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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

Why should you learn about sports just so you can participate a conversation of content won't matter in a week? I recommend a different approach: Have a conversation about something constructive that your peers might not know about. "Did you read gwern's article about spaced repetition?"[1] "I played around with WebRTC last week and got video chat working. I found a lot of bugs in Chrome and Firefox..." "Have you ever wondered how async.js avoids exploding the stack if you give it synchronous functions?"[2] Etc.

This can enrich your peers as well as yourself. Heck, they might even follow your lead and do more interesting things in their spare time.

1. http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition

2. Actually, it looks like sync detection was reverted a few months ago. It was initially added in https://github.com/caolan/async/commit/6ad64aca4c04857086f03...

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Not everyone works in a San Francisco-based start up that employees 90% technical folks. Perhaps people are just interested in a low-effort conversation item so they can interact with co-workers, neighbors, and a different social circle? Some engineers like the fact that they can enjoy fantasy sports for the nerdy, statistics aspect and still be involved with something enjoyed by "normal" people.

Not everything in life has to be about programming. And caring about sports does not preclude you from having technical discussions either.

I gave programming examples because of the HN crowd here. In my own life, it varies quite a bit. In the past week, topics have included:

* Fluorescence. (At a cocktail bar full of blacklights. Any cocktail containing tonic glowed due to the quinine.)

* Comparing the stories of Alistair Reynolds and Lawrence Watt-Evans. Their fans seem to overlap quite a bit, even though their genres are different.

* Beard growth. Why most militaries don't let soldiers grow beards. (Beards prevent gas masks from sealing well.) How fast beards grow. (About 5 nanometers per second, hence the beard-second as a unit of measure[1].)

* Noticing that dentists can replace teeth, but doctors can do little for chronic back pain.

* Laser interferometer microphones.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measu...

Aside from some topic selection issues, you might want to consider passive vs active topics. Can't do any activity while awake that's more passive than watching TV, almost anything else is more active.

I'm not too interested that a coworker watched someone else exercise on TV. On the other hand, start talking about experiences on local medium distance hiking trails, and I start listening...

Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, and Muhammad Ali might take exception with your "won't matter in a week" assertion.

You may already be aware of this, but if you're not, it's something you eventually need to hear, so I'm going to tell you now. Not everyone wants to talk about tech stuff all the time. As someone who does, I feel your impulse, but it is not going to be good for your reputation as a conversation partner if you do this.

> Why should you learn about sports just so you can participate a conversation of content won't matter in a week?

Hell why stop at sports? Let's just ignore current events that will be forgotten in a week!

I agree. It's amazing how productive you can be when you eliminate distractions: http://abughrai.be/pics/github_streak.png

I'm not sure GitHub commit frequency is an accurate indicator of productivity.

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