Hi all! Its me the resident weirdo...hardkorebob. Have any of you made a good pal, friend or bud on here this website we use everyday? If so, did you appreciate the odds of such luck? Thanks. Happy Sunday/Monday to all.
I have checked Hacker News daily since I was 12, which is over 14 years ago now (excluding camping with no internet).
It gave me and some of my best friends growing up some great conversations topics. I’m also sure Hacker News has started many hobbies of mine and provided tons of education/entertainment over the years. By far, I think the best benefit of HN for me socially has been making me a more interesting person due to the topics I’ve learned about here.
I went from a homeschooled kid on a farm to->university->junior->mid-level SE->aspiring entrepreneur at age 26 while checking this site daily.
Great site, great community, and I pray it continues in the same way it has for decades to come.
I pray with you. I love this place a lot. I have had many similar things happen to me. I have been online since 1996. Unfortunately never been able to talk to hackers IRL.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that HN changed my life. When I first started using the site almost 15yrs ago I was a junior recruiter barely making ends meet. I learned a huge amount about the tech startup world through HN and when I found out there was a small HN meetup in London (where I worked), I jumped at the chance to check it out and ended up attending the meet-up every month.
I quickly became friends with the organiser of the meetup (Dmitri) and started helping him out. Together over the next 10 years we turned the meetup into the largest tech meetup in Europe with nearly 10k members and an average attendance of 500 people (max capacity for our venue). I ended up hosting the meetup and through that event (plus HN itself) my career took off. I've worked with multiple YC companies and have launched various products and businesses leveraging the network I created through HN. Dmitri and his family are still very close friends and honestly, it really is all thanks to HN.
This is such a great comment to read as I wake up. Thank you HN for allowing me to express myself and give others like this an opportunity to flourish!!
I understand that I am not the greatest communicator but IRL if I have to wipe the earth's sorry a$$ I would because I am a servant to all. Plus I ran a portable toilet business in Lakeland and now removed dead people in VA. So why am I here I have no clue? Never felt I belonged. And I doubt a story like these would happen to me. IMHO, the sand Valley can't handle this boricua sauce.
Yes, I did reach out to one person about their project, turned into a weekly drinks kind of thing, and eventually petered out after a year or two.
One of my frustrations with the modern internet is how infrequently it leads to offline gatherings and connections these days. It used to be very normal that mailing lists, user groups, etc. would gather online, but also have a weekly/monthly meeting, conference, or post job ads/things for sale, etc. and you'd just organically end up meeting people and hanging out.
These days, the internet seems to be for people who really just want to discuss opinions endlessly and anonymously, but never do anything about it offline.
One does, very occasionally, see posts on HN about meetups, but it's rare and just one-off and ad-hoc, you'd think a big city like London, NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. could easily sustain an ongoing weekly/monthly thing.
Too easy to pick up feds / scammers / dealers / other predators looking for places to recruit fresh victims. Saw an acquaintance's "Art classes" idea fall to that last year: people would pay the $10 fee and then be disruptive with a crypto pitch.
I think the issue is there’s no reliable reputation system on the internet.
I remember when Facebook launched I thought it might serve as this (eg, “oh h2odragon has a year old account and seems not like a psycho, I’ll let them come to my art class”). But Facebook wasn’t interested and stopped providing apis and whatnot. I think it didn’t align with their business model as they kind of want scams as it drives lots of revenue (in that a significant portion of ads are misleading or scams that would be devastated if people could post reputation info like “this magic mouthguard doesn’t work and just a $10 drugstore version wrapped in $40 of social media ads”).
Does the reputation then get established using the blockchain? Is this the problem that Urbit solves? Interesting that the reliability of the blockchain doesn't have to be attached to currency. The blockchain can then actually make an actor legit? Some ideas, questions and confusions I guess.
It doesn’t need blockchain. I mean if Facebook had just provided ubiquitous apis that people could use, that would be fine and public enough.
The key is that there’s some public store of identities, and some level of social graph or complaints that lets you know if it’s a real person or not.
I think it’s better if it’s not blockchain and tied to some natural identity that people use- like Facebook- so there’s a virtuous incentive to keep it active. A blockchain wouldn’t really be self-sustaining as no one really uses identity as part of random stuff and it would need some way to pay for itself.
Oh man that's the crap I hate. It's terrible we have these thoughts and even worse that there is actual actors doing this kinda bst. I am truly to the end of my core and up to my neck had it with this terrible 75% of the world being utter nonhuman. When will it stop?
I think HN deserves far more discussion on hackerspaces/makerspaces and such! My local hackerspace is Garoa Hacker clube[1]; unfortunately I haven't had the time to participate much. If you're in São Paulo, I recommend a visit (for the 'Noite de Processing' (Processing nights)) on tuesday, and if you live here, what are you waiting for? :) (those spaces can always use more participation!) ... and maybe someday we'll meet there as well.
Noite de Processing is also streamed online as well usually by the great Alexandre Villares. The next one is tuesday 28/11/2023![2]
I guess. I think it's a choice people make. I put myself out here. Am I a target now? Don't care. Am I worried if I will fail with all this? Nope. I'm simply been online and distant but now I'm just gonna talk to everyone and make them feel like I am a friend because I am the friend, that dude that's just there to say it when need be. Anyhow maybe we all are coming to certain realizations because of the toxic environment we are all figuring out why and understanding the root causes of things. In any case. I'm open get my info off my profile.
At least from my perspective it's not so much whether someone puts themself out there, as much as the format kinda treating the authors of comments as interchangable. Like, it's unlikely I'll recognise a name from a previous comments section or post, simply because it's such a minor part of the page and so de emphasised compared to what they posted.
I know that people here are usually not toxic, and I wouldn't be worried about sharing personal info that much, but it's just an 'all names kinda blend in with this format' thing.
I see what you are saying. And I do like that this place lends itself for such thinking and being. I am taking a new approach at things and just being available to respond honestly to everything. Just another dude here. Nothing to see.
This is so great! It's a great place and time to be alive in. I simply hope we can use these tools to bring peace to regions who never experience 1% of what the US quality of life has to offer. Let's start building code that makes war obsolete. And please let's save the idealism for the dreamers.
They pop up every now and then. Wouldn't say it's a common thing. Fwiw the overlap between a random tech meetup and HN users is probably pretty high. I've gone to a few in SF from meetup.com
It was a good time for sure. I worked there 7.5 years before leaving. Still keep in contact with a lot of people from that job. On the first work day of the month there are hiring threads on HN if you end up wanting to check those out
This is great. Maybe when you in Richmond we could have coffee. I wish. Unfortunately my current job is very hectic to say the least. But if the idea is solid for sure I could make a special coffee day ;)
The problem is the cheaters and liars. The people that hide behind Terms of Use and Policies and Charters and Corporations. The people who control the world understand the reality and it is the game they force on us to play. To the unfortunate nonhumans this is normal and it is needed and desired by them. But for true humans it is an utter cesspool of nonsense and piercing thru this disgusting film of garbage is gonna take some cojones. Simply because The Establishment likes to solve everything with making you into powder pieces using mechanical tools of destruction. The only Modern Tech we have is the speed to put someone in a tomb.
I made professional connections. I was, in 2017, building a machine learning plugin for Elasticsearch (google Elasticsearch Learning to Rank). In a post about Slack's use of machine learning for search, I commented sharing the project. The Wikimedia Foundation search folks replied. We started collaborating professionally. As a consultant, I had access to many applicable use cases in the community. And Wikimedia of course had massive scale to make it bulletproof. We ended up co-creating the plugin - still relatively active for both OpenSearch and Elasticsearch.
Not me. I don’t have many IRL friends anyway because I roleplay “chaotic neutral” in every social situation. Turns out human beings have feelings and don’t want to deal with edgelord drama all the time.
lmfa0. I don't have many local friends but I do have friends although not int(1) is good with tech in any way. Didn't know about chaotic neutral until now thanks for that. Drama is supposed to be funny not taken serious IMHO.
Plenty. There's not a lot of Malaysians on here, so many tend to drop me an email when they figure it out. Most hang around the same communities (hackers, YC, tech, etc) so we end up knowing lots of mutual people too. It's a small world here.
There's also meeting people by proxy. I find another community from here. People on that community are friends with one another. Turns out those people browse HN too.
Never. Fulltime dad since 2019. I've been lurking here and on Reddit but never got anyone to respond :(
Little sad. However an impetus for mother of all inventions: social network for plutonic relations? ;)
Loneliness is a crisis and becoming an epidemic. There needs to be a way men in particular needs to find a way to connect without making them feel...may I say... despairing or desperate? :(
I hear you bro. I feel the same way. Glad you expressed it on the money. For sure loneliness is rampant and the connection to be had with other men of fellow interest is a very difficult thing for me as an American. Super social and friendly dude but the major issue in this here fine country is the ignorant mass as an ideology, people reject what they don't understand and everyone is assuming on a constant basis, everyone on defense. It is very sticky film of ... sadness for sure. But get my info off the profile man and hmu anytime.
That's great! I never check those since my skills/talents are not really keen for these types of jobs. Like someone else said, human emotion and feelings are an enormous barrier. Unfortunately I give off the wrong vibe when people place their eyes on me. So I never even try to apply for a computer job. Even tho I have been regarded a wizard by non-hackers smh. Maybe one of these submissions of mine may peek interest. I'm currently participating in Hoon Academy by Urbit Education on YT. I feel like a young person again lol.
No, I doubt I would... it seems HN is centered in Silicon Valley, and I'm in a suburb of Chicago, where there is a very low density of fellow programmers, hackers, etc. We're so spread out here, we had to invent the BBS to stay in touch.
Yes, I actually even applied to work there once as a side job, they didn’t hire me. It is good, but probably a little bit more expensive than similar food and definitely targeted towards tourists.
I have made IRL friends from other online communities, though. For me, HN is too broad and anonymous and there is little 1:1 interaction compared to, say, forums. Most of the time I don't even notice the usernames.
I have checked Hacker News daily since I was 12, which is over 14 years ago now (excluding camping with no internet).
It gave me and some of my best friends growing up some great conversations topics. I’m also sure Hacker News has started many hobbies of mine and provided tons of education/entertainment over the years. By far, I think the best benefit of HN for me socially has been making me a more interesting person due to the topics I’ve learned about here.
I went from a homeschooled kid on a farm to->university->junior->mid-level SE->aspiring entrepreneur at age 26 while checking this site daily.
Great site, great community, and I pray it continues in the same way it has for decades to come.