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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 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. :)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.