Ask HN: Who isn't in the software industry/not a hacker?
I work as an Associate in the commercial real estate industry and wonder how many others like me are out there on HN. Is there a community here like me who have an interest in technology and entrepreneurship but aren't hackers?
I love this site because: A) I get news on average 2-3 days before it makes it's way through the news cycle. B) Technology interests me and I can see what new tech could benefit my industry C) I am a wantrepreneur and like reading about startups, hopefully wanting to start one someday.
Why are you here and what do you get out of the community?
194 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadWhy do I read HN? Mostly, because I like and enjoy working in the technology space (defined broadly) and hope to build a career in tech. HN is great at giving me a view over the other side of the fence.
I would definitely agree with point A.
The odd gem, like [0].
Advice or pointers from other HN readers.
I do not work in the software industry, but I would call myself a hacker.
The term "hacker" can be interpreted in imaginative ways, I wouldn't be surprised to find hackers in your area of work.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7388576
The level of discourse is usually high while covering a very broad range of subjects. Subject specific communities still exceed HN competency in their respective domains, but nowhere that I've found covers such a diverse range of topics with a relatively high competence.
Unfortunately there are still some very obvious biases regarding certain subjects, but at least the community entertains other points of view.
Although I'm an engineer by training, HN has led me to explore many domains to which I wouldn't otherwise have been exposed. Furthermore, there are some incredible individuals here who I'd never run into otherwise, and discussions with them are extremely satisfying.
Overall a great community, though sometimes limited by the bias of its origins.
Historically have done very little investing in tech, but I'm interested in it and HN is a good way to keep up with the industry.
I look at startups as businesses or industries where the rate of change is much faster than normal. I think as an investor you're really a student of business and that makes startups a really fascinating area to observe.
What am I doing here? I've been programming since I was 11 and still do it often. You have to as an actuary.
Besides I have some web skills and I'm using to build a startup doing risk management for farmers. In this startup I'm responsible for the whole stack.
Also have web skills (the coincidences just keep coming). I do a few things on the side and am contemplating a bootstrapped startup soonish. For example, I did everything but the logo on this site: http://tvsift.com/
I fully agree with your last sentence! May I ask what you're working on?
If I understand correctly tvsift shows were you can find streaming services for a particular Tv-series, am I right?
Looks well done, I like the filter. Unfortunately for me the links below the series are not working for me on iPad (latest iOS).
As far as I know there is exactly one credentialed actuary working in any capacity in SV, but that number can only go up in the future.
Our team does a lot of analysis programming in R rather than taking the more common Excel/VBA approach. This allows common practices in software development such as version control tools (and the collaboration they can help with), testing, deployment strategies, etc, to be a major part of the usual workflow that would otherwise be missing from the usual speadsheet world so exposure to HN helps promote this in my mind as good practice.
The main draw of HN for me is the consistently high quality of posts and comments. I can be sure that were I to see the same content posted across general news sites, or other aggregators such as Reddit, then HN would be the only place I'd care to look and be certain that I'd also be learning plenty (often more than the original article) from the HN comments alone.
Unfortunately, unit testing remains difficult in Basic. I try to control the problems caused by a lack of test by regularly regressing the enormous amounts of output we have. If things that shouldn't change, change we know we have a problem. Of course, this testing can be automated.
I enjoy the tech startup world and have plans to start my own in the very near future. Currently using various sites to learn to program myself (Codeacademy, Bento, Dash). I think it is important to know what your site is doing and be able to respond to issues.
I have learned so much from this community/site that I hope it will put me on a better path to success. However, the one thing about HN (and this is true of just about any community) that there are people here who are so smart, that I get convinced that I'm not ready to start building my site. I see examples of javascript here for example, and I think "My skills are no where close to that, how can I possible start working on my sites JS."
And would love to hear your plans too!
Just a few points. Put your work in a version control system (optimally Mercurial or Git), study the request-response cycle for a few hours (no need to get very deep, but understand what programs are involved in your site, and how to configure them), and yeah, do it.
Best place to get news about the trends shaping our world, and muse over natl security implications.
Listening to CDR Chris Hatfield on the radio yesterday, made this exact observation from space. It's a human pattern that you can see from Australia to the US to Afghanistan ~ http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/a...
"... When I emerged from the near empty Officer’s Mess after our Thanksgiving meal, I wandered up to the hanger bay and was shocked by what I saw. Enlisted sailors, many of whom had spent hours painting the walls, and cleaning the floors to present an image of perfection to our superior, were standing in an endless line hundreds deep waiting to get their meal. A meal that was due to close minutes later. I had never seen a line so long on the ship before. Somewhere the logistics chain failed, and priorities were askew. I did what I could for a few of them, but many still missed out on their meal. As a leader of these men and women, I felt ashamed. As far as I know, General Petraeus didn’t get wind of this – had he, I wonder how it would have turned out. ...."
I'm surprised by this. Non provisioning of the enlisted on a major US celebration. Could be mistaken as a sign of shite leadership. Your descriptions of Petraeus on the other hand speaks the opposite.
Respect.
My hat's off to you, I have the qualifications but have always hesitated to apply to my nation's pilot programme. The sacrifices military personnel make are really extraordinary when viewed from a civilian point of view.
Much respect.
Thank you HN.
http://gizmodo.com/5949840/night-carrier-landings-are-crazya...
There is research on planes that could be sent off with orders and not require continuous communication, avoiding some of these issues, but to my knowledge they aren't in widespread "production" use.
An F-18, on the other hand, is an engineering marvel and extremely responsive, agile, and flexible. Pilots can react very quickly to situations and have a realistic chance of winning dogfights with other fighter jets, for example, which drones almost certainly couldn't do.
On the other hand, if all you need to do is assassinate some people in a country without an air force, a drone will do just fine.
Seriously naive either way.
I agree with all of your reasons for visiting HN. I've mentioned this before on another thread, but the guideline that posts should be "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"[1] tends to produce a lot of content that I find interesting, and I'm sure there are many more people like us here.
One thing that I will add is that I wish that people posted more non-programming jobs in the monthly Who's Hiring. Even if you just posted the approximate job title it'd be better than omitting it entirely. Every month I control+F>"mechanincal engineer", and there are almost never more than one or two posts, despite the fact that I see some of the same companies posting these positions on different job boards.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I work in user acquisition, specifically in SEM (AdWords/Bing). Same reasons here: cursory knowledge of programming I self-taught when trying to automate tasks, but nothing formal. Trying to learn more because I want to go the Product Management route.
This place definitely piques my curiosity in things I sometimes never knew existed. I've been lurking for a few years and can say that I've learned so much more about technology, business, etc. from here that I otherwise wouldn't have (I didn't even know what a PM was before; now I want to be one, heh).
Also echo the desire for non-programming jobs in the Who's Hiring thread, but I guess that's a double-edged sword because if it gets too diverse, it can become like a regular job board and thereby lose its relevance, for employers and employees alike. At the same time, my selfish side wishes it to be so since I would love to work for companies that frequent HN, i.e. more forward-thinking companies doing really cool things (usually).
I've only recently joined HN, but so far I've found it a valuable source of information and discussion. I've been working at a small startup on the product team (not as the PM) for 3 years. We were acquired in April and now I'm really interested in moving on and getting into a product management role, but I'm unsure of how to break into that "market."
My current location (Greensboro, NC) is probably part of the problem I'm having (I am open to moving). I joined HN to try to glean some intel on where to find PM opportunities and figure out what companies (especially the ones on HN) look for when hiring for those roles (programming ability? MBA required? etc.)
If you have found any good info to share, I'd love to hear.
While I don't find the vast majority of the content about programming interesting, there is still enough content here that I do find interesting that other similar websites don't cover.
I don't know a line of code, know a bit of security, but am always interested in how things work and what kind of WiFi is being run in my neighborhood, so I consider myself a hacker.
Reading HN gives me things to mull over regarding my own hesitant steps into the world of promotion, sales, and making a business happen on the web.
Also I used to dabble in programming back in the days of the C64 and Amiga. I will probably never do any major programming projects but I like to keep up with tech news, and this is a decent source for some of that.
http://egypt.urnash.com/rita/chapter/01/
edit. Finally got off my ass and did what turned out to be a pretty trivial fix, looks fine for me on safari/ff/chrome now. Thanks for the nudge to deal with it.
Also the answer to the implied question is PROBABLY no; I really hate doing commissions, and don't need the money from them right now. That said if the idea is something that really feels like a thing only I or about five other people could do justice to, I'll consider it.
there seems to be about a 60/40 split between straight tech/programming stuff and more general/non-technical information in a pleasantly-mixed churn. i find HN to be a good motivator to look at other fields through a "hacker" lens and think in an architectural/programming/entrepreneurial/system-level manner.
I enjoy reading about new tech and business - I like the mix of that and other general interest stories. Mostly I come here for the comments - I read comments before most articles, and I tend to only read the articles if there is a good discussion around them.
If you have any website or else
http://www.burlesquehall.com/
On a side note, with climbshare, are you using lidar scans, or are you reconstructing the 3D geometry from photos? Either way, it's quite impressive!
I'd love to know if you're doing this with LIDAR, or reconstruction from 2d images.
How would I go about submitting climb data (mostly boulder problems) to your site? What data do you need,and in what formats?
I've been reading HN for around 5 years. I'm here because I love technology, and love seeing what people are doing with it. Outside a few email lists and Twitter, there's no other site/source that I've stuck with for so long.
What do I get out of it? Aside from always learning new things (I have very little use for lambda calculus or univariate linear regression in my life, yet because of HN I know a lot about both). I spend a lot of my time now working with / mentoring / investing in Melbourne-based startups, and the comments and links I read on HN give me perspectives and thinking and experiences from a global startup community that I wouldn't always have access to.
Of course those opinions and perspectives and experiences are almost always skewed, this place is a filter bubble, but if you keep the bias in mind it's a phenomenally efficient filter of quality information and thinking.
I'm here because I like to learn about things. Not just products/services that I found out about from here that helped me in life (airbnb, hipmunk, leaky, freelancer) but simply ideas (I've learned relevant things about religion, games, science, warfare, education, driving, the basic income, and so on.)
I'm also here because my wife is a hacker and I like to be aware of what she's reading and thinking about.
Wark defines hacking 'as an “abstraction”, the construction of different and unrelated matters into previously unrealized relations. Hackers produce new conceptions, perceptions and sensations hacked out of raw data. Everything and anything is a code for the hacker to hack, be it “programming, language, poetic language, math, or music, curves or colourings” [3] and once hacked, they create the possibility for new things to enter the world. What they create is not necessarily “great”, or “even good”, but new, in the areas of culture, art, science, and philosophy or “in any production of knowledge where data can be extracted from it.” Wark argues that (new) information comes from the hack. It doesn’t matter if you are a computer programmer, a philosopher, a teacher, a musician, a physicist, if you essentially produce new information - it’s a hack [1]. In this sense, hackers are creators and they bring new ideas into the world. The aim of the book is to highlight the origins, purpose and efforts by this emerging hacker class, who produce new; concepts, perceptions, and sensations out of the stuff of raw data.'
These are all people that reason about systems. The systems and the tools vary, but the process doesn't.
Actually, the closest term I've come across personally is "systems thinking". (A phrase with its own splendid, storied history, by the way!)