Hey, me too.<p>I've started reading HN around 2012, when I was more of a game designer than developer. Throughout the years, I've changed into developer stack, grew professionally, changed game dev for fullstack web development, grew to love functional programming and embraced a lot of things doing "the HN" way. I even switched from regional companies to working for american companies remotely — thanks to "Who's hiring threads"! And when I'm talking to my american colleagues now, we share a lot of the same culture — SICP, "considered harmful", "just a monoid of endofunctors", all of which I learned here. Now I'm working on my O1 visa application, and once again, I wouldn't be here if not for HN.<p>And for the point of comparison, there's been this other social app, which I won't name, that requires a tech company email to access. For a long time, while I didn't work for a recognised american company, I thought of it as an exclusive closed club and assumed that there should be much better content there. But once I finally got access to it, it turned out to be a complete anon cesspool of bragging about TC, cheating on interviews and other things from people who came to tech just for the money, without any glimpse of love for the craft.<p>After using that other app for a couple of weeks, I've deleted it never to log on again and now even more surprised to see how great a community HN turned out to be.