Ask HN: Does Hacker News serve you?

I've been on here for 13 years. It's been one of the most valuable websites for my life, if not the single most valuable. I've learned immeasurable amounts of information about things far and wide. The content and discussions here have made me a significantly better engineer than I could have been otherwise. I've been hired into career-changing roles and hired several amazing engineers from the monthly "Who's Hiring" posts.

I even wrote an open thank you letter to HN a little while ago, lol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36163500

The most useful aspect is the curation. HN does a pretty good job at curating headlines so that I can save time and get the most important news items each day without visiting other social media sites, most of which push monetization and recommendations in annoying ways.

As for reading the comments, it's just entertainment and the same as any other social media site.

I’d say less so over the years but certainly it has been a ladder for me to higher planes. I’ve learned many things here that I may never have otherwise.

At the moment i use it as a tech radar, and pulse for my areas of interest.

I definitely get valuable information from it and 95% of that is thanks to the work of moderators. I'm one of those people who would be on messageboards 15 years ago asking "What programming language should I learn???" as an Econ major who had over-engineered many an Excel spreadsheet. The commentary here often goes into details around certain technologies and roles that I wouldn't know had I just read the documentation or hung around someone's Twitter.

Now, no place is perfect and HN does have its issues. As tech has grown beyond matters of "hacker interest" into something the majority of society participates in, the discussion here has naturally expanded into matters of society, economic fairness and regulation/taxation. Regular topics on HN reflecting this change involve immigration, crypto, diversity, free speech and more. These are topics where the signal to noise ratio is very low.

In this current climate we also see heads of companies wading into these topics and speaking in black and white terms designed for broadcast on social media. Nonetheless, these topics sometimes lead to disproportionately lengthy HN threads, where it becomes clear that there is a lot of hero worship and "appeal to authority" thinking that powers the same people that write thoughtful, helpful comments on topics that are more 'tech' in nature.

I go here because this is the defacto board "dialed in" to the sf tech scene. If somewhere else were the defacto I would go there. Knowing it is and that I am seeing the same things people in tech are seeing serves my needs sufficiently.

It's great for keeping up with tech news. I wish it were a bit easier to follow and keep up witb conversation threads, especially on big news items.

I'm sure I've gotten quite a bit of valuable information from the site, but like most information on the internet, I consume a lot of it, and it disappears almost as quickly. Some of it sticks around, but not a whole lot. It's forgotten shortly as I've already moved on to consume the next bit of information.

I personally use it as a stepping stone to explore different fields I might not have thought about before, or learn about subjects I wouldn't have looked up otherwise.

It's kinda like a human run discovery algorithm for weird niches and subcultures, plus new tech breakthroughs.

I have been using HN for about 6 years now.

Since then it has become my goto site for information or even learning anything new.

It’s where i get my motivation and new ideas

Some posts are useful, some entertaining and others help me distract.

mostly entertainment but the occasional employment is certainly valuable

Mainly interesting info...

A little of both.