Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?
So I would like to know if any of you have such experiences. I am specifically looking for stories like: 1) I posted this project and I started some company. Sold it or earning a lot of money or living my dream 2) I was hired because of my post on HN. 3) Girls chasing you because of your reputation as HN or met your wife because of your cool project ( Please don't hate me for this)
Basically money, power etc..
Forgive me for being blunt but I am not looking for "10-sec fame". I mean one day you got traffic 100K on the website. Good. But just for one day. Also, I am not sure blogging count as a tangible benefit unless it is paid service. I hope you understand my point.
Also intellectual debate, I get more information, I feel smart as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
282 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadThe story is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26327717
There are a lot of influential people on HN. I have seen companies win business and lose business for content posted here.
Either way, If the community takes interest in something (positive or negative), it is impactful.
Don't even get me started with the weekly UFO posts ...
Sad but true, it's kinda like what stackoverflow has become. It's also site of overwhelming group-think.
I anticipate downvotes to prove my point.
I made one (modestly) successful angel investment from a chain of events inseparably linked to here.
I do value the intangible enjoyment/education from HN much more than the concrete things above, though.
There’s no way the time I spend here is “paid back” just from the concrete RoI items and if you’re trying to build a financial Excel model to decide whether to spend time here, your answer probably rounds to “No”
But most days are not like that.
You also get some information early. For example, if you paid attention you could have bought calls on Gamestop when they were cheap or puts on the S and P when they were cheap back in early 2020. It’s a filter: WSB talks about a ton of stocks, but when a news story hits HN that says “WSB is talking about Gamestop”? That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information.
Hacker News can be dumb in some ways of course but it is the highest signal place I know on the internet and genuinely early on a lot of things.
However, to get any benefit out of it you have to enjoy it, and it doesn’t sound like you do, so you probably wouldn’t benefit as things are.
I think the motto about it being a place to gratify intellectual curious really sums it up. This is a forum for people who are curious, and you come every day looking for interesting stuff. Slanted to programming, tech and business building, but with a mix of everything. And if you think about what you are working on as you do you will occasionally find legitimately useful gems.
I can't disprove "That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information.", but buying GME based on posts on HN to me (or selling), is absurd and is extremely far from "inside information". As someone who noticed the GME pump 1 week before its peak and spends time on HN, there was no way I was going to put money in GME or "ride it to the moon".
It’s not some crazy thing, pretty standard business idea for my sort of business, but was still a revelation. Basically you can get a ton of business model info on HN. The specific model wouldn’t help you here, but basically if you have a business hn can show you how to round it out. Roughly:
1. I did a bunch of deep work and produced an asset
2. HN showed me how to use that asset waaaaaay better
3. However HN is dangerous if you go too far into doing only aleatory information seeking and forget to continue doing deep work (I fall prey to this at times)
You’ll see some stories in this thread of people who were not programmers on HN and who received the message “hey you can be a programmer”. If you have this knowledge it is trivial, if you don’t it is life transforming. So whether HN has any life transforming potential for you depends on whether you have any such blind spots where simply being exposed to the right idea would let you make a large change onto a new path which is substantially better than the old path.
—————
For GME, this is roughly the process. Note I had background knowledge of reddit, wall street bets, memes and basic knowledge of call options.
1. This story was posted Jan 20th, about a week before the surge. Top comment lays out the short squeeze idea. But big signal is showing “hey wsb seems to be on to something, it made it through the hn bubble”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208
2. My reaction was “oh interesting” (—> note to self “stop and pay attention to this reaction. Had it for the early pandemic stories too)
3. But what you could have done was checked the price of short dated call options. I could be mistaken here, as jan 20th might have been too late and the possible returns too small. But bought early enough, far out of the money call options could have a 50-100x return. The stock itself rose 10x so I’d be surprised if call options returned less than that.
(If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know_
Don’t put in your life savings. But my claim is that if you faced fifty such decisions on HN and put $1000 in each time your ROI would be very positive.
The pandemic is maybe a clearer example. Due to HN and adjacent tech sources I’d say I knew pretty much what was going to happen by Feb 20th. In hindsight this was way too slow, but it was still a good 3+ weeks ahead of most of north America.
I feel HN reliably has me a bit ahead of the curve.
Disclaimer, to all reading: please don’t start gambling on HN. These are just examples to illustrate my general claim that HN has a high concentration of early info compared to other sources and has high signal.
Look here: https://omnieq.com/underlyings/NYSE/GME/chain
Doesn’t have high out of the money but if I’m reading it right the potential returns for buying Jan 20th were insane. A $60 call potion expiring Jan 29th was $1.20.
GME went to $500 or so. If you exercised such an option at, say, $350, your profit on the exercise would have been $290.
At a cost of $1.20. 242x return.
And thank you, that site is incredible. Very hard to find such data. Another example of HN’s value. I searched for this kind of thing off and on for weeks, but it randomly pops up on an unrelated thread because I made an offhand mention. That’s HN.
I also love the typo of “potion” for option in your second paragraph. It seems especially fitting for this story.
> Very hard to find such data.
That is the understatement of the decade.
They could probably improve their SEO, unless they are new within the past nine months or so. When I searched historical options prices extensively nothing came up.
Do you have any affiliation with them? If not I can reach out directly. There are some pretty obvious strategies that would make them much more prominent for searches like “SPY historical options prices”
But by all means reach out to me if you've got a winning options strategy :-) or want freelance data-mangling or web stuff done (I'm retired, I'm a pretty good programmer) to get there.
This for me. I’m greatly satisfied when a problem I’m working is also a topic oh HN—even obliquely.
Otherwise, the question seems to put the cart before the horse—power, wealth.. these are positive side-effects of a life of engaged curiosity within a professional domain and good decisions, right place;right time, and luck. Not lighting in a bottle.
Precisely. Well put. There’s no way HN works as a quick fix or as a direct source of gains.
On the one hand, life does not work the way OP assumes. It's not linear, we don't "read HN –> profit."
On the other hand, news in general can become a meaningless and value-less distraction.
So I think they key is what you said: intellectual curiosity and exposure to high-signal information, without a highly specific goal in mind. You get the value of serendipity and filling in some unknown unknowns while avoiding senseless and endless clicking. HN fills that niche about as well as anything, though it certainly can become a distraction if you let it.
I read HN for sentences like this.
I wonder how many HN people became buy-and-hold millionaires.
However, for anyone psychologically inclined to like the idea of BTC and hold they could have found out about it early and got them for pennies or even mined.
As a person who gets paid convert knowledge into product, HN is an easy place to check a once or twice/day to keep up to date on decently filtered knowledge/information. I have other sources I follow, but as you said, if it hits HN it's probably important enough that I should know it exist.
And yes, this is a vague answer because that base level knowledge can manifest itself in many ways when solving a problem.
In order to keep the EV/time positive, I have become more disciplined around which articles I decide to read the comments on.
Can you expand on your methods here? I still get value from HN but want to dial things back a bit.
Comment quality is generally high on computing related technical subjects—unsurprisingly for a community composed of subject matter experts.
Finally I’ve noticed mixed comment quality on financial posts. There is significant noise but there are many commenters with an excellent operational grasp of how our financial system really works.
Some subjects attract a lot of the latter comments. This applies to both technical and business stories.
IMO if you want to get more value, then learn to tell the difference, and don't spend a lot of time "arguing with people on the Internet". You could do that forever on HN, but you can also get a ton of value out of it if you spend your attention wisely.
I've developed a bit of timer in my head. If I feel like I've perused HN too long or catch myself just refreshing the home page, I close the tab and move on.
Finally, and this isn't HN specific, I never start my day by checking sites. I always do a solid 2-3 hours of work (sometimes 'deep'), before anything else.
EDIT
Other thing, is don't argue on the internet or HN. I'll share my opinion and/or respond a bit, but if someone really wants to argue, I let them have it and move on. Takes too much time, and doesn't gain anything once I'm ok with my position. I mentioned the other day in another HN post that I had stopped going to FB for this exact reason. Zero helpful information, and it just led to arguments which take too much time and accomplish nothing.
The mental timer is an interesting idea too. Basically active cultivation of awareness to allow discipline.
https://xkcd.com/605/
The wife has negative ROI anyway. If she isn't getting me more money, a new job or another wife, there is no tangible benefit.
Also feelings, life satisfaction, love as benefits etc. don't count in this context.
Don't you know the very bad ROI they have??
(unless you count in cuteness)
But kids can end up making money, too, and take care of you when you're older.
Even though I got zero wives out of these comments, there was some real value generated here!
From my reading of HN, what you need to do is invest in crypto and date ballerinas.
It's a small thing, but I think it is an important part of HN.
This has helped with my standing in the company i work at, since i usually know every technology people are talking about. I don't know of anyone in the company with a similiarily broad knowledge.
Reading HN has also been the start of many a good nap. ;-)
Personally I come to HN because it’s one of the few places you can have a discussion and read comments without having to dig through dozens of memes and low attempt jokes.
In my case, I have a background in statistics and biotechnology and I use Hacker News (via RSS) to learn about new developments in machine learning and related technology. I tend to ignore all news related to politics/social issues because HN, on average, has a very narrow-minded (too engineer-like, often ignoring a lot of vital nuances) way of looking at those topics. Also, I'm from Europe and I find that there's a particularly American way of looking at business and personal projects that we don't have here and that I feel beneficial to get exposed to (even with its downsides).
Edit: To expand a little more on my process of using HN, in case anyone finds it interesting, I subscribe to the frontpage RSS feed, so that I usually get between 75-100 stories (just the headlines) per day, which I then proceed to quickly scan to open the interesting ones (both the original URL and its accompanying HN discussion). I've found the signal/noise ratio to be more than worth it (also factoring in the time it takes me to do all of this).
Stuff like...
"Oh I can tell you a thing or two about the legal complications of cubesat launches, my company did this for the last 12 years. [...]. By the way, this is our website"
...is probably more effective if a potential client stumbles over it than 100,000 "targeted" facebook ads, especially if you serve some highly technical niche.
So it does happen a fair bit if your startup is relevant.
https://lunchmoney.app/
HN does not engage in nefarious methods of keeping you engaged. It does not send you alerts telling you about what you've missed, it does not curate the home page to place you in your own personal echo chamber. These for me are it's strengths.
However, like any large social gathering, there will always be people whose views you cannot stand, and people who you feel closely aligned to, and this is healthy.
Whenever I see comment threads spiralling into toxic views I simply click away to another thread. For every bad comment section there will always be another good one. The key thing is, as a user I drive how I consume HN, not the other way around.
I may not be the original target demographic for HN and I've certainly not had any more than my 5 minutes of fame here, but I still find myself coming for the posts, and staying for the comments.
- No social network of friends/follows/circles
- No advertising
- No notifications on replies/threads
- Good moderation
I love reading technical blog posts. Raw tech rather than tech besmirched by the business development department.
Not everything needs to be part of the hustle. Make time for you!
Reading HN and conversing with a friend of mine in a CS program at Uni are what motivated me to turn my hobby into a new career, at 31 years old. It was through HN that I realized that I knew a heck of a lot more relevant job skills than I thought I did. Threads on HN also connected the dots for what it would take to make this my profession.
The career change itself only took me about 3 months, but reading HN was years of time invested.
I've also had some constructive interviews, on both sides, as a result of the monthly job threads.
Language-wise the quality of posts here is much better than what I would get on reddit, fb or similar.
Not sure if this counts, but it's a major reason why I visit this site daily.
I'm taking a professional reporting course at my uni and I feel like lurking here has paid off at least a little bit.
Ended up starting a writing focussed business. Don’t think I could have done it without frequent and rapid feedback.
Your comment made me realize this is probably why I keep writing comments. It is constant, precise feedback on my skill in what I do.
Very recently I achieved a significant boost in production system perf from comments here about the underlying hardware of GCP at different custom assignments. This saved decent $$ at a small company.
I've used HN twice now to cash in on the rise of BTC (unfortunately my liquid capital is low enough that this is only low 5 digit gain).
And you say information doesn't count, but filtering through the information and analysis here is a high signal way to "get ahead". To acquire power at work and amongst friends it helps to be both insightful and reliable, as well as confident. While HN doesn't make me reliable it sure as hell helps on the other fronts.
I even was in a CTO position once, which didn't work out, because I arrived too late and the startup would have gone bankrupt anyway, but I enjoyed that the most.
I learned a lot about Python and generic programming related things from the articles posted here. I read 1 article/day on average for years now.
I don't have a collection of Teslas and some bay area real estate to show for it yet, but it comes down to this: My day-to-day thoughts are massively shaped by the media I consume. I can spend all day contemplating some dumb /r/askreddit question or a novel take on Docker CI/CD I read on HN. I am pretty sure the second one aligns more to whatever the opposite of opportunity cost is. IMO, in the end, being knowledgeable makes you a better dev.
Also, I am practicing my English writing skill, so if I start this blog one day, maybe it will not even suck (and earn me all that tangible money, of course ;) ).
I know a friend who got a job offer from Square and Google after one of his blog posts (very deep, technical, explaining a new thing he discovered about the tracking of a famous app). He is not even very active on HN, just one hit post.
But, it seems to me that you are being very superficial about how you define tangible and not very open to get value from HN outside of a very direct path with obvious causality to power and money. So it will be a lottery with low chances of winning, thus I would advise you to get out of it. It will be a waste of time for you because of your way of seeing things.
Lately, I learned about CSS stack contexts because of a blog post here, and read other posts by the same author. Learned a lot about CSS that day.
In both cases the challenge was apparently challenging enough that the company actually meant "we hire based on this challenge". Sadly, an overwhelming majority of hiring "challenges" are so easy that the company feels the need to impose a full conventional hiring process behind it.
Also some technical tidbits here and there, especially on the practical side, the knowledge "on the streets", exchange experiences, niche companies that are only starting but might solve a problem you have (or might have)