Ask HN: Non-developers: What brings you to HN?
If you're not a developer, what brings you back to HN? Why do you read this? What value do you find? How did you find HN in the first place?
Please identify what you do as well, thanks! Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13668870 Thanks! That's literally the same, which is interesting! xD I work as an economist at my country's ministry of finance. Since my daily job is to write studies and reports about IT, HN is quite useful to keep in touch with what's happening. I like as well when people submit content about other topics, and I think I learned many things here unrelated to tech. Otherwise, I think the community here is great, and I really enjoy reading the comments and analysis of my fellow readers! > I work as an economist at my country's ministry of finance. Out of curiosity, do you feel that the ministry is actually making informed decisions or just acting as an executive branch while the decision makers are elsewhere? There are intelligent people here and I have a general interest in technology and society. I whished there was a filter for all articles that are not about programming. It would easily make HN my favourite news aggregator (if it isn't already, I just need to skim a lot more). The only thing I might criticise about the folks here is some openes for a broader sense of humor :P and folks thinking tech can solve any problem and is the holy grail (this might be especially true for tech in their department). In general the comments are worth a lot though. So much easier to weed out obvious bogus articles and great for finding further thoughts on things. As a data analyst, I find myself coming here for the interesting articles and comments too. I agree that a filter for non-programming articles would be hugely beneficial for those people in the community that do not program or those that are coming here to take a break from their general work schedule. You can make one of those by programming :) Jk jk, I don't even know how to do that myself. I am a very novice programmerbut mostly - 3D artist who comes here for these same reasons. Good comment threads are extremely rare these days Great! I'd just need a filter function to checkmark which tags I want to see. (preferably whitelisting, not blacklisting, so I can see something tagged with "science, programming", but not with "programming" only when I subscribe to "science".) *"a lack of a broader sense of humor" I meant to write I teach in places where there is almost zero education, heavy child trafficking.As i learn from HN, I try to teach them to kids(Remember that calculus made easy book? or those fun reads) They enjoy the true essence of learning and discovering the world from their own eyes. I hope that someday these kids will become self learners and help other kids do the same. Even learning how to send an SOS signal from a phone can be a lifesaver for these kids. That day is still far off but it is possible.And believe me,Kids are super smart and I am sure that my students will change their lives on their own. All i can do is give them that offbeat motivation. And the crowd here is very good,Thanks. you are a good person! Thank you. There is nothing more satisfying than to see the spark of interest and wonder reignite in a child. Keep up your good job people, I hope to pickup coding from where i left. I remember the good old days of basic and logo,They were fun to start programming with. :D I work in Fraud Analytics. I would call myself a failed data scientist- it was during those days (2 years ago) that I discovered HN. At first, I used HN strictly for job searching on the "Who's Hiring?" posts. Today, I continue to browse HN on a daily basis because I derive value from the comments section of contentious articles. I am pretty weak at Debates, and I think reading up on stances from well informed parties, without picking sides is useful Producer at a game development company. I love tech. I love business. I come across a lot of content I care about despite my lack of programming ability/knowledge. I love HN for its general disdain for trolling & fluff. People are generally really respectful of each other around here too! Very cool! Have you found any other online communities that share that respect and lack-of-trolling? Honestly, none that keep me coming back like HN. There are definitely some decent communities within reddit if you are willing to wade through all the garbage that Reddit throws at you by default. I'm sure you are probably aware but pretty much every specific interest you might have, probably has a r/ and generally the more specific, the less trolling and the more focused the conversation. True, Reddit has been hit-or-miss. I know they tried to make Imzy, but that didn't really take (and is now closed down). Yea.. 4 years ago Reddit was much more like HN in this regard. It is a shame how bad it has become HN includes a much more limited crowd. I would theorize Reddit is a more realistic reflection of our society (not that we want to focus on that, so I'm not saying it's any better, quite the opposite). also curious I am a law student. I always had an interest for computers. It's been difficult to accept that I won't be studying CS. In those darkest of times advice from HN comments kept me afloat. I can't imagine any other place where a 19-year old computer nerd could get a personalized advice from Ian Murdoch himself, before he passed away. HN is a great place to learn about different fields of computing, get advice, find and read quality content. I mostly like to read the discussions and come back for the dopamine rush I get from new stories :). That's really cool! Have you ever considered taking coding classes or code camps to go along with your law degree? I'm continuing to code, I never stopped. Nowadays I code for fun, experiment with different languages, contribute to OSS projects. Coding is not an issue for me, it comes naturally. Of course I wish I had the ability to receive formal training and I secretly envy people who are able to study and contribute to the field of CS. However, after years of resistance, I came to realize that I also like law. Rules of society and software engineering have a lot of common. Both in Law and Programming you think of edge cases, debug thinks, try to express yourself clearly. What's most interesting is that in Law, I also heard people using principles, which I am familiar from computers. For example in a moot court I attended, a catchphrase was that "if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it's a duck". Or when we prepare for pleadings our coaches always instructed us to Keep It Simple. Another example is when we wrote a memorandum, we started with constructing an outline (a.k.a top-down design :D), we constantly made reviews, argued heavily about restructuring (a.k.a refactoring :) ). I run a 2 year old company in Shanghai, China creating English resumes, interview coaching, enhancing LinkedIn Profiles, advising on school picks for undergrad and grad program seekers, and preparing academic application documents for US, UK, Canadian, Australian, and Japan. Prior to that I had a Wall Street type career for ~24 years which required use of R-Project and a bit of Python. I come to HN multiple times a day since I thoroughly enjoy seeing the great breakthroughs and technology mashups people make. Also running a smaller company, I am trying to utilize IT in every way including semi-automating our onboarding, client workflows, document processing, etc. Through HN, I have learned 1) how to host a server in AWS Beijing with multiple docker containers, 2) how to run a low maintenance blog with Armin Ronacher's excellent Lektor, 3) how to create a biz process workflow with Typeform-->Zapier-->countless apps, 4) how to set up an R-studio Shiny Server and use dplyr to analyze university databases, etc. Soon, I will be semi/automating reports for clients using Rmarkdown/Latex which will save my lean org tons of time. I am blown away by the breadth and depth of material and links. HN is my primary launchpad for all things solutions related. I know I couldn't run my business without it. And I am really grateful for the genuine efforts people on the site make to assist each other. Vince Fulco, CFA, CAIA
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LinkedIn: https://cn.linkedin.com/in/vfulco 第一次在 HN 看到中文哈哈哈。 > If you're not a developer * You wouldn't mean software developer, would you? Property, product, and marketing campaign developers interested in a start-up business might not be happy with IT types monopolizing the word "development". * Years ago when I worked in IT we were only ever called "computer programmers". People called Enterprise Business Software Development Engineers usually couldn't program. * I've learnt more about programming doing it as a hobby since leaving paid IT work than I ever learnt when working at it. Does my non-software day job mean I'm not a "developer"? * A doctor, administrator, or marketer learning programming as part of their job could be better placed for automating it than a software developer learning about some domain they want to automate. > You wouldn't mean software developer, would you? Of course they mean software developer, because this is a forum for software developers. I wouldn't show up on a site for property, product, or marketing campaign developers and get angry that they were using the word in their context. > this is a forum for software developers I always took HN to be a forum for people either starting up a business or into "hacking" things. Of course many software people visit here, probably because many fast-growing businesses over the last 20-30 years have been software based, and/or many products and systems that people hack have a large software component. But HN isn't specifically for software developers as far as I know, and people hacking for growth in the property business shouldn't be classed as "non-developers" on Hacker News. I'm not trying to say other types of developers are second class citizens. I'm trying to say that when you're standing in a room with 95% software developers, that's "software developer" is the default type of developer, and other developers are the ones that are going to need to clarify. You're standing in a place that is, if not 95% software developers, then 50% software developers + 50 other types of developers at 1% each. Developer is going to mean "software developer" to most people here. That's just a practical reality, not a judgement against other professions. Travel Agent. I used to be very into programming when I was younger, so I enjoy the content, but the level headed discussions make HN so much better than reddit overall. Hi, as a Travel Agent, What website you visit the most beside HN? curious to know. R&D Engineer working in composites (armor). Don't have any programming experience outside of a few college classes but found HN to be a great resource for discovering interesting websites, reads, and discussions. It's also usually quite a different perspective from non "tech" engineering colleagues I interact with. Used to be in aerospace engineering. I have an interest in computers/media and appreciated the quality of content on HN. Many of the articles and discussions fly over my head but I enjoy that. It's like living in a foreign place; you start to understand the language after a time. I am now a lead developer and still enjoy browsing here. Biology MS student here. I am interested in science and tech in general. I come here because of the content and quality of discussion. Because of HN, I got to know great insights of various topics and specifically different prospective towards them. I work in Marketing and I am studying Communication Sciences. I come here for two reasons mainly: -My interest in anything technology related -I respect the HN community, generally speaking. The comments are always insightful, the topics of discussion are very interesting. Read about development, learn from the people in the industry... but I ask myself that question many times when I get to read comments on some news :) (why the f* am I here?) Haha, I feel like this is common. There was actually an ASK HN about that a couple of days ago. Lawyer and developer. I like the fact that discussions here tend to be intelligent and I always learn something new :) I do r&d. Indirect networking and the hope to spot niche market opportunities that may go big in a not too distant future. Can you talk a little about the networking benefits of HN? Marketing guy. I come for the discussions. What kinds of discussions on here interest you?