Ask HN: How did you come to know about HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you come to know about HN?

10 pointstseeker14 comments

I have been using HN for the past 5 odd years, but it occurred to me today, that HN/HN links don’t show up on google search. I realized, I came to know about HN through my workmate. Wonder If I would have found HN If it hadn’t been for that workmate. How did you find about HN ?

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I was looking to write a spam filter and came across Paul Graham's essays. I read them all, then produced a graphic of relationships between them:

http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/PaulGrahamEssays.html

I haven't updated that in ages - not sure I still have the code for it.

I send a link to that to PG, and he said I should submit it to HN.

So I did.

Original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=368657

Revisited: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=397408

Wow. 2008/11/18. Over 7 years ago.

wow, image maps for clickable sections. Neat thing for something 7 years old

Somehow Flipboard surfaced it in relation to my various technical curiosities. Several years later it dawned upon me that this was not an aggregated feed but an actual individual source, and a totally trivial amount of delving led me to locate the actual origin. I registered and stayed.

I was on reddit pretty early on when it was mostly programming links and PG essays. There was a submission announcing "Startup News" and I clicked it and signed up. I searched to find the original announcement, this may be the first post:

https://www.reddit.com/comments/15gkq/startup_news_ycombinat...

Came across this debate about OO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245737

Thought the discussion was pretty good. Was frustrated with OO at the time and wanting to get away from it. Interestingly, it is currently the second result for "OO sucks" on Google.

I came here through a mention on the http://www.JoelOnSoftware.com Business Of Software forum. I unfortunately missed the party there and it was already dying down when I started reading the forum on a regular basis.

People, I followed on Twitter, kept sharing links mentioning HN or citing from comments. After some time I decided to check it about but it took me some time until I realized what this "thing" was and appreciate the value behind it.

Via mentions in Google Plus, I believe.

Just as important, I stayed here because the conversations here are good (polite, with thoughtful posts).

I think Gizmodo linked to some thing here a few years ago and I started obsessively coming here since.

Discussing the more thoughtful sub-Reddits with a friend. HN came into the discussion.

I was looking at online tutorials and hacker news was one of the tabs in the browser.

Michael Arrington linked to it from TechCrunch a few years ago.

Techcrunch lead me to ycombinator and ycombinator lead me to HN.

There was a bunch of HN posts posted to hackaday.

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