[Pomfers]

No one understands everything here. When it comes to software development, everyone I know says they're only really knowledgeable about what they work on. Most other areas, they'll have at best some passing knowledge of. It's like how doctors become specialists in just one part of the human body. There's maybe 5 people in the world are are a qualified dermatologist, endocrinologist, neurologist, and cardiologist at the same time. It's the same thing with engineers.

[bufferoverflow]

That's not true. I understand most of things posted and discussed here. And I'm not some amazing 100X programmer. Having a CS degree definitely helps.

However HN is definitely skewed towards the obscure and the nostalgic with a dash of genetics and cosmology. Most of the programming happens in traditional languages - C/C++/C#/Java/Javascript/PHP/Python, and HN would make you believe everyone is writing functional stuff with monads and functors in LISP or Erlang.

The community is great though, very knowledgeable.