20 Years of YC / HN

Mar 17 2025 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 woul ... Read full article.