The first time when I saw HN in 2006, I was not impressed. It was a weird looking site with an insiders community and it didn’t seem interesting to me at the time because I was a big TechCrunch reader and Arrington’s daily drama was way more fun/interesting to read. A couple years later (around 2009), another engineer that I met shared his habit of compulsively checking HN everyday and I was shocked to hear that the site still existed and that people were actually using it. Soon after I started checking it more and more to figure out what he was talking about… and eventually developed the same habit!