A Year On Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

A Year On Hacker News

bennesvig.com

90 pointsbennesvig13 comments

I'm closing in on a year myself. One thing that HN has clearly done for me is turn my interest in technology into an interest in businesses driven by technology -- it's moved me up a whole meta-level.

I can't help but think of technology now in business terms. What does it cost? How much is it worth? Is that a viable business model? etc.

For years I suffered under the familiar problem of being a technologist that was viewed by non-technologists as being essentially thought of as a high paid janitor. Nobody cares when things work great, but you get beat in the broom closet when something falls down.

The business-side that HN taught me has paid off tremendously, pay raises, promotions, more responsibility. Without any perceptible change in my skills as a technologist, I'm out of the broom closet and into the board room these days!

"I'm closing in on a year myself. One thing that HN has clearly done for me is turn my interest in technology into an interest in businesses driven by technology -- it's moved me up a whole meta-level."

Hah! It made me go in the opposite direction, but in a good way. I started drifting away from CS and SE, getting more and more bored by it. Slashdot was my only half-decent "tech" news site. Other things become more interesting to me.

Then I discovered this site. Now I'm very happily being dragged back into developing my hacking skills. For a while I was letting my skills slip. But now, I'm getting good at it again. Thank you, HN.

I come to HN for the comments. Every now and then I'll read something that really inspires me. I'm not necessarily talking about great advice, either. Sometimes just reading over other people's frustrations will lead me to new business ideas.

I'm often disappointed by some of the front page submissions these days so I end up reading a few gems and for articles I'm not really into I'll go into the comments too. The comments can often be more interesting than the articles themselves. I'm right there with you!

> I'm often disappointed by some of the front page submissions these days

The supposed decline in submission quality is mostly an illusion. PG set up a page that only shows submissions by older users (first six months or first year --not sure which) to evaluate the supposed submission quality decline:

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Additionally, everything has an item ID #, so if you want to prove it to yourself, you can go through everything sequentially.

I don't think "old users" is a good metric for measuring quality, it assumes that the age of your account is somehow related to your intentions on this site.

There's 3 things I think are affecting the quality:

1) A lot of stuff is written specifically targeting HN, that probably didn't happen when the traffic a front page story got was negligible

2) There are sites that blindly submit everything they publish

3) There are people who blindly submit popular sites within seconds of them publishing anything

You don't have to be a new account to be doing any of those things. My account's ~4 years old, I could be doing any or all of them.

Being able to find the opinions of so many like minded individuals is both a blessing and a curse-- it's great to be able to skim the responses to major news items, but often I find myself just nodding along to every comment, even though the most thought provoking discussions are the ones where I end up disagreeing with the prevailing opinion.

Great post, and thanks for the read.

I'm about 6 months (daily-->hourly page refreshes) into HN and I've read some of the most incredible articles here. I feel the same way you feel, and agree on your point of "few people are remembered for being well read.....start shipping...".

With that boost of morale, my decisions to put a lot of things I've read here into practice seem all the more rational.

After few months of reading hacker news articles and reading comments I decided to be a part of this community. The discussions here are of the highest caliber from any other community out there. Already over the past few days of joining, I've learned a tremendous deal. I can't wait to see how my development (personal and technical) will advance over the next year!

I'm already past my one year mark, and somehow I have 917 karma.

I think I fell off the wagon somewhere.

If the difference between your karma and his concerns you, I suggest you not check the leader board.

That wasn't my implication. When I originally started with HN, I was telling myself I didn't want to join another community and all I wanted was aggregated links worth reading.

I am now 917 karma into said community. The wagon, I fell off it.

My bad. (Perhaps it implies I'm a "karma whore" that I jumped to the wrong conclusion?)

I hope you don't really regret the fall.

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