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Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

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431–440 of 585 posts

Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#431

The church is like a second family for me. I made so many great friends there! Of course it will not be for everyone, but if you are open to it you can try.

I’m not religious at all, rather agnostic, but my wife is a nonpracticing Christian. (Although I find a good sermon/pastor to be motivating, thought provoking, and just full of basic life lessons that happen to he documented in an old book). I’m fine with the concept of the right church because of the community effects especially as a parent and wanting my kid to have as many positive role models as possible in his l…

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Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you a direct question, and I hope you'll respond directly. Lets say all of those "transfusion alternatives" demonstrably fail, and someone has two choices left: Transfuse or Die; you might phrase that as "Transfuse or Pray", but either way... ...What then? When all other options are exhausted, the prayers aren't working, and your last chance to live involves transfusions, are they permissible?

They aren't. That's where a strong future hope comes in, and the desire to follow God's laws over all else. That doesn't make it easy, but if one truly believes something, shouldn't they be be willing to make sacrifices for it? People don't think twice about giving their life for their country, so why would somebody be any less convicted?

Travolta lost millions of dollars on Battlefield Earth. That's commitment!

Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#433
Skydiving. Nice hobby, lots of people to hang out with, go eat together after. Plenty of time to talk between loads. After a while you end up having friends all over the world, and you are welcome at a dropzone anywhere. There are quite a few different disciplines within the sport, from high speed to low speed both in freefall and under canopy. There's always something new to learn or practice and people to do it with. There are events organized all over the place, often around holidays, where people gather to jump.

Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#434

Always had a thing for radio control, so eventually in 2015 or so I had a look online and discovered crawlers (1:10 scale replicas of 4x4/AWD/rock crawlers). There are quite a number available to purchase in ready to run form, and self-build kits. Lost interest in the geeky side of mechanics and electronics - they're neccessary to buy, or make a body. Jeeps, Land Rovers and Toyotas seem to be favourites. The thing I…

Woah. I was expecting something like my traxxas but this is way more, nice work!!

Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#435

My neighborhood. When we moved in we sat out front every evening, and made small talk with every single person who walked by. Some were caught off guard, some kinda just waved and moved on, but most stopped to talk. What's interesting is that people who had lived in that neighborhood nearly 20 years together had never talked, and met for the first time as both stopped to chat at nearly the same time. Then we started…

awesome.

reminds me of The Balcony Movie (saw on Mubi).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e58xwcNzjb0

...and, this is kind of the idea behind this -- for apartment-dwellers.

https://myapartmentfamily.com/

Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#436
I see a lot of people recommending specific forms of dance. I’m gonna be a bit more broad and say “social dancing” overall. Specific dance recommendations can lead people to give up quickly when running into base issues.

Swing dancing will most likely appeal to the typical HN reader but there are a variety of dances out there. Dances like salsa and bachata are vastly larger than most other social dances but they have no appeal to me. (Machismo, Latin culture, somewhat exclusionary as a whole, not much actual socializing) Same for Argentine Tango. (Old people mostly, very snobby, tends to be expensive, feels like the nimby wine snobs dance due to the typical goer) There’s lots of other dances - not gonna bother describing each. But my point is - each has a distinct culture and community (or lack thereof) associated with them. If one doesn’t hit your fancy - I’d recommend exploring others. It might not be that dancing ain’t your thing - it might be that particular dance ain’t your thing.

Social dance overall is quite popular with the white collar crowd and especially so with people in tech. That is - it’s popular with the men. There’s more variance on the other side. Don’t expect to meet your future wife at a social dance either - the ratios are quite lopsided when it comes to single men:women. It’s usually relatively even men:women but it’s heavily single men and many women in relationships. Many women go purely for the love of dance (and attention) but very few men go for purely the love of the dance.

Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#437
I mostly haven't. Work has brought me all of the best friends in my life, including multiple of my long term committed relationships and current wife. I don't particularly enjoy this, I've just never really been able to figure anything else. I started programming at 11 and it's been my biggest hobby and passion for a very long time.

Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#438
post #64

Reading the comments, I notice a lot of posters seek out tech communities. While I get why a nerd would want to do that, I have a different tendency. Most of my outside-of-work activities are actually not tech related. Sure, I have a bunch of private projects to work on, but I usually do that in single player mode. I picked up a number of "also working in tech" friends over time, and going out with them is still fun…

leaving SF was a godsend. I was tired of everyone being in tech and it's nice interacting with people that are actually diverse and don't all work in the same industry and have the same mindsets.

That's the saddest part about people who moved to SF for tech. They moved here, interacted with their coworkers, who are tech workers, they found roommates through their company, so their roommates are also tech workers, and so all their friends are also tech workers, all the people at parties they go to are tech workers. So it's no surprise all they know of San Francisco is tech. There's more to San Francisco than tech, but if that's all someone ever sees of the city, it's no wonder they drew those conclusions!

Just like I'm glad the people who hated the city left because Covid finally gave them an excuse, I'm also glad the people that failed to see the beautiful wonderful city underneath the moneied veneer of tech are gone as well. It saddens me that the two cities didn't mange to meet and melt in America's mixing pot, but, ah, that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Re: Ask HN: Where have you found community outside of work?

#439
For me I actually moved from Seattle, WA back near family by the beach picking up surfing and enjoying old and new friends for a bit. Church helps a lot for sure, and because I grew up here I have connections to people all over town which helps so different than Seattle, where there was tonnes of churn through covid both in the groups and the people who lived there.

It's something I think about quite a bit in wanting to potentially move to SF/SV or Austin, TX and get back closer to the kinda work I was more interested in on the American side of tech.

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