If I remember correctly, somebody who knew me from the Business of Software forums mentioned my business here, I saw it in my logs, and started reading. I had no idea any of this startup stuff existed prior. I had heard of pg but only knew him as the Plan for Spam (Bayesian spam filtering article) author, and thought he was actually the same person as John Graham-Cumming (who is also an HN user, also has a cognate for Gram in his name, and also wrote Popfile, a Bayesian spam filter).
My early impressions of HN were "Oh wow, a place where developers talk about topics like AdWords? This is relevant to my interests."
I've wanted to share this story for a while and now is as good a place as any. I found Hacker News from you via the Motley Fool. You wrote a long post on the Fool and mentioned it was copied from another internet forum. I picked a particular unusual-looking phrase in it, searched, and found it which turned out to be on HN. I stalked through your HN comment history and then I was hooked.
HN clued me in on how technologically backwards my then-employer was, and led to Stack Overflow Careers from which I found my current job, so yes you've substantially affected the direction of my life.
Yup, that's the one. "Sickly cows" was the key phrase and you're still on the first page of Google results for it. Link (wow, a 6 digit HN item number): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=472985
I didn't want to give specifics for preserving your Fool anonymity if you still wanted it, but guess you have a public enough internet persona nowadays that that ship has sailed. Thanks again for helping direct me into a better level of software experience and knowledge, as inadvertent and roundabout as it was. I started stalking you on HN in hopes of more Japanese slice-of-life stories that you shared on the Fool, and wound up discovering a much greater world of software instead.
I keep a fig leaf of pseudonymity there, but it's a ridiculously thin fig leaf for anyone who knows me from HN. A few folks have figured it out over the years, but I appreciate your discretion, as back in my nobody-knew-who-I-was days I talked about some fairly personal stuff there.
My early impressions of HN were "Oh wow, a place where developers talk about topics like AdWords? This is relevant to my interests."
That was about ~2,000 days ago.