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."
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.
Yup, that's the one. "Sickly cows" was the key phrase and you're still on the first page of Google results for it. Link (wow, a 6 digit HN item number): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472985
I didn't want to give specifics for preserving your Fool anonymity if you still wanted it, but guess you have a public enough internet persona nowadays that that ship has sailed. Thanks again for helping direct me into a better level of software experience and knowledge, as inadvertent and roundabout as it was. I started stalking you on HN in hopes of more Japanese slice-of-life stories that you shared on the Fool, and wound up discovering a much greater world of software instead.
I keep a fig leaf of pseudonymity there, but it's a ridiculously thin fig leaf for anyone who knows me from HN. A few folks have figured it out over the years, but I appreciate your discretion, as back in my nobody-knew-who-I-was days I talked about some fairly personal stuff there.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
72 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadMy 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.
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.
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.
I didn't want to give specifics for preserving your Fool anonymity if you still wanted it, but guess you have a public enough internet persona nowadays that that ship has sailed. Thanks again for helping direct me into a better level of software experience and knowledge, as inadvertent and roundabout as it was. I started stalking you on HN in hopes of more Japanese slice-of-life stories that you shared on the Fool, and wound up discovering a much greater world of software instead.
Interesting how a small tiny link can lead to information that can reshape your entire reality.
"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.
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.