Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Have Taken Up Farming

dylan.gr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 166 posts

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#111

Post by theturtlemoves »

dejv wrote: post #28

I also taken up farming in 2013 after 10 years of working on startups (as founder and early engineer, with no success at all). I was about to move back to village I was born at and escaped as fast as I could at the age 15. I started natural winery at the ripe time when it first started to be popular and managed to miss the wave. It was a great first year after many years of tech grind in big tech hubs. I was waking u…

How can you afford playing farmer after "no success at all"? Asking for a friend

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#112

Post by [deleted] »

dyauspitr wrote: post #107
exq wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did it. I grow organic market/CSA produce and provide opportunities for special needs individuals on the farm. I go to bed dog-tired, I make a fraction of what I would in software dev these days, but every single day is rewarding, and my resting heart rate is in the high 40s/low 50s without going to the gym. No jira tickets, no sleepless nights slamming caffeine during a sprint, no out of touch execs forcing me to…

Can you compare the actual income between the two?

[deleted]

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#113

Post by thinkingemote »

TrackerFF wrote: post #91

Also, the statement "From a spiritual perspective, there are only two career paths one can take: farmer or artisan. Anything else unavoidably involves doing evil or is essentially meaningless." is just so wrong that it's hard to take rest of the blogpost seriously. Helping people for example is neither farming, nor artisanal, and is quite arguably the least evil and most selfless things one can do. The world needs ca…

Note that the quote was "involves doing evil". This is important and different than a declaration of a career as evil.

The meaningless thing is more of an absolute statement however.

A career can do (and even mostly do) good and sometimes unavoidably do evil.

Likewise a career can be (and even mostly be) meaningful and sometimes unavoidably be meaningless at times!

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#114

Post by qweqweqwe1 »

>I finished reading the Bible. It resonated with me in a way nothing else had before. A mirror was put in front of me and I saw myself clearly for the first time. Finding God, I realized how far I had drifted from the straight and narrow.

ahahahahahahahah

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#115

Post by dejv »

theturtlemoves wrote: post #111
dejv wrote: post #28

I also taken up farming in 2013 after 10 years of working on startups (as founder and early engineer, with no success at all). I was about to move back to village I was born at and escaped as fast as I could at the age 15. I started natural winery at the ripe time when it first started to be popular and managed to miss the wave. It was a great first year after many years of tech grind in big tech hubs. I was waking u…

How can you afford playing farmer after "no success at all"? Asking for a friend

I lived for next to nothing and I had a gig maintaining a system that paid something like 1500 euros a month and it required few hours a month. Did that gig for 12 years, saved me many times when I tried to launch other projects.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#116

Post by nicbou »

Dansvidania wrote: post #41

I wonder about what in the software industry causes so many people to have similar "symptoms" from it. I believe it must be something about dedicating oneself to creating something that "does not exist" in a material sense. My 'farming' has been woodworking: completing the simplest wooden furniture has given me a satisfaction that I do not remember any app or software product ever getting close to causing, despite th…

For me, it's a mix of factors:

- Our work feels very abstract and removed from real people in the real world. Sometimes I did not even understand what our product did, or it got axed after a year. Marx's theory of alienation felt very real.

- We can afford to consider other options. It actually feels achievable. Few people have that luxury.

- Many of us had a relatively easy career start, and underestimate how hard other fields are to get into.

- The material world just feels better. Making digital art does not feel as good as watercolours. Carving wood is a much more complex sensation than drawing in autocad. Even paper books feel better. I can't explain why, it's just how it is.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#117

Post by dwedge »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #104
tock wrote: post #89

Achieve FIRE. Then you can afford to explore different lifestyles without fear. The software industry will always exist if you want to come back.

Sure, waste a decade or two and then live your real life. FIRE is a nice idea, but in the pure sense it is really just the idea of deferring the life you really want to live. You might die before you get there. The fisherman and businessman story come to mind here.

Trouble with the fisherman story is there's a modern version where the businessman comes back with AI and steals your lunch.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#118

Post by tock »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #104
tock wrote: post #89

Achieve FIRE. Then you can afford to explore different lifestyles without fear. The software industry will always exist if you want to come back.

Sure, waste a decade or two and then live your real life. FIRE is a nice idea, but in the pure sense it is really just the idea of deferring the life you really want to live. You might die before you get there. The fisherman and businessman story come to mind here.

1. The life I want to live doesn't involve optimising for a salary. I want to fish for fun. Not fish for a living.

2. High earning SV engineers can easily build a substantial corpus in under 10 years.

3. Most people don't know what they want to do. That means experimenting till you find it.

4. Its the safest way of figuring out and following your dreams I can think of. Of course you may die before 30 but thats statistically less probable. I am optimising for the case where I do live to the median age. Optimising for the worse case scenario seems too pessimistic.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#119

Post by Tade0 »

moron4hire wrote: post #38
Tade0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't read the article, but a quick Ctrl+F confirmed my suspicions. I was raised Roman Catholic and to me it was always a head scratcher why would someone insist on a certain translation which is at least two languages away from the original. It's a whole field of study and there's broad agreement that as language evolves translations need to be updated, otherwise you'd have to become an expert in that old languag…

From the article: > I finished reading the Bible. It resonated with me in a way nothing else had before. Having been raised in a Christian tradition as well, I don't get this. I don't get how you can, as an educated, rational, thinking adult, go from 0 religion to learning about Christianity and saying, "yeah, that sounds plausible." The only reason I stuck to it so long was familial fear mongering and cultural momen…

I was never religious - my mom made an effort to bring me and my siblings to church every Sunday so that at the very least we wouldn't stand out in this deeply conservative environment.

My decisive moment was pretty silly in hindsight, but I stopped going to church after that. I was ten and me and my friend spent the better part of an afternoon after school collecting buckeyes (aka conkers, horse chestnuts). We were headed home with our spoils but when we were passing a church, my friend recalled that there was some kind of holiday that day and he had to attend mass. He gave me everything he had collected and joined the crowd standing there in the cold.

Exodus 20:5

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#120

Post by gaws »

dejv wrote: post #115
theturtlemoves wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you afford playing farmer after "no success at all"? Asking for a friend

I lived for next to nothing and I had a gig maintaining a system that paid something like 1500 euros a month and it required few hours a month. Did that gig for 12 years, saved me many times when I tried to launch other projects.

What system required more than a decade of maintenance? Were you the only person working on it?
Post reply on HN