So the question is, what non-traditionally tech professions are represented here on HN and how did you get hooked to Hacker News?
I got hooked on the condescending, presumptuous, all knowing commentary. I’m kidding!
I really got hooked on the many, many gems I’ve found (links & comments) about many of the various things I’m interested in: music, nutrition, leadership, psychology, even religion, etc, etc, etc. I’ve learned a lot here.
I’ve been lurking for a couple of years, but finally made an account the other day. This is my first comment!
edit: precision and apologies. I know my English is not that great and I am sorry for that. that is also why I don't comment that much. But I do read a lot.
That is literally my dream job, if only I were French…
I found HN while I worked at Google on self-driving cars from 2014-2018. At least two postings on HN have been direct material impact to me: the first about an autonomous tractor we might be experimenting with soon, and the second about water restrictions in CA that fortunately did not end up impacting us, but caused us to come up with some interesting water contingencies.
Not sure about autonomous, but just something you own, that you have full schematics and design specs for, and can repair yourself — seems like a huge market given the state of things right now.
There is definitely demand for tractors from new producers. The inability to repair a tractor during harvest is simply unacceptable. Their technicians can take weeks to get around to you, especially if you are a small shop.
Asking out of plain curiosity.
It's true that parts availability has been somewhat of a problem as of late, especially when computer chips are involved, but I am not sure it being open source really improves on that. If the OEM cannot keep up with production, your DIY/local supplier efforts are likely to suffer from the same capacity problems. It's not like you're going to setup your own silicon fab on a whim when your tractor breaks down in the middle of harvest.
Marcin et al., had also designed and built an open source earth brick maker, and trialed it in building buildings out of it. The advantage is being able to source building materials on site.
I don’t know how far the organization has gone in designing and prototyping the other devices they have on their roadmap.
I think people who aren't involved with farming can't really comprehend the amount of technology involved and the savings that technology enables (and ultimately makes it worth it even if the equipment is more difficult/expensive to repair).
As an aside, we always hear complaints about John Deere and never other manufacturers. I wonder if it's because anti-corporate populism works better when it's targeted at a well known american brand or if John Deere is truely that bad. We don't have any modern John Deeres in my area but a few Case IH and Claas, and I've never heard any complaints.
Btw my point isn't to justify the anti-consumer behavior of some manufacturers, but to provide context as to why "an open source tractor" is a completely naive idea.
That said, occasionally there's some nice cross-over content that gets me thinking, generally in the deeper soft-skills such as the contrast between the consequences of systems and process management in tech vs my industry. One particular example for me is the criticisms of perceived bureaucracy and red tape in tech (particularly in start-ups), and the idea that it is the scar tissue of former corporate mistakes. That example is interesting for me because the criticisms often levelled from the tech scene are frequently benefits in my industry - slowing down and forcing multiple checkpoints hinders iterative process, but it's really important when making a mistake results in a multi-fatality and the cost of rectification is going out and modifying thousands of assets rather than pushing a new code update.
I think there's value in general in taking off the blinkers and looking over the fence at other industries. It's a healthy way to ensure the groupthink isn't being too blinding.
I've seen where tech decisions were made on a whim in a startup and new engineers had to suffer the decaying legacy code. It depends on context and circumstances.
I try to contribute to legal threads where I can, but /some/ HN contributors' level of obtuseness towards the nuance of legal issues can be off-putting.
As can the insistence to treat every social and moral issue as newly discovered, merely because there isn't a /computer science/ paper written on it yet. (I am exaggerating for effect, and I say this with genuine affection for the CS-crowd, but I think that there's at least a thread of truth in my last sentence. It's human nature that we approach problems from our own perspective or specialism first).
Still, a fascinating place to hang out, and I have huge respect for the general level of contributions, and individual contributors, here. I hope that us non-techies patronising HN adds to the richness of the debate.
I think this is more a quality of hackers than a quality of the CS-crowd, though they often go hand-in-hand. Hackers looking into any field will treat it as if it's never been discovered before; trying to build the field again from first principles.
That's interesting, though. What are your thoughts on AI+law 10, 20 years from now? How do you lawyer colleagues feel about your specialization?
I think AI will keep us very busy over the next decade. There are a lot of individual issues of a legal nature where AI creates some non-trivial challenges (equality, privacy, intellectual property) and there’s also some more fundamental themes which challenge some of the liberal underpinnings of our legal system. There’s a lot of hyperbole around AI but at least some of the wild predictions of change will probably bear out in practice.
I think that my colleagues see the value in the advice I give; either that or they’re too polite to tell me otherwise. Clients seem happy to pay for the advice, which is a good indicator, although I now work in-house because in private practice it is a difficult area to scale. (This is more a reflection on how much of private practice has become about leveraging a lean team of junior lawyers to transactional work at bulk scale; even multi-million dollar corporate M&A or real estate deals can be very repetitive in nature. AI will eventually eat this type of work. Ref: Richard Susskind.)
There’s still a bit of scepticism that tech is a standalone discipline. I can see the argument both ways. I believe that it is helpful to have lawyers who understand all of the legal implications of e.g. AI, across multiple legal disciplines, and so can give general counsel. I practice elements of privacy, IP, contract, discrimination, regulatory law etc. etc. all as they affect tech. On the other hand, there are situations where it might be better to have deeply specialist advice with a tech overlay. Where necessary, I will partner with my colleagues. The idea is that the client gets legal advice that is correct both as a matter of law and on application to the technology they are working on.
Luckily, there are a lot of smart people here who are interested in many other things and that’s what I’m here to get exposure to.
I’m also involved with the much more preliminary work into a fission power for nuclear electric propulsion, which is a much more difficult problem.
I could speak a lot about this stuff. If anyone really wants to talk, email is in my profile.
I was a long-time lurker too but it’s much more fun when you engage in the comments! :)
Still a hobby programmer and love tech. The tech industry has a dynamism and pace that contrasts even modern mining sharply.
I'm not sure when I stumbled upon HN but I was hooked immediately. Also helps that HN is very data-light so I can load it reliably via our old satellite connection on-site.
If you mean about mining in general, any blogs or information sources for mining engineering information online tend to be exclusively commercial in nature. I wish it were otherwise but I feel it's a symptom of the amount of practitioners being relatively small compared with other professions. I have been thinking about creating a forum or Wiki lately, could be a fun project.
If you do, please drop me a note.
IIRC, I ended up here during one of my sporadic attempts to teach myself to code for fun. I stuck around for the diverse and interesting content plus the thoughtful and sane discussions. I don’t participate that much, but I always enjoy reading the comments on here.
Anyway, now I program to relax. Recently I have been working on this: https://git.sr.ht/~bjoli/goof-loop/
programming for me is like crosswords: I see a problem, I ponder on it, I solve it. The horizon is so much shorter I feel it is something that keeps me sane.
But in many ways they are the same. You learn a technique or a tool, and suddenly it makes some things that were previously impenetrable seem easy.
The difference is that the horizon for my playing is usually 6 months and upwards, whereas programming is at nost a couple of days.
Both can be frustrating, though. For bassoon I want to improve my circular breathing and stamina, which takes forever and is hard work. In programming I want to implement RRB-trees (a superset of clojures immutable vectors), but I am sadly a bit too dumb at the moment.
I'm here because I pay for my masters and academic hobbies in other fields with my tech day job.
I believe in the Renaissance model of trying to understand and succeed in many fields.
There is truth in the saying that making your hobby a profession will suck the joy out of it. I think I would go crazy with doing either philosophy or programming full time. Splitting it 50/50 regularly gives me time off of both which is great for creativity and motivation, especially if things are not going so well with one of the two. On the downside I will probably never excel at either.
Would you mind sharing how you, currently, find programming work at around 20hrs/wk?
Edit: Just googled and found TastyIgniter. https://github.com/tastyigniter/TastyIgniter Don't underestimate the value of someone who knows code AND has worked in the industry in helping clients implement tech like this. You could make a good consultant!
We’re multi location so as a store-level manager I’m not totally familiar with how we as a company procure new services or glue together what we use into something resembling a seamless experience for the guest.
I think about trying consulting but if I did so my strengths right now are setting efficient process and development+training, not so much tech. There are times where I think to myself I should bounce around working a handful of restaurants for a few years to get a better idea of the tech available and expand my food+menu development skills.
I found Reddit to be one of the most hateful communities online. Checkout the Herman Cain award sub if you want proof.
In my 20s I wasted a ton of time arguing about politics and even my own life on that site. While 9/10 times I'd find someone fun, the 1/10 was spent absorbing pure vitriol.
Ultimately no one cares about what I think or how I choose to live my life. No normal person will spend all day trying to degrade others or celebrating another's death. But that's like half of Reddit.
Occasionally I'll still find something useful, usually related to programming. But I simply don't venture into anything else.
For example, most of the specific game subs are hyper-focused on their topic with paper who genuinely want to know and talk about the scene.
Now real examples would be subs like the old thedonald, and the myriad of extremely racist subreddits that are allowed to exist unchecked.
Found HN as a uni freshman in CS. Had a 5 year mini career as a dev in tech, but wanted more fulfilling(for me) work - hence the transition.
Back then, I was an HN reader for what I would call "career development" learning, trying to keep on the bleeding edge. Now I'm here for the tech-adjacent conversations and reading the more nuanced insider discussions on breaking tech news(eg: recent FB stories). Another reason for my keeping up with HN is occasionally a post will inspire a new side-project to improve either my personal or professional life outside of tech.
I’ve mostly lurked on HN, but I know there are a number of others with the same passion here. I’d love to get to know you!
Got immediately hooked not only by selection of links but also informational (an entertainment) value of comments which quite often are more intresting than a linked article itself.
The quality of the discourse is high here, so I'll stay as long as that's the case!
My PhD was in cancer-immunology. I was looking at the interaction between the immune system and lymphoma cancer cells. It was a particularly interesting area because the cancer cell and the reactive immune response were, once upon a time, the same cell. We used several high dimensional techniques to identify cells, including single cell sequencing, which can measure the production of up to 20'000 genes per cell on several thousand cells. I also used something call mass cytometry which binds around 40 antibodies to individual cells looking at what's on their surface. It was great stuff and I'm still working on some of my data from it (analysing it is still a bit of an unsolved problem!).
I learnt Go because I realised that I was using R without understanding programming. I loved using Go, it's a great imperative language, but maybe not that suited to run-once analyses of numbers (I know writing this someone will prove me wrong!). I did a bit of mathematical modelling in Julia too, and really enjoyed that. I'm actually a big fan of R - once I got my head round using it in a functional style, it's very elegant for my work.
If you wan to do a PhD in cancer research, probably worth contacting Professors to see if they're aware of any interesting projects and talking to the people supervising them. My advice is to do something you're genuinely interested in and have an adviser that you will be able to get along with even in times of acute stress! Good luck!
You'll hear these particularly bad TTS narrations all the time if you suffer through enough Youtube Pre-roll ads.
Narration is as much about acting as having a nice voice. We've only just begun in getting the computer voice to sound mostly human, getting it to act is another thing entirely.
HN is just such a friendly place, with interesting and interested people, and a mostly honest and level-headed discourse. It's fun to be here.
Biochemist with a PhD, leading a group for bioprocess development and scale up. Been following hackernews for a few years now. Probably found it via digg or reddit, don't remember really. The things I like about NH is the minimalist UI and very high signal/noise ratio in the comments.
I have also played with the idea to switch professions for quite some time, but my programming skills include only basic python and microcontrollers. But in the end I always realise I'm very good at what I do and have a PhD in the field so it would not really make sense to switch and start over.
Which I also don't understand as it seems like more trouble than it's worth sometimes (I worked for a corporation that was in that field at one point, we were expected to make big changes almost every year when new laws got passed).
A town of 10K might have a completely separate building code and zoning categories.
We do have some tech mandates but my interest in technology is largely personal. My parents are both in tech and their very problem driven compsci dinner talk in the evening greatly influenced me throughout my younger years.
I feel that since tech grew into every corner of society its far less peculiar to have a tech interest than maybe even 15 years ago.
I want to learn coding, but haven't been able to start for quite some time now. But I have interests in tech stuff and that's why it's interesting to read HN nevertheless.
Anyways, every time I start talking about myself I feel like self pity is taking over and I hate that.
But you're definitely right, civil eng is quite broad and I have done jobs within it that I was good at and where I had fun. Bachelors thesis will be something about printing concrete.
I currently work in water resources, maintaining a Monte Carlo models of systems of dams that is used to estimate changes to flood risk and other impacts - both as a result of climate change and changing regulations. The job feels a lot more like software engineering or tech support some days, so there seems to be a lot to learn from HN.
If you are looking to learn to code while doing civil engineering, or at least water resources, Python, R, Matlab, and even VBA for Excel are all commonly used. Focus on getting really good with one of them. A lot of the software I deal with is written in a combination of Java for the UI and FORTRAN for the computational engine, so having some background in those doesn't hurt, but definitely secondary.
(As for the original Ask HN post - I started reading HN a number of years ago after some more tech-oriented friends kept sending me links to discussions here - mostly stick around for vintage Mac shenanigans and stories, and the comments on them, but also often take a look at posts with career and leadership advice.)
Always been interested in tech stuff and around ‘08 or ’09 taught myself to program properly so I could contribute to Blender since I enjoyed using it but aren’t really that good at 3D art.
Kind of wish I’d signed up for an account at slashdot at the turn of the century for some ‘hacker cred’ but looking at my account over there my first post was in ‘05. Incidentally, that’s where I’d learned of this Linux thing since windows ME was such a POS I was super happy to find a replacement…thinking back that had to have been in ’01 or so.
Also remember messing around on the interwebs in my college days in the mid-90s but didn’t do too much techie stuff, mostly just whatever your common person did on the web in those days.
Now I just read HN to get my news fix when I get an off moment here and there…
Always been a geek, used to code, love to think in terms of systems / data / interfaces... kind of missed that natural "tech" path in my career, went to a top business school out of what you'd call laziness (achieving a top business school in France is much easier than achieving a top engineering school)... so reading HN in a way is a way of fulfilling my passion for tech and my curiosity for all those geeky areas from engineering to physics to maths to whatever you'll find on HN any given day.
I have to add, carrer-wise, that being able to have an educated opinion on IT matters when you're not the IT guy in the room is actually extremely valuable, and one good excuse to keep reading!
I'm essentially in the business of thinking clearly about client problems and communicating that thinking as effectively as possible, which means that I gravitate toward communities that take pride in the same. Although this is a technically oriented forum, I find many of the discussions here to be intelligent and thought-provoking, especially when they have to do with philosophy, psychology, sociology, economics or business -- those topics that we all must be concerned with, whether we work in tech or not.
HN is a place I visit to understand some of the latest tech I should/should not use to get my job done. Also it’s an honest place that tells you clearly whether your comments/submissions are useful or not. I like that kind of feedback. Also I like this site because it allows me to gather and evaluate viewpoints I both don’t have or don’t agree with.
Ended up going to medical school. Now I'm in the process of specializing in occupational medicine.
I still wonder what might have happened. My friends always tell me I would have made it. Who knows.
Always had an interest in tech, so I'm currently in process of switching careers to programming. In the meantime, I'm continuing to work in tech support for other composers.
Don't recall how I ended up on hn though
Got sick of reddit
Tech industry articles still tend to provide insights, though I have no use from posts exclusively on programming. Both tech and non-tech posts/comments are quality - kinda obvious, but this is HN's killer feature.
I also enjoy reading about topics I can barely understand. But now in the office we are trying to use git for working together, not only our overleaf's local installing.
Tell me to lurk moar. I am considering myself the last of your brother. And even if I can't improve my tech knowledge, and, then, with the time my 80% becomes 90%... I'm very happy for this site to exists.
And I'm 45 years old.
I like HN for the fairly diverse things they get posted. I don’t read a lot of the deep techy stuff because I don’t understand any of it. But the discussions are often pretty interesting and it’s a (in my head) better use of browsing time than Reddit.
One of the funny things about tech is that only a small percentage of tech workers are doing "pure" tech, where that's all you really need to know about. The great majority of the jobs involve developing a lot of knowledge about whatever line of business you're working in, so that you can implement the business rules and workflows correctly, and fix things that address the problems your users actually care about. I've done tech in several completely different businesses, and I always enjoyed learning how they work.
I found HN in March 2020 on Telegram, when I start use RSS because main agenda of news was unreliable and social networks became absolutely crazy.
I used to study physics before I got serious about theatre, and my dad is a programmer. I think he introduced me to HN at some point a few years ago, and today I am using it daily to indulge my curiosity, laziness and procrastination. (;
This is an awesome thread to read, thanks for posting the question!
Today I have a job I actually love as a mechanical research engineer, which is varied and lets me program and play with electronics from time to time. I still program in my free time, though it's getting scarce these days (as a father to a 2 year old). That works pretty well as a job/hobby combination as programming requires no space and is pretty much free, which isn't really the case of, say, machining robot parts (have access to a lathe and CNC mills at work).
I did try working as a developer for a year ("DevOps" for an accounting software company) but was pretty unhappy and quickly started looking to move back into ME. However, I'd be lying if I said reading about the astronomical total comp numbers that are casually thrown around HN didn't make me question my career choice sometimes.
I sometimes wonder if there should be more social science courses in tech studies, seeing that there's a lot of already open doors being barged through by some popular CS papers and discussions... But maybe that's unfair:)
HN also reminds me a little of the old digg, and a bunch of other early 2000's online communities.
I probably got here through a PG essay or mention on a tech podcast.
I wouldn't call this high tech. Most of the time I'm working with very primitive IT environments, trying to introduce little bits of technology as strategically as I can. Other times I'm trying to bring in tools for dealing with other data formats. Half of the day is just training people on stuff you dev types might take for granted (i.e., regex).
HN keeps me abreast of the latest movements of the content software stack. It's what clued me in to Asciidoc a few years back. For whatever reason HN seems to have built an insanely good commenter culture. How they've avoided brigading with such an open system I have no idea.
HN is a perfect blend of business and tech for me. The comments sections are significantly less toxic the rest of the Internet.
I guess it will no doubt be chaos for another few months as the industry gets back to it's feet.
Season 3 of "Succession" starts October 17
I think HN is a great and simple looking resource for keeping up to date on various news in tech and business world.
Admittedly, I have little interest in some of the topics that pop up - that goes into the politics of open-source software, controversies surrounding some of the languages and tools, etc. But there's so much different stuff here, so it's cool.
If there are a lot of data points in the three quadrants that have something tech about them, there are going to be some in the fourth quadrant as well.
About 10 years ago learnt Python as a bit of fun. I have now developed a niche of IT/Accounting. New accounting systems need IT assistance, so being conversant in IT stuff helps the implementations go smoothly and I can write some of the integrations.
I honestly can't remember how I found hackernews.
I also enjoy checking it on the weekends. The community is helpful. I love that the site is simple and doesn't add new unwanted features.
Seen very talented people on HN and quality of comments is really good.
I like this thread and good to see people from different industries and verticals. Going to bookmark this URL :-)
What?
There's also this website https://programminghistorian.org/