New to HN, where to start? | Hacker News Reader

New to HN, where to start?

5 pointskmack9 comments

Hey everyone, over the last couple of weeks I have been casually browsing the HN forum and have discovered what a massive and excellent community this is. So, I guess I was just wondering if there are any guidelines or things that a newcomer should be aware of? Thanks guys!

View on HN

Well, if you want to read things by some of the top contributing users, a good place to start would be the "leaderboard" [1]. Click on one of the users names, and click "comments". These are usually pretty fun to read (especially from those with high "avg" karma).

Also, to answer a couple questions you will inevitably have while browsing through their comments or old posts:

1) There is a karma threshold for down-voting (currently 500).

2) The "expired link" page you see is a known issue and is unlikely to be fixed any time soon.

As for guidelines:

Always try to add to the discussion. Be nice. This isn't reddit (humor is fine, but stupid jokes are not). Upvote on quality of content, not appeal of content.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

I guess another question I have, which maybe should just be created in it's own thread is this...

I'm looking for a technical co-founder for a new business. While I'm not trying to find someone from this post, I am curious as to what would be a good path to take to begin to establish myself as a good person to go into business with. It seems that one of the most important things, beside from being generally qualified, motivated, etc. is to begin trying to learn as much about the technical side of things as possible.

Do you guys agree with this? If so, where is a good place to start learning to code on a basic level?

Best path = ship something.

If you want to learn to code, start with Udacity:

www.udacity.com

It is a great resource, and it is free.

wow, thank you this is extremely useful and easy to understand

This is now two years old, but still a pretty awesome resource:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive

Also if you want to search with more control than Google provides, check out:

http://www.hnsearch.com

Awesome, I'm really excited to really start learning some stuff about the tech/start up world. It seems that I've read more interesting articles on HN in about fifteen minutes than hours on other forums

The Guidelines link is in the footer.

Oh, alright thanks

Reply on news.ycombinator.com