How and Why I Read Hacker News

I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Hacker News is slightly younger - 18 years old - but others have been reflecting on the two together which got me thinking: I find the news site incredibly valuable and it’s controversial, both for me and for others.

I started reading HN back in 2012 when I was first teaching myself how to program. I have no idea how I found it - probably linked from one random blog post - but soon I was reading it every day over lunch. I thought it was a direct line into the zeitgeist of startup culture that I was entering. Maybe that was true. I didn’t even make an account for years - simply lurking and browsing the top stories and “Show HN” posts at lunch while I was learning Ruby and JavaScript for hours every night. Especially when I was on tiny startup engineering teams, it was the closest thing to a water-coolor where I could eavesdrop on senior tech talent.

After a bit, I discovered the comments section available on every post. And I found the vitriol and self-aggrandizement but also some real gems of advice and hard-earned tips for building complex software. And I took note. I’ve found so many helpful notes in that forum over the years. And I’ve tried to contribute a bit of my own.

Over the years, I started posting my own projects and sometimes a blog post to the forum, and occasionally I’ve hit the front page. It’s fun, but the rarity of it reinforces just how big the pond is that you’re swimming in.

After so long, I now see larger patterns in the topics submitted. Seasons of rewrites and industry standards pass and return. I’ve seen micro services rise and fall, startup funding ebb and flow, Rails come and go and come back again. I don’t lament the seasons - I embrace them as evidence the industry is still evolving.

For the past many years, this is how I read HN:

• I read it at lunch. If I don’t have time at lunch, I generally don’t read HN that day.
• I pull up the front page and scan the top posts for:
  • anything that interests me directly
  • anything that has a high comment count
• On any post, I open the comments section first and scan to see if there’s valuable wisdom there
• Then I’ll read the actual linked content
• I’m very stingy with karma - I upvote something maybe once every couple weeks

This is a weird pattern; probably the inverse of many other people reading the site. I know this because almost anyone I’ve ever talked to about HN says that they mostly ignore the comments. They find them too negative and pedantic.

But I find the actual value of the forum to be in the people there. I get the top tech stories of the day delivered to me over and over again every week from multiple sources. But only Hacker News has that (the tireless efforts of dang) curated, karma-driven comment section.

Thank you, people of HN.