It’s been over three years since I found out what Hacker News was, and I feel that I owe a blog post (if not more) to detail my adventures, ambitions, and madness that I can only attribute to reading Hacker News. I also feel it’s pretty appropriate at this time when everyone seems to be complaining about the quality of submissions and whatnot.

Hacker News for me has served a lot of purposes for me over the years, and I feel it’s important for others who don’t read it to start reading it. Hacker News has helped develop me as a ‘Hacker’ in a number of ways, of which I’ll try and list a few:

Learning

Technology wise, when I first started reading Hacker News, everything was completely new. I didn’t know what Rails, Scala, Machine Learning, ‘Big Data’, Cassandra or any keywords were (to be fair, I’m still in the process of learning these things). I’m no expert at a lot of things on Hacker News, but at least I have a pretty good idea of what people are talking about. Given this, it puts in to perspective what you still have to learn as an engineer and the business implications for doing so.

Your primary source of value as an engineer is the ability to solve problems, and knowing the tools available out there gives you a broader tool kit to produce an efficient and maintainable solution. There are a lot of hard engineering problems. There are also a lot of SOLVED hard engineering problems. Therefore, it’s quite obvious that you should be solving the UNSOLVED problems, yet somehow a lot of companies tend to solve similar problems over and over again. Hacker News always has projects popping up that usually help solve problems (whether it be in the business sense as a startup/project/SaaS or in the engineering sense as a library or package). It’s important to keep up to date with these things if you want to be a good engineer.

Opportunity Cost

Another popular set of posts that I find apart from tech and code-focused subjects tend to be those of tech employees ranting about their experiences. A lot of experience and knowledge from people a few years down the road from you can be helpful. There tends to be quite a lot of noise, but there are also a lot of gems.

Why do people stop working at Facebook and Google? Why do people love/hate consulting? Why do people get burnt out at startups? What are some good lifestyle changes I should make if I want to follow any of these paths?

There are a lot of answers (not necessarily right answers) through articles in HN which address them. Of course, the best way to figure it out is to talk to people directly and go try things yourself, but a lot of frustrations and problems with going down each path can be avoided by just knowing things beforehand.

As a university student, I’m constantly pondering about these questions (especially since taking part in internships is part of my program). So figuring out a way to jump-start my career and making the right (and wrong) choices early on can save a lot of time and frustration.

The subset of people who read HN is very small in the grand scale of things. Probably over 95% of the places software developers will work will be void of HN readers, and knowing more and learning more can help you accelerate over your peers given this vast source of knowledge.

Learn to Build Your Own Opinion

Yet another category of posts tends to be things about startups getting acquired, people launching their projects, and in general news about the latest tech gadgets/cloud services/etc. As the internet generally goes, there’s a lot of hate and butt-kissing. Even with the HN group, you’ll find that people may have strong opinions that you don’t agree with or totally agree with. Some people have opinions without justification, others do, but in the end it’s really important to take a lot of things as a grain of salt and reason about things yourself. Remember, HN readers are a tiny subset of the internet. There are people who do greater things, make more money, have more experiences (if those are your life goals, for example), so don’t limit your world view to what’s on HN, but take it as yet another source of opinions that will perhaps influence your life decisions.

You will definitely understand more if your company posts a product launch on HN and you read the comments. There’s a lot of misinformation that people have who don’t know what they’re talking about (even if they are really smart), simply because they don’t actually work at the company and know what will happen. It’s natural. People speculate. They can speculate closely, or wildly inaccurately. That’s why I don’t read TechCrunch religiously - it’s because you only get a very skewed sense of the truth, if any. It’s like Poker. When you see WPT videos, you only get about an hour of exciting hands and crazy all-in rounds. You don’t see the literally hours upon hours of sitting and waiting for a hand (patience is a virtue in poker) that the professionals take. Media companies have to make money after all. So given that, don’t limit yourself to the mindset from the internet, but form an opinion on top of it.

Get started!

There’s a pretty good compiled list of good Hacker News articles here, and of course there are more, but it’ll take a little more digging: Ask HN

Like my post? Follow me on Twitter: @j_ckao