Ask HN: What topic instantly will spark a great conversation with you? - tboyd47
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jasonkester
Travel.

It's the easiest way to strike up a conversation while on the road. "Where are
you from?" or "How long are you out for?" is all you need, and is a perfectly
acceptable thing to ask anybody you see standing by themselves overseas.
Everybody feels a bit lonely and out-of-place in Bangkok or wherever, so
they're usually happy for a chance to talk.

It works nicely for parties and casual conversations as well. "Got any big
trips lined up?" will generally restart a dying conversation that has already
used up the weather and other boring topics.

Sadly, "conversations among strangers" is a dying art. It used to be that when
you were alone with 10 minutes to kill, the most productive thing you could
find to pass the time was to smoke a cigarette or just stand there thinking.
Now you pull out your phone and try to look busy. It's impolite to interrupt a
busy person on their phone, whereas in certain circumstances it's almost
_polite_ to interrupt a person leaning on a post staring off to space. So my
theory is that fewer people are meeting each other in real life these days.

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open-source-ux
_" What topic..."_

\- The disappointing and rather uninspiring state of programming language
design today.

\- Developer's inexplicable love for complexity and their complete inability
to recognise it.

\- The hypocrisy that's rife throughout the programming profession on so many
topics e.g privacy and online tracking; the pervasive lack of quality, the low
standards.

\- We love to say one thing and practice the complete opposite (while being
completely oblivious to it). Beliefs like striving for simplicity and the
importance of naming things are dutifully acknowledged and agreed by all
developers but make not one iota of difference to the way they code.

\- How the foundation of much modern computing is built with sticking plaster
and quicksand - but most developers couldn't care less.

Shall I continue?

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sarah123ed
Gender bias and 'race' bias.

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ambivalents
Nutrition or exercise (though I wish my discipline towards these things
matched my interest...)

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codegeek
Anything related to building a bootstrapped business. I would love to talk to
founders who have bootstrapped and scaled a company from 0 to say 50 people
and revenue from 0-10M (give or take). I would love to just listen to people
who have done that.

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vkaku
Tax laws.

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dvtrn
Space travel

Edit: Actually just anything involving astronomy

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malux85
Deep Learning. Computational Chemistry. Trump. Metacognition.

But I also love to listen - especially to people who are passionate about
their subject area, whatever that is.

I’d rather be listening to be honest.

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bloodorange
Cats

Motorcycles

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tinktank
why emacs?

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sgillen
Why emacs though?

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darkjedi_emacs
Why for god sake emacs?

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nvusuvu
Baseball

