I'm a recording/mixing/mastering engineer and I study philosophy. For some reason I am drawn to the tech scene. It is very strange surfing this site, having to disregard 80% of the links on the front page. I mean, in the beginning, every second word i read was completely incomprehensible to me (ajax, kernels, clojure, get, git, whatever).
Yet I've stuck around for years..
HN is a good place to get educated about a subject through the medium of debate. I know it's a bit of an echo chamber etc, but you can learn a lot here. Frequently I read a article posted here and have an opinion only to see it challenged back and forth by people who know the field well.
Philosophy and deep mathematics collide somewhere alone the line so you're probably not that far away in your studies :) Some years ago I coaxed my brother into jumping from a philosophy degree straight into mathematical logic (he went on to drop out of a PhD in category theory).
Actually I am now studying Computer Science as a minor (philosophy still being my major) at my university (we have a very flexible program here in Denmark). I find it very difficult, but also very rewarding.
And yes, I actually have tried to learn to code. First through Zed Shaw's Python book, then through some youtube videos but the big hurdle for me has always been how to _publish_ my stuff. It's all great fun that I can make some command line stuff, or write some JS/HTML but I was never explained how to actually do all the basic steps of having a website. I.e. domain names, servers, everything. I felt like i was playing with legos by drawing them on paper.
You don't have to be a sysadmin to publish your stuff. If you have a few hours, try to get a VPS to mess around. Some hosters offer different software packages to start with. Install something like Debian in minimal version (no LAMP stack) and follow a few tutorials on how to install and configure Apache + SSL-certs, PHP, MySQL, configure sshd, maybe an FTP server and an email server.
This will take some time in the beginning. You won't remember everything later and it's not important to internalize the Apache config. It's just to get a feel for the environment. The next time you have to publish something, you at least know that there's something like virtual hosts in Apache and roughly how to configure them.
It's no magic ;)
http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/
Fogus: What drew you to programming?
Hickey: I was running a recording studio and got a computer for it. I was intrigued by what it could do—this was in the relatively early days of MIDI—and filled with the possibilities of what it might do. So I taught myself C and assembly language and started writing music software. I was immediately hooked.
My main focus is the psychology of groups of people.
Everything the software is and does, is about serving those people and improving their lives. Without knowledge of how individuals and groups behave, this entire venture is futile.
To accurately reflect my "main focus" I should vote about 15 times for math and then spread votes liberally around the others. Instead I shall abstain.
Explanatory text is good when it wouldn't bias the responses. Explicitly allowing multiple selects is good to be stated up front (see ColinWright's explanation elsewhere). Using an "Other" response is relevant when you don't intend to change the possible responses halfway through (and changing them effectively invalidates your results up until that point).
HN is the only place I've seen get regularly irritated by poorly-written polls; the Internet is filled with really bad ones, because survey design isn't taught unless your major actually needs them (i.e., user experience, social sciences, marketing and sales).