Hacker News Reader

Comment by erikig | Hacker News Reader

Reading HN never seems like work. I feel like I could do it all day.

You're supposed to come up with something that feels like work to other people.

I know plenty of people who consider reading, in any form, work.

My point exactly. I showed this to a couple of my non-tech friends and they couldn't quite understand why we'd spend hours looking at what seemed like "work stuff"

Are they hiring? ;)

I read "net news" - a lot. So much so that people comment on it. I always wondered if there was any value in "here's what is hot" in the tech world - like a personal link aggregator.

Yeah, I could share/blog/tweet (and I do, but not much) but often the things that are interesting later aren't things I share right away. Still trying to solve that problem.

One way in which I benefit from being a Hacker News junkie is that I have like third of (the better part of) the Internet cached in my head. Every now and then (usually many times a month) someone mentions a problem they're working on and I immediately chime in with "you know, two months ago there was this article on Hacker News, which described this tech/tool/advice that solves exactly this".

Among many others, I managed to positively affect my company this way by pointing my boss in the direction of good solutions and clarifying which of his ideas are actually feasible.

There could be in the future. Imagine you comment and construct your personal path through the Net that you share and others are allowed to search. Not just reddit/hn, but everything. And it is not just, I posted to hn or commented on hn, but your actual personal shared web history (with comments: yours and others)

Well, dealing with the UI feels like work. :-)

I was thinking the same thing about socializing with tech people, then I remembered that the heuristic was an logical conjunction. It both has not seem like work to you AND seem like work to other people.

Of course, for a lot of people uninterested in tech and programming, reading HN would seem like work. And, for many tech people, socializing also seems like work. So I guess it's a matter of what group you're comparing against.

Interesting perspective. Looking at things this way, I can say I definitely have no problem of being aware of industry trends, startup culture, as well as having a constantly broadening perspective on the art of programming itself. It's something that sounds like what a good employee should be doing, but I know that for many it's a chore. I do that because, well... I just like it. No actual planning or effort involved.

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