I wrote a blog post[1] a long time ago. Someone post it on HN and for some reason(?) made it to the frontpage. When I checked by website records (a week later) I saw a HUGE spike in traffic. My blog is very low volume 50-100 visits per day... so that spike in the graph dwarfed every other day displayed. I bit the bullet and joined the community. It has surely paid off as it kick-started my remote career.

[1] https://www.convalesco.org/articles/2013/02/01/the-macosx-wa...

I remember reading a 'lessons from a developer' type e-book a few years back.

And he said something like...

1. Don't underestimate the time you can waste on Hacker News

2. Don't underestimate the value you can get from using Hacker News

About two years ago I stumbled across Paul Graham's essays and started reading my way through them. One of them was "What I've learned from Hacker News" (http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)... That introduced me to HN.

(At the time I was in a Third-World country with very limited Internet. HN, at ~10kb per page load, was one of the few sites I could afford to visit regularly. That helped to get me hooked ;-) )

Followed the mentions on the dwindling Business Of Software forum where I was a relatively new lurker and was disappointed by the lack of new posts.

Joined the first day it was open to non-YC founders. PG posted an announcement on Reddit.

I'd previously checked out Reddit the day that it opened. PG posted an announcement on comp.lang.lisp.

Man, your post brings back memories. I have opened my account only five days after you. But the story of how I came to it is the same. Thanks for reminding me.

Heard of Paul Graham first circa 2002 via a classmate who had become infatuated with lisp. Rediscovered his stuffs (essays, On Lisp), circa 2007 when lisp was my hobby language of choice (picked up during a brief attempt at grad school before burning out on being a broke student). Found HN via that and/or Reddit about that time, eventually made an account to post something. Scratched an itch (tech-interest-wise) that work was not satisfying at the time.

I can't remember the specific event, but I recall doing a Google search for "hacking news" based on some recent public event.

Naturally this popped up, and it matched with my interests of creating web sites and running a hosting company at the time, so I just ended up sticking around.

I was at the Mountain West Ruby Conference in 2009 and someone mentioned the live feed was submitted here, so I came to check it out! I even have the exact link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528103

63 days ago I visited this URL : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11340510 from some article comments.

I was bored so I went to the book store, I bought and read the book Founders at Work (twice), was looking for similar books online, found the essays of PG, landed somehow on HN. True story.

A coworker two jobs ago told me about it and I've been reading ever since. So glad she told me about it!

Organic searches for some pure tech stuff, i.e. not startup/business related. HM was popping up quite a lot of times.

An old friend who i respected as a skilled hacker told me about it after we worked on a project together.

Guy in the team, shame on him, send me link. Aaand the day went by...

I used to google "startup ideas" a lot back in the end and found PG's articles. That led me to HN.

I wish I could remember! Probably searching for an answer to a tech problem on Google.

Followed discussion link back here about a year in.

Stayed, mostly lurk. Learn a ton. Than you all for perspective most of all.

I believe it was linked to on Slashdot.

Because Trevor.

thanks to keybase.io

Via a link on Techmeme.