While investigating the possibility of using Lisp on a project, I came across a book by Paul Graham. Subsequent net searches led to HN. The project died as a result of new ownership and Lisp remains a curiosity that may yet be satisfied recreationally.
I was in the first cohort of founders in the Ignite accelerator (https://ignite.io/) in the UK, and it was mentioned by one of the people running it. Accelerator programmes are quite a small world.
a bunch of people on twitter were bragging that they got a lot of traffic from this site called hackernews...
Same. When I saw people literally launched successful companies because of HN it was too good to ignore.