I have checked Hacker News daily since I was 12, which is over 14 years ago now (excluding camping with no internet).
It gave me and some of my best friends growing up some great conversations topics. I’m also sure Hacker News has started many hobbies of mine and provided tons of education/entertainment over the years. By far, I think the best benefit of HN for me socially has been making me a more interesting person due to the topics I’ve learned about here.
I went from a homeschooled kid on a farm to->university->junior->mid-level SE->aspiring entrepreneur at age 26 while checking this site daily.
Great site, great community, and I pray it continues in the same way it has for decades to come.
I quickly became friends with the organiser of the meetup (Dmitri) and started helping him out. Together over the next 10 years we turned the meetup into the largest tech meetup in Europe with nearly 10k members and an average attendance of 500 people (max capacity for our venue). I ended up hosting the meetup and through that event (plus HN itself) my career took off. I've worked with multiple YC companies and have launched various products and businesses leveraging the network I created through HN. Dmitri and his family are still very close friends and honestly, it really is all thanks to HN.
I understand that I am not the greatest communicator but IRL if I have to wipe the earth's sorry a$$ I would because I am a servant to all. Plus I ran a portable toilet business in Lakeland and now removed dead people in VA. So why am I here I have no clue? Never felt I belonged. And I doubt a story like these would happen to me. IMHO, the sand Valley can't handle this boricua sauce.
One of my frustrations with the modern internet is how infrequently it leads to offline gatherings and connections these days. It used to be very normal that mailing lists, user groups, etc. would gather online, but also have a weekly/monthly meeting, conference, or post job ads/things for sale, etc. and you'd just organically end up meeting people and hanging out.
These days, the internet seems to be for people who really just want to discuss opinions endlessly and anonymously, but never do anything about it offline.
One does, very occasionally, see posts on HN about meetups, but it's rare and just one-off and ad-hoc, you'd think a big city like London, NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. could easily sustain an ongoing weekly/monthly thing.
I remember when Facebook launched I thought it might serve as this (eg, “oh h2odragon has a year old account and seems not like a psycho, I’ll let them come to my art class”). But Facebook wasn’t interested and stopped providing apis and whatnot. I think it didn’t align with their business model as they kind of want scams as it drives lots of revenue (in that a significant portion of ads are misleading or scams that would be devastated if people could post reputation info like “this magic mouthguard doesn’t work and just a $10 drugstore version wrapped in $40 of social media ads”).
The key is that there’s some public store of identities, and some level of social graph or complaints that lets you know if it’s a real person or not.
I think it’s better if it’s not blockchain and tied to some natural identity that people use- like Facebook- so there’s a virtuous incentive to keep it active. A blockchain wouldn’t really be self-sustaining as no one really uses identity as part of random stuff and it would need some way to pay for itself.
Noite de Processing is also streamed online as well usually by the great Alexandre Villares. The next one is tuesday 28/11/2023![2]
[2] https://garoa.net.br/wiki/Noite_de_Processing
[3] On youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@GaroaHackerClubeSaoPaulo/streams
caras, vocês são incríveis
Love from VA <3 Be Kind
I think the format is just not well suited to making real connections between users. Everyone's just too anonymous and hard to recognise for that.
I know that people here are usually not toxic, and I wouldn't be worried about sharing personal info that much, but it's just an 'all names kinda blend in with this format' thing.
We've been working together on Toughbyte, our second venture, for more than eight years now: https://www.toughbyte.com
Which really seems quite prescient, 22 years later.
I also made a close IRL friend because we wore the same (obscure, in-joke) HN t-shirt to a conference.
I’d love to meet more.
I live in Berlin and Las Vegas, and I’m regularly in many other major cities (SF, NYC, LA, London, Tokyo).
sneak@sneak.berlin, hit me up for coffee. Signal number’s on my website.
I made professional connections. I was, in 2017, building a machine learning plugin for Elasticsearch (google Elasticsearch Learning to Rank). In a post about Slack's use of machine learning for search, I commented sharing the project. The Wikimedia Foundation search folks replied. We started collaborating professionally. As a consultant, I had access to many applicable use cases in the community. And Wikimedia of course had massive scale to make it bulletproof. We ended up co-creating the plugin - still relatively active for both OpenSearch and Elasticsearch.
There's also meeting people by proxy. I find another community from here. People on that community are friends with one another. Turns out those people browse HN too.
I owe so much to HN, I wish I could contribute back to it somehow.
Little sad. However an impetus for mother of all inventions: social network for plutonic relations? ;)
Loneliness is a crisis and becoming an epidemic. There needs to be a way men in particular needs to find a way to connect without making them feel...may I say... despairing or desperate? :(