Ask HN: Who isn't in the software industry/not a hacker?

Compared to a modern fighter jet, drone aircraft are cheap, dumb, and disposable. Satellite control involves many seconds of latency and sometimes communication is lost entirely, especially in bad weather. It is routine and expected for a drone to just lose contact / fail / crash and be written off. You can get away with that since there's no loss of life, but you probably wouldn't want to use a drone to carry a nuclear bomb, for example. You can always just assassinate the Taliban leader tomorrow, but an unidentified or hostile aircraft violating your airspace needs to be dealt with right now.

There is research on planes that could be sent off with orders and not require continuous communication, avoiding some of these issues, but to my knowledge they aren't in widespread "production" use.

An F-18, on the other hand, is an engineering marvel and extremely responsive, agile, and flexible. Pilots can react very quickly to situations and have a realistic chance of winning dogfights with other fighter jets, for example, which drones almost certainly couldn't do.

On the other hand, if all you need to do is assassinate some people in a country without an air force, a drone will do just fine.

I'm a physics PhD student, working on experimental quantum computing. My day-to-day work varies a huge amount, but can generally consist of cleanroom nanofabricaton, circuit design, data processing, machining, and experimental design.

I consider consumer technology one of my hobbies, and hackernews lets me keep up with the latest trends in software engineering. I've always been particularly fascinated with technological forces that can have big impacts on the world at large, and new uses/trends in software have played a huge role in that. I like to think that hackernews keeps me grounded to what's the latest and greatest in the world where the "big things" can impact people on a much shorter timescale than the work I currently do. I plan to go into the tech industry when I graduate, and I'm highly considering an internship next summer.

I do continuous improvement projects (using Green Belt Six Sigma training) in my day job.

Trying to get a travel focused startup off the ground (http://www.planitwide.com).

Been fascinated with all things tech for a while and am constantly in awe of people who can build stuff. I also firmly believe that inspiration comes from the most random sources and HN fits the bill for both of these things.

I'm a recent high school graduate. I got turned on to this by my comp sci teacher, I'll be going to university in a week for computer science, so I'm bending the rules because I'm not in the software industry yet.

I totally agree with A, B, and C, but I also really enjoy just the interesting articles I wouldn't find elsewhere. Here I can actually learn as opposed to school (Can I use that as a verb? I can break the rules if I want!).

I'm a historian? Maybe? I've taken to calling myself a security anthropologist lately. I study the history of security, talk about it, write about it, think about it endlessly.

I love this community. I've had amazing conversations in the comments and taken a few of those to email or twitter as well. I know that I would eventually see most of what I read here elsewhere, but this is the only place on the internet where I read the comments.