- MOOCs recommended on HN threads are fantastic. I spent hundreds of hours on MOOCs recommended here. Same goes for textbooks. Other people’s lists I found posted here are also great. Like Mark Saroufim, Susan Rigetti, etc. I now have a really high threshold quality for tech/math books. I read SICP, Little Schemer, Steven Strogatz among many great books. There are threads on tech books, MOOCs, especially those posted during pandemics.
- I learned about the fast.ai MOOC here, and projects I did from the MOOC helped me land my first Deep Learning job. I was a Physics undergrad.
- There is higher quality of discourse where the standard is high. This put things into perspective, and made me much more confident and capable. Like, just learning a new language in a week- if you think this is normal to most people who do software, you are wrong.
- HN posts links to direct judgements, court filings, papers, etc. Now for all areas of my life, I look for the direct source- read new laws, past tax treaties, papers etc. I prefer it over reading blogs or newpaper reports.
- HN is actually diverse. I, for the first time in my life, encountered sane Right Wing here on HN. I am from India, and all American social media were biased towards one direction, and the RW discourse was kind of eh, not smart. Maybe Quora had a small faction of smart RW. Having smart RW sources to read and learn from makes me a well-rounded person. English is not my first language, and I jumped into social media without any supervision when I was 13. So, take that into account. All American social media was a particular side's echo-chamber. That was eyebrow raising and squint-demanding from even a 16 yo me.
- I see many on HN working with electronics, Math, AI as hobbies/side projects. That has directly inspired me to do the same in my life.
- There are a lot of people here who have families, a home, focus on friends, a job/business- helps me striving towards those. Before, there was a distorted view of consumer/hedonism/activism focused adult life focused on money, extremely strong opinions, bragging about achievements, etc. From the outside HN might seem like a startup/money focused forum for a certain "kind", but it has the highest concentration of diverse smart people in my experience. No other forum has so many meditators, electronics-tinkerer-for-fun, Math-obsessed-for-fun, etc. I started meditating ~4 years back based on a comment that recommended Mind Illuminated book. HN played an important role in my coming-of-age.
Thank you, HN!