..

I feel like the content submitted has been on the decline, particularly in comparison to content submitted even just two years ago. I must be on the HN-decline equivalent of a nicotine patch.

There was a page evaluating submissions from 2, 5 and more years ago, and they ended up deciding it had not declined that substantially.

You can check out what Hacker News looks when they remove "new" accounts here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/classic

(created by pg to measure exactly that)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com