Comment by donthellbanme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donthellbanme | Hacker News Reader

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You would be suprized.

I know a few people whom keep up on tech trends, even though it has nothing to do with their job.

I follow programming trends, basically through HN, and self study. (I have wasted a lot of money on programming/Computing books.), and I'm basically a Jack of all Trades in life.

I'm a mechanic certain years. I'm a contractor certain years. I'm a Electrician when I am very low on money. I'm a Watchmaker whenever someone asks me what I do. (I hate that last sociatial question. When did it become copacetic to ask for job status, and finances. I guess it came with the Selfie. (I didn't use a question mark on purpose. Too disenfranchised today to care.)

I do miss the days before relying on bloated JS libraries.

I miss the LAMP days for my personal websites.

There was a free server I used to use, but forget it's name.

It allowed full domain names without their branding. Like mysite.com, instead of mysite.com.branding.

I know Git, Google, and Amazon offer a free page, but I just don't like learning their way of putting up a site.

As you can by my verbage, I'm not a professional.

But for some reason I try to stay current on certain aspects of this industry.

> I'm a Watchmaker whenever someone asks me what I do. (I hate that last sociatial question. When did it become copacetic to ask for job status, and finances. I guess it came with the Selfie.

It significantly predates the selfie. Tyler Durden mocked the question in Fight Club before smart phones existed, and it was already very old then. I'd bet money you could find films and books in the '50s that document that question (I think I know of a novel that does, but I'd have to double-check to be sure). I bet the only reason it'd be harder to find in 18th and 19th century literature is that so much of that was by and for aristocrats. Pre-industrial-revolution, perhaps it was an uncommon question.

It makes sense in a world where most people spend the best 40+ hours of their week working a job for wages, lose another 5-10 good hours to commuting to that job, and the rest of their waking time is spent desperately catching up on neglected housework and recovering from that 40 hours. It's only outliers who are bugged by the question, or see it as presumptuous. These outliers usually have settled for a lot less than most people are willing to (materially, and maybe family-wise—this'd be your Tyler Durdens, your actually-poor-and-not-just-slumming-it bohemian sorts or members of Fussell's "Class X"), or else have found themselves in a situation where they're much richer than most people but don't have to work all that hard for it (some of the Fussellian upper-middle, especially later in their careers, plus your usual trust-fund kids).

As a programmer for my day job, I thought it was weird as well.

But then I realised I am interesting in things other people do as a job: cooking, CAD, gardening, wood work, music.

So people must be interested in programming as a past time.

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