I get a lot of value out of HN, but the biggest wins monetarily have been advice regarding consulting, often across multiple threads. Two favorites which stuck with me enough to be Googleable:
That was at my last week at the day job. As I recall, I posted from my Kindle at godawful late following hellish overtime, dinner, writing the first page of notes for AR, and checking into a hotel. I think I was still calling it Notiphone then. Notifo launched a week or so later and I scrapped the name.
I'd check the notebook but lost it in America in October.
I'm sure we're all guilty of that. X idea gets in our head. What a silly idea!. X idea sticks around. X idea still sticking around. Maybe X idea isn't so bad...
Woohoo, my post is Patrick's favorite! If you only you had written a book, I would have immediately demanded an autographed copy! :) Ah well, please stop by when you're in Seattle.
Thanks for pointing this one out. I was aware of many similar approaches, but having them expressed so succintly really drove home the point of how to use them and progress through them on a particular 'bug' or project.
In the threads-about-HN category, pg's comment from 1078 days ago that upvoting to indicate agreement and downvoting to indicate disagreement with comments has its place on HN.
I am aware that since then pg has been thinking about ways to refine the commenting system or flagging to make sure that the right incentives occur on HN to encourage worthwhile threads and comments to those. Kudos to the OP here for asking all of us to look up good examples of worthwhile content on HN.
Now the way I "bookmark" HN threads is by sharing the submitted links, with a hat-tip to HN, with my Facebook friends. Seaching the links I've recently submitted to Facebook, I see that an HN thread about science books
Instead of taking the usual 10 seconds to read each comment, it's now going to take 10 minutes (assuming you skim through the entire thread each person links to).
I'm definitely holding onto this super thread, though, as it may well become the unofficial threads of threads.
A Hacker's Guide to Tea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934051 . I stopped drinking tea because I would sometimes like the taste and sometimes not without being able to sort out why some was good and some was not. Now I understand and can reproduce consistently good cups.
Is there a way to save/bookmark HN threads under my HN profile?
I see "saved stories" under http://news.ycombinator.com/saved, but don't see a way to save anything there. The only other option is to comment on something and then have it available under "threads", but that sucks.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1225179
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191094
Comments rather than threads picked because they stuck, but the contextual threads were also good.