Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThaddeusQuay2 | Hacker News Reader

"It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays."

You sound like a typical bored teenager, with too much time on their hands, wearing their boredom as a nihilistic badge of honor, expecting everyone to entertain them, while simultaneously acting as if they know everything, thereby supposedly being superior to the entertainers. If you can't find anything good to read, then use your apparently copious time to write something which you would want to read, and then anyone who responds positively to it will probably be someone like you. Find enough of these people, and you'll have created a self-entertaining community. Hackers build solutions.

View on HN

Yes. I am 16. I stay home from school because learning civics and history and math and science are super boring, so in between sessions of wallhacking on legacy counter-strike servers I refresh a startup tech news site looking for intellectually stimulating articles.

You're right. I do know everything. Everything except how best to use my time when I occasionally want to waste it broadening my horizon with unusual and interesting information. I typically walk around the house in underroos bragging about how bored I am. Then I zone out to American Idol.

I'm not sure what kind of parallel universe I'd have to exist in where writing about things I don't know anything about is possible, but once I find that reality, by golly I'll take your suggestion to heart.

Hackers really are the Thomas Edisons of our time. Extremely productive in everything they do and never piddling away on something just out of intellectual curiosity. Hackers only seem to create practical solutions to the big problems facing the world today. I'm so glad every college graduate who's just landed his first job writing JavaScript for a start-up can refer to themselves with such a prestigious title. And with so much credibility!

What I don't understand about your comment is that you seem to believe that nobody ever gets bored at work or needs a break from a grind of meetings, coding, red tape, conference calls, etc. I envy your steadfast dedication. I, however, do actually need a break once in a while and enjoy reading about things that are interesting and new to me, or just enlightening in some fashion. Forgive me for crying about it into a thread about distraction.

Heh. Good stuff.

10 out of 10 for the put down but seriously between libraries, a kindle and google you have access (mostly free) to virtually the sum total of human knowledge. There is lots of stuff out there that will distract you and feed your brain, you're just going to have to cycle through more than 4 sites to get it.

No, they are pretty interesting. The teachers are boring, may be. History? The civil war? The Isreali-Palestini conflict? The poverty in the world? Water distribution in the world?

Go and look for the interesting parts. There are lot of interesting stuff in the world, apart from the tech scene. I wish I spent more time when I was your age reading about politics.

That was a sarcastic rebuttal, the author of that post is not really 16.

If you want real intellectual stimulation, go to a university. Seriously. There are some super interesting things going on at universities, but you have to take some initiative to find them.

Sit in on some classes, check out the university library, find some clubs that seem interesting and hang out at their meetings, talk to professors and students -- maybe even get involved in some of the projects happening there. You'll get a lot out of this, I guarantee it. I can recommend this to people who've already attended universities too. Many of them could use some intellectual stimulation.

I tend to agree. If you're having trouble finding good content in the age of endless content, well, that's an opportunity.

Hell, I could read Wikipedia for 8 hours a day and not get bored.

Interesting aside, I read "... a typical bored engineer..." the first time, which also worked.

I read the same thing the first time, which indicates to me that it originally said that, but OP didn't find it condescending enough.

Yeah, he should just start a magazine about the stuff he is interested in. That's when I did when I was a bored 22 year old :-)

Boom, boredom problem solved, plus nice contact network from all the cool folks I contacted and got to write something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com