Do you consider Hacker News to be a positive/useful use of your time?

Yes. The signal does come with some noise, but I've found HN incredibly valuable for my professional and career development. I spend quite some time here but I think it's worth it.

HN pretty frequently has posts from senior engineers or senior managers sharing things they've learned over long careers, which I feel has given me a shortcut into many of these insights.

Without HN, I would not have been as aware of how hot the developer market is at the moment, or what common salary levels are around the world. I'm starting a new job next week, through a startup that I found because it advertised a role on HN, at significantly higher compensation than my previous job.

Comments on HN have given me a lot of insight into how people approach things like contract negotiation or how they deal with conflict or frustration in the workplace. Often these comments come from a place of experience with patterns recurring over many positions at different organizations. I'm heading into (only) my third job so these experiences are valuable to read about.

Beside that I've also found many resources that were just fun or intellectually stimulating here.

It's a bit of a mixed bag, but overall I think it's been a positive influence. I've tried to mitigate the negatives by assiduously avoiding threads I know will have meaningless flame wars or absurd overreactions in the comments - anything on Apple, or the culture war, or cryptocurrencies and associated tech, or (to some extent) Mozilla. Over time I've found that there's a few repeating patterns to HN comment threads so I can tell which ones to avoid from just the title or the top comment. If you find yourself mired in meaningless conversations here, do that same thing you would do in any other social network: learn to filter out things that don't add value.

I think there is quite a difference between HN and most other social networks, the general level of discussion is significantly higher than almost any other online place I've visited.

The biggest problem for me personally with HN is that the front page updates every few minutes. To counteract this I made https://hackerdaily.io, it's Hacker News, but only with yesterday's posts. This really helps me to not check it every time I'm bored and want some dopamine and to actually read more of the articles and discussions.

You get what you want out of it.

My favorite use of HN is simply to get informed discussions on the pros and cons and alternatives to specific technologies I'm kicking the tires on.

For example, if I'm looking for a good VPS host that is cheap with great support I'll pick a random one off a Google search and then restrict it to HN discussions. Bingo, a plethora of alternatives from people with some experience with them.

The big danger with HN is that it's pretty one-sided, and reading it affects you even if you are aware of that fact. So while it's good to keep on top of tech news and tech politics, there's little beyond that.

Our world is so rich, and I feel that by reading HN only you miss out on a lot.

It keeps me informed but it definitely has a few negative qualities.

- I seem to spend too much time on it. Obsessively checking it. Reading the comments. I recognize the behavior from when I was frequenting Slashdot back in the day. It definitely has some addictive qualities and I need to force myself to stop reading it so often.

- The debate is a lot less fun than Slashdot used to be. I kind of miss the silliness. Humor is frowned upon and people are way too serious.

- HN definitely has a techbros vibe. I guess that's by design but it's not very inclusive.

- Moderation is a double edged sword. It's good at silencing the offensive and silly comments that make reddit such a dumpster fire. But you get a bit of overzealous "this conflicts with my world views" style moderation too which results in cancel culture style snuffing out of contrarian views. I've been down voted a few times where I struggled to understand why. I wasn't being offensive. I wasn't being contrarian. I was merely being inconvenient to someone who was what I would classify as in of the highly polarised camps in US politics that was out to cancel anything conflicting with their narrow world views. I'm from the EU so I might be a bit tone deaf on that front. I struck a nerve basically and I was being cancelled. Moderating the moderators should be a thing. I've went from negative 2 to positive 10 on the same comment in some cases. Basically people strongly agreeing or disagreeing with the same thing. Moderation should be strictly about weeding out the bad stuff not snuffing out debate. Moderating the moderators seems to be not a thing.

I get more benefit from HN than any other source. The signal-noise ratio is still poor, but it's still great. At the very least, there are excellent books, there are people who help you get stuck out of things, and there's good product recommendations.

There is a large techbro demographic here, and certain topics to avoid. But the tech part rubs off. I avoid browsing daily though; it's too easy to get sucked into arguments, complaints, and gossip.

I think it's great as a link aggregator to stay up to date with what's going on in the world. I don't really follow politics or general news, but if something big enough happens it will be on HN in one way or another, even if it's not related to tech.

As for discussions/comments here, no. There is the occasional comment gem from experts, but it's low quality 99% of the time. There are a few topics I'm an expert in, and whenever a related story appears on HN I check the comments and I can't help but continuously roll my eyes about how uninformed and simplistic they are. Most people have no idea what they're talking about and just repeat what they've heard from someone else or what they believe the popular opinion is. For most topics I'm ignorant enough that I can't tell the difference, but I assume it's the same for those, so it's best to just ignore what people say here.

HN for me is the equivalent of "being the dumbest person in the room", ie. I get to learn a lot and get confronted with new and challenging ideas, which is great.

Of all the developer sites I go to that are not pure Q&A, HN has the best signal to noise ratio: Lots of folks with interesting backgrounds often add insights, explanations, and rebuttals in generally polite and informative comments.

I also check the 'new' postings (see top of the page). Often times, there are interesting posts in there that for one reason or another don't get enough traction early to make it to the first couple of pages. But they have interesting content. It's also, in a small way, a service to the community to get in there and upvote worthwhile content.

Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN?

219 points by ElectricMind 10 months ago | 273 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26366538

I have made friends, interviewed for jobs, connected up with a few people in person afterward, helped others find jobs, learned all sorts of fascinating facts for whenever I am forced to make idle small talk, found ways to sleep better, learned why my past company had a doomed model, gotten all sorts of free tech goodies, discovered tools to make work easier, and had some great debates.

I tend to have a lot of meetings in my life anyway where my presence is required, but little else, so that is where a lot of my HN time comes from.

No, it's time wasting. But it's not as bad as Reddit is.

I find the value I gain from HN is that it provides me a slight edge to the stock market. I am an early riser and find that by visiting HN before the markets open offers me an opportunity to be aware of new information before it hits the street. This could be a hammer sees nails everywhere situation but more likely breaking news articles with high HN engagement are a good indicator of a news story's potential effect on the market.

Hard to say. Been here for 10 years. It got me into tech as a career (although programming and computers generally had already been a hobby). I've met some people through it. Launched some things. A lot of time spent arguing in comments that was probably wasted.

Reddit, twitter, and youtube fill a similar space for me.

On the whole, they're net positive I'd say. I'm more informed about a wider range of topics and opinions than ever before.

When I started reading Hacker News I learned a lot from the articles I read on here. At one point when I launched my freelance career (around 2012), I got a great freelance gig here with a startup that was really good experience.

These days I still check HN every day, but for some reason I find most of the content dull or uninspiring, and the seeking job/freelancer postings are less interesting. Moderation is still awesome though.

I'm browsing HN everyday, but only once. I look at the first page, open the titles that seem interesting in new tabs and that's it. Sometimes I go into the comments and read some opinions about some topic.

I also read the good titles I missed during the week in the newsletter on Saturday morning.

I keep up to date about new technologies and directions, I think that helps me adding context to my managerial decisions.

I did once.

Then I noticed a suspicious rise of articles in my top 120 (my arbitrary limit) that were “uniquely targeted to me”.

That bothered me. I felt gamed.

Now HN is throwaway central. I'm not disrespectful, but this has affected how much of myself I put into my participation. Make me think even for a second that I'm responding to a bot, balrog will appear!

This continues to this day, and worse is that some comments are clearly bot-generated detritus. I've seen a lengthy, almost persuasive comments that are clearly GPT-3 boilerplate crap, so now I'm forced to ask the question: Is the person behind the comment to which I'm responding even a person? Yeah, HN kinda' feels like it's AI doped with juicy articles suspiciously trailored oft much these days.

I do know, however, how difficult this is to police. It's like playing wackamole. I dealt with this with malware and phishing and it was non-stop wackamole!

Yes, I consider it to be a positive use of my time. Here are some benefits:

   - keeping aware of latest tech trends
   - deep deep knowledge in some of the comments about tech stuff and other stuff. I like to learn so this is helpful
   - the ability to shine a spotlight on things I think are interesting, either what I've written (occasionally) or what others have written
   - the monthly jobs post is helpful for keeping an eye on the tech hiring market

You can definitely waste time on HN, just as you can on some of the other sites you mentioned. I occasionally find myself cycling between HN, Twitter, LinkedIn and email, waiting for that hit of dopamine with an interesting comment or reply. When that happens, it's time to go to bed, go for a walk, or read a book.

I'm pretty new here. Less than two months. I've stopped using Facebook so I was looking for some other news outlets that I could use. Now I'm using Twitter, LinkedIn and HN. HN is taking much less of mine time than Facebook. I think that this is due to lack of visual distractions.

Yes.

I personally don't use any other social media site. But if I wasn't reading HN, I'd probably do something else that has less value or that would keep me busy longer (like playing the guitar or cooking stuff).

It does keep me up to date on most things tech (which I am expected to talk about socially, cause I am the tech guy among the people I know), plus it has a bunch of really interesting articles on random subjects which is refreshing.

My wife's in the art world. And because there is no HN of the art world, she has to check facebook to stay connected professionally, and that's a really bad thing cause she keeps being tempted by these algorithmically-optimized crap content.

HN is somewhat addictive, but it's one of the only ones that doesn't need to monetize your addiction.

Yes.

1. I sometimes stumble upon random strangers who do something related to what I'm researching or working on and usually you can just comment and they will reply. This level of accessibility to the actual tech people is rare. Imagine trying to reach a Google software engineer through their end-user support channel. Won't happen. But you might e-meet the same person here.

2. It's great for conversation topics with peers, especially if all of you check the headlines in the morning.

3. I just love the long-term prediction articles and especially their discussions. Of course, the predictions will most likely turn out wrong. But understanding how people reached those predictions can be very valuable for making sense of the arguably messy tech landscape affecting all of us.

I wish HN would hide your karma points because they act as a notification. Whenever they go up I am compelled to click Threads and see why, to get a little dopamine hit from being acknowledged by strangers online.

Other than that HN is miles above any other such website because they KISS.

It is facebook for tech bros, with occasional nuggets that are really good. There 's a certain level of self-worship by the people who occasion here , but i don't think its that special. It's basically what reddit would be if its audience was 10-20 years older.

I 'waste' a lot of time here because i have a lot of empty time these days. I would like to have more diverse communities on the internet, i 'd take 10 forums instead of the duopoly reddit/hn taking all my attention. There is value in participating in separate the bubbles vs participating in watered down groupthinks.

Yes and no. It can be very counter-productive to engage in difficult discourse, which may interrupt your flow and disturb your productivity for days, knowing that you are incurring a lot of online turmoil for sharing a view counter to mainstream narrative.

But reading HN regularly also can provide daily insight into the workings of an industry that is notoriously obfuscated by all and sundry.

Use it productively: don't spend more than 30 minutes a day on HN, in total, over the course of a day. Open the articles that interest you, participate as you can, and ignore the stuff that isn't relevant. Its a valuable feed.

HN has been a net positive for me, as it does keep me informed of new trends in our industry. It does come with a startup bias, but as long as you don't take the culture here as representative of the entire industry, there is good information and discussion.

That being said, it is possible that it can be addictive for a specific person. My usage of HN is a daily reading session each morning, maybe add a comment or two, and maybe glance again later when taking a break from other things. If you find yourself on this site all day, or fretting over how your comments are doing, there could be a problem.

It's definitely useful. Most of my other aggregate information sources have serious overlap with each other or are hyper-specific, HN is a definite outlier that surfaces a broad range of interesting material I wouldn't come across otherwise.

As for whether this is positive... If I'm being objective, I can't say that having even more well-curated content available is a positive influence. But my difficulties in curbing a tendency to binge on reading material aren't the site's fault.

Though, it would be helpful if I could set the front page to only show 10 or 15 items instead of 30.

It's like news and opinions, it can help you to keep you up with whatever is moving out there, and sometimes some relevant opinions or counterviews come up. News in general come also with a downside, you can find much literature out there.

To me your issue sounds like procrastination, which is normal and very common, just make sure it is not out of your control. Find a balance in how you spend your time, perhaps you would like to read HN as much as a magazine or only the top articles of the week if that helps you.

Almost every sufficiently small unit of time here is a complete waste. However, over a longer timescale I find it useful. I kinda look at it like a webring for discovering points of view I wouldn't otherwise stumble across. And some comments are insightful.

My biggest gripes are the endless "rewriting X in Y" stories and the comments from people who are smart in their own field who think that any other field is amenable to their armchair reasoning.

If you find you are developing too much of a HN habit (visiting much too frequently). Turning on procrast in the settings to 3 hours (or greater) is a great way to train yourself to do fewer visits.

Also the 'best of/top links' is great for finding what has been popular (although it maybe too late to add your comment at this point):

https://news.ycombinator.com/front

I have always thought several years ahead about my career, and the best way to do that has been keeping up on the professional literature. Back in the days when magazines were a thing, I subscribed to them with my own money (and wrote it off) because it was that important to me. The equivalent today is reading HN, and if I were you I would have no problem regarding it as an essential part of my career development.

Plus, it is just a good part of my life.

I browsed a lot prior to 2019 and recently again. I used to work in software development but have moved out of the field recently.

I love HN and derive a lot of benefit from it, unfortunately during the Great Scare I found it impossible to stay away from the associated threads.

That sort of stuff seems to have died down now though, so we're good.

If I could just censor any mention of it I'd be much happier, I'd add it to uBlock if I could, heh.

No, I don't consider it a particularly great use of my time, but I'm fine with that. It's my time and I don't always have to be productive or making money with it.

The content and discussion is usually entertaining, but sometimes the people are infuriating, particularly on "political" posts haha. It happens.

I am a technologist and religious. I think hacker news is one of the few places I feel free to be both. I am not looking for a platform to be religious however my answers to philosophical questions are generally handled with respect. HN keeps me up to speed with tech and let's me be myself.

I think that HN has a long term value that I've yet to tap. I've been tuned in to the conversational aspect of it, but if you need to know about subject X, the search feature will pull up a ton of informative discussion about it with pretty much all of the important aspects and gotcha's covered.

Before I would say so-so. I got useful links and discussion, but I also felt like spending a lot of time here. Even for my few articles making it to the front-page I would say that the traffic was a bit of vanity -- surely nice for ego, but that's it.

Since my SHOW HN submission, though, I cannot complain at all :)

Somewhat? I like seeing various things that interest me. I often avoid the comments here as I find them to be toxic, and definitely “group thinky”. Contrary opinions are generally shit upon, even when there might be a good reason.

In the past 20 years I’ve had to reprogram myself to not read comments.

HN with an RSS reader is the way to go. No need to compulsively check and you can skim through things quickly.

Good question.

Maybe I've found some good services or products on Hacker News I wouldn't have found otherwise.

But there is a lot of noise for not very much good stuff.

Even though the internet is 20+ years old now, I still find it incredibly bad a recommending stuff I'm actually interested in.

Personaly I would appreciate more articles focused on art (cinema, culture, photography...) and pholosophy but still curated agenda is much more educative than any other social media algorithm.

Actually HN is my last and only curated feed. I use 70% RSS, 30% HN.

HN is very focused on interesting topics and polite discussions. I'm constantly learning new little things here, also I already bought ~10 books based on local recommendations. I don't view HN as a waste of time at all

If there is leadership in this world still capable of public debate ill be there to read, perhaps contribute.

Not so much interested in what people say as what it says about them and less interested in individuals than the sum of the parts.

I budget 60mins a day max to HN and other sources. I dont have to use it but I can spend at most 60m on it. Either contiguous or spread out. Also, take every thing I read from these sources with adequate doses of salt.

Hacker News is the only aggregator I consistently check. I consider it my secret weapon. It exposes me to a variety of important technical ideas, which helps me stay on top of my part of the industry.

Plenty, if you push away the fluff threads (such as this one) you get to learn a lot of things and get challenged on your beliefs in the replies which is always a great opportunity to grow.

I quite often find confirmation to my own thoughts in HN comments. It's tremendously useful to see peers express anonymously and to learn their vocabulary along the way.

I still consider HN to have one of the greatest signal/noise ratios out there. It's rare to not find one or two interesting things each day.

I check the top posts every day for technical news but having fun is not the intended purpose of hacker news i believe.

If I want to chat with fun people, I use reddit.

The knowledge I gain from this community has helped me to get work like nothing else.

It’s better than alternatives.

When I am sober, HN is a bit of a distraction and is probably neither beneficial or detrimental to my mentality.

However when I am drunk, someone is wrong on the internet (https://xkcd.com/386/).

yes, i read it daily on Mastodon but please stop to reposet each 3-4 days the news about electronic tongue that analyse fish it's anoying

a single throwaway comment I wrote the other day drove 6k visitors to my side project/business

hanging out here is incredibly fun/useful to me

It comes across overly critical. Say something and likely the only response will be in disagreement. Could be a single anecdote. Could be downright misinformation. And now that comment is taken as the main of the conversation.

It is far, far too easy to simply disagree with a comment, effectively add zero actual knowledge, and direct the conversation away from being constructive.

There is a difference between simply having a conversation and being destructive.

yes;

1.) I prefer the https://hckrnews.com/ "an unofficial alternative hacker news interface." .. So If I have less time - I can check the top articles+comments in the last weeks.

2.) If I have to research some topics - I am using https://hn.algolia.com/ "Search Hacker News"

I skim in the morning for "News".

I avoid otherwise because of the "Hacker" (i.e. tech bro) vibes.

HN solved my existential crisis. I prefer hckrnews.com and often feels like I'm just wasting time but few posts and comments really changed the way I look at many things.

Sometimes, yes.

No.

yes.