
Ask HN: Non-technical readers of HN, why are you here? - romanhn
HN&#x27;s primary audience is &quot;hackers&quot;, which generally extends to the engineering types. I however have gleaned a lot of insight from comments written by non-coders, particularly those without an engineering background.<p>If you&#x27;re one of those, I&#x27;d love to hear how you found out about HN and what keeps you coming back.
======
Dave_TRS
While I am not a programmer, I gravitate to Hacker News the community seems to
value smart, clear, concise, rational arguments, and sees through the BS.
Because the community is intellectually curious, it is happy to discuss any
interesting article that contains a smart new idea or perspective, which
extends far beyond programming.

 _Link Quality_ : Articles that are low quality and don't provide any new or
noteworthy information are not upvoted by HN and as a result I don't need to
take time and energy to sift through them. Almost every mainstream news site
on the internet is half full of fluff, and the FB newsfeed is even worse. HN
avoids this be having a community of smart people who care enough to vote, and
also by not being captive to advertisers

 _Comments Quality_ : Concise, rational, well backed up comments get upvoted.
If I don't have a pre-formed opinion of a particular article I can turn to the
comments to find the smart people who know what they're talking about, and
then the best rebuttals right below. If I stay on WSJ I don't see that.

 _Diversity_ : Not only does HN cover an incredibly diverse range of topics,
but also a diversity of opinion in the comments. Most news sites are siloed by
topic, and my FB feed is an echo chamber.

 _Procrastination Value_ : Something about HN makes it the ultimate place to
go when you don't want to do something else. Your brain gets a jolt from
hunting through the list and finding something new and interesting to read.
And it updates constantly at a similar pace to meet my procrastination needs.
Plus the articles are good so I feel like I actually learned something
compared with the Buzzfeed articles I might have clicked if I went to FB.

~~~
kleiba
I _am_ a technical person but probably (a good deal) older than average here
on HN, and to be honest, I cannot fully agree to the statement "[...] seems to
value smart, clear, concise, rational arguments, and sees through the BS"
(unless the emphasis is on "seems").

Don't get me wrong, my point is certainly _not_ that HN is _the opposite_ of
this description - I just don't find it very different here from other
interactions I have. If anything, I sometimes get a bit of a "full-of-myself"
vibe in some comments here, more than I'm used to.

That's just a personal opinion, though.

~~~
samleoishere
Getting your point. Maybe the "other interactions" you have are on par with
those here on HN and that begs the question, where do those interaction
happen?

~~~
kleiba
I've been working in computer science / computational linguistics departments
of various universities / research institutes for pretty much all of my
career.

------
stult
I honestly have no memory of how I first stumbled across HackerNews, though it
was sometime in 2014. At first glance, it didn't make much of an impression on
me, because of the obfuscating jargon in article titles and the dated site
design. But I saw a couple interesting articles, then came back a couple days
later and found a couple more, and slowly it became part of my morning
routine. Eventually I started reading the comments and realized that this is
what Reddit was like 8 years ago. Smart people who know what they're talking
about and are contributing frequently to lively discussions on serious topics
in science, tech, business, law, and occasionally higher brow cultural topics.
Even when someone posts something off base, you can rely on the comments to be
edifying.

Nominally, I'm a lawyer, so most of the content here is not targeted at me. I
also occasionally code small projects at my job when it isn't worth
coordinating with our IT vendor, so I'm not entirely untechnical, but that's a
skill set I developed on the side for fun and only relatively recently. I do
however work in tax law at a large accounting firm and deal with the R&D
credit a lot, which means it is helpful for me to maintain at least
superficial fluency in technical fields ranging from computer science to
automobile engineering to pharmaceutical research and everywhere in between.
Reading the material posted here helps me do that.

Just as a small example, I frequently have to interpret the information from
client documentation with pretty much no context because the clients just dump
a bunch of documents to us and don't want us wasting their SMEs' time. Usually
someone randomly picking out 100 emails from their inbox, downloading whatever
happens to be on their shared drives, mass exporting JIRA tickets, or some
similar method for pushing a bunch of undifferentiated crap at me. When we are
in exam or appeal, I have to find the documentation in those dumps that
supports the tax credit claim, which means I have to understand the technical
content as well as its legal significance.

Just browsing through comments here and seeing what real enterprise
programmers think and talk about has been extremely helpful in helping me
contextualize these often jargon-laden and obscure documents. Imagine as a
non-technical person receiving a Word document titled "Memory Heap
Fragmentation," which just contains a stack trace and some commented C++ code.
You don't even know what a stack trace is, or memory heap fragmentation, or
how to distinguish C++ comments from C++ code. Hell, you probably barely know
what memory is. Reading here immerses me in a sea of that jargon, but in an
unusually accessible and interesting way. I can read the Wikipedia entry for
memory heap and my eyes will just glaze over after three lines. But here, I'll
read a fascinating story about how someone encountered a bizarre bug stemming
from a weird quirk of a malloc() call. I still have to google some of the
topics, but the context makes them interesting enough to slog through the
reference material.

I've also become slowly more technical in my own skill set and career
trajectory as I've been browsing HN, and I owe a lot of that to what I've
learned here. I've become an internal product manager for a software tool we
are developing for our practice and I am often consulted on firm-wide software
projects, despite being relatively junior in rank (i.e. not a partner or
director). In those meetings, I can speak somewhat intelligently about whether
we want to pursue an Oracle or Azure platform for a product because of the
articles I've read here. I can comfortably poopoo a partner's obsession with
IBM's Watson because of what I've seen experts saying here. And I can do that
while understanding the legal, accounting, and business domain, which makes me
a more appealing resource than a purely technical consultant. So I guess I
should say thanks to all you brilliant HackerNews contributors for advancing
my career far beyond what my personal merit deserves!

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
This the most interesting response to date. Not because of the reason you're
here, but I can see the parallels to what I used to do in reverse.

I spent over a decade writing software for a medical device manufacturer and
was at a fairly senior position. On any given day I had to interact with
biochemists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, production floor
technicians, technical support, or customer hotline people. Most of these had
little or no interest in software, or the internal operation of a very complex
instrument. But yet I had to find a way to translate the reason for some
obscure fault or weird behavior into whatever their frame of reference was so
they could either understand it and fix it, or explain to the "customer"
(internal or external) what went wrong, why, and how to correct the problem.

Just had to say that because a lot of my support tasks seemed very similar to
your remark about receiving a technical document and having to make sense of
it to understand its applicability from a legal perspective.

~~~
stult
I think what you and I are experiencing is the core trend of software
development away from purely technical challenges toward domain-specific
adaptation of existing technology. Not that there aren't cutting edge coders
building innovative tech. There's just a massive amount of non-innovative tech
work which is now easily achievable because the infrastructure and labor pool
are up to the challenge at affordable prices. Building a website or an app
isn't usually a technical feat anymore, but rather a routine activity. It's
like construction, just nailing beams to other beams, with everything
standardized.

The bulk of the work ends up being collecting and refining requirements to
ensure that the tech serves the business needs. You don't need brilliant
coders to achieve that. You need people who are moderately competent in
understanding the tech and are extremely fluent in understanding the business
challenge. That's why domain-driven development is kind of hot right now. It
drives people from the tech end toward attaining fluency in the domain and
people from the domain toward attaining fluency in the tech. You came from the
opposite end as me, but we're driving toward the same middle, which is
someplace where people understand how to take a set of business needs and
translate them into functional code. It's nothing new, really, it's just
spreading to encompass a much larger percentage of the workforce than ever
before because tech is becoming so pervasive.

------
Disruptive_Dave
Non-coding marketing guy here. When I jumped into the "startup" world I did
all the cliche things, joining HN being one of them. I also found myself
surrounded by tech nerds and I needed to start understanding this foreign
language they spoke. I skip over the technical articles on here, which
actually makes the reading experience quite fulfilling. There's plenty here
for non-techs, including relatively healthy conversations and debates. Also, I
like to pick up tech jargon and randomly blurt words out during all-team
meetings to give everyone a reason to laugh. "JSON" is my favorite term to
use. Every now and then the devs will look over and ask me how I'd approach
some problem and I'll string together something to the tune of: "Well, I'd
first query the database to ensure we're stringing together the AngularJS
properly, then I'd hardcode the server side to strengthen our architecture.
Also, JSON."

~~~
totalrobe
A+ for effort... I wish any of our marketing folks had even heard of JSON

------
tchock23
HN helps me converse with the contract developers I work with. I use it as a
way to keep up with what is new in the development world to understand
when/how to apply it to the projects I'm working on.

Admittedly, it is hard for me to keep up with the latest frameworks/tools/etc
without the context of being a full-time developer, but I try. Some of the
"hacker-oriented" articles on HN go over my head, but that's ok. I still enjoy
learning about it.

I think it's important for non-technical founders to have a grasp of what is
out there to be able to converse intelligently with developers. HN helps fill
that gap for me (albeit imperfectly).

~~~
jerf
"Admittedly, it is hard for me to keep up with the latest frameworks/tools/etc
without the context of being a full-time developer,"

It's impossible even if you are. It's probably best to understand this as an
instance of the multi-armed bandit problem [1], and the mature full-time
developer will eventually settle into an exploitation phase.

There's a lot of nuances beyond that we could get in to, but I think that
captures the essence of the situation fairly well. Though I will mention that
mature developers also develop the skill to successfully use the experiences
of others to judge the payout probability of certain "arms" more correctly
than a new person will, which the pure multi-arm bandit problem usually does
not encompass.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-
armed_bandit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit)

~~~
rocqua
Now I wanna study a multi-armed bandit where levers get added over time,
perhaps even one where levers don't have a fixed distribution, but can have
some drift.

~~~
stimj
(grad student here who had a year of his life robbed by multi-armed bandits)
It's been tried, if you want to jump in the rabbit hole check out this paper:
[http://www.kdd.org/kdd2016/subtopic/view/online-context-
awar...](http://www.kdd.org/kdd2016/subtopic/view/online-context-aware-
recommendation-with-time-varying-multi-arm-bandit)

------
bookofjoe
I'm a board-certified anesthesiologist/research scientist
([https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrMc8AAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrMc8AAAAJ&hl=en)),
author ([https://www.amazon.com/Quantations-Joseph-Stirt-
ebook/dp/B00...](https://www.amazon.com/Quantations-Joseph-Stirt-
ebook/dp/B007IA3FXO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487349543&sr=8-1&keywords=joseph+stirt)),
and blogger (www.bookofjoe.com). I don't know how I happened on Hacker News
sometime last year, though it may have been after seeing Y Combinator or one
of its principals mentioned somewhere. Sources — and the past — are more often
than not misremembered, so I'm hesitant to go beyond that.

What keeps me coming back daily are the links to stories I would never see
anywhere else. I'm a TechnoDolt®© (I coined the word) and haven't a clue about
coding and software et al, but headlines like "Robots Rule at Swiss Factories
as Strong Franc and Wages Bite (bloomberg.com)," "What makes the perfect
office? (timharford.com)," "Your personal Facebook Live videos can legally end
up on TV (thememo.com)," "The Beauty of Nature Seen Through Creepy Webcams
(wired.com)," "German parents told to destroy Cayla dolls over hacking fears
(bbc.com)," and "Map showing the homeland of every character in Homer’s Iliad
(kottke.org)" — 6 of the 30 links currently on the front page! — get me right
where I live intellectually.

~~~
bostonpete
Serious question -- is there such a thing as an anesthesiologist who is not
"board-certified"? I shudder to think there are anesthesiologists out there
who didn't have to pass any sort of certification process...

~~~
Balgair
Yes, most are not certified because 'the board' is specific to each country
and depending on country maybe each province/state or each city/municipality.
To practice in a certain geographical area, you'd have to certified by the
board in that area. Some countries have treaties that will recognize other
boards as sufficient. In the end, it gets complicated and you only really need
to worry about it if you are in the field.

------
startupdiscuss
Do you think there are non-technical and technical people, or do you think
everyone has different levels of various skills?

What is a "non-technical" person? If you mean someone who literally doesn't
code I would submit that the majority of the articles are not about
programming.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
That sounds just like the sort of comment a technical person would make.
Nothing slips past the Turing test!

More seriously: There are a lot of people with no primary interest in science
or technology. They might be really into art, music, sports, politics,
entertainment, and probably a million other topics I can't think of that may
intersect with technology but isn't about the technology.

That's also a possible answer to the question. There is likely an intersection
with technology regardless of your interests, and some people might come here
to learn more from the technical folks. Some might even contribute back from a
nontechnical perspective.

~~~
combatentropy
An artsy music teacher once told me that music to her feels like math. That
was both an epiphany and a disappointment.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that all of the arts involve
learning a good deal of technical craft. In fact, obsessing over tools
(whether you have the best trumpet, paint brushes, videocamera, etc.) is a
special kind of bikeshedding, rampant in art forums.

------
herghost
I'd say I was "partially technical" I guess.

I work in security so have technical expertise in that space - the traditional
'hacker' \- but I don't primarily sell myself as technical in business.

I'm here because I like the technical detail, I want to stay up to date with
the technical detail, and I want to improve my skills in this area _as a
generalist_.

I quite often find that the technical discussion here ends up either over my
head or beyond my interest, but I'm more likely to find something insightful,
useful, or just straight up interesting when existing around here than when
existing in other 'lower' level forums.

What I really like is finding a 'gem' of a comment that might quite
incidentally make the penny drop on something I've sort-of understood for a
while.

And beyond that, I find the moderation and general community around here to be
the least toxic I've seen of basically any other place on the internet.

------
malthaus
I've used to program professionally when i was younger (still do as a hobby)
and use HN to keep up to date on tech topics. Been working for an investment
firm until recently and it helps tremendously to understand underlying tech
trends. HN can be skimmed quite quickly and the comments are usually
insightful (although very biased).

Also curiosity; e.g. trying to understand how people can retroactively justify
using that disgusting mess that is the Javascript syntax & ecosystem.

Graduated here from slashdot and digg back in the day as i became interested
in startups.

Additionally; where else to potentially find that mythical rockstar developer
with aligned interests as the now useless 'idea guy'. Sometimes makes me feel
like a gold-digger hanging out in a banker-bar though...

~~~
mi100hael
_> e.g. trying to understand how people can retroactively justify using that
disgusting mess that is the Javascript syntax & ecosystem._

Plenty of us engineers are here for the same reason...

~~~
OJFord
It seems most justify it by hiding the disgusting mess behind that horrible
(but 'pretty') cursive (though I think monospace) font that seems suddenly so
popular.

------
graeme
I was starting a business in 2011, and a friend sent me a link to a Hacker
News discussion on some self-employment issue I had been thinking about.

I was deeply hooked.

I now run a web business: [https://lsathacks.com](https://lsathacks.com)

Not a programmer, though I learned enough scripting to generate some of the
html on the site, and to know what sort of things I can and can't ask a
programmer to do.

Hacker news is an incredible resource for web entrepreneurship. I learned an
incredible amount about running a business here, and was able to apply it
successfully to what I was building.

There are also wonderful discussions on a variety of interesting topics here.
I scan the front page every day and am able to pick out things relevant to my
work, or that seem interesting.

Further, when I want to research a technical topic, I'll use the search
function here. I've found great discussion of SASS tools and of books.

~~~
alexpetralia
Search function? Do you mean searching through Google with a filter for this
site only?

~~~
mod
There's a search at the bottom of the page.

------
kumartanmay
I am one of those. I came across HN a year & a half back to know happenings in
tech world, esp tech startups. Now I am hooked to it for genuine news and the
discussions that happen are a goldmine of information.

------
el_don_almighty
When slashdot died, I had nowhere else to turn for a long time and wandered
aimlessly for intellectual stimulation.

Eventually, Boing Boing linked to an article here and I suddenly found the
collective hive of wisdom I needed.

HN is like having a million smart people finding cool stuff that I know I will
like.

I want a diversity of topics that are tech related, but not specifically tech
focused. I've learned more about business management, philosophy, medicine,
and human life than any other source.

And when there is a call to arms, people are willing to step up and make a
difference. The comments aren't trollish.

I love this place.

Don't screw it up

~~~
Main_
Same here, after the Slashdot and Digg debacle, I joined HN.

A lot of very smart people here. I always get excited to read the first
comment and its always something insightful.

------
turc1656
Don't remember how found out about HN. But there are a number of reasons why I
am here every day:

1) I may not be a Silicon Valley technocrat, but I do have a strong
understanding of core computer science and programming. Part of why I'm here
is to further that knowledge for use in both my personal and professional
projects.

2) Links cover much more than just geeky technobabble. I enjoy reading a
variety of topics from statistical discoveries from big data analysis to
political thought pieces to websites designed purely for fun to links about
new services. The range of topics is fairly robust and it excludes the stuff I
don't care about (sports, celebrity gossip, etc.)

3) I care deeply about personal security and there are solid discussions here
semi-regularly about that.

4) Opposing viewpoints. Many politically related comments here are on the
liberal/democratic side of the fence. I'm more of a socially libertarian but
fiscally conservative person. I like coming here to expose myself to different
opinions and, more importantly, the thought processes behind them. I
consistently evaluate those ideas to see if they have merit and whether or not
they fit into my value system. In is my belief that if there is a well-
reasoned argument that contradicts my own, this is one of the places I will
find it. I also post my own thoughts here to see how they land with the crowd.
More often than not, they resonate. If not, they at least don't get downvoted
or piss anyone off. This tells me that when you are talking about intelligent,
reasonable, normal people there is more common ground between the various ends
of the political spectrum than I had imagined. Finding this common ground and
gauging the reactions to politically related material is one of the most
important functions of HN for me. It helps me grasp what's going on in other
people's minds who aren't just blindly supporting a political party.

5) Comment quality is far above nearly all other sites. This is, almost
without exception, the only place on the entire internet I post anything
public. I don't use social media and almost never comment on any other forum
or public article online.

6) The simplistic design. It's fast, straightforward, and bullshit free. No
ads or third-party scripts.

~~~
dang
> _No ads_

HN does have job ads for YC startups (described at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)).
The one on the front page now is
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13670103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13670103).
You can tell it's a job ad because it has no vote arrow and no username. This
"reserved slot on the front page for a YC-related ad" approach has been HN's
way of giving something back to YC for years. I seem to recall a post by pg
announcing it in the early days.

We're diversifying that front-page slot to sometimes show startup launches
instead of job ads. Those stories begin with "Launch HN". We figured that
would be better both for the YC startups (since just-launched ones aren't
ready for job ads yet) and to the HN community (since launch posts are
probably more interesting than job ads).

~~~
Tiksi
Does self promotion count as advertising? If it's YC promoting YC-backed
startups, I wouldn't really consider it advertising as that requires a third
party, at least in my opinion.

~~~
dang
Strangely enough I don't think I've ever thought of that distinction before.

------
Taylor_OD
I found hackernews when I was a technical recruiter and realized browsing
articles here would allow me to be more credible with clients and developers.
Now I run the career management / job training department at a coding bootcamp
and hackernews feels like the only quality source of discussion about
technical news. I also share a lot of articles from here, using buffer, to my
linkedin and twitter page.

------
monsieurgaufre
Tl;DR To learn.

I'm someone with a social studies background but I've always been interested
in technology and also its ramifications in society.

Also, comments on here are often more interesting than the article itself and
go more in depth. I like to learn by myself so this helps a lot to understand
the bigger picture on the technical side of things.

~~~
mvp
Yeah I click the comments first and then the actual link most of the time.

------
lutusp
Although I'm a programmer, I visit HN regularly because (frankly) the mean IQ
here is higher than for most social media sites.

I posted to Reddit for many years
([https://www.reddit.com/user/lutusp/?sort=top](https://www.reddit.com/user/lutusp/?sort=top))
but IMHO Reddit is in the midst of a major meltdown with respect to content
quality -- in my view it has attracted too many users of doubtful intellectual
abilities.

I find that HN has consistent high quality content, conveniently accessible,
with an easy-to-use interface.

> HN's primary audience is "hackers", which generally extends to the
> engineering types.

I think that was once true, but a quick read of a given day's front page posts
suggests a much wider audience, both among those who post articles and those
who read.

~~~
bbcbasic
I find some of the programming subreddits such as Elm, Purescript and Haskell
to be intelligent. It ain't all bad on /r

------
burmer
IANAE. I enjoy playing around around with databases and web design as a hobby,
so I like the coverage there. I also like interesting articles about
scientific discoveries, controversies, etc. Also, the commentariat on the
whole is fairly civilized and actually enlightening sometimes. That's a rarity
online, in my experience. Bonus points when people who created the
project/product (sometimes a long time ago!) show up in the threads.

------
nickpsecurity
Well, the word "hacker" in this context really means "thinker." I mentally
substitute it as "Thinker News" when I reflect on what the site is about as
that better describes a site full of IT and non-IT people delivering deep
insights. Like you, I've learned from the many non-technical or just non-IT
people that are here. I say "or" because there's many technical fields other
than computers. I'm also curious how they discovered the site as it might hint
at how to get more of them on here. I've met many people in other fields who
would make good commmenters but not sure what entices such people to
discussion forums like this.

~~~
cr0sh
I'd say it goes beyond "thinker" \- more like "thinker/maker/doer" \- anyone
can have an idea, but not many take it to the next step and execute on it
(which ultimately leads to YC thing of startup investment/funding, if the idea
has merit and was executed well).

~~~
nickpsecurity
That distinction of execution tied into the startup concepts is a good point.
The site is for thinkers but owner values execution over good ideas. The work
Maker in its modern connotations is closer to something embodying all that.
Wonder what other single words embody a group mixed with people constantly
thinking up or doing interesting things.

------
duiker101
I definitely have an engineering background but I think I can understand
people that come here without one. In the end HN is really a place to talk
about also a lot about many other topics.

I mean, just glancing at the front page now:

\- What makes the perfect office?

\- Your personal Facebook Live videos can legally end up on TV

\- Let’s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it

\- Airbnb Acquires Luxury Retreats, Beating Out Expedia, Accor

\- Humans evolved to tolerate smoke poisoning

~~~
oblio
Your list could be summarized in a tabloid article title:

"Who would have thought that even technical people are still people?"

:p

------
aakriti1215
I'm also one of these people - I recently landed a job which required me to
learn how to code. I work with the tech department at the startup, and so
everyone around me reads HN. I've found that it's valuable for discussion (the
articles and stories are often talked about over lunch or in meetings). Plus,
I've been looking for a source for interesting news that I care about. While I
don't read most of the techie articles about how to do stuff or the newest
updates to software, I read all of the other stuff that pops up. I enjoy the
community, asking and answering questions and I've found myself hooked on.

------
itsautomatisch
I am self-learning programming and find HN to be a good resource, even if a
lot of it is over my head. There's also discussion here that doesn't exist on
other websites about things I like, such as the BSDs and Lisps. It's also a
good place to skim tech news because if it matters it's generally on the top
page with a lot of comments.

------
kradeelav
For me, HN started off as an alternate news source to reddit; there's more
signal to noise with every article on the front page. Even if it wasn't
newsworthy per se, you could (and still can) count on a vast majority as free
and surprisingly in-depth knowledge. An example - once their was an article on
MIT's free online course; a specific lesson on Chinese Architecture was a
godsend when I had been trying to expand my footprint in architecture theory.

I'm an illustrator / comic artist / graphic designer triad, if it counts. :)

~~~
curuinor
Quite hilarious, since Reddit was one of YC's first investments

~~~
dang
One of HN's origin stories is that pg finally got around to writing it when
Steve and Alexis stopped accepting his feature requests.

~~~
mvp
Oh that's interesting. I remember being hooked to reddit when it launched. And
then after a while it started slipping and was happy to find HN (quite
possibly through reddit or maybe pg essays) which was a bit like the original
reddit, but much better.

~~~
dang
Precisely, and that was no accident, since the idea for both sites came from
pg. Of course he knew it was in Reddit's interest to grow, but when it lost
the property of being interesting for him personally to read, he created HN, a
much smaller sibling, and kept it that way by design.

------
cylinder
I wouldn't say I'm non-technical. I spent most of my childhood on computers in
the 90s-early 200s. Jumped on AOL very early on, got into Warez, progs, all
that fun stuff, then into early web development (MS Frontpage!), built a blog
from scratch using ASP + text files (back when we called them eZines) in 2000,
got into IRC, running piracy groups and scripting some pretty cool stuff in
mIRC scripts, and then later on tinkering with building stuff in PHP and such.
Unfortunately, IT and sofware were not considered good career paths around
2002-2003, at least to my immigrant parents, and I was steered the wrong way
as far as picking a major. I'm still figuring out my career path, sadly, but I
don't think I would have been a very good software engineer anyways.
Nonetheless, I have a close affinity still to tech, software, startups and
such so I've been coming here for a while. Actually, I feel nostalgic for the
older days of the internet, when it was a lot less crowded, it was easier to
get attention for something new, and there were less charlatans and hucksters
trying to get funding for startups. Too much money flowed into the internet,
and I don't think it's the "frontier" it used to be anymore. Not that you
asked, but I think the full migration of "the press" onto the web has not
necessarily been to the web's benefit either (take a look at Google results
these days for anything that's not a product and you'll just find the same few
online newspapers and blogs dominating).

------
shostack
I'm a digital marketing guy who is probably nerdier than most engineers I know
(for example, I can claim to have spent a portion of my youth playing D&D with
the Gygax family in Lake Geneva, WI every weekend).

As I've developed in my career, I've gotten more and more technical. I used to
actually do some basic web design back when I was younger and things were
super simple, but since then have gone on to refresh my HTML/CSS/JS skills and
go from there. I wanted to learn how to make an actual web app with a
database, so I started learning RoR, then backtracked and learned more
foundational Ruby before continuing.

I love reading the technical articles here because it has done wonders to
teach me new concepts, point me towards new resources and in general grow that
part of my brain.

HN is also great because I'm pretty deep on the ad tech and analytics side of
things, and I love talking shop with people who have similar experience when
those articles come up. It is also good to continually immerse myself in
opposing viewpoints. I'm not in favor of all advertising by any means, but
there can be some pretty solid dialogue around that here beyond the typical
"all advertising is bad" mantra you come to expect from many technical people.

The signal-to-noise ratio is also relatively high compared to some other
forums I'm on, and I've actually had some great business contacts come from
simply commenting on posts here.

~~~
dang
> _for example, I can claim to have spent a portion of my youth playing D &D
> with the Gygax family in Lake Geneva, WI every weekend_

Now that is a classic example of what we mean by whimsical tangent—the very
best kind of tangent. Please tell us about that sometime!

~~~
shostack
Oh man...so many stories to tell about that Dang!

I ended up at the Game Guild (game store in Lake Geneva) by chance on a school
trip for a small group of people who had various social issues (I was in it
because I had bad social anxiety in HS). Saw people playing D&D in the back
room and as I started talking to them realized it was several of Gary's
children and grandchildren and friends. So I would make the hour-long drive
from the Chicago suburbs every weekend to play with them for a few years. It
actually ended up being one of the biggest drivers for me getting past my
social anxiety such that you'd never know I used to have it if you met me now.
I ended up founding my own D&D group back home as a result and later in
college. Both led to meeting lifelong friends and becoming confident in social
situations, speaking, organization, etc. since I was DM most of the time.

A couple of my favorite stories...

\- Bringing my best friend and watching him start arguing with Gary (without
knowing who he was) about how Dwarven women don't have beards. Kicked him
under the table and whispered "he made the f-ing game, if he says they have
beards, they have beards!"

\- Joking with some people about the various named spells like the spell lines
for Bigby, Tenser and Mordenkainen and being confused why some of them seemed
to be talking as if the spells were theirs. Turns out I'd been playing with
the people who originally created and played Bigby, Tenser and Mordenkainen,
so yes, they were their spells.

\- Having Gary teach me a harsh lesson in physics and volume calculations when
I cast a high-level fireball in a smallish space and incinerated half the
party. He was not the most forgiving when it came to interpreting the rules.

\- Being listed as an official playtester in the Lost City of Gaxmoor book.

Unfortunately, the Gygax family had a somewhat tragic history with businesses,
and beyond what went down originally with TSR, the Game Guild itself (which
his son Luke bought out at one point) seems to have fallen on hard times and
is no more.

On a side note, I work at SmugMug right around the corner from you guys (we're
near Evelyn and Pioneer right off the 85 exit), so if there's any interest in
a HN D&D group, I might be convinced to dust off my dice bag!

------
creaghpatr
I've yet to find higher quality discussions covering a broad range of topics
on the internet.

Also the uncluttered U/I...no distractions.

------
idlewords
Computer came like this; can't find close button

------
germinalphrase
I'm a k12 educator. I come to HN primarily because of the quality and depth of
discussions. I also enjoy considering the intersection of technological
progress and our built world. Even if I don't dig into the technical details
as most commenters here would, I believe participating adds a level of depth
to my knowledge that I wouldn't gain otherwise.

------
alexandersingh
I always click through to the HN comments about an article before clicking
through to the article itself in the knowledge that I'll get a rigorous, open-
minded perspective on the topic.

Many times the criticism and debate I've read here has been better than the
original source material itself.

~~~
marak830
This. I am only an amateur programmer, bit i often prefer the discourse over
the article, to the article itself.

Now I routinely check the comments first.

------
rf1331
I'm a big fan of HN's moderation - stopping flamewars, rules against clickbait
titles, ect

------
multjoy
Because somewhere along the line, rather than going to the US and becoming
some sort of dotcom millionaire back in the late nineties, I didn't.

Now I live vicariously through this site, dreaming of a nice office job with
my own desk and a chair that isn't knackered...

------
Havoc
Clever people. High quality content. Good signal-to-noise ratio (cringe). And
another cringey phrase - thought leaders. I find that the thinking here is
ahead of the curve in general not just tech.

Also, while I'm in finance I understand a lot of of the tech chatter. I've got
some rudimentary coding ability. (I can code a functional genetic algo from
scratch - it'll just take me 20x longer than one of you guys and be a very
nasty solution).

Crucially that level of understanding is sufficient to scan the thread titles
and work out which ones I care about. "upcoming LLVM 4.0 release" \- it's
something *nix related. Don't know what but I'm certain it's not for me. Next
topic.

------
diegoperini
I am technical so some amount of bias may be involved here.

Comments in HN have depth that no other similar site reached. They are harsh
but not too brutal, lengthy but not too much, detailed but not overkill,
sometimes false but not in a way that can cause harm if taken too seriously.
Authors are from all around the world but still there is a common language
based on English (this sentence is nonsense if you don't get it but that's
okay, i didn't harm you I hope). No edge is too sharp to hurt here. Aside from
that, it really has a masturbatory side, almost like porn. Porn can be fun
sometimes.

------
tingbadimalo
I'm an MBA student at the University of Michigan. I have a background in
Engineering and software so I can appreciate the discussion topics that HN
gravitates towards.

To me HN is a great source of 'frontier information' AND associated
perspectives that are generally fair but probably biased towards techno-
optimism (not necessarily a bad thing).

The comment quality is a huge plus point compared to other communities. I
think i could probably get the same news from a variety of sources but the
opinions and time taken to create quality comments is staggering and keeps me
coming back almost daily as a lurker.

------
Torn
I'd say I'm pretty technical (I do frontend / full-stack work in my dayjob),
but as startupdiscuss said below, it's a spectrum. There are plenty of people
that are better coders than me, that work lower-level in the stack or are more
mathematically inclined.

The tech articles aren't the only reason I come back - there are a lot of
useful insights here around startups, business practices and culture, as well
as war stories from entrepreneurs. The more places I work the more I observe
that engineering skills are great, but not the main hurdle for product or
company success.

------
gist
I found this place when Fred Wilson mentioned HN on his blog many many years
ago.

I come back partly because of the intermittent reinforcement of my comments
being upvoted and trying to predict when they will be downvoted. Also
obviously goes without saying that I learn things that I never knew and get
turned onto companies that I never heard about. [1] And being exposed to to
other points of view.

[1] For example when seeing the OP who posted this romanhn I wondered who he
was, saw he worked at pagerduty and checked out that site. I had heard of it
but didn't really remember what they did.

------
totalrobe
I'm a product manager working on enterprise software, but do not do code
professionally (I do hobby projects). I keep up with new tech, frameworks and
tools partly so when I get push back from development such as "we can't do
that with our framework", I can point to an article or video or technology
that might get them thinking outside the box.

Also, sometimes I wish had gone into a more technical role initially but now
feel like I can't switch into an equivalent dev oriented role but at least I
can still play around on the side.

~~~
mvp
How do they take it? Do they accept it or show resistance?

~~~
totalrobe
Usually a compromise due to a strong history of reinventing the wheel,
although recently new technical management has been increasingly open to
outside tools and technologies.

------
pforpineapple
To become one.

Since I started reading HN a couple years ago (yes, reading. I don't feel
confident enough to comment) I learned so many things. Now I use code almost
everyday in my day job as a UX designer. I work in tech, so it only makes
sense I understand as much of it as possible.

Also, it's a hobby of mine to build things. Since I joined HN it's been quite
a journey : got myself a RPi and played around with it, build a couple dynamic
websites on my own server, taught myself Ruby on Rails (that's what the
hackers use at my startup) and so on.

thanks guys !

------
shirleman
I work as a technical recruiter and have done tech related work since college
(covering tech stocks, VC, working at a big data startup in ~6 different
roles, and now). I think HN provides good and interesting articles about tech
and the world beyond. I don't really ever muck about in the comments because I
don't know enough to really make a contribution but I try to check it a few
times a day, see if there is anything really stimulating.

------
throwcomment
Because is the site for dreaming about becoming a programming and has
interesting posts about biology, astrophysics , aircraft and spacecraft , and
whatever you want, games , nutrition... Also, some people with knowledge
writes comments on the topics often. I like the zoology posts most, But im not
technical in anything near all those fields, just like to read. Its a terrible
site for your your productivity, better stay away.

------
losteverything
Comments

Ease of selecting and reading "stuff" (and not reading)

Subject matter. I have a degree in math and CPS back in the Herman Hollerith
days and enjoy the subject matter.

------
eecastro
I'm a high school teacher in San Francisco, and I have an obligation to
prepare my students for the world they will live and work in. To do that, I
need to stay aware of what that will look like and what skills they'll need.
HN is just one of the ways I can keep abreast of what's going on outside my
own discipline.

------
8jef
Hey. I'm not a coder, unless HTML, some CSS and a bit of PHP count for
something. I'm here for all the extra stuff not related to code, unless the
code stuff has some philosophical flair attached to it. I have no plan to get
into the startup world, while I'm contemplating a few side project kind of
ideas that I might never get into for lack of [put any reason here]. The
hacking crowd has been an interest of me since I started to learn about SEO,
roughly 15 years ago. One led me to the other. Besides HN, I read local medias
from my country, as well as international news in English and French.

The big thing for me in HN world is the scientific bias of almost anything
discussed here, coming from almost every science fields. I couldn't find that
anywhere else, yet. And that, I understand.

------
sigmaprimus
I don't consider myself a non technical reader, just under educated reader but
I would like to respond anyways. I found this site the same way most of my
friends have, one of my friends (real friends not Fb friends) sent me a link
regarding some cutting edge technology (I believe it was about biohacking)
that we previously had a conversation about. There are a few reasons I keep
coming back, I like the YC idea of supporting startups, the same reason I
watch TV shows like the shark tank, dragons den etc., I like the fact I can
sort the news by newest submissions and last and probably most importantly,
with all the fake news and rumors, click bait and the like I value the
moderated comments section just as you suggested in your question.

------
mvp
I alternate being a hacker and non-hacker.

When I'm in the hacker mode I read almost everything here. Then I go into non-
hacker mode maybe for a few months or years when I come here to read non-
programming related articles and discussions.

Whatever it is I just hang on to HN.

------
yeahnoyeah
I'd agree with previous commenters that there isn't really a technical / non-
technical split - it's more of a continuum. I'm definitely on the technical
side of that continuum with respect to the general population, but relative to
a lot of people who browse this site I'm probably on the low end.

I started reading more HN while searching for a replacement for/supplement to
Reddit (feel like average quality there has declined a good bit in recent
years). I think the articles posted on HN are generally pretty interesting and
informative, and in a lot of cases the comments and discussion here seems to
be better in comparison to Reddit.

------
6stringmerc
As a Content Creator and active US Citizen, what happens in the Tech fields is
of paramount concern both to my Artistic and Ethical sensibilities.

I'm here to learn new things, see multiple angles on various subjects, and
take a pulse on how a cohort like HN thinks or behaves. Then I contrast my
findings with a decidedly Non-Technical site like The AV Club, among other
places, to get more data points / opinions to consider.

Lastly it's been my way to keep pushing myself to continue to re-learn
Software Development. Resources and examples help. There's no replacement for
actually practicing though, so time here is, again, also subject to
categorization as idleness.

------
jelliclesfarm
Wow! That's a pretty interesting..i actually never thought of it like
that...that 'hacking' only extends to engineering type..examples: farming is
hacking ecology..yoga is hacking breath..procreation is hacking mortality etc.
to me..a hacker studies a secure well established and seemingly stable system
for loop holes, enters it, breaks it down, creates chaos and redesigns it. As
I understand it now..it is not necessarily about problem solving in technical
parlance. But being a non technical person, I see 'hacking' as a diff way to
solve problems as I understand it from a colloquial point of reference.

------
shubhamjain
An interesting thing I noted recently: Lots of people around me read HN, but
with a varying degree of depth. Some programmers skim over the coding
articles, some take interest in SaaS / marketing articles, and some only read
science-related articles. And of course, everyone enjoys reading comments.

Although, discussion here can get awful technical but HN can cater to
everyone's interest. Everything from 'why lawyering is an unsound career
option' to 'why pugs are anatomical disasters' gets discussed. One of the many
things I enjoy here is digging up old threads about obscure topics and I
rarely get disappointed.

~~~
godelski
Honestly it is the technicality of the comment section that keeps me. If I go
somewhere like Reddit there isn't enough coherence between the subreddits and
you deal with a wide range of expertise and skill level. There is also a lot
of trolling. HN can serve as an echo chamber a little because it is more tech
based but the skill level is above average and being aware of the echo chamber
seems to be enough. So I'm often surprised at how many things I learn from the
comments and the accuracy.

As a counter example I've commented on other sites about basic topics that I
work with and was significantly downvoted because someone that played KSP
thought they knew more than someone who works in the industry that provided
sources. That kind of thing doesn't seem to happen nearly as often here and I
love how people frequently provide sources. As a scientist this makes HN a far
superior community.

------
nhalls
I'm a marketer for a software company looking to stay up-date, while I don't
read ever technical article (or even know what they refer to at times) I enjoy
the curation and quality of what is offered.

------
pattisapu
The commenters here are extremely intelligent--and often witty and
unpretentious as well--which is an unusual combination. Who wouldn't want to
hang out with such people as much as possible? :-)

~~~
pc86
> _The commenters here are extremely intelligent--and often witty_

That is largely what keeps me coming back as well

> _and unpretentious as well_

We must be on different websites

~~~
mvp
There's such a variety in comments that both of you could be right. And I
think we unconsciously quickly skim to read the kind of comments we enjoy
reading.

------
scndthe2nd
There always seems to be something cool going on here. Whenever I see that
orange banner pop up on my newsblur, I know it's going to be something atleast
'huh' levels of interesting.

------
jgamman
wow, just jumped into google mail and found a personal reply from Alexis to an
email i sent in 2006 about (now called?) downvoting ring behaviour. @#$@#$ i'm
so old now. came to HN after being early user of Reddit. not a programmer, ex-
scientist and to echo some of the other comments, I mentally delete 90% of the
programming articles (i prefer mathematica although that is not a popular
choice here) but even at 10% or less, i always find something of interest. i
guess i'm a classic hacker definition kinda guy.

------
southpawflo
bartender here. studied biology in college, no formal CS/EE whatsoever.
stumbled on paul graham's essays and that led me here. started reading
slashdot back in 2003 and kinda gave up on it 3 or 4 years ago, to me HN is
like slashdot 2.0 which is why I love it.

I'm not sure if I would consider myself a hacker, however I love seeing how
things work and I do know just enough to be dangerous wrt all manner of topics
that show up here

------
vogt
I'm a UI designer and I hang out here to learn how programmers think so that I
can improve my craft and relationships with developers in my work life.

------
nailer
I started on Startup news (which is what we used to call Hacker News before it
had a name) 9.55 years ago.

I was a Unix person who was good at 'scripting' type stuff but didn't know
anything about making apps with a UI (in fact it kind scared me).

A few years in I swapped being a Unix guy who knew Python to being a Python
guy who knew Unix. Then I became a node.js person. Now I'm a founder at
CertSimple.

------
sigmaprimus
I just tried to look up what brought me here but unfortunately my history
doesn't go back that far, wouldn't it be nice if HN had a section in the
account management section so we could see the articles we have viewed?
Granted this would not help in answering this question as most people don't
sign up on their first visit but I would still be a nice feature.

------
magic_beans
I don't know if I quite count as "non-technical", but I'm definitely not an
"engineering type". I'm a self-taught web developer and work primarily with
JavaScript. The only algorithm I know is sorting. I am not a "hacker".

I'm here to learn what I don't know about "engineering" so I can be better at
my job!

~~~
johnfn
You use JavaScript! You're a hacker. :)

~~~
pards
... and not an engineering-type? :-)

------
DrNuke
There are two kinds of tech converging here actually, so HN communities should
be three imho: software eng as a field (marginally interesting to me),
software eng for other industries (what drives me here), non technicals (hit
and miss to me). The glue keeping these together, however, is mostly the
YCombinator / SV cash-promise attraction imho.

------
weston
Good question: I'm fascinated by startups and I came across HN and I've been
reading this site since around 2010. I now work for Streak (YC S11) in support
and I'm learning web dev on the side.

Also, even if a reader of HN isn't a hacker, there are tons of interesting
articles about technology and other topics that are interesting as well.

------
non_sequitur
i'm a tech lawyer and find intelligent discourse about tech/business/random
related things interesting. it's also very helpful to get a 'how techie types
view the world' perspective. i lurk and never comment b/c as you said, the
audience is primarily for hackers and non-coder comments dont seem as welcome

------
jseliger
Intellectual interest.

------
nocoder
I heard about Hacker news on the Introduction to Recommender systems class on
coursera where they talk about HN algo for ranking articles. I have a job as
marketing guy but I am very interested in technology and analytics, trying to
even learn programming so this is a great place

------
johncla99
I'm halfway there...not an engineer and my academic background is social
sciences; but with a technical background occupationally. I'm here because it
is an exceptionally diverse news source for all kinds of topics, technical and
non-technical both.

------
4ad
> HN's primary audience is "hackers"

Who told you that?? HN's primary audience is startup people, it was even
called _startup_ news in the beginning. It certainly has nothing to do with
hackers (for any definition of hacker).

HN exists to support YC, that's all.

~~~
johnfn
> It certainly has nothing to do with hackers

This seems a rather extreme assertion about a website named _Hacker_ News.

~~~
ddebernardy
[http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

^ Per the parent you're replying to, it used to be called Startup News.

~~~
johnfn
Right, and it's called hacker news now, so I don't understand how that is
relevant?

------
pyed
I'm a self-taught programmer, I do programming only for fun and open source
projects.

------
matco11
To become more technical. Even when you don't have a technical role
(especially if you are in a tech biology company) it is valuable to be able
speak the same language

And I find the more you are in a leadership role, the more it becomes
important.

------
nicky0
Maybe it's the posts about business, science, philosphy, economics and so on.

------
robbiemitchell
I don't write code for a living (beyond basic HTML/CSS/JS), but I work at tech
startups and talk primarily with technical staff. My current startup is
founded by some machine learning vets.

Intellectual curiosity, mainly.

------
Broken_Hippo
I stumbled here somehow, then for some reason made a new account when I moved
overseas. I stay because there is interesting stuff here.

I'm not very technical and do artwork, but seriously am interested in general
tech trends.

------
free2rhyme214
I'm working on building my third company and although I'm not an engineer, I
love all things tech. I come back here every week so I can stay up to date on
the engineering community.

------
kome
I am a bit geeky as well, so I enjoy the general discussions. HN is also an
interesting place discover new interesting technologies.

Then I sort of like to cringe at the whole "start-up" culture. :)

------
wears_sweaters1
I 'was' a technical person, so id gravitated here to learn. Ive since left
that role but I still enjoy the higher level of commentary here. One can only
Reddit so much.

------
cm2012
I am an online marketing person. Plenty of growth related stuff here +
otherwise intellectually interesting stuff. Only non applicable things is
threads on python vs ruby, etc.

~~~
algebraicgeo
Also, huge articles (+ flame wars) on Python 2.x vs Python 3.x I never read
those :)

------
algebraicgeo
I trawl HN like sites for links to info of fundamental importance in
algorithms, math and whatever. What I am not looking for are the new
languages, frameworks and such.

------
jasonkester
You're mistaken. HN is a community of entrepreneurs building predominantly
software businesses.

There are also lots of engineer folk here, but they arrived much later.

------
maximp
I'm an ops/business guy trying to become a technical person, and this is a
great place to learn and understand how technical people think.

------
totalrobe
Reddit front page hasn't refreshed yet

------
geoka9
I like HN, but I still feel it was a mistake to call it that ("Hacker").
That's like calling yourself an expert, maestro, champion, etc. Sounds self-
conceited and/or insecure.

And besides, it's more about figuring out how to make money than how things
work. Nothing wrong with the former, it's just the name is a misnomer.

~~~
falava
There is a book writen by Paul Graham, creator of HN: Hackers and Painters[1]

And there is one tradition to call a hacker to someone who hacks(with software
and hardware)[2], doing clever and/or ugly things, and that is not exactly to
be a programmer (and also not exactly a security breaker, the other tradition
for the hacker name[3])

I think that following the first tradition, the name of the site is well
deserved.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html)

[2] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hack](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/hack)

[3] [http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-
of...](http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of-hacker/)

~~~
enzanki_ars
See also:
[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html)

hacker: n.

[...]

6\. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for
example.

[...]

~~~
dragonwriter
Tangentially, abusing code blocks for quotes is ugly on desktop and basically
unreadable on mobile (the latter because it prevents proper reflowing based on
screen width.)

~~~
enzanki_ars
Fixed the code block. I used an 80 character line limit, but I forgot phones
have far less than that. Thank you for the reminder.

------
elzo
I just don't like porn.

------
mechanismic77
I have no idea.

------
hanzeemer
To learn

------
wannabetechba
Non-tech industry person here. I'm here because I enjoy learning. My first
science project strung standard DOS games to autorun via 5 1/4 floppy. I
charted Lemonade Stand to maximize profits (and modified) to max everything.
I've authored a very minor install manual for OpenEMR on Ubuntu Server on
Windows 7. In an attempt to gain paid work, I voluntarily revised popular MS
Access instructional manuals. (The author wondered why the editors he paid
didn't catch these errors.) Well, I also studied communications and my funding
requests have literally kept 100 people alive for seven years.

I enjoy creating presentations that others call "quality presentations. I
taught Excel for adults for one semester. The students were rude. The
administration worse.

I return to learn and seek employment to cure my unemployment. I'm an outsider
looking in. I see the American tech community gripe about H1B, training your
replacements, lack of jobs, low salaries, etc. I can see why you "techies"
have these problems. The problem is you.

Former friends who called me "resourceful" and "intelligent" are employed by
ACN, IBM, Bloomberg, and financial companies. I helped each in my own little
way. Not once has any returned the favor or, even a call.

While at my first large financial institution (none of the above), my company
computer was misbehaving. Call to first tech support said to call second. Call
to second said to call third. Third said to call the first. I have docs that
state it will take IT 20 hours to search emails. Why so long? Gmail does it in
seconds.

I've spoken with a few tech recruiters. While you techies bemoan lack of
opportunities, I bemoan lack of transparency, capability, and integrity. This
is your system.

I've interviewed for BA and tech writer positions and seen managers' less-
qualified friends receive the offer. Yes, in a few cases I have compared quals
on paper. People don't leave jobs, they leave managers. Wasn't there a joke
about "who's your manager" at Intel? This is your system. It's broken. Not
only do you refuse this person who would LOVE the opp to PDCA all day, you
treat me rudely while choosing the "more experienced" person yet you have no
idea how well he or she succeeds.

"We can't possibly reply to all candidates..." Why can't you? Is your email
broken? I receive your spam marketing every week...

I tried AutoCAD probably before most of you were born. It arrived on 12 5 1/4
floppies. No user manual. I maintained tech manuals for a dept. I've trained
trainers on how to organize data and build a business plan on one sheet of
paper - in one hour.

I checked in with the guard for a recent trainer interview. He said I was at
the wrong building and I was sent 200 yards across the campus. That guard said
I was at the wrong bldg. and sent me back to first bldg. My interviewer was
now at the desk awaiting me, now late. She reminded the guard I was scheduled.
I'm 20 min late and sweating in a suit.

The audience for my test presentation awaited me. Computers, monitors,
keyboards, etc. were strewn across the presentation area. They scheduled this
yet left these things where they intended I present in order to receive an
offer from them.

Given three days to prepare my presentation, I impressed one so well she
asked, "If you have no experience with our system, how do you know it so
well?"

Oh, while working 70+ hours/week in temperatures that once hit 126F, I sought
additional opportunity. I found it with a remote worker for IBM. He would
travel to businesses and fix their POS, networks, etc. I was lucky to assist.

The mess in tech is your mess. You have no idea how to measure ability. You
have no idea how to interview. You have no idea how to treat people decently.
You drive away decent, capable, honest, people in favor of status quo. One day
you'll get it but from what I see it won't be before you too are unemployed. I
return to learn. It's a shame you are looking out for those who want to learn
with you.

------
lexap
Is this a joke? Most articles on HN are not technical.

~~~
joslin01
Ya there was a day tho...

~~~
dang
Actually the mix has stayed fairly steady over the years. If anything the
technical posts have upticked a bit. Sometimes when this comes up I pick a
random date and look in the Internet Archive for the front page that day to
see what sort of differences leap out. Maybe I'll do that again.

Edit: ok, I randomly went to
[http://web.archive.org/web/20120823000341/http://news.ycombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120823000341/http://news.ycombinator.com/),
which makes the point clearly, maybe too clearly—it almost seems like too
strong an example the other way.

~~~
downrightmike
[http://www.waybackhn.com/](http://www.waybackhn.com/) is much easier to
browse through.

~~~
dang
Nice! I didn't know about that.

------
Helmet
I'm a "technical" reader, but I feel compelled to answer - I really wanted to
get away from Reddit. Even on more serious sub-reddits, where you would expect
some form of rational discussion, threads always devolved into puns or corny
(and predictable and bad) jokes. That sort of stuff generally doesn't make it
here, and it's all the better for it.

------
Stauche
Two of my closest friends work in Silicon Valley.

One is moderately successful. The other...well...lets just say if I mentioned
his name every single person on here will know who he is - but I don't name
drop :)

I'm not really a technical guy at all but my brain is really creative so my
friends appreciate my opinion and advice for their work. And I'm a non-
technical nerd so I love reading about tech and science!

