3 ms·

Out of curiosity, what brings a physician at a community hospital to a largely programmer forum? I'm genuinely curious, I love the fact that HN has such a dive

Out of curiosity, what brings a physician at a community hospital to a largely programmer forum? I'm genuinely curious, I love the fact that HN has such a diverse set of very intelligent people.

shouldbworking 10y ago
I've seems lot of people from other branches of engineering and medicine on HN. My guess is that biology is just an interest in the natural form of tech, seems to be a lot of overlap.
- Baeocystin 10y ago
  I agree. I may earn my living in the tech field now, but I majored in Cognitive Science, not Computer Science. And I think it has served me well.
smackingly 10y ago
I have an interest in technology. This place has a good offering of technology news and discussion that I can't find elsewhere. Also, a significant number of my investment gains originated from stuff I read here (bought a bunch of Monero when it was $0.45/unit, for example). Finally, I learned a little programming (mostly Go and C++) to automate some stuff at work and home (reports, backups, email notifications and things like that). HN is a reasonable litmus test for what people are using to do stuff like this.
- barrkel 10y ago
  I don't think reasonable developers use C++ or Go for any of those things. You might use a backup utility written in C++ or Go; but you don't write your own if you can help it, and you drive it with a scripting language like Python or Ruby or even bash. No knock for learning. But if you want to get maximum bang for your learning buck, focus on higher level stuff with lots of third-party libraries that integrate with the things you want to automate, ideally with a interpreter REPL for exploratory coding.
  - neutronicus 10y ago
    They might be consuming some APIs that drive the choice. \shrug. Hard to know.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - smackingly 10y ago
    Yeah, I know, I was just trying to show that I have a broad set of interests and enjoyed learning Go and C++. I use "rclone" for most of the backup-related things.
- pfarnsworth 10y ago
  That's very cool, thanks for sharing!

Out of curiosity, what brings a physician at a community hospital to a largely programmer forum? I'm genuinely curious, I love the fact that HN has such a diverse set of very intelligent people.

shouldbworking 10y ago

I've seems lot of people from other branches of engineering and medicine on HN. My guess is that biology is just an interest in the natural form of tech, seems to be a lot of overlap.

Baeocystin 10y ago
I agree. I may earn my living in the tech field now, but I majored in Cognitive Science, not Computer Science. And I think it has served me well.

smackingly 10y ago

I have an interest in technology. This place has a good offering of technology news and discussion that I can't find elsewhere. Also, a significant number of my investment gains originated from stuff I read here (bought a bunch of Monero when it was $0.45/unit, for example). Finally, I learned a little programming (mostly Go and C++) to automate some stuff at work and home (reports, backups, email notifications and things like that). HN is a reasonable litmus test for what people are using to do stuff like this.

barrkel 10y ago
I don't think reasonable developers use C++ or Go for any of those things. You might use a backup utility written in C++ or Go; but you don't write your own if you can help it, and you drive it with a scripting language like Python or Ruby or even bash. No knock for learning. But if you want to get maximum bang for your learning buck, focus on higher level stuff with lots of third-party libraries that integrate with the things you want to automate, ideally with a interpreter REPL for exploratory coding.
- neutronicus 10y ago
  They might be consuming some APIs that drive the choice. \shrug. Hard to know.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- smackingly 10y ago
  Yeah, I know, I was just trying to show that I have a broad set of interests and enjoyed learning Go and C++. I use "rclone" for most of the backup-related things.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
That's very cool, thanks for sharing!