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20 Years of YC / HN

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.

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. 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.

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