Have you made IRL friends from HN usage?

In a way, yes.

I have checked Hacker News daily since I was 12, which is over 14 years ago now (excluding camping with no internet).

It gave me and some of my best friends growing up some great conversations topics. I’m also sure Hacker News has started many hobbies of mine and provided tons of education/entertainment over the years. By far, I think the best benefit of HN for me socially has been making me a more interesting person due to the topics I’ve learned about here.

I went from a homeschooled kid on a farm to->university->junior->mid-level SE->aspiring entrepreneur at age 26 while checking this site daily.

Great site, great community, and I pray it continues in the same way it has for decades to come.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that HN changed my life. When I first started using the site almost 15yrs ago I was a junior recruiter barely making ends meet. I learned a huge amount about the tech startup world through HN and when I found out there was a small HN meetup in London (where I worked), I jumped at the chance to check it out and ended up attending the meet-up every month.

I quickly became friends with the organiser of the meetup (Dmitri) and started helping him out. Together over the next 10 years we turned the meetup into the largest tech meetup in Europe with nearly 10k members and an average attendance of 500 people (max capacity for our venue). I ended up hosting the meetup and through that event (plus HN itself) my career took off. I've worked with multiple YC companies and have launched various products and businesses leveraging the network I created through HN. Dmitri and his family are still very close friends and honestly, it really is all thanks to HN.

Yes, I did reach out to one person about their project, turned into a weekly drinks kind of thing, and eventually petered out after a year or two.

One of my frustrations with the modern internet is how infrequently it leads to offline gatherings and connections these days. It used to be very normal that mailing lists, user groups, etc. would gather online, but also have a weekly/monthly meeting, conference, or post job ads/things for sale, etc. and you'd just organically end up meeting people and hanging out.

These days, the internet seems to be for people who really just want to discuss opinions endlessly and anonymously, but never do anything about it offline.

One does, very occasionally, see posts on HN about meetups, but it's rare and just one-off and ad-hoc, you'd think a big city like London, NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. could easily sustain an ongoing weekly/monthly thing.

I think HN deserves far more discussion on hackerspaces/makerspaces and such! My local hackerspace is Garoa Hacker clube[1]; unfortunately I haven't had the time to participate much. If you're in São Paulo, I recommend a visit (for the 'Noite de Processing' (Processing nights)) on tuesday, and if you live here, what are you waiting for? :) (those spaces can always use more participation!) ... and maybe someday we'll meet there as well.

Noite de Processing is also streamed online as well usually by the great Alexandre Villares. The next one is tuesday 28/11/2023![2]

[1] https://garoa.net.br/

[2] https://garoa.net.br/wiki/Noite_de_Processing

[3] On youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@GaroaHackerClubeSaoPaulo/streams

Nope. Sites like this and Reddit aren't places where I've ever become close to anyone, let alone become friends with them or ever met up in real life.

I think the format is just not well suited to making real connections between users. Everyone's just too anonymous and hard to recognise for that.

I met my co-founder as a result of him posting a Show HN and my comment on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262380

We've been working together on Toughbyte, our second venture, for more than eight years now: https://www.toughbyte.com

I've gotten a job through HN which has turned in to friendship if that counts. Every now and then meetups popup too which are cool

You guys exist IRL ?

I’ve made the IRL acquaintance of two of the smartest and most well-known people on HN, thanks to HN.

I also made a close IRL friend because we wore the same (obscure, in-joke) HN t-shirt to a conference.

I’d love to meet more.

I live in Berlin and Las Vegas, and I’m regularly in many other major cities (SF, NYC, LA, London, Tokyo).

sneak@sneak.berlin, hit me up for coffee. Signal number’s on my website.

No. The internet in general is pretty bad for making friends IRL. Even the apps dedicated to it like humble bff are pretty poor.

Sort of.

I made professional connections. I was, in 2017, building a machine learning plugin for Elasticsearch (google Elasticsearch Learning to Rank). In a post about Slack's use of machine learning for search, I commented sharing the project. The Wikimedia Foundation search folks replied. We started collaborating professionally. As a consultant, I had access to many applicable use cases in the community. And Wikimedia of course had massive scale to make it bulletproof. We ended up co-creating the plugin - still relatively active for both OpenSearch and Elasticsearch.

Not me. I don’t have many IRL friends anyway because I roleplay “chaotic neutral” in every social situation. Turns out human beings have feelings and don’t want to deal with edgelord drama all the time.

Plenty. There's not a lot of Malaysians on here, so many tend to drop me an email when they figure it out. Most hang around the same communities (hackers, YC, tech, etc) so we end up knowing lots of mutual people too. It's a small world here.

There's also meeting people by proxy. I find another community from here. People on that community are friends with one another. Turns out those people browse HN too.

I have, several people from around the workd that I was fortunate enough to spend time with IRL.

I owe so much to HN, I wish I could contribute back to it somehow.

Never. Fulltime dad since 2019. I've been lurking here and on Reddit but never got anyone to respond :(

Little sad. However an impetus for mother of all inventions: social network for plutonic relations? ;)

Loneliness is a crisis and becoming an epidemic. There needs to be a way men in particular needs to find a way to connect without making them feel...may I say... despairing or desperate? :(

I got my job from Who’s Hiring and have subsequently made friends / good work relationships there.

No, I doubt I would... it seems HN is centered in Silicon Valley, and I'm in a suburb of Chicago, where there is a very low density of fellow programmers, hackers, etc. We're so spread out here, we had to invent the BBS to stay in touch.

Not HN, but we did the first indiehackers meetup in NYC and met a ton of people. At least one in the group hits front page of HN from time to time.

No, the metro I live in does not have a preponderance of HN users. I can name maybe 3 or 4 (not counting one that dang banned)

I haven't made any friends yet because I've only been here for a month, but now I want to meet some friends.

Met my cofounder on HN in 2017. We’ve since been working on a consumer saas app called Readwise for past 6 years.

No, but there's always a first time. If you are in Stockholm, hit me up at pablo at injavascript dot com

Yes I have! Several, in fact. If anyone is interested, I'd love to chat. My email is in my profile :-)

No, not yet. But I think that few users are from Europe, so it's not that easy to find people.

Nope but I have known at least two other (infrequent) posters IRL in the past.

Nope.

No.

I have, yeah. Mostly kind of a professional friendship, haven't talked in quite a bit though.