5 ms·
Medical doctor.
by wittyreference 6y ago
Medical doctor.
- Benjammer 6y agoJust curious, how does an MD end up on Hacker News? Edit: I don't mean this in a gatekeeping way, I honestly was just curious to hear an example of how this happens. Do people outside tech have someone in tech mention the site to them? Do they browse and just read the fraction of articles that aren't about something software related?
- EForEndeavour 6y ago1. Medicine is an ancient tower of hacks upon hacks. 2. Many people have areas of interest outside of their profession.
- oblio 6y ago3. Programming is one of those things you can do as a side-gig/hobby. I'm quite sure you can be a programmer and an MD, but you probably can't be both a theoretical physicist and a neurosurgeon :-p
- eitland 6y agoI'm fairly certain there was at least one doctor who used to write Linux kernel code as a way to get rid of stress after work. (3 minutes of searching got me Con Kolivas, and "ck" sounds familiar so that might be him.) edit: now I see heavyset_go has commented about the same.
- globalguy 6y agoWhy not?
- _jal 6y agoWhy do programmers read about medicine?
- certmd 6y agoProbably the same way a medical article ends up on the front page of hacker news. People have interests outside their area of expertise. Which is good!
- renewiltord 6y agoMy cousin is an MD. I'm a software engineer. His home network is more well-provisioned than mine (IoT stuff on separate VLAN, PiHoles,...). He also has a nicer soldering iron and a DIY voice assistant.
- XYZZYBouy 6y agoIt's because Dang is an XYXXY boy. Kind of the same way how your next persident get sturck while jaywalking. Shit happend dude. Everything is a curious thing. Just absorb it.
- heavyset_go 6y agoPeople have intersecting interests. For example, Con Kolivas is an anesthesiologist who is also a Linux kernel hacker.
- wittyreference 6y agoI have lots of interests outside of medicine, including programming (and bookbinding, archery, powerlifting, and etc.) I got to HN itself ... I don't know how. I delete my account about once a year to try and limit my breadcrumb trail, so I can't really look backwards and say how long I've been here, or what may have gotten me here. IIRC, it was probably due to chasing articles on startups/entrepreneurship, as I seem to think that was over-represented in my early HN reading. But it's probably been about a decade, so take that with a grain of salt.
- laplacesdemon48 6y agoI'm on a path to becoming a MD. Was in finance before and discovered HN probably 4 years ago. I can't speak for the original poster but I think HN users are attracted to complexity and raw truth. Medicine and programming have a lot in common in that regard. An example is the discovery and isolation of insulin [0]. Banting barely convinced somebody to give him lab space for 2 measly months. He then experimented with tying off the ducts of dog pancreases or removing the pancreases altogether. He realized he could keep a severely diabetic dog alive with injections from another dog's pancreatic juices. There was some drama around the subsequent purification of insulin and the Nobel Prize. The full story almost sounds like software hacking and startup drama. [0] https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/frederick-banting-charles-best-james-collip-and-john-macleod https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/frederick-...
- eitland 6y agoI've been delighted to see not only MDs but also a bunch of actual farmers, students, kids, retited people etc :-)