I honestly have no memory of how I first stumbled across HackerNews, though it was sometime in 2014. At first glance, it didn't make much of an impression on me, because of the obfuscating jargon in article titles and the dated site design. But I saw a couple interesting articles, then came back a couple days later and found a couple more, and slowly it became part of my morning routine. Eventually I started reading the comments and realized that this is what Reddit was like 8 years ago. Smart people who know what they're talking about and are contributing frequently to lively discussions on serious topics in science, tech, business, law, and occasionally higher brow cultural topics. Even when someone posts something off base, you can rely on the comments to be edifying.

Nominally, I'm a lawyer, so most of the content here is not targeted at me. I also occasionally code small projects at my job when it isn't worth coordinating with our IT vendor, so I'm not entirely untechnical, but that's a skill set I developed on the side for fun and only relatively recently. I do however work in tax law at a large accounting firm and deal with the R&D credit a lot, which means it is helpful for me to maintain at least superficial fluency in technical fields ranging from computer science to automobile engineering to pharmaceutical research and everywhere in between. Reading the material posted here helps me do that.

Just as a small example, I frequently have to interpret the information from client documentation with pretty much no context because the clients just dump a bunch of documents to us and don't want us wasting their SMEs' time. Usually someone randomly picking out 100 emails from their inbox, downloading whatever happens to be on their shared drives, mass exporting JIRA tickets, or some similar method for pushing a bunch of undifferentiated crap at me. When we are in exam or appeal, I have to find the documentation in those dumps that supports the tax credit claim, which means I have to understand the technical content as well as its legal significance.

Just browsing through comments here and seeing what real enterprise programmers think and talk about has been extremely helpful in helping me contextualize these often jargon-laden and obscure documents. Imagine as a non-technical person receiving a Word document titled "Memory Heap Fragmentation," which just contains a stack trace and some commented C++ code. You don't even know what a stack trace is, or memory heap fragmentation, or how to distinguish C++ comments from C++ code. Hell, you probably barely know what memory is. Reading here immerses me in a sea of that jargon, but in an unusually accessible and interesting way. I can read the Wikipedia entry for memory heap and my eyes will just glaze over after three lines. But here, I'll read a fascinating story about how someone encountered a bizarre bug stemming from a weird quirk of a malloc() call. I still have to google some of the topics, but the context makes them interesting enough to slog through the reference material.

I've also become slowly more technical in my own skill set and career trajectory as I've been browsing HN, and I owe a lot of that to what I've learned here. I've become an internal product manager for a software tool we are developing for our practice and I am often consulted on firm-wide software projects, despite being relatively junior in rank (i.e. not a partner or director). In those meetings, I can speak somewhat intelligently about whether we want to pursue an Oracle or Azure platform for a product because of the articles I've read here. I can comfortably poopoo a partner's obsession with IBM's Watson because of what I've seen experts saying here. And I can do that while understanding the legal, accounting, and business domain, which makes me a more appealing resource than a purely technical consultant. So I guess I should say thanks to all you brilliant HackerNews contributors for advancing my career far beyond what my personal merit deserves!