Alan Mustard, former US ambassador to Turkmenistan and trained in agriculture, is a well-known OpenStreetMap geek and quite familiar with GIS issues. Diplomats can have hobbies, you know.

I myself am a linguist and translator, no professional background in the hard sciences or IT at all, but I have still been involved in Free Software for many years and so HN is a natural news channel to read.

Programming is now a hobby and I still do some open source stuff and push out various side projects for fun.

Eventually I'll have to retire and so I always hope some of my side projects will take off to supplement my retirement income.

Why can't a diplomat have a tech-related hobby? Most people outside tech have hobbies that are unrelated to their daily job.

It could be someone who was in tech or was educated (formal or by oneself) on tech but switched to being a diplomat on seeing opportunities to make a better difference with their skills. Depending on the area of work, diplomats could highly benefit in today’s world by understanding tech better. We have allowed tech to dictate policies for too long and playing catch up. So any diplomat who understands tech well would be a great asset to policy makers and decision makers.

>but what does a diplomat do on HN?

Learn things? I'm none of the things you listed, nor do I do anything remotely related to computer sciences, but I still frequent HN.

Tech news with hacker directed filtering.