20 years of YC

I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand.

As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It was probably on Reddit or Digg. Once I found it, I started reading every day, mostly because the comment sections were so full of smart people in tech.

At the time I was working as a data analyst, mostly with SQL and Excel. I understood that I would need to learn much more to move into engineering, which I was getting excited about, but didn’t quite understand how to bridge the gap.

When I first started reading HN, I didn’t understand 99% of the linked content, the jargon in the discussions, or the companies mentioned, but I was determined to learn. My general approach was to skim the top headlines and headlines that I could understand, read the post, and then read the HackerNews discussion.

As I read the discussion, I would come upon terms I had no idea about: Big O notation, collaborative filtering, caching, Hindley-Milner type systems, lambda architectures, CI/CD pipelines, cryptography, generics, build or buy, B-trees, Bloom filters, trunk-based development, red/green deploys. I would look all of them up and go down countless rabbit holes.

HN is a bit bigger these days, but, thanks to contributors and the tireless efforts of dang, still so perfectly ambiently captures what tech is thinking about in the current moment. If you don’t have a supportive community at work － like many of us data scientists － HN was the perfect ambient watercooler to be near senior technically excellent people in the industry.

In the first few years, I read maybe 2 links out of the 30 ever on the front page. But, because I read HN 4-5 times a day, after a few years, things started falling into place.

Other than constantly studying, Hacker News was one of the main things that pulled me up out of my bootstraps from a non-technical major afraid of SSHing into a server, to a person confidently deploying code to millions of users. There is only one other thing that has brought as much value to my career in tech, and that was the connections I made on old Twitter.

Over time, I gained enough confidence to start blogging on technical topics, HN gave me something new: being aware that HN might pick apart that content forced me to learn to write clearly and precisely for a highly technical, educated audience.

My favorite feeling is when, via a link, something I have written or created has made an impact on someone out there in the ether. Or, from the reader side, when I read something that makes me go “I’m not alone. This person has also thought about these problems,” and I can’t wait to see if there are any good discussions on the topic.

YC is proud of the companies it launched: Reddit, Airbnb, Instacart, Doordash, Stripe. Ironically, the biggest multiples it’s generated for the industry have been from a low-dazzle text forum written in Arc Lisp.

Thank you for everything, HN.