Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

My semi-cynical, 35+ years in the industry advice? Avoid blogs, forums, podcasts, social media pages, news sites that only focus on the 1% of startups that make it 'big' seemingly overnight.

Go out and talk to fellow entrepreneurs, hackers, company founders and people in the industry, and you will quickly find out that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE goes through a heartless grind and struggle to get things done or to make a difference. Connect with these people on a far deeper level than just making money or comparing tech stacks and identify what it is that gets them out of bed each morning with a spring in their step. If it is the same reasons that get YOU out of bed every morning, then sign them up as your support buddy so you can measure (and they can help you measure) the real metric that makes you tick. No room for impostor syndrome in this scenario at all.

View on HN

That's a smart thing to do...

I had spent several years in this startup bubble - both physically and information-wise - and still do to some degree. So it happened to me that I talked to people I knew to some degree, that have very little technical technical understanding and then half a year later they tell me how they deep dived into some hard to get technology.

That frustrated me a lot and it took me quite some time to understand that they just went step by step through tutorials or fully finished boilerplates with doing very little on top on own initiative.

I remember this one guy even starting to blog about advanced Machine learning techniques on LinkedIn.

> Avoid blogs, forums, podcasts, social media pages, news sites that only

> focus on the 1% of startups that make it 'big' seemingly overnight.

I'm starting to think that Hacker News is one of them. Of course a lot of the information here is very new and up-to-date, and oftentimes I learn from articles and comments (obviously) things that are relevant for work and people like me working in this industry.

But on the other hand I get the impression that I was much happier fiddling around with technology before I touched this startup bubble and one year after started reading HN at least once a day.

I totally agree with your statement, but how can one compensate for the fear of missing out of new technologies, interesting discussions among interesting people sharing their insights to the problem in hand, like you're doing with us at the moment. That's the only reason I check Hacker News, or some Subreddits multiple times a day, so that I won't miss that one non-upvoted post which could have proven significant to me, whether personally or educationally.

How many non-upvoted life-changing posts have you come across? I've been visiting hn and reddit almost every day for maybe 8 years now, and the answer for me is zero.

I find the time and effort needed (as well as the mental stress) to make sure I am not missing out on anything is not worth the end result.

A quick scan of the front page gives me more than enough interesting material.

FOMO is a trap. You're looking for a needle in a haystack, but instead you should let someone else bring the needle to you.

If something is worth your time, someone you know and trust will bring it up to you. The more people you talk to and interact with, the more likely you are to be offered up information that is actually significant to you. It is also more likely to have a real impact because human interaction is more "sticky" than a simple website post.

What you're doing now is akin to throwing a Bubble sort at the problem. It's slow, inefficient and a waste of time.

Yeah but there are bizillion other tech related websites and blogs. Those are mostly not as shiny as HN but they have links as well, discussions and buzz words which can be googled. That's basically how I did things in my pre-HN times. Actually Google was my entry-point oftentimes. I think I might have missed certain trends but on the other hand I got much deeper into technologies I actually cared about.

Totally agree with you on this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com