What is beyond Hacker News?
I read and follow almost everything that is trending/first page in Hacker News since 2008. It was right after I started computer science at university. It's probably the only habit apart from brushing my teeth and taking a shower everyday that I still keep since that date.
Some would say this is some kind of procrastination — But for me, this has completely changed my life. I've discovered many new technologies, felt deeply in love with Ruby, which then led me to leave my average-sized hometown to work in São Paulo — Brazil's most busiest and wealthiest city — And just around one year ago to the sexy and vibrant city of Berlin, in Germany.
If it wasn't for the great community of HN. I would probably be still programming, but in a standard that I would definitely look down as of today. This created a completely new me. I evolved with the fastest growing industry in the planet. I saw Dropbox, Airbnb and other YCombinator companies becoming the mythical unicorn, and then how this created the startup ecosystem that surrounded me where I lived. I'm even able today to write a blog post in a foreign language with some sort of conciseness!
Reading the expectations and beliefs of people from Silicon Valley, discovering their standards, breathing their ideas of how to change the world, all this injected daily in my brain. This made me disconnected with reality at most times, which of course, were way different from an american Stanford graduate. As of today, I feel closer to that reality — maybe too close up to the point that I don't feel any of the Impostor's Syndrome I did in the beginning.
It's no lie that this made me unhappy at a times, but then I moved forward, and then became unhappy again, and then had more progress…
But I feel that as of now, I'm not improving as much as I did, as if I'm of now a product already finished, a "senior" Hacker News reader, trying to squeeze the last drops of the community's hivemind…
The startup revolution isn't anywhere over yet, but as of today, it's a proved model. Some startups after a lot of cash injected grow big and really turn industries upside-down. Others found ways to be bootstraped and become profitable, other incubators have developed their own models which changed markets in other parts of the world. "We won."
But I’ve hit a plateau. I don’t feel improving anymore reading it, but still raising the bar for my expectations and getting more unhappy. Also, HN today is established. YCombinator is big. I feel things have changed a bit, even though it's still great and there's much valuable information.
It might sound a bit weird, after all, it's just a news feed. I'm not even a famous community member or someone who actively participate in discussions. But it has some deep meaning and value for me. I would definitely like to have that documented in a way that I can look back and see(and this is what I'm doing right now).
I'll be forever grateful from how much I've learned on HN. It was more worthy than all my third-world school education and pretty close to the same experience value I've got from university.
But it's time for me to move on.
This year, 2016, I will spend my reading time on something else.
