Ask HN: Non-developers: What brings you to HN?
If you're not a developer, what brings you back to HN? Why do you read this? What value do you find? How did you find HN in the first place?
Please identify what you do as well, thanks!
Please identify what you do as well, thanks!
Otherwise, I think the community here is great, and I really enjoy reading the comments and analysis of my fellow readers!
Out of curiosity, do you feel that the ministry is actually making informed decisions or just acting as an executive branch while the decision makers are elsewhere?
The only thing I might criticise about the folks here is some openes for a broader sense of humor :P and folks thinking tech can solve any problem and is the holy grail (this might be especially true for tech in their department).
In general the comments are worth a lot though. So much easier to weed out obvious bogus articles and great for finding further thoughts on things.
I hope that someday these kids will become self learners and help other kids do the same. Even learning how to send an SOS signal from a phone can be a lifesaver for these kids.
That day is still far off but it is possible.And believe me,Kids are super smart and I am sure that my students will change their lives on their own. All i can do is give them that offbeat motivation.
And the crowd here is very good,Thanks.
There is nothing more satisfying than to see the spark of interest and wonder reignite in a child.
Keep up your good job people, I hope to pickup coding from where i left. I remember the good old days of basic and logo,They were fun to start programming with.
Today, I continue to browse HN on a daily basis because I derive value from the comments section of contentious articles. I am pretty weak at Debates, and I think reading up on stances from well informed parties, without picking sides is useful
I love HN for its general disdain for trolling & fluff. People are generally really respectful of each other around here too!
It's been difficult to accept that I won't be studying CS. In those darkest of times advice from HN comments kept me afloat.
I can't imagine any other place where a 19-year old computer nerd could get a personalized advice from Ian Murdoch himself, before he passed away.
HN is a great place to learn about different fields of computing, get advice, find and read quality content.
I mostly like to read the discussions and come back for the dopamine rush I get from new stories :).
Coding is not an issue for me, it comes naturally. Of course I wish I had the ability to receive formal training and I secretly envy people who are able to study and contribute to the field of CS.
However, after years of resistance, I came to realize that I also like law. Rules of society and software engineering have a lot of common. Both in Law and Programming you think of edge cases, debug thinks, try to express yourself clearly.
What's most interesting is that in Law, I also heard people using principles, which I am familiar from computers.
For example in a moot court I attended, a catchphrase was that "if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it's a duck". Or when we prepare for pleadings our coaches always instructed us to Keep It Simple. Another example is when we wrote a memorandum, we started with constructing an outline (a.k.a top-down design :D), we constantly made reviews, argued heavily about restructuring (a.k.a refactoring :) ).
I come to HN multiple times a day since I thoroughly enjoy seeing the great breakthroughs and technology mashups people make. Also running a smaller company, I am trying to utilize IT in every way including semi-automating our onboarding, client workflows, document processing, etc.
Through HN, I have learned 1) how to host a server in AWS Beijing with multiple docker containers, 2) how to run a low maintenance blog with Armin Ronacher's excellent Lektor, 3) how to create a biz process workflow with Typeform-->Zapier-->countless apps, 4) how to set up an R-studio Shiny Server and use dplyr to analyze university databases, etc. Soon, I will be semi/automating reports for clients using Rmarkdown/Latex which will save my lean org tons of time.
I am blown away by the breadth and depth of material and links. HN is my primary launchpad for all things solutions related. I know I couldn't run my business without it. And I am really grateful for the genuine efforts people on the site make to assist each other.
Vince Fulco, CFA, CAIA Managing Director 伟思胜企业管理咨询（上海）有限公司 Weisisheng Corporate Management Consulting (Shanghai) Ltd. vfulco@weisisheng.cn 淘宝店：伟思胜简历面试留学服务中心 微信订阅号： vfulco-weisisheng LinkedIn: https://cn.linkedin.com/in/vfulco
* You wouldn't mean software developer, would you? Property, product, and marketing campaign developers interested in a start-up business might not be happy with IT types monopolizing the word "development".
* Years ago when I worked in IT we were only ever called "computer programmers". People called Enterprise Business Software Development Engineers usually couldn't program.
* I've learnt more about programming doing it as a hobby since leaving paid IT work than I ever learnt when working at it. Does my non-software day job mean I'm not a "developer"?
* A doctor, administrator, or marketer learning programming as part of their job could be better placed for automating it than a software developer learning about some domain they want to automate.
Of course they mean software developer, because this is a forum for software developers. I wouldn't show up on a site for property, product, or marketing campaign developers and get angry that they were using the word in their context.
I always took HN to be a forum for people either starting up a business or into "hacking" things. Of course many software people visit here, probably because many fast-growing businesses over the last 20-30 years have been software based, and/or many products and systems that people hack have a large software component. But HN isn't specifically for software developers as far as I know, and people hacking for growth in the property business shouldn't be classed as "non-developers" on Hacker News.
I am now a lead developer and still enjoy browsing here.
Because of HN, I got to know great insights of various topics and specifically different prospective towards them.
I come here for two reasons mainly:
-My interest in anything technology related
-I respect the HN community, generally speaking. The comments are always insightful, the topics of discussion are very interesting.