What's the Purpose of Hacker News to You?
swombat: I'm a compulsive arguer. I love to pit my ideas against reality. HN gives me the opportunity to argue with intelligent, thoughtful, articulate people on a large scale.To an extent, this is what I do on my blog too. But it's a lot cheaper to write a comment like this one than to write a whole blog post.As a start-up CTO, I also use HN as a "pulse feel" for the start-up/tech community. It's important to be in touch with the communities that you operate in or near, and HN largely fulfills that purpose for me.