There's also a ton of academic lurkers -- I've always though that this due to the facts that 1) the border between academia and industry is pretty porous in technical fields (super obvious in ML research, but I think holds more generally) 2) academics borrow---and contribute to---the same set of methods and technologies 3) most individuals have an interest in complex systems (and their hilarious, tragic faults) such that they find articles like this one interesting.

I think it's also useful to look at preceding communities like Slashdot — in that case it started out pretty tightly scoped for Linux enthusiasts, gaming, programming, and the then-nascent social internet but then the cohort of regular readers and contributors got older and they found themselves in policy, academia, and managerial business roles; as long as people remained involved in the community, the content of the site expanded to reflect the (extremely rapidly increasing) role of tech in these domains. (Obviously, Slashdot suffered from several ownership changes, a lame commenting system, and most everyone moved on to other venues).

and 4) the signal-to-noise ratio on HN is very good compared to other online discussion forums.

~30% of submissions are software-dev-only (new typescript 3.0 release), but most submissions are just high quality, interesting posts. And the level of discussion is excellent - no memes, no jokes. Its like the opposite of reddit.

Yeah this. Signal:Noise ratio on HN is far better than any other source of tech news & discussion I know of. I skip the programming-related threads.

I think Lobste.rs might sneak past HN on signal:noise, but it gives up a bit of variety in topics.

our heavy diesel emissions performance machine runs Linux, and after a vendor training on how to use it I became totally fascinated with it. A lot of Linux professionals like HN a lot, and the articles are a good break from the norm on lunch break.

Im learning python, too! :)

I've been lurking here for 10 years. For most of that time I was employed as an electrical engineer.

Why should people who are interested in high quality technical discussion surprise you with their presence?

"Hacker" used to mean a lot more than "software developer".

I came across HN by accident, and what keeps me coming back is the interesting, informative links & threads, and the quality of discussion. Threads about workplace issues are of interest to me, as are general scientific and social topics.

I'm a "scientific" programmer, meaning that I use programming as a problem solving tool, but I don't write commercial software for a living. I turned away from that path in the early 80s.

I've been reading this site since 2009 and can barely write anything more complex than Hello World. The guidelines on submissions say nothing about software engineering, and the definition of hackers as written by Paul Graham does not limit it to software engineers.

The comments are informative, there's no politics, it's more interesting than the news. I'm a sales recruiter, so I don't read the in the weeds software articles, but there are still 2-3 good articles on the front page at any one time.

> there's no politics

Ok I am definitely clicking on bad articles

HN is not a monoculture the appropriate stuff on the site can interested anyone and no one is required to be a software developer to get on this website.

Nobody is required to be anything on any public forum; that doesn’t change the fact that communities exist, and the vast majority of people on a forum are there due a particular taste, and share a common preference for discussion.

That anyone of any interest can visit the webpage is not a sufficient explanation as to why anyone of any interest do visit it. The question is whats so special about HN that draws such a varied background, despite it clearly having its strongest preference towards software engineering (on any given day, if you counted by category, it would be surprising to find software engineering / programming not as the highest).

A reddit forum has the same public property, but the software engineering channels presumably do not draw such varied backgrounds. So why?

Maybe granularity -- there's only one front page for HN? I usually find that I want to read 10% of articles on the front page, but I'm often surprised by which 10%.

Most likely to the type and extent of moderation that is present on HN and the evolving purpose of both websites .

A lot of the content is still relevant for those in other IT roles, or even just hobbyists. I'm a security engineer rather than a dev but I still find many of the posts on the site useful and/or interesting

Big factor for me is the higher-quality discussion compared to say, Reddit.

Not everyone in the software world is a developer.

you had me at "bad pickup" :)