If you're one of those, I'd love to hear how you found out about HN and what keeps you coming back.
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.
Most of the stuff I read is actually economic, not necessarily financial. For that: http://economistsview.typepad.com/ is about as good as it gets. Although I would recommend ignoring the frequent Krugman reposts. The comments are also usually dominated by 3 or 4 very opinionated posters. Also http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ for general news/interesting headlines. https://www.statnews.com/ is great for healthcare.
One thing I see every once in a while on HN is people with the belief that they can spend a week or two knocking out an algorithmic trader and start raking it in. In order to break this illusion I would recommend: http://financial-math.org/ http://www.quantresearch.info/
And in terms of investing, Bogleheads is of course incredibly popular but still the best way to get investing safely and quickly.
EDIT: I'd also like to say that the Wall Street Journal is pretty invaluable but I have a subscription. The google loophole closing may make that a more difficult source for the layman.
Also, the Wilmott quant finance forums are great: https://forum.wilmott.com
There are various finance blogs, but discussion sites tend to be a disaster - actual information is worth money and not given away for free, so most people are just "talking their book".
A very niche community though. Most prefer sticking to Bloomberg.
This is one of my favorite quotes of the year so far!
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.
Coming back to Europe, the same conversations cannot be found. Most of my peers in college dont know where Silicon Valley is located and even if they would, they are more interested in drinking booze and planning on when to do it. The only way I can remotely keep up with the headlines of what matters in the Bay Area is to read HN.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
"When you have more information about what works and what doesn’t, you shift to spending the majority of your time pulling the best lever (exploitation), but you keep exploring the other options in case your current best option isn’t the very best that exists. Here’s the thing: the exploration phase never stops."
I've been trying to settle into the exploitation phase now with Ruby, but circumstances are forcing me back into polyglot mode. It's pretty frustrating because it feels like a demotion. Alas, but that's just how the industry is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Musicians and non-musicians?
Ballerinas and non-ballerinas?
Of course there are. Yes where you draw the line is somewhat arbitrary and will vary from person to person but there is still a distinction to be made. You can be pedantic and say "Well everyone is a ballerina, they just might be a really unskilled one." But someone who is very unskilled really isn't a ballerina.
The equivalent would be "are there programmers and non-programmers"
That is a specific job. "Technical person" is not a specific job.
Not everyone who calls themselves a ballerina or a chef has a job as one.
While 'technical' more generally refers to the techniques and tooling of any trade, craft, or activity (arts included can have technical terminology, etc.) - we understand it here, or so I thought, to mean those concerned with our trade/craft/activity, y'know, computers or the internet, or whatever else non-technical family members describe us as 'doing'.
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.
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...
Plenty of us engineers are here for the same reason...
Not your main point, but it's very simple: if you're building a web app (or interactivity on a web page), you don't have a choice as it's the only thing that runs on browsers. (Or did you mean "why wouldn't people use a better language that compiles down to javascript"? To which I'd reply: it's one more layer of abstraction, and depending on the scale of your project it might not be worth adding that extra layer.)
I was deeply hooked.
I now run a web business: 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.
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
A lot of very smart people here. I always get excited to read the first comment and its always something insightful.
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.
HN does have job ads for YC startups (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). The one on the front page now is 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 HNs are hopefully more interesting than job ads).
But it's good to know they do that.
This is by far the place that contains the most commentary by folks of that persuasion that I'm aware of. Not just on the internet, but also in print, on TV, and in person. So I guess my question is, if you come here for opposing viewpoints, where do you go for agreement?
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.
I posted to Reddit for many years (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.
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
"Who would have thought that even technical people are still people?"
:p
I'm an illustrator / comic artist / graphic designer triad, if it counts. :)
There is room for a lot more internet communities. Plenty of permutations haven't been tried yet, or were tried and failed for extraneous reasons.
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.
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!
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!
Also the uncluttered U/I...no distractions.
Many times the criticism and debate I've read here has been better than the original source material itself.
Now I routinely check the comments first.
Now I live vicariously through this site, dreaming of a nice office job with my own desk and a chair that isn't knackered...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is largely what keeps me coming back as well
> and unpretentious as well
We must be on different websites
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
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.
I'm here to learn what I don't know about "engineering" so I can be better at my job!
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.
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.
This seems a rather extreme assertion about a website named Hacker News.
^ Per the parent you're replying to, it used to be called Startup News.
Please, tell me more about the true definition of a hacker and why this site would be of no interest to them.
The first of the site guidelines of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you want to understand what HN is you need to understand Paul Graham. pg is a hacker, programming language designer, startup founder/investor, and voracious polymath—so all the factors people are mentioning in this thread were there from the beginning. HN's function was to furnish pg (and anyone with similar tastes) with interesting things to read. This principle—intellectual curiosity, just like the guidelines say—has always been the main driver of HN.
HN is at its most valuable to YC simply by being as interesting as possible. That idea is counterintuitive to some, but to people like pg and the early HN community it's as obvious as water. Happily, YC is still run by people who know that the best way to optimize HN for business value is not to.
And I find the more you are in a leadership role, the more it becomes important.
Intellectual curiosity, mainly.
I'm not very technical and do artwork, but seriously am interested in general tech trends.
Then I sort of like to cringe at the whole "start-up" culture. :)
There are also lots of engineer folk here, but they arrived much later.
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.
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
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hack
[3] http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/first-recorded-usage-of...
Edit: But it's like Surgeon's Journal. No one is called a hacker only because they reads HN, right?
hacker: n.
[...]
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
[...]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...
> Hacks at the MIT are practical jokes and pranks meant to prominently demonstrate technical aptitude and cleverness
Edit: And this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
> Therefore, the hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT AI Laboratory.
> Richard Stallman explains about hackers who program:
> What they had in common was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they used be as good as they could. They also wanted to make them do neat things. They wanted to be able to do something in a more exciting way than anyone believed possible and show "Look how wonderful this is. I bet you didn't believe this could be done."
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.
Edit: ok, I randomly went to http://web.archive.org/web/20120823000341/http://news.ycombi..., which makes the point clearly, maybe too clearly—it almost seems like too strong an example the other way.
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!