Ask HN: How did you find yourself on HN?
Hello! I've been here for a few months now. When I got my new laptop, I installed brave instead of chrome and typing "news" in the top automatically re-directs here.
I didn't expect to end up spending so much time here. I am nowhere near a programmer in my day-to-day life. I am currently embarking on a study of topology with the assistance of a friend who does research in mathematical physics, but aside from that my interests lay in literary fields and I'm quite shocked to see that very frequently the interests of other users here oftentimes matches up with my own. But I am also aware that many users here are actually in "silicon valley" (or at least work full time as developers); though, looking at the CS majors I went to school with, I have to imagine you guys are a special sort.
I had an amazing first boss who shared it with me near when I started and said "Ya know, for when you have some downtime". Not only did that introduce me to this awesome news and community, but also, he normalized the idea of some downtime during the 8 hour work day which was so important for me to hear as a junior engineer.
It was very difficult.
I had to learn about astral projection, which allowed me to disconnect from myself and rise above my physical body so that I could see what I was doing.
It was only then that I was able to visually observe myself and found that I was actually looking at Hacker News.
It was well with the trouble.
I think I heard about a new JavaScript framework that can help with that.
Congratulations. I'm still searching.
I googled myself and found lively discussion on my naval exploits of 1991. https://github.com/timonoko/sextant
In 2013 this comment was posted to HN:
> I'm a developer in Windows and contribute to the NT kernel. (Proof: the SHA1 hash of revision #102 of [Edit: filename redacted] is [Edit: hash redacted].) I'm posting through Tor for obvious reasons.
> Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening. The cause of the problem is social. There's almost none of the improvement for its own sake, for the sake of glory, that you see in the Linux world.
> [...]
http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-w...
This was reported on certain tech news sites that I was occasionally reading then.
There's a popular security website called thehackernews, i used to read it in school(-10y). occasionally I'd get results from hn in searches, I mostly skipped the site entirely because meh what would a site that's designed like that would even have.
around the same time, i randomly visited some startupfair here locally and made friends w some folks, then one guy asked if i read hackernews, i said yea yea ofc. (not the one he was asking about)
later that night, i was wondering why that guy asked me about hackernews he was not even into security. So i looked up hn, and since that night, this site keeps on giving.
I likely learned about it from Reddit or from a peer in University.
HN is likely part of a lineage of online discourse. I was introduced to that lineage with slashdot. Slashdot -> digg -> reddit -> HN was the likely path.
A lot of comments here are in the spirit of slashdot, but HN punishes "funny" comments so is a bit more serious.
I imagine slasdot was ultimately a child of usenet. I think SomethingAwful and metafilter and the greater phpBB ecosystem were also in there somewhere.
There are likely related lineages with IRC, Slack, TeamSpeak/Ventrillo, and discord.
I think I saw someone mention HN in a reddit comment about 10 years ago.
More lost than found myself here (like many others I suspect).
But heard through the grapevine back in 2010 or so. Joined and have lurked here everyday more or less since and always find something interesting. Kind of a homepage really.
Had I know I'd be here 13 years later I wouldn't have made such an ironic username lol.
I can’t exactly remember how I got here actually. I vaguely remember coming across Paul Graham’s (pg) writings and getting hooked there first but I also can’t rule out alien abduction either.
Found it in 2013 when I was into "Rationality" (Lesswrong and the like). Lurked for a while, then had an account for a few years. Ditched that when my older comments started looking stupid and made this one.
I've also done very little computer programming relative to all my other work and hobbies. Heard about HN from an acquaintance.
I can't remember any more. Probably via /r/programming back in the day. Apparently I created my account in April 2009, but I had certainly lurked before that.
It's been so long, I've forgotten where I first heard about HN.
Since COVID and subsequent Long Covid in March 2020, I've got very little in terms of outlets for my attention.
Watched a Torvalds video where he was at debconf (I think?) and someone asked him if he goes to Hacker News at all. Went to Google, and the rest is history.
I am not sure. I think someone mentioned it on Slashdot and I started gradually reading hn more. It took many years to actively participate, though.
I believe I found out about it from my uncle when I was like 16 or 17. Or at least he convinced me to check it out.
My account was created 17 years ago. I don't even remotely remember.
I read about it in a book called Chaos Monkeys.
I'd seen this place mentioned a few times on metafilter and twitter but didn't come visit until I saw it mentioned on both /r/math and SotS in the same week. Word of mouth, basically. I came here for the academia but stayed for the physical industry talk.