Ask HN: How did you discover Hacker News?

6/6/2026 at 5:33:09 PM

A pg essay almost two decades ago, when the site was still called Startup News.

by runjake

6/6/2026 at 2:40:41 PM

I was hovering over PC forums since 2000 until in 2018 I stumbled upon here. My first thought: where the hell was this treasure hidden all this time? Second thought: are there such gems for other fields (my field-medicine, sports, travel etc)? I found none with so high quality, curration, expertise.

by tsoukase

6/5/2026 at 11:08:23 PM

I started reading Paul Graham's essays after listening to his talk: https://web.archive.org/web/20130729231533id_/http://itc.con...

by kirubakaran

6/5/2026 at 3:17:52 PM

I drew a graph of connections between Paul Graham essays, and coloured them via a PageRank-style weighting algorithm. I emailed it to PG, and he suggested I post it here.

by ColinWright

6/6/2026 at 10:17:08 AM

I was researching frameworks for building progressive web apps and stumbled over "Hacker News as a PWA" (https://github.com/tastejs/hacker-news-pwas).

by fabianholzer

6/5/2026 at 7:41:35 PM

Through pg's essays, which I discovered via a Joel Spolsky blog post. Perhaps this one: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

by dang

6/5/2026 at 8:30:54 PM

Man, you've been here since the beginning!

by chistev

6/5/2026 at 11:06:39 PM

Looks like I created my account a week before dang! I was lurking for a few months before I actually created the account.

by kirubakaran

6/6/2026 at 4:06:34 AM

Strangely I think it was TechCrunch. But I was reading pg's essays years earlier (maybe through Joel On Software) and already had known about yc.

Think it was related to the initial request for startups post: https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/y-combinator-starts-seedin...

by jaredsohn

6/6/2026 at 3:34:36 AM

Links to HN on Techmeme, and I was on Techmeme because I was interested in memes.

I was interested in memes because I had read Daniel Dennitt's Consciousness Explained back in the mid 1990's and was on the internet looking at them because the meme meme had become more mainstream.

Or to put it another way, I found HN through intellectual curiosity as a distraction from my practice collapsing in the sub-prime meltdown...it was long ago in a galaxy far far away.

by brudgers

6/6/2026 at 3:59:08 AM

Got a tip from a fellow admin on IRC (Freenode v1.0) and made an account (since lost) in 2007 - followed up in late 2008, been an on and off reader / commenter since then, more so lately given less hands on work IRL.

by defrost

6/5/2026 at 7:41:20 PM

Coworker about 10 years ago. Took me a few years to register an account.

by CobaltFire

6/6/2026 at 3:54:14 AM

I think I signed up one of the first days after it launched, it was called Startup News. Either from a pg essay or reddit, can't remember which.

by larrykubin

6/5/2026 at 11:58:50 PM

I think i got linked here from a slashdot article. That one is flooded with russian trolls nowadays so i mostly visit hacker news, and people are nicer here too

by cantalopes

6/6/2026 at 8:37:55 AM

A chatter linked HN on #commonlisp on freenode back in 2011.

by mna_

6/5/2026 at 7:20:11 PM

It was so long ago (with a different account), that I don't remember.

by rationalist

6/6/2026 at 12:03:36 AM

Cant remember. Probably searching for an answer to some coding problem.

by dnnddidiej

6/6/2026 at 3:58:32 AM

My AI agent, Ziggy Stardust, told me about it.

by JessieJanie

6/5/2026 at 7:28:43 PM

Saw I post on /r/programming in 2011.

by m-hodges

6/6/2026 at 10:19:15 AM

Hum... don't remember. The oldest HN post that I can positively remember right now is the Wash my Ferrari problem from 2012 so it should be via Debian forums

by pvaldes

6/6/2026 at 10:25:25 AM

via Paul Graham

by geldedus

6/5/2026 at 2:43:11 PM

Recommended by Codex

by shanewei

6/5/2026 at 3:34:50 PM

College roommate 17 years ago while doing NSF summer research, I am eternally grateful Eric!

by verdverm

6/5/2026 at 9:29:01 PM

[dead]

by andrewmcwatters