I have a physics degree. It turns out a bachelor’s degree doesn’t help much, and I was too burnt out at the time to go to grad school. I took a few introductory programming classes and I’ve been trying to get back into it lately. Try talking to a bartender sometime, you may find out they’re not as dumb as rocks.

-Irrelevant, but I chuckled at your last sentence.

One of the all-time smartest people I’ve ever met worked a bar in Bergen, Norway; autodidact in anything which caught his fancy, he could give you a lecture on what brought down the Scythians, serve a new guest and striking up a conversation on advances in semiconductor fabrication with him, picking up where he left off the lecture on the Scythians before heading out to see if any of the patrons outside wanted anything, having a quick word on the Poincaré conjecture with the math postgrad having a beer in the backyard...

He had studied for a while at the university before figuring out that he’d have more time to study if he didn’t have to concern himself with exams, quit, kept his uni library card and got down to it.

Norway's like that. Last time I was there the taxi driver taking us back to the airport knew more about the CUDA API than I do (not a terribly high bar, but still...).

My bartender friends are some of the smartest, most capable, most hard-working people I know.

I met a programmer many years back who had previously been a physicist at CERN. I'd never have guessed but I think he picked up the programming bug there. If you think coding is your thing then go for it and all the best to you!

Not really surprising when you consider that the web was invented there (CERN).

There are very few physicists who don't know how to program.

Hn is very it specific. I wouldn't thought that you find many bartenders here for the soul reason that those two interests or occupations are just different independent to intelligence.

Super cool backstory. I also wondered what brought you here as well.

How’s the pay? What’s the process for becoming a bar tender? I always thought it might be a fun job when I retire.

Though sad that she's now taking marching orders from Pelosi now https://www.nationalreview.com/news/aoc-drifts-away-from-act...

That article has very thin gruel for "taking marching orders from Pelosi": not endorsing some people and asking for civility in Twitter feuds.

Be skeptical of anything written by the National Review about progressives.

I don't follow politics much. But I think it just underlines to get stuff done in many areas of life you need to be willing/able to compromise and build coalitions.

If you read this forum carefully you'll find it indeed contains constructors, truck drivers, firefighters, pilots, physicians, teachers... just to name a few from memory.

All these "non-developers" are priceless when discussions pop up which require domain expertise (which we developers usually lack)

[edit: they are also priceless generally speaking]

ha I tried to find out what people are on HN, but I didn't get any responses. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21484252

Not in tech either, but I like reading and casually following the scene. Kinda funny watching the language flame-wars every so often

That's an interesting response. It seems to me that the flame level on this site is quite low in response to somewhere like Reddit. People argue here, of course, but usually it's in an informational sort of way and rarely devolves into "yer momma is soooo fat...." kind of discourse.

Yeah, you're right. Civil disagreement is allowed here on HN; anything else gets downvoted into oblivion.

Obviously, Haskell is the superior option here. Anything else is a travesty.

You're WRONG. :D :D

Clojure!

Or was it PHP?

You're close, it's Lisphp, the Lisp built on top of PHP.

How do you find HN compares to Slashdot?

Discussion on hn is higher quality. I'm an almost original slashdot reader, user id is 4 digits. I haven't browsed there in perhaps years at this point.

It's been at least a decade or more since I have been on /. . It really seemed to have went down hill when the Bush election was going on, they did a lot of political coverage and it just ruined the feel of the site. People started exposing their political bent and the site in general just became more snarky.

The Microsoft bashing was better on slashdot though </joke>

I'm still getting used to the idea that Microsoft might not be all evil. It's a weird feeling :)

It is pretty bad now, low signal to noise ratio. Lots of trolling.

Don't read slashdot (never seen it TBH)

Doing market research for the Ballmer Peak

Speculation:

- Could be they have a hobby of computers

- Could be they are still in school

Not everyone who cares about tech news is working in the tech field.

HN is way more geeky/nerdy than your regular tech news, hence my curiosity.

Not really, it's just slower moving. For every 1 real geek tech post, there are two or three days of regular news things. I came here based on the slower, more thoughtful discussion. I'm in higher ed, not even close to tech.

At one point I was working construction during the day and working on a visual programming language at night.

Needless to say, I have little sympathy for those claiming a talent shortage.

I always found it interesting how many people have taught themselves programming.

I was at a customer site a few months ago installing some test hardware and the guy I was working with was their welder, having been an auto mechanic before and we got into a discussion about programming in Python!

The best interaction, however, would be the homeless guy I met who used to be a programmer.

One of the best Microsoft stack Sysadmins (AD/Exchange) I knew back in the day was a former diesel mechanic who got badly injured in an accident and transferred to do help desk work. He dove in and really mastered it. Just a great guy who was great at training new folks.

Not programming but the other wacky transition was a Wall St guy who burnt out, started a subsistence farmstand in the country, married a hippie lady and sold vegetables, drove a school bus and plowed snow to get by. Really nice guy... when he died it turned out he owned a few buildings in NYC and was loaded to the tune of $20-30M, and his family had no clue.

I once met an unemployed software engineer who went door to door selling magazine subscriptions.

Reminds me of King Vidor's The Crowd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crowd_(1928_film)

(I guess that could kinda be a spoiler for an almost 100 year old film?)

LOL might be too dated, for this crowd but man that movie was a classic to those that worked thru that era.

My plumber has written a ton of VBA in Excel to automate his business.

I took a year off once and strongly considered trying to get a job as a bartender for fun because I enjoy making cocktails.

Was going to ask this too lol