Ask HN: How did you find Hacker News?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743604

by rememberlenny • 12 years ago

31 70 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

patio113• 12 years ago

If I remember correctly, somebody who knew me from the Business of Software forums mentioned my business here, I saw it in my logs, and started reading. I had no idea any of this startup stuff existed prior. I had heard of pg but only knew him as the Plan for Spam (Bayesian spam filtering article) author, and thought he was actually the same person as John Graham-Cumming (who is also an HN user, also has a cognate for Gram in his name, and also wrote Popfile, a Bayesian spam filter).

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.

T-hawk2• 12 years ago

I've wanted to share this story for a while and now is as good a place as any. I found Hacker News from you via the Motley Fool. You wrote a long post on the Fool and mentioned it was copied from another internet forum. I picked a particular unusual-looking phrase in it, searched, and found it which turned out to be on HN. I stalked through your HN comment history and then I was hooked.

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.

patio113• 12 years ago

Hah, awesome. That was me explaining subprime mortgage products by reference to insurance on disease-prone cow herds, right?

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.

MichaelStubbs• 12 years ago

I saw it referenced on Reddit. It was probably /r/programming but I don't recall fully.

ragatskynet• 12 years ago

Fun because I do not remember exactly, but I remember I was reading the weekly mail newsletter before the actual site.

grayrest• 12 years ago

Shared an apartment with a guy in YCS07.

andrzejsz2• 12 years ago

By meetup

andrzejsz2• 12 years ago

That is HNLondon but the funny thing there was no url on HNLondon page so I was forced to find it myself

ankurpatel• 12 years ago

Flipboard

randall• 12 years ago

I worked at Justin.TV. My impression is early yc companies used it as an internal reddit that just got more and more external over time.

rickyc091• 12 years ago

Word of mouth.

normloman• 12 years ago

It was mentioned in a list of alternatives to Slashdot. That site became trash the when dice.com took it over. Too bad. I liked it better than here. The users were way less optimistic.

TurplePurtle• 12 years ago

It's one of the sites on http://www.jimmyr.com

cyphax• 12 years ago

I was looking for a replacement for Slashdot, which became more childish by the day it seemed, and someone suggested HN. I haven't seen much of Slashdot since. :)

simmons• 12 years ago

A blog post of mine was posted to HN a few years ago, and I thought, "where is all this traffic coming from?" I'm not sure how I missed HN before that.

chrismorgan• 12 years ago

I haven’t got the faintest recollection.

lpgauth• 12 years ago

2248 days ago I saw a post on Techcrunch, I think..?

chedigitz• 12 years ago

2232 days ago, I also saw a post on Techcrunch... Discovered a whole new world.

Interesting how a small tiny link can lead to information that can reshape your entire reality.

nichochar• 12 years ago

Fellow, older developer in startup when I was younger I think. He also introduced me to IRC. It was like losing my virginity

cm2012• 12 years ago

A friend had applied to YC and told me about when I mentioned a start-up idea years and years ago.

joeblau• 12 years ago

Moved to San Francisco and saw a few people on the Caltrain reading the site.

techstroke• 12 years ago

Heard about PG essays from a friend in Mumbai , then saw HN for first time and got addicted to it since , and now it's in my default tab in chrome !

Xcelerate• 12 years ago

It kept showing up in Google search results so I joined. Kind of sad that it doesn't really show up as much anymore.

galfarragem• 12 years ago

Surfing the web. I believe that was after reading a PG essay.

"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.

moconnor• 12 years ago

I think Joel Spolsky mentioned something about "the ycombinator kids" in one of his blogs many, many years ago. Can't find a link to it but that's where I first heard the name and investigated.

decasteve• 12 years ago

I came here by way of reddit, by way of Spolsky.

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.

klez• 12 years ago

I was looking for security-related news and typed "hacker news" on google.

BillyMaize• 12 years ago

I googled something like "Paul Software Engineer" to see if I myself would come up and found Paul Graham's articles which lead to hacker news. I had no idea what a startup even was but found the content to be of such a higher quality than anywhere else that I visited often.

knackers• 12 years ago

I think it was through Slashdot.

egeozcan• 12 years ago

I'd been reading the stories/comments long before I joined. I remember the motivation to open this account (worst decision in my life in terms of productivity but I would have still joined in the light of this knowledge =) ) but I don't remember how I first landed on HN. Definitely not a Google search. Likely a reference to a comment here linked somewhere.

gadders• 12 years ago

Michael Arrington mentioned it on TechCrunch.

dobbsbob• 12 years ago

EDIT: forgot, I found this site much earlier. I was learning Lisp, found the pg Lisp story of running Yahoo stores, had no idea who he was, found HN through his page on wikipedia

jckt• 12 years ago

A random Google search. Thought, with a name like "hacker news", I'd come up with a lame "script kiddie" site full of teenagers or something. Couldn't have been proven more wrong.

libraryatnight• 12 years ago

I found it on r/programming

lazydon• 12 years ago

For me the route was via StackOverflow (SO). I looked for a question like what other sites are there like SO for gaining some real world wisdom.

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

qzapaia• 12 years ago

i heard about HN in some video of mejorando.la several years ago.

neillyons• 12 years ago

I found Hacker News via the Stackoverflow podcast. Jeff or Joel mentioned it in one of the early episodes.

J_Darnley• 12 years ago

I'm fairly sure it was a link someone posted on IRC.

cliveowen• 12 years ago

Strangely I've been here for less than a year but I don't remember how I came across HN, not a clue.

jqm• 12 years ago

It was pre-bookmarked in the Firefox bookmarks on a Linux distro I installed.

septerr• 12 years ago

For me it was a colleague when I mentioned I feel so out of date.

harrykim• 12 years ago

I found it via Flipboard magazine recommendation.

pflanze• 12 years ago

I don't remember the exact ordering of events anymore but I was looking for a programming language alternative and stumbled upon lisp, and read PG's essays. Then shortly after, he introduced YC, and then I think HN was linked from the YC website or so. I didn't create an account for another 1-2 years.

skizm• 12 years ago

jimmyr.com

Patrick_Devine• 12 years ago

I was at PyCon a few years back and pg was one of the keynote speakers. I actually didn't know who pg was at the time, but I really enjoyed the talk. There was a Q&A session after the keynote, and a bunch of people got up and asked pg questions about Hacker News and I remember thinking "wtf is hacker news?".

wilsonfiifi• 12 years ago

When I started searching for serious topics in Google, HN kept appearing in the 1st page results so I decided to bookmark it lol. But I only joined when I felt I could post something meaningful.

ibandyop• 12 years ago

http://popurls.com

jtheory• 12 years ago

This question seems to be impressively bad at generating discussion.

I have no recollection at all, I'm afraid; I only know it was about 6 years ago because my profile tells me so.

rememberlenny• 12 years ago

What would make it better?

soneca• 12 years ago

I heard about YC first. That was just a little more than a year ago, so HN was already strongly related to it.

borges• 12 years ago

A friend of mine shared some hacker news on Google Reader (the best google's social network)

bkamapantula• 12 years ago

A friend recommended to me.

jasonkester• 12 years ago

I found it as a referer in my weblogs. The article in question was in the process of being Meh'd and Die-in-a-fire'd at by the crowd at Reddit, whereas here there was a small yet intelligent discussion about the technology used to build the thing the article talked about.

Fishing it out of my history, it seems it was submitted by this user named "pg".

michaeltocci• 12 years ago

I have been reading posts for about a year, I only recently (in the past couple of weeks) got an account.

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.

mrdazm• 12 years ago

While working my first job out of college as an A/V Tech (I'm a web developer now - front-end) I had a lot of downtime and was bored. I asked a friend, another programmer, to recommend good sources for articles/posts and such and HN made the list.

brudgers• 12 years ago

In 2008, my laptop was insufficiently powerful to produce some of the renderings I was building and so I had to do some research and that got reading about computer hardware after more than a decade of just buying stuff off the shelf. Reading computing articles became a worklike activity as the the economy tanked and the construction pipeline dried up and with it design work.

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.

zura• 12 years ago

Found it several times through organic search. Then, I went to the main page and thought that it was interesting.

zorta• 12 years ago

through android application "Pulse". It was (actually is) a suggestion under "Computer" category

jamielee• 12 years ago

After playing MineCraft, I got interested in Java. I started reading a Java textbook. My curiosity for programming grew, and I was curious to read about all the different kinds of programmers (including the mischievous and law-breaking ones). Googled "hacker." Stumbled upon hacker news.

drcongo• 12 years ago

I found it a bit grumpy.

Mankhool• 12 years ago

TechCrunch 1771 days ago. Before it became AOLCrunch. Sigh.

Abraln• 12 years ago

Mine is a bit less professional, I was playing a MMO (forgot which), and someone had hacked their way into the company's servers and stole some credit card numbers. I googled "MMO name" hacker news, and saw some interesting article a couple of results down.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

I followed the link here from Paul Graham's personal website, where he keeps his collection of essays.[1] A local friend recommended that I read his essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular"[2] back before Hacker News existed, and later an online friend recommended that I read "What You'll Wish You'd Known."[3] Then I started keeping an eye out for new essays by Paul Graham, and eventually while reading one of them I followed the link to what was then known as Startup News.

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

[2] http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

[3] http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

edj• 12 years ago

I found out about about HN after I encountered Paul Graham's essays in the late 2000s.

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.

1: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/02/18/graham

X41• 12 years ago

i stumbled upon Kale Davis Hacker Newsletter some time ago

PeterWhittaker• 12 years ago

I mentioned to a friend an article on /. He said "buh, I mostly read HN, /. jumped the shark a long time ago".

He was right. Been here ever since.

steanne• 12 years ago

the global shared stories section of newsblur.

hnal943• 12 years ago

Wikipedia binge (programming languages) -> Greenspun's Tenth Rule -> Paul Graham Essays -> YCombinator.com -> HN

Ask HN: How did you find Hacker News?

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