Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17005203

by yekanchi • 8 years ago

36 43 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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!?

zuzuleinen9• 8 years 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

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• 8 years 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.

zuzuleinen9• 8 years 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=383e62709f4ac9e20d7d...

znpy• 8 years ago

Same here: thanks but I don't need more emails in my Inbox. RSS would be fine though.

jitendrac• 8 years ago

One more subscriber ;)

zuzuleinen9• 8 years ago

Thank you :) I hope you will enjoy the next emails :D

deadcoder09042• 8 years 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?

zuzuleinen9• 8 years 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.

ibnishak• 8 years ago

Subscribed

zuzuleinen9• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

It's slightly more productive than procrastinating on other sites.

jordansmith• 8 years ago

"Productive" procrastination is my favorite form of procrastination.

whatyoucantsay5• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Do you know where the new elves are?

lfxyz• 8 years ago

Did we know those elves were elves at the time?

whatyoucantsay5• 8 years 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.

badcede• 8 years ago

And yet here you are.

dang4• 8 years 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).

whatyoucantsay5• 8 years 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.

bmpafa• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Don’t forget those rust vs go threads. 300 comments of people talking past each other ;-)

jokh• 8 years 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.

MoBattah2• 8 years ago

Right. HN readers call out logical fallacies well. Makes me a better analytical thinker.

O_H_E• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

We've hired a bunch of people from HN over the last 10 years.

MoBattah2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

SF?

invalid_• 8 years ago

I get to read well documented arguments AGAINST hype and trends. I like that

Ask HN: How do you benefit from Hacker News?

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