[ahelwer]

Your phrase "it was like a new world was opened to me" really took me back. Before "the orange website" cynicism, before disillusionment with technology, before deciding startups were a tool to exploit engineers. I remembered finding HN in university - this weird non-web-2.0 website - and learning there was so, so much more to know outside of the narrow computer science curriculum. Things I first heard about on HN include:

* TLA+, now one of my main extracurricular technical interests

* The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, kicking off a tour of philosophy that seemed like simple intellectual exploration until I needed it most

* Conflict-free replicated datatypes. I loved their mathematical purity, noticed the CRDT Wikipedia article was a stub, decided to write it, and so got back into editing Wikipedia.

These plus countless other things I don't recall, some of which permanently joined my amalgamated pool of knowledge and influence me in ways I don't even know.