Non-programmer here. I've gotten great advice on work and links to great resources that have helped me change the way I work. It's not an overstatement to say that great writers like patio11 and Zach Holman have thoroughly changed how I see work, collaboration, and how it should interface with my private life. I don't run a SaaS app (yet) and I certainly don't make open-source contributions, but the principles of their posts can apply to a lot of fields that aren't purely technical. In the last year and a half since I started regularly reading I brought a lot of great ideas to my previous employer and then changed my career for the better.

tldr: Everything I've read here has given me immense clarity in how I personally view life and work, and I'm happier for it.

Wow, thanks. Glad I could help.

DigitalJack might claim to not be a programmer, but if s/he knows enough to ask "Why can't you just digest or hash the JS?", that's pretty programmery.

Besides, "Programming" is a large spectrum; I know jack-all about javascript but am comfortable building CRUD apps in C# and am in the intended audience of "don't build your own crypto because you're an idiot" blog posts. I consider myself a programmer (even though I have a lot to learn) and had the same question in my head as DigitalJack.

To broaden their horizons? Because they're interested in technology even if they don't define themselves as a programmer?

Just curious: why would a person comment not to add value, but to ask a semi-snarky rhetorical question?

While plenty of comments here are snarky, I didn't think that particular question was.

Thanks, I wasn't, indeed. Just curious, and the answers are interesting. Pity that most people here see trolling where there's just questions.

There is a lot of stuff on HN, with a slim majority being programmer-centric. HN is a place to pique one's intellectual curiosity regardless of coding background. I think there's a lot of coding stuff here because we happen to be on computers to access HN and, as people who are curious, we're likely to have already dabbled in tuning or coding for the computers we are on and other systems.

Apart from a large portion of posted articles not being specifically about programming, there are many great posters here who are non-programmers such as tokenadult. Discussions and articles are not limited to programming. Moreover, the spirit of HN seems to be discuss what the community deems worthy (upvoting) with a few restrictions.

It is, but mostly because of the low barrier to entry in software.

I'm technically minded though--chip designer. Software is a hobby for me. I guess I more meant that I'm not a JavaScript programmer and don't know the subtleties of that ecosystem.