Ask HN: How did you discover Hacker News?

9 points | by chistev 1 day ago

23 comments

  • tsoukase 5 hours ago
    I was hovering over PC forums since 2000 until in 2018 I stumbled upon here. My first thought: where the hell was this treasure hidden all this time? Second thought: are there such gems for other fields (my field-medicine, sports, travel etc)? I found none with so high quality, curration, expertise.
  • runjake 3 hours ago
    A pg essay almost two decades ago, when the site was still called Startup News.
  • kirubakaran 21 hours ago
    I started reading Paul Graham's essays after listening to his talk: https://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.con...
  • ColinWright 1 day ago
    I drew a graph of connections between Paul Graham essays, and coloured them via a PageRank-style weighting algorithm. I emailed it to PG, and he suggested I post it here.
  • fabianholzer 10 hours ago
    I was researching frameworks for building progressive web apps and stumbled over "Hacker News as a PWA" (https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas).
  • dang 1 day ago
    Through pg's essays, which I discovered via a Joel Spolsky blog post. Perhaps this one: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
    • chistev 1 day ago
      Man, you've been here since the beginning!
      • kirubakaran 21 hours ago
        Looks like I created my account a week before dang! I was lurking for a few months before I actually created the account.
  • jaredsohn 16 hours ago
    Strangely I think it was TechCrunch. But I was reading pg's essays years earlier (maybe through Joel On Software) and already had known about yc.

    Think it was related to the initial request for startups post: https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/y-combinator-starts-seedin...

  • brudgers 17 hours ago
    Links to HN on Techmeme, and I was on Techmeme because I was interested in memes.

    I was interested in memes because I had read Daniel Dennitt's Consciousness Explained back in the mid 1990's and was on the internet looking at them because the meme meme had become more mainstream.

    Or to put it another way, I found HN through intellectual curiosity as a distraction from my practice collapsing in the sub-prime meltdown...it was long ago in a galaxy far far away.

  • j4nek 2 hours ago
    someone on irc once posted a link to a hn discussion. :)
  • defrost 16 hours ago
    Got a tip from a fellow admin on IRC (Freenode v1.0) and made an account (since lost) in 2007 - followed up in late 2008, been an on and off reader / commenter since then, more so lately given less hands on work IRL.
  • CobaltFire 1 day ago
    Coworker about 10 years ago. Took me a few years to register an account.
  • cantalopes 20 hours ago
    I think i got linked here from a slashdot article. That one is flooded with russian trolls nowadays so i mostly visit hacker news, and people are nicer here too
  • larrykubin 16 hours ago
    I think I signed up one of the first days after it launched, it was called Startup News. Either from a pg essay or reddit, can't remember which.
  • mna_ 12 hours ago
    A chatter linked HN on #commonlisp on freenode back in 2011.
  • rationalist 1 day ago
    It was so long ago (with a different account), that I don't remember.
  • dnnddidiej 20 hours ago
    Cant remember. Probably searching for an answer to some coding problem.
  • JessieJanie 16 hours ago
    My AI agent, Ziggy Stardust, told me about it.
  • m-hodges 1 day ago
    Saw I post on /r/programming in 2011.
  • pvaldes 10 hours ago
    Hum... don't remember. The oldest HN post that I can positively remember right now is the Wash my Ferrari problem from 2012 so it should be via Debian forums
  • shanewei 1 day ago
    Recommended by Codex
  • geldedus 10 hours ago
    via Paul Graham
  • verdverm 1 day ago
    College roommate 17 years ago while doing NSF summer research, I am eternally grateful Eric!
  • andrewmcwatters 23 hours ago
    [dead]