This is the first time I've heard of HN described as "warm"
Besides that, HN is very nicely moderated. It might be just me, but I value non-echo-chamber places. HN is very surprisingly very diverse, and I have considered many POVs that I hadn’t considered before. HN made me a better person.
Apart from that, people in HN are generally very helpful and are keen on giving valuable advive. Thanks, everyone.
HN has been transformative in my life and journey. I am a much better engineer, well versed in diverse subjects. I am in a much better place in my career for HN. They say, "if you are the smartest person in a room, change the room, if you care to grow". I am certainly not the smartest or the most experienced person in this room, and I grew a lot and keep growing due to HN.
I lived (and now live, due to WFH) in a very small town. What I do, nobody understands. First, FB connected me with smart, accomplished expats who grew up in my town, then Quora gave me a glimpse of outside world, Amazon gave me book-gadget-parity, and Reddit gave me a good base. I learned programming with the help of Reddit recommended sources. Then finally, HN recommended sources made me, and keeps making me better.
And thanks to pirates, too, because many stuff that I could not literally afford, were available for free.
I got to know about SICP, nand2tetris, genetic programming, and a lot of other things from HN for the first time.
And the level of competence of people on HN is much higher. I get better just by trying to be worthy of this place.
A heartfelt thanks to HN.
I will make a post, too, when I am where I want to be.
I like to call them Good Samaritans because I also cannot literally afford to buy the interesting things I want. In the age of perpetual copyright and DRM, it would be a much less interesting world for me if I had to pay for everything. Some of the things I am most interested in cannot be found in the public library.
For example, "Beyond Good and Evil" by Friedrich Nietzsche on Amazon is $3.99 for the eBook, $17.99 Hardcover and $6.99 for paperback. Nietzsche has been dead for 122 years, so why do I have to pay? No one currently alive had anything to do with helping Nietzsche produce his work.
Pirate Bay to the rescue, I downloaded the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche (72 books, essays and other works) for the total cost of FREE. How amazing is that? I'm not sure I could even do that by paying for it. Thank you to anyone who made that torrent available (or similar torrents.) You're doing God's work.
> Pirate Bay to the rescue, I downloaded the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche (72 books, essays and other works) for the total cost of FREE. How amazing is that? I'm not sure I could even do that by paying for it.
You have a good point, but chose a bad example. For works that are public domain or otherwise out of copyright (at least, non-obscure ones), you have fairly good legal download options, starting with Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/779
https://archive.org/search.php?query=Nietzsche&and[]=creator...
Within that set of public domain works, the most popular ones often have somewhat nicer (but still free) editions from places like Standard Ebooks, Feedbooks, and Manybooks:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=Nietzsche
https://www.feedbooks.com/search?protection=without_drm&quer...
Also, for books, it’s always worth trying Gutenberg, first: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/779
I mean sure there are aggressive responses but nothing like the vitriol you see on many other platforms.
By not striving, it achieves it.
The interface plays a major role. Most are turned away by how 1999 it looks. The flip side of that is that the "community" here is much like those of the 90's. You had to be somewhat intelligent to get online in the first place, and most everyone who could had a lot in common right out of the gate. No need to contrive "community", it forms organically, as it should.
This is unimaginable in most major forums I know.
I'm taking OP's description of "warm" to mean "not hostile", which I think is true. I've seen people throw out baseless insults on front page threads and you can watch them be buried live in real time over the course of about 15 seconds.
It's one thing to have a set of civil house rules for a forum, but the community here is much better at enforcing them than any other I've seen in this space.
The couple of times that I've been (factually) wrong about something on here I'd say it was 50/50 between being corrected politely and abrasively. Compare that to twitter, where it seems the entire point of the website is to dunk on people, and 50/50 is not so bad.
But generally speaking HN is very "warm" when you ask for help in desperate situations. And it is not just bound to Tech. You have Chemist, Physicist, Biologist, Lawyers, Doctors, Virologist, Finance ( Non - FinTech ), Food Sectors, People actually working inside government etc etc, ( 12+ years in I am surprised at the diversity of expert reading HN. ) nerds from all around the world hanging on HN, You have professionals giving you some advices or at least a place to start and improve the situation while you may be completely helpless or clueless.
Compared to Reddit, where such behavior is par for the course.
A place with room for constructive (or not) criticism, one that is not oppressed by outrage culture and people vigilant to construe everything you say as a personal insult that must be condemned, a place where you can be sure to be told directly when and why you're wrong, that is indeed a warm place, one where you don't doubt that people mean what they say.
When slurs, personal attacks and incivility are fair game you can't attack inconvenient opinions by complaining that they are not presented in a high enough brow manner.
This tilts the balance of power in favor of whatever the local majority opinion is (as if voting wasn't a strong enough mechanism for doing that) because every subjective rule you can possibly use to exclude commentary will always get wielded harder against the minority opinion.
Warm is nice. HN can lean cold, which is not so bad either.
I had to stop using Reddit/Twitter for the most part. You can't have a reasonable discourse on those platforms.
On Reddit I got called slurs, I've had people tell me I'm a horrible human for saying you can't afford LA on 40k a year. Here people are at least civil.