It's funny, I sometimes feel like I am the only one on Hacker News who isn't an actual hacker, nor have any knowledge in field. I'm just a guy with a general, intellectual curiosity and HN somewhat satisfies that.

I'm a recording/mixing/mastering engineer and I study philosophy. For some reason I am drawn to the tech scene. It is very strange surfing this site, having to disregard 80% of the links on the front page. I mean, in the beginning, every second word i read was completely incomprehensible to me (ajax, kernels, clojure, get, git, whatever).

Yet I've stuck around for years..

Rich Hickey created the Clojure programming language and he has the same background as you. In school, he focused on music, and his creative energy was directed at music composition. There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence suggesting a link between the type of mind that creates music and the type of mind that creates software. After school Hickey got a job at a music studio, and it was there that he first encountered computers. See here:

http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/

Fogus: What drew you to programming?

Hickey: I was running a recording studio and got a computer for it. I was intrigued by what it could do—this was in the relatively early days of MIDI—and filled with the possibilities of what it might do. So I taught myself C and assembly language and started writing music software. I was immediately hooked.

Did you read up on all the stuff you didn't know or do you still dismiss them? Ever bothered learning how to code?

That sort of sounded snarky but I'm not sure if it was meant to.

HN is a good place to get educated about a subject through the medium of debate. I know it's a bit of an echo chamber etc, but you can learn a lot here. Frequently I read a article posted here and have an opinion only to see it challenged back and forth by people who know the field well.

Philosophy and deep mathematics collide somewhere alone the line so you're probably not that far away in your studies :) Some years ago I coaxed my brother into jumping from a philosophy degree straight into mathematical logic (he went on to drop out of a PhD in category theory).

Oh sorry, didn't mean to sound snarky. It was a genuine question. I was just wondering how reading HN had an impact on my parent poster in terms of "computer words" or coding skills that he didn't understand before.

Hey ntaso,

Actually I am now studying Computer Science as a minor (philosophy still being my major) at my university (we have a very flexible program here in Denmark). I find it very difficult, but also very rewarding.

And yes, I actually have tried to learn to code. First through Zed Shaw's Python book, then through some youtube videos but the big hurdle for me has always been how to _publish_ my stuff. It's all great fun that I can make some command line stuff, or write some JS/HTML but I was never explained how to actually do all the basic steps of having a website. I.e. domain names, servers, everything. I felt like i was playing with legos by drawing them on paper.

Nice :) Then good luck to your studies.

You don't have to be a sysadmin to publish your stuff. If you have a few hours, try to get a VPS to mess around. Some hosters offer different software packages to start with. Install something like Debian in minimal version (no LAMP stack) and follow a few tutorials on how to install and configure Apache + SSL-certs, PHP, MySQL, configure sshd, maybe an FTP server and an email server.

This will take some time in the beginning. You won't remember everything later and it's not important to internalize the Apache config. It's just to get a feel for the environment. The next time you have to publish something, you at least know that there's something like virtual hosts in Apache and roughly how to configure them.

It's no magic ;)

All of the above. Or almost. And being a jack of all trades really works for me. In fact, that's what I think my focus really is - picking up new skills, figuring stuff out with an obsessive drive to know how everything works. And having done this all my life, I've gotten pretty good at it. I was never happy doing just one thing for any length of time. Now I do them all (consultant with multiple clients doing very different stuff for each, plus my own projects). First time I really feel like I'm enjoying my work.

I run a software startup producing a SaaS product for communities.

My main focus is the psychology of groups of people.

Everything the software is and does, is about serving those people and improving their lives. Without knowledge of how individuals and groups behave, this entire venture is futile.

You missed HN off the list.

Application development encapsulates both, Desktop, Mobile and Web?

I think it’s too late now to split it up, so yes. But it would be interesting to see how people on HN are distributed among these cases. I think I will re-submit the poll with better categories one day or other.

False multichotomy - on different days I could tick at least half those boxes, because on those days that would be my main focus.

The poll allows for more than one vote. I voted for the two categories I spend the most time in.

When most people vote for one category, voting for more than one makes a mockery of the whole process and just makes it even more pointless than these polls usually are. Better would be to ask people to spread ten votes around the places they feel they have more focus on. Those that have a single point of focus could put all ten votes on that, people like me could spread them around accordingly.

To accurately reflect my "main focus" I should vote about 15 times for math and then spread votes liberally around the others. Instead I shall abstain.

It's not an accurate poll that should be used as a good model of reality. Just a way to have an idea: you mostly care of the order of votes, not the individual bits.

So tick all of the relevant ones then?

For the next few months, physical oceanography.

If I have an electronics hardware business based on microcontrollers should I choose entrepreneurship, software, or hardware?

I think whatever comes to your mind first. What are you most passionate about?

yes

Testing/Quality should be an option.

Did I miss a major field or category?

Something for those of us for whom the job is just a way to pay for what we actually want to do.

Oh, I was supposed to put down my job? :( Oops.

No worries, it's not clear at all what you're supposed to put down. Personal focus, professional focus, aspirational focus, academic focus, general interests, hobbies...? I'm not sure. The list provided isn't really a good fit for any of those things.

I thought whatever comes to mind first and I think that suffices to get an overall picture. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. Maybe I should have added a short explainatory text at the beginning? How would you exactly improve the design of the questionnaire?

The weakness of the poll is in part a reflection of the weakness of your question. What is a focus? Why is it a main focus? What is the question you're really trying to answer?

Explanatory text is good when it wouldn't bias the responses. Explicitly allowing multiple selects is good to be stated up front (see ColinWright's explanation elsewhere). Using an "Other" response is relevant when you don't intend to change the possible responses halfway through (and changing them effectively invalidates your results up until that point).

HN is the only place I've seen get regularly irritated by poorly-written polls; the Internet is filled with really bad ones, because survey design isn't taught unless your major actually needs them (i.e., user experience, social sciences, marketing and sales).

I appreciate your clear and upfront response. I shouldn’t have submitted this poll without giving substantial thought to the question and options first. I only wanted to get a very rough picture of how the main interests/hobbies/professions are distributed on HN, so I didn’t care much about rigor; but that probably negatively affects pollee morale. I’ll keep that in mind for the next time.

Physical sciences? (instead of physics)

Done.

Programming Languages?

Is it too broad for a subcategory of theoretical computer science?

I'd personally say it fits in theoretical compsci.

Operations Research

Do you think it justifies for a separate category? Wikipedia says "It is often considered to be a sub-field of mathematics.", but I know that Wikipedia is not always correct and that I have some other small categories already at choice.

It is a bizarre conglomeration between CS, Mathematics, and Industrial Engineering. It is distinct from math in much the same way that CS is distinct from math.

Maybe add an "other CS-related" and "not CS-related" fields ?

Blogspam isn't a choice?

Developer tools is missing.

QA?

Done.

Did I miss it or is there no Operating Systems & Compilers?

It's at the bottom but maybe it was added after you posted your question?

Right, I added afterwards.

Javascript, making people's lives easier with technology

Classic application development?

Law

Aerospace engineering

aerospace engineering as well

Done.

be happy

Money.

Procrastination