Ask HN: Non-technical readers of HN, why are you here?
HN's primary audience is "hackers", 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.
If you're one of those, I'd love to hear how you found out about HN and what keeps you coming back.
192 comments
[ 22.8 ms ] story [ 652 ms ] threadWhat 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, 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.
Then I sort of like to cringe at the whole "start-up" culture. :)
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.
I'm here to learn what I don't know about "engineering" so I can be better at my job!
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.
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.
Also the uncluttered U/I...no distractions.
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
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
"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."
https://joshkaufman.net/explore-exploit/
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.
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.
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."