It was actually as throwaway comment [1] that Joel made in a talk I went to back in 2011 that brought me to hacker news.

It was something like "when a link starts getting multiple posts on hacker news that's when we know we've hit on something..."

I'd not heard about hacker news until that point. I was probably hanging around codeproject.com. Since then I lurk almost daily, and am always amazed by the breadth and depth of articles and commments, both tech and non tech.