I can see how HN is bad for the author's well being, but certainly not for mine. I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories. I don't feel any need to switch languages/frameworks when reading about new/hyped stuff.
It's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.
I'm with you. I'm here as a consumer. I skim most articles. I waste little time. Instead, I get a humongous wealth of information on a great variety of topics.
Also, one quick skim of the article list gives you a good idea of what's hot in tech. Even that has great value, and helps you decide what you should and shouldn't read.
About 10% of the time I jump into comments straightaway because they give you a good idea of the topic/validity of the article.
So true!
HN comments on hot new tech also act like gyro stabilization for me. When I read an article on tomorrow's hot new framework I often go "wtf I can't go on using Ruby and Ember" (although Ember is pretty new itself, if we're being honest); comments then help me manage my expectations. A la "There's no silver bullet", "this aspect is suboptimal", "you could try optimization X for established tech Y to achieve the same"...
"I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories."
I don't feel bad about reading other people's success stories either. What I hate is how some people reading those stories give super powers to those people who have succeeded as if there is no luck, timing or anything else and then those people, what they say, is oh so important even on subjects that they have little expertise in. The halo in other words.
Problem with some of the hyped stuff though is that it can become a self fulfilling prophecy when a mass of early adopters decides to go down a particular path with the latest thing.
Plus, most of what I see on HN these days is really bad business, political, social, and legal analysis, not any of the things discussed in this article. (This article is a great example of the same.)
It is possible for this to be true in general (in other words, there will be someone whose comments are more accurate than 99% of other people), but that's not the case for me. I just try to withhold my opinion on stuff that's not obviously true.
Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts and what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
Less time being a mindless drone, never leaving your lane? ;)
I personally have learned quite a bit on HN that has led me to being a better programmer. A discovered Two Scoops of Django (https://django.2scoops.org/), Javascript Allongé (https://leanpub.com/javascript-allonge), and plenty of other things that have expanded my mind. The debate between promises, callbacks, and generators made me think critically about how I do asynchronous JS. The local love of functional programming has inspired me to dive in, and ultimately made me a better imperative programmer as well. And overhype of Edward Snowden's every movement aside, HN does a great job of surfacing stories about the intersection of policy and tech.
I also value a lot of the discourse that happens here. I think HN, even with its flaws, is a better community for discussion than Slashdot, Ars, or most of the rest of the sites covering tech.
I definitely see the benefits here. But whenever I see a point like this I wonder: if you had replaced hacker news with a different activity, could you have formed a similar list of things you learned? Perhaps a longer list, or one of higher quality? Not trying to criticize you, just something I think about in these cases.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not arguing that HN is somehow optimal. I'm just saying that as a continual time investment, it's provided greater returns than the alternatives I've used in the past, with regards to staying on top of the scene in tech, startups, and tech-related policy.
I think everything you've said in your comment is correct, but when did the alternatives become "be a mindless drone" and "be a mindless drone who reads hacker news?"
My point is to criticize the implied argument that keeping your nose down working on the problems in front of you is inherently more productive than spending some time on HN to trying to gain some wider perspective.
That's probably a strawman attack, but the first line of my comment wasn't meant to be taken so literally, which I tried to signal with the emoticon.
I generally agree that gaining a wider perspective is valuable, but it's not clear that HN is the best way to do that, and the OP outlines a number of reasons which make sense to me why it would be a bad way to do that.
At the least, HN exists in a thickly-walled bubble. There's not a very wide perspective here.
I'm development lead on my startup and just being aware of new tech, other startups, problems with frameworks, algorithms,... all help me be better informed for my job.
Exactly. Even a better reason to read curated content. You need to get awareness with what's going on in the tech community without sinking massive amounts of time. Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
This implies that the average reader is diving into every article. If my job (or interests or sideproject or...) happens to be Ruby or Lisp related, perhaps that's a useful article. Personally, I rarely-if-ever use either, so I tend to skip those.
And that's really the point. Sure, reading (or even skimming) every last article is a waste of time, but I don't think most of us do; we jump to the stuff that interests us. At least I do. And if I'm reading only curated lists, all I get is what interests someone else. There's some overlap, but I'll end up mentally filtering by title anyway, and there's a good chance I'll miss quite a bit that would be of real interest and value to me.
HN doesn't have that much content, I never feel overwhelmed. The front-page turnover rate is really slow, to the point that I pretty quickly get my "fix" and then leave. Over the course of a day I might sink an hour into it, 2 if there's something interesting going on. However, I usually read maybe 3 articles per day at most.
>Do you really need to know about some lisp-variant someone implemented in 20 lines of Ruby.
I find the recent "tiny JS app" craze to be kind of cool. It's neat that a language can be so expressive that you can throw together something so complicated in under a kilobyte. I guess I don't need that kind of stuff, but it usually ends with me learning something new and wastes 5 minutes of my day at most.
Yes, awareness. I was reading 2+ hours a day of HN at my previous work. I was still more productive than most of my co-workers and was able to introduce useful tools, solutions and practices. One of my fellow developers asked, "How do you find out about all these stuff?"
So yeah, how do we find out about all these stuff otherwise?
If you read my article, then you'd know how. Curated content. It gives you the best of both worlds. Being able to dig through less news to find "good" content while still keeping up with today's news. With the added bonus that you can choose your content (wide categories / general tech or specific communities like Android, or HTML5).
Curated content still gives you what you want, but with less work. Additionally, you're reading will be consolidated (in theory) into a larger block of time on a less frequent basis, freeing up more time throughout your week.
Works the same way for me, a project manager. I dont want to know ghe finest details of everything that hits the front pahe here, I just want to know theif names, what they do, where their value are at and who is using it. Reading comments is also interesting when there are conflicting opinions on the topic.
Why not just for amusement? Or to just see what interesting things people have come up with? Why does everything have to be "only towards this goal", what happened to just doing things just for curiosity's sake?
"but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts"
Agree that the downside always has to be taken into account.
One thing that I have noticed over time is that at least some successful people tend to be highly focused and less interested in the types of things that, as they say on HN are "anything that piques one's curiosity". I'm amazed at how little curiosity they have actually.
What you are describing (that I think some people are missing here) is that sometimes you read things on HN, you then fork, and then you are going down the next shiny ball of opportunity because it is so much fun to do. And so easy to do. Only a click away. So it's rationalized in a way like "well what could be bad about learning learning is always valuable!!" without taking into account the opportunity cost of all that learning.
The key is as you say "less" and limits. There have been things over the past that I have forked to that have paid off in actual results and money. And things that have not. By devoting a set amount of time to satisfy curiosity you can gain much. But like with anything else you have to make sure you aren't shortchanging something else that is more important.
This can be rephrased as, "What's the value to you of posting on HN?"
The value to tptacek can be denominated in units of "hundreds of thousands of dollars," for example.
I have to run -- I wish I could go into more detail with this comment. I'd talk about some other non-monetary benefits, like the ability to seek out a network, or to get feedback on weaknesses, or a bunch of other things.
> Sure, but what is the opportunity cost of reading all of those posts
No idea, I just do it for leisure. And frankly, I hardly read any TFAs posted to HN. I first read the headlines, if something seems interesting, I skip to the comments. If I still think it's interesting, I might skim TFA. I'm not trying to be time efficient or anything, that's just how I enjoy using HN.
> what are you really gaining from reading all of those "new technology of the month" postings?
I basically never read posts about new stuff, unless the title says it's from someone I respect. If something shows up repeatedly, I might get interested and Google it, maybe even skim that article about it.
All in all, I think I'm using HN a bit like Twitter: Lots of noise, with a little bit of signal in it I might want to follow up on.
HN isn't to blame for this, but the current Bay Area, VC-istan culture really is toxic. I don't know how people can stay motivated with their 0.03% equity slices when some completely unqualified idiot gets his IUsedThisToilet app acquired for $4 billion just because he went to the right schools going back to preschool. It's sick.
It's best to tune that shit out, but it's hard when people are young and impressionable, and given that the contemporary Silicon Valley culture is all about extending adolescence into the mid-30s (and then discarding people)... well it's easy see why people succumb to that nonsense.
The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.
> The fundamental problem is that engineers are treated as a commodity in the Valley, and investor money is prized. It should be the other way; funding should be the commodity, and high-end engineering talent should be the seat of prestige.
I've noticed that a lot of writers in tech generalize their experience to everyone in the community. Several times a day I'm struck by someone who talks about his/her experience like it's a common experience, when it may or may not be. I think it would be safer and more relatable if the author had said "HN - Bad for My Well Being," but of course that doesn't sound as portentous.
Absolutely. There's a lot of "I don't like X, so X is bad" out there. It's quite disturbing the number of people who can't imagine that other developers might approach the world in a different way and with different values.
I get the impression this is a trait that seems more present in programmer types than many other people, and this fascinates me. I notice this in myself too. I almost always try to reduce/abstract my own problems or issues to 'general principles', and I tend to want to get to the root of things.
There are many plausible explanations for this (and obviously I've tried to get to the root of this phenomenon too), but at some point I started reflecting on whether this behavior is a good or bad thing.
I think it's both good and bad. It's good primarily because a lot of people look at their own problem in isolation, and share/address them as 'their unique problem', which keeps them from seeing underlying patterns or principles and from tapping into the experiences and observations of the countless others that have had pretty much the exact same problem. But it can also be bad, because not everyone likes being subjected or presented with this kind of generalization, and attempting to think about a problem in a general sense while you are suffering from it yourself complicates the search for solutions immensely (especially practical, direct solutions to implement).
Does anyone know if there has been research into this? I never really thought of diving in the the 'psychology' of programmers...
I noticed it in action recently when watching a David Lynch documentary about Transcendental Meditation where he describes his experience of meditation as "the cables of and elevator being cut and falling into oneness." My first thought was that Lynch has a very unique mind and probably doesn't realize that is not a very typical experience during meditation, but bless his heart, he wants everyone to have it.
I completely agree with you. Way too often to I read articles stating various truths based on their sole experiences. This is just one more thing that devalues HN and warrants curation.
In this particular case, this is not only my experience but the experience of some of my colleagues and friends. That doesn't mean that this applies to everyone and obviously it is an opinion article.
You said HN is bad for my well-being. I'm suggesting that you don't know how HN is for my well-being and my experience as a reader would have been more satisfying if I read your article to satifsy my curiousity about why HN is bad for your well-being. If you had put it as your problem I might have a couple more suggestions, but you instead tell me how I should solve this problem you think I have.
Some might find it interesting that I consider part of my job as a tech strategy consultant is to keep up with what's happening on HN.
I try not to open every link or anything, because I procrastinate just like everyone else. However, some of the value that I provide my clients is knowing about changes to their competitive landscape before they do.
Tightly coupled with both experience and a willingness to offer strong, thoughtful opinions on the day's tech news, I am often able to be the most honest and disconcertingly knowledgeable person at the table... all thanks to scanning HN a few times a day.
I owe much of my livelihood to your often link-bait posts, so thanks. :)
Still not nearly as bad as Reddit. Subreddits have value, but look at the front page of Reddit. Zero value. On any given day, of any week, month, or year. Reddit's front page is 100% wasted time. I demonstrate this by asking to myself: Ten years from now what will Reddit's front page look like? Answer: The exact nonsense memes and image macros posted today.
The frontpage of reddit is what you make it. Get rid of the crap, subscribe to subreddits you actually like, and you're good to go. There are some decent subreddits...
I completely agree. I replaced (a good chunk of) my reddit browsing with HN browsing. I may burn excessive time here, but I feel like I'm at least learning/gaining something while I'm here. And the commenters here are actually intelligent and the top replies are generally decent and not "witty" one-liners.
But I don't work in the startup world. I don't get the stress of second guessing everything I do because in the same week opinions on all sides of an issue germane to startups have been heavily upvoted at different times. So perhaps that is key.
I don't think anyone has claimed reddit, or at least the default reddits, are a productive way to spend your time. All the default subreddits are pretty much just for entertainment.
> This is mostly because Reddit's choice of default subreddits are poor
Presumably this isn't entirely a choice: I would expect a good subreddit to get worse if it was made default. (And I've heard that /r/atheism got better when it was made undefault, but I haven't actually looked.)
Ah, the Catch 22 of popular discussion based websites. You want to be popular, but you want to remain high in quality. It's shockingly difficult to do both.
Yep, /r/science is about the only default that is ok. And if you've seen a climate change discussion there, you'll realize how painful it is to keep discussion on topic on reddit.
I remember going to reddit and thinking, damn these comments are loads better than slashdot. I don't think I can contribute anything interesting, these people are sharp so I won't post at all.
Might have just been me but there is a marked difference in tone on the site.
Specifically, I think AdviceAnimals and Gaming are the most toxic defaults plaguing the front page. Reddit would have a substantially more intelligent front page if it got rid of those defaults.
I would almost suggest replacing /r/gaming with /r/games, which is a 100x more intelligent subreddit with actual discussion (due to proper moderating and disabling of thumbnails), but I would hate to see that subreddit become toxic because of front-page publicity. It really depends on how dedicated its moderators are up for the task.
To me, watching Reddit grow has been an interesting perspective on how population size affects democracy.
4-5 years ago, you would more often see long articles or self posts where someone would make a case for something on a topic. People would read the whole thing, try and understand the issue, and talk about it.
As reddit has grown, thoughtful posts have been replaced by one liners and memes. The front page is mostly just a dumping ground for whatever is viral at the moment.
I think this, interestingly, mirrors what happened to democracy in the United States. The democracy that the founding fathers imagined was one run mostly by the educated few, with everyone else also having the ability to voice their concerns.
What its turned into now is a chaotic mess of talking points and rhetoric, with two factions on opposite sides just screaming the same things at each other.
I think its because the more people you get involved in decision making, the simpler you have to make the case for each potential choice in order for the most people to be able to understand it. People will choose an inferior choice that they can understand over a superior one that they can't.
And the problem then is that oftentimes the most important things are the things that are hardest to understand.
I've noticed a different bad thing that happens to me when I am active on HN. I become very argumentative IRL. On HN it's fun to engage other people, debating, disagreeing and arguing your point. It's constructive and usually we all get something from it.
I noticed that the more time I spend active on HN (in comments) the more I tend to correct friends when they make a mistake or vigorously argue a point of view on something not that important (these aren't bad things the but the frequency with which I was doing them annoyed me and my friends and it wasn't just the important stuff I was arguing, it was stupid things).
When I logged out of HN for a while this behaviour slowly started to improve. I couldn't stay away for ever though but I am much more aware of the effect and try to stop myself before I get too deep into a stupid debate/argument both on HN and IRL.
Yes! This and the need to explain things always in an exact and neutral way without actually knowing all to much about the issue at hand and thereby blatantly ignoring the reality and the knowledge and interest of the persons around you.
I don't blame HN. I've learned and still learn a lot of cool stuff here. It's the best source to stay up to date on internet drama and timely background information for security and hacking related incidents. Also a lot of programming and Unix related ideas I would hardly find anywhere else. But it's of little use to me. I'm not the security engineer of a start up. I'm not even really coding at the moment.
My reality is different. I should leave my room, work on my bicycle, solve the real and urgent issues around my life and sit in the library or hanging around with friends doing real stuff. Connecting with real people and learning something about other aspects of life. This may be different for others here.
Instead I'm here trapped in a strange click loop. I would do probably something similar without HN or even without internet. It's sad but the OPs post about is a good reminder to cut it down... it's irrational for me and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
It depends on how long you've had an HN account. At some point the content seems to get repetitive. It's pretty easy to ignore the content that you've seen before.
But in the beginning it is a wealth of information, giving you insight into what should be expected when trying to start a barebones new company.
So you gorge on the articles until you rarely get new insights from them. Then, naturally, your addiction to HN ends. (Typically this starts the "remember when HN was good?" comments)
Now if you are addicted for other reasons, like you feel socially involved here, that I can not speak to. But if your addiction is content, that will fade once you've had your fill.
I have a different problem with it, which is that it invariably makes me feel pretty incompetent, because no matter what subject comes up, people with 10 times my level of skill in fields that I consider myself relatively competent in start discussing things and I suddenly feel quite completely devoid of any skill at all. Even on a simple thing like posts about typing I find people lamenting how they are only able to output 60wpm while I measure myself at 48wpm. Part of my problem is that I tend to be a generalist and know a lot of things quite well rather than single specialist topic at extreme depth.
How this all plays out in my head is a complex thing, but overall I feel like it is bad for my self-image. It is just very hard to keep the perspective in mind that I might be in the top 20% of people in a field but the top 1% will be the ones who start commenting on a specialised topic on HN. Add to that the different personality types hiding behind people's pseudonymous identities and you are getting a super distorted picture of the world.
My advice would be to embrace your generalist nature.
There are certainly roles fit for specialists, but generalists with rare blends of difficult and useful skills are a lot more valuable in most situations. Specialization in any one area tends to have rapidly diminishing returns.
I think any above average developer can make themselves more valuable at a much faster rate by becoming decent at complementary disciplines like design, user experience, conversion optimization, writing, etc. than by continuing to hone their development skills.
Even within development, becoming decent at every level of the stack, from dev ops and databases to front end, is usually going to add a lot more value than becoming slightly stronger at your specialty.
Flip it on its head and HN comments are one of the best places for me to learn, find interesting things to read, and above all read about perspectives and experiences on a subject different from my own.
Just because someone can overtake you in the conversational straightaways when it comes to their specific area of study does not mean you cannot outmaneuver them in the chicanes of general knowledge. :)
While I think all of OP's points are valid (loss of productivity, focus on things that are too positive or negative, unactionable items, etc.), I think there is a flipside. I'm not saying you should spend an exorbitant amount of time on HN, but I think many come for the community and shared purpose. It's like getting your Reddit fix without having to worry about cat photos and memes. There are many tech-related articles here that aren't about frameworks or success/failure.
Honestly, most of my HN reading is because I need a mind-break from whatever I'm focusing on. I find it's a great way to take a break, and still learn a few things while I'm at it.
I was working on such a reply, but you said it better. The only thing I would add is that it's up to you to be disciplined, and not run from work, procrastinating on HN. But this is not an issue inherent to HN.
>>The solution is not to read absolutely no news at all.
A question: What makes you think so? I've gone months and years at a time without reading any news; it's a fantastic feeling, and if something is really important you'll hear about it from a friend.
Just as "read less HN" may not be applicable to everyone, "you should probably keep reading the news" may not apply to others, or at least others may have had positive experiences quitting the consumption of news media.
There is definitely a flipside. I wouldn't be nearly as up to date with tech if it wasn't for HN, and last summer I managed to get an internship at a startup that I would have had zero chance of finding had I not seen them in a "Who's Hiring?" post on here.
Oh definitely. I would just argue that you had to dig through a lot of posts that were less-than-beneficial and that a filter for an "Ask HN" would have been more worth your time. And that is just one form of curated content that I was mentioning.
> Something that can curate the top posts and send them to you on a schedule.
When you read a bunch of articles and upvote interesting ones (for whatever your value of "interesting" is), you contribute to the community by making a distinction between articles.
The problem with reading from a curated feed is that you're most likely no longer participating (because it's too late to meaningfully upvote), and hence delegating curation to all the other users. When a majority of all the other users are doing the same, then the power of curation becomes concentrated in fewer voters.
I suspect the value of HN is amplified by the meaningful participation of its users. There are many other ways to be a passive consumer of news.
I actually think the discussions on HN are pretty good, even the political ones. There are some well thought out people here, and then people who I would've empathized with years ago when I was younger and not more exposed to the way the world works. Both sides are helpful to read and be aware of.
But I mainly read HN for the tech news. I'm one of those people who will learn about Github/Twitter/Heroku being down from here. All the big hacks are posted here and thoroughly discussed. I probably would've never played around with CoffeeScript, Angular, Go, and Dart without them being endlessly discussed around here. I wish I had something like HN when I was in college.
It seems to me that often HN is an echo chamber for people who want to feel superior about their tech choices - an attitude that's inherited from it's creator PG. I mean, "Blub programmers"? Can you get any more elitist?
I view HG as a boy's club for programming fashionistas. It just happens that sometimes amongst all the posturing there's something genuinely valuable.
Regarding the OP - I think that HN is fine as long as you learn to skim and filter.
I actually took around 2 months off of Hacker News over the summer when we were coming up on a big deadline with the beta launch or our new game, and I must say I noticed a significant uptick in productivity over this period. Completely fasting; however, hasn't turned out to be the best idea since I'm now more addicted than I was previously. The newsletter idea is probably the best of both worlds.
HN is an online community, where people go because they feel that it fulfills them in some way (maybe because they plan to do a startup of their own one day and reading about other startups makes them dream, because they like debating with others, etc.).
I suggest the ridiculous notion that you should do what makes you happy, and if going on HN fulfills some part of your being - no matter how irrationally - then go for it.
The issue I have with HN (and other Forums), is that there is a lot of repetition in the comments. In part on HN this is probably not helped as it's difficult to overview and digest threads, especially if the comment trees are large. Comment verbosity and positional changes also make it difficult.
I think that is why in part people come, post, then move on. Necro-posting, even a day late is pretty pointless if you want to add to the general discussion.
I think I'd rather comments have a character limit. Or to get people to post summaries of their posts as titles. And/or some tl;dr; post mortems on comment threads.
Regarding the curated content option, I don't think that would be a good option for me. I come here to learn about the unusual and non-mainstream tech stuff. Of the 20 frameworks, it's true that I can only really learn one, but I probably am not going to want to learn whatever one the curator decided was best, because the curator is going to choose the most popular/hip/mainstream one, since that's the one that would be of interest to the most readers. I come here not to learn what's popular, but rather to learn about the things that aren't popular.
actually i love all of this stuff on HN. i really don't agree with the argument presented here - as well presented as it is.
hn is a resource where the stories of the kind listed in this article are available at all. for me this is important because i want to read those stories, i want to learn from the mistakes of others and see what other people /think/ worked well for them. sure it hurts my productivity, but so does the beer i would drink, the movie i would watch or whatever else that i would do in my down time because that is when i read HN for the most part.
what is bad for my well being here is all the 'self-entitled prick with first world problem' stories. i have no respect for them and it saddens me that the community as a whole seems naive enough on average that this stuff is considered news and not just 'smart' people embarrassing themselves with an utter lack of common sense or life experience. it makes me genuinely angry. the worst part of it all is that these stories and promoting them feed the very cause you fight against... see just thinking about draws me into wanting to collectively slap the majority of the community around the face and tell them how it is, you know the good ol' sciency way by pointing at data and examples littered throughout history instead of jumping on some crazy emotional bandwagon.
Is it weird that I read Hacker News for none of the reasons he lists? I'm rarely interested in reading about startups succeeding or failing, or new frameworks or languages, but I am interested in reading about cool things people have done with technology, or even non-tech related news. I guess I'd probably be more suited to slashdot's content, but I prefer Hacker News' format so much more.
This is one of the few technical communities online where I post comments. The problem I have with reddit is that downvoting is too rampant. I also enjoy the focus here on startup companies, even though I'm not a founder. reddit seems to have this bias against startups which is overly cynical and even demoralizing. To me, the startup scene is (part of) what makes the software industry interesting and distinguishes it from, say, chemical engineering. If I ever do decide to become a founder, the information I've picked up here, almost by osmosis, will undoubtedly be invaluable.
Regarding posts about new languages or frameworks, I really don't think anybody is seriously suggesting you go rewrite your production codebase. That's silly hyperbole. Lots of people here actively work on side projects or they may be in the planning phase for a new startup with no code written yet--situations where they can legitimately consider using a newer framework or language.
I shall invoke Sturgeon's Law: ("ninety percent of everything is crap." )
Sturgeon's revelation, commonly referred to as Sturgeon's law, is an adage commonly cited as "ninety percent of everything is crap." It is derived from quotations by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic: while Sturgeon coined another adage that he termed "Sturgeon's law", it is his "revelation" that is usually referred to by that term.
The phrase was derived from Sturgeon's observation that while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, it could be noted that the majority of examples of works in other fields could equally be seen to be of low quality and that science fiction was thus no different in that regard to other art forms.
HN has been a blessing for me. It has taught me so much about startups/consulting and everything related. And the comments section is tremendously valuable. As an avid forum reader (self-proclaimed) I have the experience of knowing how to comb through the comments and be able to quickly extract what's important. Only a fool reads everything and interprets it on face value.
Sometimes in the comments what's written isn't important, but the thought process behind that writing could really help excel one's career (if one's able to discern it). I have to pay homage to the tremendously experienced consultants here, in which I've learned so much from, and has helped my career unequivocally.
This is such an outstanding point, like all internet resources there is a wealth of knowledge you can obtain from HN. But you have to condition yourself to differentiate between what is sensational and what is actual fact.
I might get burned for this, but I don't know why people even evangelize posts of this kind. For starters they are off topic. And what is the end goal? At one extreme are you trying to lead an exodus? Do you feel like you're helping people because you're telling people how to effectively use their time? There is such a wide range of types here I don't know how this advice can be applied ubiquitously.
I love HN because I get to see so many great early stage products. I get to hear opinions from all ages that reveal the environment we are in (Young and old developers trying to mesh together, new techniques meet old). I don't really know too many other communities that have what HN has.
I do not feel qualified to determine the psychological effects of HN on readers, but the author has some valid points. HN does leave one with the impression that there's this "get rich fast" club of 20-something entrepreneurs who are getting huge valuations and 8-figure cash investments for unfinished and seemingly unimportant niche products and unfortunately, you, the reader, cannot be part of it. This might be frustrating for people who work hard on their own startups and cannot get anywhere near this VC craze because they live on some other continent. Then again, it has no real impact on their own efforts, success is not made by VC or hype, it's the product that counts.
HN, like all news sources, is a mixed bag of content that has varying degrees of relevancy to its readers. Very few people have time to read all of the Wall Street Journal on a daily basis, much less benefit from absorbing that much information, and the same thing applies to HN. However, HN still provides a great source of current and emergent trends in the startup world. If one isn't able to consume this site's content in a way that's beneficial to them then the blame is squarely on their own lack of discipline. Writing blog posts extrapolating one's personal tendency to misuse this news source to some general rule of thumb is pointless.
I agree. However, I wouldn't say that this is entirely useless as it does offer some suggested alternatives to help build better habits. What I discuss in my post is something that I've seen friends and co-workers struggle with and the newsletters were something largely unknown to some.
Some of the stories I read at HN appears on "mainstream-media" a day or three later. In most cases, Hacker News makes the local technology news "no-news".
As for the author's opinion, media, by definition, usually cover the exceptional stories, great success or failures, but not the daily challenges each of us is coping with, while struggling to generate more leads or turn a lead into a deal (yep, same letters, reads backwards).
I love stay in sync with the remote Silicon Valley and HN, the stories and the comments help me get that.
Thanks PG and the other guys for putting this site together and maintaining this site for us, entrepreneurs all over the world!
Web design weekly definitely provides quality web design related content. I've also talked to the curator and he's a very nice guy which doesn't change the quality of the content, but does let you know your supporting a decent person.
My newsletter Jobety provides web design and dev related jobs once a week. I sort through a lot of different job boards and pick out what I consider to be the best ones.
Of course I'm a bit biased, but I think curated newsletters provide a lot of advantages, several of which are listed in the post. Another one that I would add is the ability to focus on a particular topic or area that you find useful. I created a (curated) list of a lot of them recently - http://www.kaledavis.com/2013/09/06/newsletters-newsletters-....
Is it "complain about HN week" ? If you got problem with HN stop reading it, simple as that. We don't need your "awesome" advices how to read stories on HN, we don't need to hear that HN sux.
I dont think anyone here got problem with filtering the content, if you dont want to read another startup stories you just don't. I do not see any problem here.
Hacker News is still awesome community, people here usually have awesome attitude. It keeps me motivated.
I'm not sure how many of you do this, but I often find myself looking something up on HN, just out of curiosity of what was discussed and what people thought about it.
I think it goes without saying that it's all about your objectives and perceptions. Objectively, HN is a valuable resource to stay informed of micro-innovations in the tech industry.
I'm not someone that's insecure about what I don't know or how smart I am, as I'm constantly trying to improve all areas of my life; as a result, many of the posts here are inspiring and help set a fire under my ass to get out there start doing.
This is the difference between consuming content and letting the content consume you. HN can't harm you unless you allow it to. Don't blame the content.
Sometimes there's no excuse for self-discipline, critical thinking, a healthy perspective on life, and self-esteem. I don't say this flippantly. All of the above are lifelong challenges for most people (myself included).
Something I've considered doing is taking HN and/or reddit posts and then applying a machine learning algorithm to figure out what kinds of articles I like/dislike and automatically filter out the ones that are likely to waste my time, or at least improve upon the existing sorting system and make it more personalized.
HN and proggit are two great sources of consuming technology related information. I usually spent 20 mins in morning and add the interesting looking articles on instapaper for reading in free time. I don't think it's making me less productive at all and HN comments are great at deciding what to read.
I must have missed all those articles about languages/frameworks you need to learn immediately. Generally I feel pretty comfortable with the tools I have now and don't feel threatened if I see some new cool tech everyone's excited about, but it does make interesting reading.
Your article did strike a chord with me, simply because I had the exact same epiphany that you write of, a few months ago, and have been spending less time on HN since.
So, point of my commment is, add me to your anecdata count, of another one that thought in the same way and arrived to the same conclusion.
I use HN as a kick in the butt. Whenever I feel down or demotivated I just browse to HN's home page, see what amazing work is being done in the tech world while I'm just sitting there, remember that I want to be a part of it, and go back to work with my motivation restored.
My girlfriend is reading the Daily Mail like I read Hacker News. I don't know which website is worse for our well being but I try to read the day best voted submissions and it is enough to keep me updated with everything else.
I use HN to test if internet is working. Don't do this, worst idea ever, but it's built in my muscle memory. It also happens that I read HN in a tab, and then open a new tab and get on HN again. Muscle memory.
I think most people visiting HN choose to read what is relevant to their interests and goals, as well as submitting similar content or submitting something perhaps breaking news in the tech industry for the day
Another post in the do this, do that, because it's better for you fashion. Since when people are going to stop writing with so much entitlement ? What do they know what works for me anyway ?
Technology ADD is a issue I have been struggling with for some time. The compulsive urge to chase every new framework is real and I do not know how manage it as it eats through my productive time.
Out of 250 Hacker News posts that cross my transom in a given week, I might open 30 links, decide to actually read 6 of those thirty tabs, and learn something from three of them.
This is still a better ratio than most websites. Sturgeon's Law applies. 90% of everything is crap, another 9% is of decent quality but not relevant to anything I need to do-- leaving 1% that is worth it for me to read. So I'd say that HN's numbers are on par, if not slightly above it.
See, I'd really like to dislike HN. Paul Graham used to be an iconoclast (with some serious technical chops-- go read On Lisp-- deserving of much respect) fighting the stodgy establishment of VC-istan. Having seen the failings of investors nearly destroy his business on several occasions, he tried to build something new and different: a fast path to funding and access so startups could focus on building instead of bullshit. But now that he is the establishment, he's not fighting hard enough. Then there is the issue of HN's abysmal quality of moderation, for which he must accept responsibility. So I really want to dislike HN and tell it to fuck off wholesale...
... but, the problem is that, in spite of these negatives, there's just a lot of really good stuff that ends up here. Reading less HN is good advice, but there's enough high-quality stuff here (in submissions and comments) to make it worthwhile.
If you're that weak that you can't even read HN without properly filtering shit in your head, you shouldn't use the internet. What a terrible and pointless article.
It's all just information, what you do with that is up to you.