Ask HN: Anyone Using HN for Work? Research Competition. Spot Trends. Other?

A friend and I are busy building a cognitive search engine. We extract data and insights from text. We're planning to launch a free product on top of HN to learn from people using it and iterate from there.

Before launch we need to understand (1) if there's anyone using HN for work, and if yes (2) how and in what field.

Assumption is that there might be people using HN to learn about competition, find trends, research new applications of technologies, and probably more.

Thanks.