Ask HN: How did you discover Hacker News?

I drew a graph of connections between Paul Graham essays, and coloured them via a PageRank-style weighting algorithm. I emailed it to PG, and he suggested I post it here.

I started reading Paul Graham's essays after listening to his talk: https://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.con...

I was hovering over PC forums since 2000 until in 2018 I stumbled upon here. My first thought: where the hell was this treasure hidden all this time? Second thought: are there such gems for other fields (my field-medicine, sports, travel etc)? I found none with so high quality, curration, expertise.

Through pg's essays, which I discovered via a Joel Spolsky blog post. Perhaps this one: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

Links to HN on Techmeme, and I was on Techmeme because I was interested in memes.

I was interested in memes because I had read Daniel Dennitt's Consciousness Explained back in the mid 1990's and was on the internet looking at them because the meme meme had become more mainstream.

Or to put it another way, I found HN through intellectual curiosity as a distraction from my practice collapsing in the sub-prime meltdown...it was long ago in a galaxy far far away.

Strangely I think it was TechCrunch. But I was reading pg's essays years earlier (maybe through Joel On Software) and already had known about yc.

Think it was related to the initial request for startups post: https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/y-combinator-starts-seedin...

I think i got linked here from a slashdot article. That one is flooded with russian trolls nowadays so i mostly visit hacker news, and people are nicer here too

I can't remember. It's been at least 15 years? HN is still worth reading and the level of discourse is still quite high (though slightly worse than a decade ago). But it's refreshing to have a place where the comments are better than the prose of the linked articles in question.

My JavaScript tutor made mention of it in one of her videos. I checked it out and created an account only for me to abandon HN till I came back this year to create a new account and now I find HN interesting :)

I was researching frameworks for building progressive web apps and stumbled over "Hacker News as a PWA" (https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas).

Got a tip from a fellow admin on IRC (Freenode v1.0) and made an account (since lost) in 2007 - followed up in late 2008, been an on and off reader / commenter since then, more so lately given less hands on work IRL.

Coworker about 10 years ago. Took me a few years to register an account.

Hum... don't remember. The oldest HN post that I can positively remember right now is the Wash my Ferrari problem from 2012 so it should be via Debian forums

I think I signed up one of the first days after it launched, it was called Startup News. Either from a pg essay or reddit, can't remember which.

I was obsessed with creating tech startups in my bedroom before I even knew what the term "startup" meant.

I was showing a friend a hosting service I built and he told me to check out Hacker News. This must have been around 2009.

Discovering HN quite literally changed my life in various ways. It's genuinely insane how much this site, and that conversation, has directly and indirectly been the source of various branches my life has taken.

Things were so fun and dynamic back then. This was back when people would post weird weekend projects here and within a few months were millionaires. I'm sure it still happens, but much less frequently.

I used to search hacker news and used to get the YC website and accidently got into this.

College roommate 17 years ago while doing NSF summer research, I am eternally grateful Eric!

A pg essay almost two decades ago, when the site was still called Startup News.

I don't remember but probably it was StumbleUpon. Around 2012.

CS50x at the end there was a short list of places to check out

It was so long ago (with a different account), that I don't remember.

Cant remember. Probably searching for an answer to some coding problem.

A chatter linked HN on #commonlisp on freenode back in 2011.

Michael Arrington told everyone about it on TechCrunch.

Saw I post on /r/programming in 2011.

My AI agent, Ziggy Stardust, told me about it.

someone on irc once posted a link to a hn discussion. :)

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