I'm a board-certified anesthesiologist/research scientist (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=5DdrMc8AAAAJ&hl=en), author (https://www.amazon.com/Quantations-Joseph-Stirt-ebook/dp/B00...), and blogger (www.bookofjoe.com). I don't know how I happened on Hacker News sometime last year, though it may have been after seeing Y Combinator or one of its principals mentioned somewhere. Sources — and the past — are more often than not misremembered, so I'm hesitant to go beyond that.
What keeps me coming back daily are the links to stories I would never see anywhere else. I'm a TechnoDolt®© (I coined the word) and haven't a clue about coding and software et al, but headlines like "Robots Rule at Swiss Factories as Strong Franc and Wages Bite (bloomberg.com)," "What makes the perfect office? (timharford.com)," "Your personal Facebook Live videos can legally end up on TV (thememo.com)," "The Beauty of Nature Seen Through Creepy Webcams (wired.com)," "German parents told to destroy Cayla dolls over hacking fears (bbc.com)," and "Map showing the homeland of every character in Homer’s Iliad (kottke.org)" — 6 of the 30 links currently on the front page! — get me right where I live intellectually.