My early impressions of HN were "Oh wow, a place where developers talk about topics like AdWords? This is relevant to my interests."
That was about ~2,000 days ago.
HN clued me in on how technologically backwards my then-employer was, and led to Stack Overflow Careers from which I found my current job, so yes you've substantially affected the direction of my life.
I run into fellow Fools fairly infrequently (and don't spend much time there anymore) but always fun when two parts of my life intersect like that.
I didn't want to give specifics for preserving your Fool anonymity if you still wanted it, but guess you have a public enough internet persona nowadays that that ship has sailed. Thanks again for helping direct me into a better level of software experience and knowledge, as inadvertent and roundabout as it was. I started stalking you on HN in hopes of more Japanese slice-of-life stories that you shared on the Fool, and wound up discovering a much greater world of software instead.
I was in lurk mode for a while, not having anything to say about most of the core topics here, until one day a discussion of linguistics or something else I actually know about drew me into commenting. An odd coincidence is that patio11, one of the community's favorite commenters and one of mine, and I have the same join date. Of course patio11 deservedly has far more karma for both submissions and comments than I have. I'm very grateful for his efforts and the efforts of many other participants to keep this a community friendly to thoughtful, informed, international discussion.
P.S. I found this thread by looking for active threads. I do that sometimes here on HN to find interesting threads I missed while they were most visible on the HN front page or new page.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
At some point, I started reading Techmeme regularly, and at some point after that I started following the links to additional coverage of the stories, and one day there was a link to HN.
The quality of the articles kept me coming back more and more over several months and gradually I started reading the comments. Eventually almost four years ago, there was something that so compelled a need in me to shoot off my mouth that I made an account and posted something. This was more than two years after my interest in computing had been rekindled.
At the time, it took 200 karma points [which a middling popular submission can earn in a few hours these days] to get the downvote, and I thought, well maybe one day. Then as I approached the magic threshold, it was raised to 500 [a number of karma points that can still be hit with something appealing to populist sentiment].
What kept me coming back is that HN is all the Really Fucking Smart People™ who write comments and find articles [or write them]. It may not be the center of the computing universe, but it's pretty damn good. And trying to write in a way that is similarly engaging turns out to be a lot more rewarding than trolling ever was.
Fishing it out of my history, it seems it was submitted by this user named "pg".
I've always found good stuff with this technique - It's like poor man's machine learning algo applied to oneself. People who liked this item also liked...
One such thread of my current favorites looks like:
SO --> HN --> Reddit --> Less Wrong --> Yudkowsky's blog --> Marginal Revolution blog
I think I first saw a reference to PG on John Gruber's DaringFireball. I think this[1] may have been the link that first sent me to PG's essays.
I read all of the essays, up to that point, and then became curious about this thing called YCombinator, and this other thing called Hacker News. I lurked on HN for a while and finally started an account 1703 days ago, which was Monday, 14 September 2009.
I first heard of reddit from Joel Spolsky when he mentioned it sometime in late 2005 or early 2006, which is where I discovered of Paul Graham and ycombinator. For a long time a blog post by Paul Graham was the top up-voted article, with a few hundred upvotes. I was active on reddit from 2006-2009, then migrated to Hacker News.
I now frequent HN but reddit has devolved into a image board for memes.
I heard about HN while talking to my father (we are both software devs) so I went to check it out, and thats when I heard the angels.
"The good son always comes back home"_portuguese proverb
If you belong somewhere you'll get a way of finding it. It is just a matter of time.
I have no recollection at all, I'm afraid; I only know it was about 6 years ago because my profile tells me so.
He was right. Been here ever since.
Interesting how a small tiny link can lead to information that can reshape your entire reality.