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Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?

36 points by yekanchi 8y ago

I have known HackerNews for quite a year and most of the time (daily) i review the top 5, 6 links based on my favor, i recently started to think that it's very diverse and mostly i forget about the tricks and fresh thing i read, i just want to know are others like me and they just read and forget or do you feel and act other than this!?

zuzuleinen 8y ago
HackerNews is a great community. I love the comments because they come from people much smarter than me. I actually started to make a newsletter from comments which contain an important lesson: https://lessonsofhn.com https://lessonsofhn.com Sadly the newsletter has only 4 subscribers and I might discontinue it in the future. However, I will not stop favoriting comments which contain important lessons. Now I'm thinking about building a tool which will send you favorite comments of a user to your mailbox on a frequency you choose. You can add your own user and then you will not forget the things which you favorite because you will keep getting them in your inbox.
- vertis 8y ago
  I love the lessons you've shared so far, but I don't enjoy getting newsletters (I drown in emails). Maybe there is another way to share them.
  - zuzuleinen 8y ago
    Thank you, I'm so happy you love them :) I chose the e-mail format to make sure that I don't lose any lesson. E-mail forces you to act on it: either read it or delete it. I made a weekly newsletter so people don't get drown in e-mails. But I totally get your point, I will think about a way of solving this issue. Until then you can also subscribe via RSS to the e-mails: https://us9.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=383e62709f4ac9e20d7d19b59&id=9415e4492e https://us9.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=383e62709f4ac9e20d7d...
  - znpy 8y ago
    Same here: thanks but I don't need more emails in my Inbox. RSS would be fine though.
    - zuzuleinen 8y ago
      Here is the RSS https://us9.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=383e62709f4ac9e20d7d19b59&id=9415e4492e https://us9.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=383e62709f4ac9e20d7d...
      - gletard 8y ago
        Thanks, please continue publishing. I have just subscribed via Feedly.
        zuzuleinen 8y ago
        Thank you :) Will do!
      - Kevin_S 8y ago
        I've subscribed via RSS.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- jitendrac 8y ago
  One more subscriber ;)
  - zuzuleinen 8y ago
    Thank you :) I hope you will enjoy the next emails :D
- deadcoder0904 8y ago
  Wow love the lifting lesson. Subscribed. Telegram bot will be amazing as I use it a lot. I probably will make it myself if I can do something with that RSS Feed. Do you mind if I make it?
  - zuzuleinen 8y ago
    Absolutely not :) If you make it let me know I can share it on the website as well. You can find my e-mail on my profile.
    - zuzuleinen 8y ago
      Sorry, I wanted to say Absolutely :D Without the not :)) Sorry I'm on mobile and cannot edit the comment
      - deadcoder0904 8y ago
        Lol I thought absolutely not. Its a good site. I'll probably launch it in a couple of days. And when do you release new newsletters? Any specific days?
        zuzuleinen 8y ago
        Yeah, I was on train and busy, but yes I wanted to say I don't mind :) I release every Friday morning around 8:00 UTC+1
- ibnishak 8y ago
  Subscribed
  - zuzuleinen 8y ago
    Wow, you guys are amazing :D I got 80+ subscribers because of this comment. It definitely helps with the motivation :D Already started to build a small tool for myself to help me curate the best content for the subscribers. Hope you will enjoy the e-mails to come :)
JunaidBhai 8y ago
Very frequently we come across prospects for our design services who are part of the HackerNews community. It becomes a great opener to connect with them.
meesterdude 8y ago
It's been a mixed bag. I think there is a toxicity in the moderatorship and a predisposition for downvotes - which is frustrating. There are also recurring cirlce-jerks which distorts things as well. Nor has the HN platform improved in the years I've used it. But sometimes there will be a worthwhile link, or a salient comment, perhaps once a week; and that's about ratio i've found when using HN over the years. And those things are the things I remember. If you like something, comment on it - it means more than a vote, and helps you bookmark it if you ever want to track back to it.
muzani 8y ago
It's slightly more productive than procrastinating on other sites.
- jordansmith 8y ago
  "Productive" procrastination is my favorite form of procrastination.
whatyoucantsay 8y ago
To me, it serves as a powerful cautionary tale. Ten years ago, it was a vibrant community where pg, pmarca, DHH, and many other quite accomplished individuals commented regularly. It's not like that now. The elves have left middle earth. HN's greatest contributors of the past, have been gone for years. Worse still, the site's audience has broadened greatly and its content has shifted towards the very mainstream news topics that it once avoided. Moderators have clear political axes to grind. While the site initially shunned submissions related to politics (and even codified this in its guidelines), it's no longer uncommon for flags to be turned off explicitly political stories that lead to viscous flame wars. HN is invaluable, as a reminder in the fragility of communities and of the impermanence of anything we create. If a project that some of the smartest people on the planet put their heart and soul into can fall apart so ruinously, who are we to have any ego about our creations?
- zamazingo 8y ago
  Do you know where the new elves are?
  - lfxyz 8y ago
    Did we know those elves were elves at the time?
    - whatyoucantsay 8y ago
      pmarca had two separate $1B+ exits and the invention of the first mainstream web browser under his belt
  - whatyoucantsay 8y ago
    I believe pg, pmarca and many of the others went from Reddit to HN to Twitter to more private lives. If the question is "what site in early 2018 most resembles HN of 2006", I believe the answer is Indie Hackers. Its community is open, friendly, genuinely helpful and focused on business. It's not quite the same since it takes more of a pro-bootstrapper stance, but then again the HN ethos used to be more tilted towards frugality and truly early-stage companies than it now is. Things will undoubtedly change as they grow, but IH is arguably the finest place on the internet for entrepreneurs.
nvarsj 8y ago
Honestly I don't know if I do anymore! I've been on HN for nearly 8 years now. I felt like HN used to give me a big edge in tech. Much of my value system around architecture, engineering, and working were at least partially formed and shaped by reading HN - articles and comments. These days, I feel like HN has degenerated substantially. If you have an opinion that goes against the majority's view, you will get downvoted rather than argued against. The echo chamber on HN is bad these days. I feel like many articles on the front page are not original (reposts, celebrity person/company worship, mass media links, etc.). There is a lack of any original insight. I still stick around though - occasionally there is that gem in the rough. And it gives me some practice to voice my own opinions, like I'm doing here.
bmpafa 8y ago
I like it for curation of articles I'd otherwise not likely find (esp. ones that aren't new, which makes it feel like a temporally separate newsfeed). I also like the general distaste for clickbait, markety bullshit,etc. I guess in that respect, it's like all the brains you'd expect from silicon valley with very little of the Kool Aid. ...but mostly I just like seeing people piss & moan about Electron using >50MB of RAM
- w4tson 8y ago
  Don’t forget those rust vs go threads. 300 comments of people talking past each other ;-)
jokh 8y ago
I like how comment authors employ real critical thinking, unlike places like reddit where all the top comments echo each other. So fresh perspectives helps me learn from people with different viewpoints who aren't afraid to question others when they're wrong/BSing.
- MoBattah 8y ago
  Right. HN readers call out logical fallacies well. Makes me a better analytical thinker.
O_H_E 8y ago
From the most productive ways to keep-up with news and a nice place to hear comments from knowledgeable people about these news. I learn about new technologies, and sometimes comments from people help me decide next language or technology to explore next.
tptacek 8y ago
We've hired a bunch of people from HN over the last 10 years.
- MoBattah 8y ago
  Is this usually someone writes a comment related to your field, you find it insightful, check their profile and it goes from there? Or is it usually started by someone's "Show HN" post? I'm sure these generalizations are too broad.
quickthrower2 8y ago
It gives me an impression about what is going on in tech in other countries, that would be hard to know about. For example I know I can double my salary if I got to SF, although I may not act on that.
- yekanchi 8y ago
  SF?
invalid_ 8y ago
I get to read well documented arguments AGAINST hype and trends. I like that

dang 8y ago

People can assess the ruins for themselves, but I need to correct some factual errors. 1. Mainstream news stories were more common on HN in past years (actually a lot more common); 2. moderators don't moderate HN to suit their own politics (in fact we take great care not to); 3. we don't block anyone for making a comment about YC (that's in response to your user profile, since I can't reply there).

whatyoucantsay 8y ago
1. Which years? 2. I've seen it happen countless times. With the exception of pg himself, who displayed an allergy to politics or anything that got in his way of attempting to discover truth, I believe every HN moderator his sit firmly on the same side of the political spectrum and culture wars. Being humans, most have a propensity to ignore inflammatory or factually incorrect comments they agree with while flagging those they don't as "generic" or flamewar inducing. I noted dozens of examples of this behavior but the ROI on going through them is almost certainly poor or negative. The moderation response related to major controversies of the past 2 years has been clear. Which pages were artificially weighted was very poorly correlated with the intellectual honesty of their contents. 3. I was indeed prevented immediately upon making the comment in my profile, and met with a message that I was commenting too quickly. Even after waiting a full hour, I was still blocked from commenting. Interestingly another story recently asked about YC's GDPR compliance and was weighted so heavily that it sank below much older stories with fewer upvotes. Comments didn't outnumber votes, ether. #3 is actually related to #2 as YCs deepening economic and political investment in an authoritarian state increases the likelihood of a future HN where comments challenging certain militaristic, ethno-nationalist propaganda will be flagged as "generic political arguments" while repeating the propaganda itself is allowed. My view of YC's ethics is not so poor that I think this is an immediate risk, but money does tend to bend politics over time. In the early days, few expected Yahoo would one day assist in uncovering rights activists so they could be executed, and yet they did.
- dang 8y ago
  Arguments about HN getting more political / getting ruined by politics go back almost as far as HN itself: 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=348994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=278434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243561 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1542380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320152 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157485 Sound familiar? Those are just the first few I found. In those arguments, pg was in favor of keeping politicized stories if they were intellectually interesting and not just about politics: 2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=243614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=349168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=196756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94861 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403775 We've kept the original rule that a political story on HN needs to have something intellectually interesting, but we've also tightened it. For example, when a thread turns into a political flamewar, we moderate it more than pg used to. There were many past submissions that neither users nor moderators would allow today, like these from ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=94840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208518 Just look at those threads! (Edit: also interesting how the item IDs more than doubled in the first half of 2008.)
- dang 7y ago
  (This is the second half of what used to be at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I've split it off because the first half turned out to be useful to link to in other contexts.) Re "I've seen it happen countless times": since you don't know anything about our politics, what you're seeing is your own interpretation of whatever stood out to you, which is likely whatever you most disliked. I know it feels convincing, but people convince themselves of everything this way, from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15546533 to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307091. It is called the Hostile Media Effect (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), and there are countless examples on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=13110004 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=.... Re your account, it looks like we rate limited it because it has a history of using HN primarily for political (and especially national) battle, which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's routine HN moderation. Saying something about YC was not the active ingredient; people do that all the time without getting moderated. Indeed we have a rule against moderating HN for that reason: see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20yc%20moderate%20less%20not%20more https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20pg%20chair https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=.... Re the YC/GDPR thing: it's impossible to say much without a specific link but I can tell you we didn't downweight it because of YC—that would break the rule I just mentioned. Users were complaining about a flurry of GDPR posts in recent weeks and even posting lists of recent discussions, so if we touched it at all it was probably dupe-related.
  - whatyoucantsay 8y ago
    This comment further validates the concern. If regularly countering demonstrably false propaganda encountered within threads is "national battle" that gets an account limited, but the demonstrably false propaganda itself is accepted, then something is broken. The Eternal September comment rings true. There was a staggering change from 2006-2008, and a gradually decelerating decline ever since. Site policy changes are not necessarily the primary factor. As an audience gets orders of magnitudes larger, it grows diluted and less cohesive. That said, I fully agree with DanielBMarkham's comments from the election thread (despite having been in political agreement with the majority myself). PG has made truly non-PC comments here and in essays. His writing isn't that of a populist or a cultural conservative by any means, but is also clearly out of tune with the bay area echo chamber. There is a wide space between supporting Trump and not fitting in in SV! Broadly, the political topics pg seems to write about have been an opposition to political correctness, favoring equality of opportunity, and a belief that individuals creating wealth help the world rather than harm it. Some of these positions were either left leaning or had broad popular support 20 years ago, but most would now be considered right or centrist. This, coupled with his previous willingness to voice deeply sensitive but true observations, may have lead to his retirement (e.g. "founders with strong foreign accents have less startup success"). Things may have changed after Valleywag took aim at him, however. The only "battle" being waged from this side is 1) for the pursuit of truth 2) for the freedom, happiness and well-being of every human to the greatest degree possible This does involve criticising certain bad ideas (e.g. "It's acceptable to invade a peaceful neighbour to regain territory our ancestors held hundreds of years ago", "Human traits are shaped only by environment, without influence from heredity" or "Gay men should be thrown off rooftops"). Politics is far from the most important thing, but it, or tribalism generally, is often involved when a strong majority believe something at odds with history or empiricism. Investment bubbles and other herd behaviour are also deeply fascinating and worth debating. Trying to accumulate karma leads to ever stronger filter bubbles. Consequently, karma is a resource best spent on ideas that are both possibly true and deeply unpopular. Given the willingness to dissent and the apparent alignment of goals with HN's stated guidelines, these and future comments may possibly serve as a useful canary in a coal mine.