Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevenjgarner | Hacker News Reader

It surprises me that all 10 jobs still exist, while there are several more recent occupations that no longer exist (albeit they were not that common):

Milkmen, Elevator operator, Switchboard Operator, Ice Cutter, Bowling Pin Setter, Film projectionist, Lamplighter, Leech collector, Alchemist, Bematist, Redsmith, Daguerreotypist, Town crier

View on HN

See also The Lindy Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

The industry is over half a century old by now, barring some absolute catastrophe, it's not going anywhere.

Big solar flare would do it. Probably not worth worrying about though, not much we could do about it.

Solar flare would be awesome for coders. Some huge percentage of enterprise applications no longer have source code (they're just binaries with the code lost to the ages).

All those binaries destroyed with the disks and insufficient disaster recovery would have to be rewritten!

I doubt if many enterprises would survive this level of catastrophe.

Thanks for the link! Hadn't heard of that, although I've seen similar reasoning in other contexts. (Basically, the most reasonable estimate, absent other data, is that you are at the mean -- so, for example, one could reasonably guess that half the people to ever be born have been born at present.)

So some people have 4 testicles?

(assuming I'm average...)

I'm probably missing the point here but yes, in fact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyorchidism

A Rare Case of Polyorchidism: Four Testes: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4747319/

Milkmen 100% exist in the UK. Even though I don't drink actual milk they have a massive range of products they will deliver, so I get fruit juice, various foods and oat milk delivered by my milkman.

Milkmen 100% exist in the US also. Several houses close by have delivery coolers for https://www.smithbrothersfarms.com/ and their trucks appear regularly.

Milkmen, elevator operator, and switchboard operator were extremely common occupations in their heydays, all of which overlapped with my childhood.

I only stopped milkman service here in Palo Alto a couple of years ago (though the dairy downtown shut down maybe 30 years ago). It turned out to be a direct milkman->teenager pipeline which was better than walking to the grocery store twice a day.

Why are you going twice a day? We drink 3 gallons of milk a week, but only go once a week.

I didn’t really go twice a day, what I meant was that a teenager can drink a gallon of milk, eat five square meals, every day and still be thin as a rail.

Given all the other food being bought we didn’t really have to have milk delivered, but milk the doorstep seemed to result in less junk food consumption.

As an empty nester I drink less than half a gallon a week.

Town crier job advert in the U.K. from 6 years ago

https://www.crediton.gov.uk/Portals/0/Downloads/job-vacancie...

Projectionist

https://careers.atg.co.uk/opportunities/job-search/job-detai...

Milkman quite common round here https://shonesmilkandnews.co.uk

Switchboard operator https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/xi/direct_apply/?vac_ref=916883814

Fairly sure elevator operators in Blackpool tower exist and ride in the car with you. Less sure about Eiffel Tower, I do remember one in the car on the Empire State Building. In india of course you can barely get in the elevator because of the operator and his stool.

From your link I ended up in the nationwide Ancient and Honourable Guild of Town Criers http://www.ahgtc.org.uk/

The milkman is alive and well here in Rhode Island. Every other house has one of these on their front porch: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-55YYt59jQqk/TxnrEKJT4BI/AAAAAAAAA...

+1000 for Monroe Dairy.

Nostalgia alone would almost make me a customer. But now I'm so used to milk from their glass bottles that I really notice (and dislike) the taste of milk from plastic.

We had a milkman from a local farm until recently. Highly recommend it. Or if you’re in the Bay Area, Farmstead delivers glass bottle straus milk and picks up the empties.

Alchemist became Chemist. Dageuerreotypist became photographer, which has only recently gone away.

Town crier is now the guy flipping a sign for the new burger joint.

Town crier [1] is now news anchor.

[1]: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/79/2b/89/792b8997970b433b06b10721b...

Been a while. Is that from Rome or Spartacus?

That's from Rome.

Photographers have absolutely not gone away, at least not in the wedding industry.

most of those didn't exist in medieval times either. Is it surprising that most common are also most timeless?

A building I worked in recently finally got rid of its elevator operators (along with a set of frighteningly rickety elevators) about 4 years ago. They must still exist in some places, maybe a few grand old hotels and social clubs.

Milkmen definitely still exist in the UK, and likely other places.

https://www.milkandmore.co.uk/

These guys do doorstop milk deliveries to much of the UK. In our area they comes on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings at around 5:30am.

Milk in old fashioned glass bottles, Welsh cakes, yoghurt... Yummy!

I have a milkman in Seattle in 2021 - works great!

Fresh milk delivery seems like something that could definitely make a comeback though!

Elevator ladies still exists here in Taiwan and Japan.

I would argue that a daguerrotypist is exactly analogous to a modern photographer; and print media is still developed as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com