You probably misunderstand XML - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2010/11/17/you-probably-misunderstand-xml/ <comment><USER2> The contention that XML's core use is for semi-structured data is misleading and, as far as I can tell, an effort to revive XML usage through re-branding. But nobody is seriously suggesting the whole idea behind XML has failed, so I don't think there is any need to come to its defense in the first place. Afterall, the idea behind it gave birth to the data format behind _the entire web_ as we know it today. As the article mentions, there are lots of cool data formats out there, based on XML, like SVG and RSS or Atom.

Those examples do, however, have something in common which is very telling: they are simple formats that can be handled in a text editor and can be interpreted easily. (Sure SVG files tend to get huge, but they're not really complex.) These areas are not where XML has failed. It failed to get traction because of scenarios where big "tools" vendors made it their personal mission to deliver bloated datasets for bloated enterprise applications in an effort to sell unnecessary software, supported by a legion of consultants who made a lot of money trying (and often failing) to make this mutant juggernaut work as intended. Much like Enterprise Java, contact with these wasteful projects scarred reasonable developers for life who desperately wanted to get their stuff working with as little fuss as possible. The result after these experiences was that almost no productive developer wanted to touch this stuff if he had a choice.

(I say "productive developer" here to distinguish, somewhat simplistically, people who just want to get their stuff done in as little time as possible from corporate devs who have little stake in the success of their projects and who get paid monthly for sitting at their desks regardless of the eventual outcome, as long as they keep looking really busy when it's time for their performance review where the total number of lines coded is still considered a valid benchmark.)

So, no, I don't think XML is misunderstood. We appreciate it, and it still is valuable in areas where JSON will never be the right choice. At the same time, polemically declaring JSON as a simple key-value format one step above the flat file is frankly disingenuous. JSON can (and often does in practice) contain the same hierarchical data representation as XML.</comment>


RIPE NCC explains YouTube hijack - <AUTHOR> http://www.ripe.net/news/study-youtube-hijacking.html

<comment><AUTHOR> For those of you wanting to understand what BGP actually is, I recommend an introduction to BGP by Geoff Huston [1]

[1] <http://cidr-report.org/ispcol/2006-05/bgp.html></comment>


Speed memory access by arranging data to take advantage of CPU caching - <AUTHOR> http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/data-locality.html#11 <comment><USER2> I've recently been using [http://halide-lang.org/](http://halide-lang.org/), a language designed to separate the specification of an algorithm from the order of the computations and the layout of the data in memory. It allows you to first get an algorithm working and then quickly try a huge number of permutations of the options for data layout, parallelism, and vectorization. You can get incredible speedups vs. a naive series of C for loops.

<comment><USER3> That looks pretty sweet, thanks for the link.

This is where I feel functional languages will have a huge advantage in coming years. As side effects are reified and put in the compiler's control, they can be modified and optimized automatically.

While TFA is interesting, and a pretty good overview of designing programs with the cache in mind, it just shows me how far we have to go in language design. I don't want to manually make all of these modifications, let alone carefully profile each permutation of all the possible choices. We have fast, dumb computers, let them do that work.

<comment><USER4> Sure, this is the myth of the sufficiently smart compiler [1]. The problem is that such compilers generate fast code until you hit an edge case and then suddenly they're slow. Today, JavaScript is the canonical example; you never know how fast code will run without benchmarking, and it changes with each browser release. Or take SQL for another extreme example, where performance depends on the index you hit and the query plan the database comes up with.

To counter this, people invent things like the asm.js specification, which tells you exactly what you need to do to make JavaScript fast, and then we're programming in assembly again. (Or perhaps C++.)

So there is still plenty of room for languages that aim for predictable performance. I believe this is where Go and Rust are headed.

[1] [http://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/40.html)

<comment><USER5> Actually the problem is that compilers have dropped the ball on optimizing data representation. They generally don't even try.

Some faint glimpses of light can be seen, like compressed references in HotSpot or this Halide.

Rust and Go have nothing planned in this area.

<comment><USER6> Not go or rust, but I'm curious, in ocaml or haskell, I imagine it is not easy to change data representation without refactorings, because of the widespread pattern matching? e.g. in ocaml: let (x,y) = point;;

<comment><USER7> That's one of the reasons why record types are recommended instead of tuples. They don't cost anything at runtime but make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you are interested in seeing specific data on the effect caching has on memory bandwidth, you might want to check out this paper I wrote back in 2011[1].

Some of my findings:

\- Effective bandwidth is approximately 6x greater for data that fits in L1, 4.3x greater if it fits in L2, and 2.9x greater if it fits in L3.

\- Contention for shared L3 cache can limit the speedup you get from parallelization. For instance, running two threads for a data set that fits in L3 results in a speedup of only 1.75x, rather than 2x. Four threads on one four-core processor results in a speedup of only 2x vs the single-threaded program.

\- It takes relatively few operations for programs to become compute-bound rather than memory bound. If 8 or more "add" operations were performed per data access, we found that the effects of caching disappeared almost completely, and the program's execution was limited by processor rather than the memory bottleneck.

The specific magnitude of these results is machine-dependent, but I would expect the general relationships to hold for other machines with a similar cache hierarchy.

[1] [http://www.stoneridgetechnology.com/uploads/file/ComputevsMe...](http://www.stoneridgetechnology.com/uploads/file/ComputevsMemory.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> First I heard of this sort of thing was from DICE's presentation on "Data Oriented Design" [http://dice.se/publications/introduction-to-data-oriented- de...](http://dice.se/publications/introduction-to-data-oriented-design/)

I think they'd differ from the author here that this isn't an optimization to go to when performance starts to suffer, but a design that you have to start using from the beginning, because it's a big change to refactor everything to this style.

<comment><USER10> There was also a talk on this from Mike Action (Engine Director at Insomniac) at GDC this year. He echoed the same sentiment that cache misses are the main source of performance problems in software. I only partially agree, as network calls are several orders of magnitude slower, and in many services that's actually your bottle neck, not the cache misses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The best cache-aware programming lesson I ever received was in the CS61C course at Berkeley -- building a cache-blocking algorithm to run a matrix multiplication function using the cache as efficiently as possible. We unrolled loops so that the size of each iteration was exactly the size of one cache block, and saw instantly the increase in FLOpS.

Then we did some OpenMP parallelization. That was cool.

Nice post!

<comment><USER12> I had a similar project in a programming for performance class at UT Austin. We had access to TACC supercomputers and were tasked with finding the CPU's L1 cache size via trial and error. We were testing it by using matrix multiplication and measuring performance output, and changing the chunk sizes accordingly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Martin Thompson has a blog and a series of talks on "Mechanical Sympathy" \-- being in tune with the machine to extract performance, like a race car driver.

"How to get 100K TPS with 1ms latency": [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/LMAX](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/LMAX)

Blog: [http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.in](http://mechanical- sympathy.blogspot.in)

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're interested in this type of thing, I highly recommend "Code Optimization: Effective Memory Usage" by Kris Kaspersky:

[http://www.amazon.com/Code-Optimization-Effective-Memory- Usa...](http://www.amazon.com/Code-Optimization-Effective-Memory- Usage/dp/1931769249/)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a very good article on the topic.

I hope universities start to catch up and build this, along with distributed systems computing and networking, into their core curriculum.

Mix multi-threaded programming with cache effects and there is a whole new world of side effects and un-expected results. There is a side-note in the article about it, but I think that deserve a whole article on it too!

It is interesting that this kind of plays a bit in the favor of functional languages. They are often data centric more than code centric. As in your lay out your data then pass it to your functions as opposed to thinking about the layout of the functionality as different objects that just happen to encapsulate data (so this separates and breaks down the data).

<comment><USER16> I studied this at university in 1996. I hope university courses haven't "forgotten" this sort of thing since then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those on GNU/Linux who want to know about the CPU caches on their machine the "lscpu" gives more detailed cache info than /proc/cpuinfo.

I got curious about how lscpu was determining L1 Data and L1 Instruction caches. So I had a look at the source code of lscpu and found that it was looking in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu _/ cache/ and /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu_/topology/

This lead me to "Memory part 4: NUMA support" [http://lwn.net/Articles/254445/](http://lwn.net/Articles/254445/)

Pretty interesting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER18> So this is all cool, and it's incredibly nifty to have the hardware insight while writing software. But these optimizations (loop tiling, loop fusion, etc) could (and, to my knowledge, ARE) part of basic gcc and java compilers. Why are they not more commonly used? Why do we have to specifically provide a flag to say "Hey btw I almost forgot, make my program 50 times faster."

I'm slightly in the dark as to why loop optimizations are not part of the default compile process.

<comment><USER19> Optimization takes serious amounts of time - it's generally a combinatorial problem. If you are not building for production release, do you want to sit for 5 minutes (or 5 hours for a big system) while the compiler cranks away optimizing code that you are just going to rebuild in 20 minutes anyway? Plus, it just doesn't matter for a lot of production code. Finally, if the code is not in a hot path, it really doesn't matter if it is optimized or not. If you make a block of code 10x faster, but some other loop costs you 50% of the performance time, well, you really gained almost nothing. So, heavy optimization tends to be something that you turn on selectively and judiciously.

<comment><USER18> That's a good point. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Alignment is another key the author forgot to mention. Cache aligning data is seriously important, even if it means padding stuff like crazy. Caches are pretty big, but having to load two different cache lines and do some bit trickery is a real killer.

Also, if you really want performance, go parallel. Cilk is amazing and there are forks of both gcc and clang with cilk. Cilk is seriously awesome.

<comment><USER21> Of course that doesn't apply to games anymore but to high performance computing. Systems for gaming vary too much for that to be of any importance. Maybe if you are doing it for the consoles, but then you have to optimize each individually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are some interesting implications on databases in terms of column-stores vs row-stores due to CPU caching. Besides the I/O improvements, column-stores benefit greatly from better CPU usage because the data is iterated over by type (column by column), so the same operators stay in the cache. This allows data to be pipelined in to the CPU and processed very quickly relative to traditional row-stores. It can even be efficient to operate on compressed data [1] if the relevant decoding data can be kept in the cache.

In case you missed it, there was a relevant article last week about how B-Trees benefit by reducing the number of cache requests.

[1]. [http://db.lcs.mit.edu/projects/cstore/abadisigmod06.pdf](http://db.lcs.mit.edu/projects/cstore/abadisigmod06.pdf)

[2]. [http://www.me.net.nz/blog/btrees-are-the-new- black/](http://www.me.net.nz/blog/btrees-are-the-new-black/)

<comment><USER5> Yes, array-of-structs -> struct-of-arrays is a well known manual optimization pattern. Compilers sadly don't do it, except to cheat on SPECint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was curious about this as I have never done any such testing, so I wrote a simple c program.

The object was a struct with a size of a typical game object( 100B ), then I trashed the memory by doing a lot of malloc/free using the size of the object. The two tests were one with an array of objects( contiguous array ) and the other an array of pointers to objects which were allocated separately. Then I iterated over the object doing some very simple operation( just enough to access it, and identical for each object ) and timed this. And of course I trashed the memory some more for each time.

The time taken ratio is:

array of objects : array of pointers to objects

1 : 1.189

The second test is identical except I made some extra effort to make sure that every object in array of pointers was not adjacent to any previous one in memory:

array of objects : array of pointers to objects

1 : 2.483

The difference got much smaller once the operation on each object became more time consuming.

</comment><comment><USER23> There is also the topic of Cache Oblivious data structures. Sadly, I'm still trying to figure that one out but it looks like it could help. Both with the memory and cache access time disparities and it is claimed that also with the memory to disk disparities.

If someone knows of an easier to digest explanation than the proof-laden academic articles I'd appreciate a pointer :-)

</comment><comment><USER24> [http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661) A talk by Herb Sutter about cache, ram prefetcher, locality/contiguous allocation. Very simple and informative.

</comment><comment><USER25> Author should mention growing cache size.

<comment><USER26> can you give a hint? i think i understand the article (well, i haven't read it, but i sometimes need to tailor code to work better with the cache on a cpu), but i don't know what you're referring to.

<comment><USER25> Memory speed vs cpu speed doesn't include caching technologies.

[http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/images/data-locality- char...](http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/images/data-locality-chart.png)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone successfully been able to completely quit using Google? - <AUTHOR> And if so, how? <comment><USER2> No, because one is still forced to use some of their products by others: captcha, mailing gmail addresses, ads and tracking even in iOS apps, tracking on most websites (which can usually be blocked). Youtube is unfortunate, because many obscure things are only available on it, but it's not an essential service.

FIY if you're in the US they're also buying access to your CC purchase info.

<comment><USER3> Regarding YT, my solution is youtube-dl. Which is also a massive improvement on the service itself; cross-platform, choosing of format and resolution, keeping the media file and not being at the whim of an internet connection, work around tracking and intrusive / malicious advertising, etc.

[https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/index.html](https://ytdl- org.github.io/youtube-dl/index.html)

<comment><USER4> On Android, I recommend NewPipe. Available from F-Droid repo.

<comment><USER5> Is it actually working for you ? I installed it and it cant play videos and crashes with an error.

<comment><USER6> yes sometime it has a bug and wont work for a while. just wait until an update. had this multiple occasions, still wont give up on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> another-dave It's a work in progress for me.

Flashed my Android phone with Lineage OS without any Google Play Services — _most_ apps work OK, though have some teething issues (some probably based on my config). Find any google things I still need I can use the web version for.

* some apps crash on start-up, even though you'd expect them not to be using Play services. Others (e.g. Monzo) work fine but I no longer get push notifications.

* some e.g. (Citymapper) work really well apart from the Maps integration, which is fair. Would love if devs could provide a fallback to link out to another maps providing app for directions but know it's not financially viable.

 _Maps.me wrapper around OpenStreetMaps is a really nice replacement for GMaps — like that I can correct things on it too. Only issue is that address lookup is slow & house number level info is a bit lacking. In London though, street level is good.

Moving cloud stuff is slower going — Have mail forwarding to Protonmail & will start to put an auto-reply on emails asking people to use new address directly. One thing I'll miss with GMail is the "send as" feature for other email accounts — use it a lot for things that are jointly between me & my wife. Also wish I'd have used a custom domain before switching so that I could swap vendors later more easily.

_ Need to pull photos & docs and create a backup somewhere. Not sure what vendor I should use for that.

<comment><USER7> Have you been able to get Waze to work without gapps?

<comment> another-dave Sorry, late getting back to this! I haven't tried Waze at all. I'm not driving, so was looking for something that'd work for walking directions so went with Maps.me instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes. As far as I can tell. Google lost me the day they shut down Reader. There are plenty of alternatives as long as you're not forced by your job or a particular client into using their services.

One thing I'd still like to achieve is to find a permanent solution for avoiding communication with people who use Gmail. Strong-arming them into a new e-mail service is a non-starter.

<comment><USER8> I'm surprised nobody has built a better email client by now. Gmail, as an enterprise solution, is quite expensive. I'd rather use any other service.

An email service bundled with a calendar or to do list functionality could potentially be a billion dollae company.

<comment><USER9> There's a lot of very good email providers out there, many of which would please the HN crowd requirements. Are you talking about a pure email _client_, ie where emails are stored elsewhere? Where's the business in that ?

<comment><USER3> The issue is not whether there is an alternative or not. The issue is convincing someone who uses Gmail to stop using it, and change to another service.

<comment><USER10> The exercise is pointless, the equivalent to arguing about the most private pen for sending postcards.

<comment><USER3> More like two people having a conversation in the street, except one of them is screaming every word and you're just asking to please tone it down a bit, which is too much to ask for that person.

<comment><USER10> In that scenario, the quiet guy doesn't realize that there is a cable guy standing behind him listening as well.

<comment><USER3> Mail is not that private, that is not the point being argued, and why I offered the street conversation example. From the moment you communicate with someone else, you've lost control over the information.

But there's a huge difference between that, and having every word you write plus all the info that can be inferred from that, recorded, stored forever, analyzed and re-analyzed, sold, exploited, misused, etc, by a hostile unscrupulous advertising company or its partners.

<comment><USER10> IMO, you're probably better off with Google or to a lesser extent Microsoft, as their model is about selling ads based on your information, and hoarding your data for competitive advantage.

I assume that your cellular carrier and cable company are monetizing any bit of data they can capture and selling it for pennies to all sorts of parties.

<comment><USER3> There's a reasonable compromise to be found to live in a modern digital society. Otherwise, just move to a deserted tiny isolated island in the Pacific. One with a bit of higher ground. Climate change, et al.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, I've been without using Google Search for more than 2 years. I'm using DuckDuckGo, and honestly very satisfied with it (I particularly enjoy using `!` shortcuts, like !w or !d).

Also have stopped using: Maps, Docs, GMail, and other small services. Google domains and subdomains are blocked in my /etc/hosts file.

The one exception is YouTube. It's hard to replace that one, although I sometimes consume it through HookTube or even DuckDuckGo.

The other half-exception is Android, although I have rooted it, removed Google Play Services and Google apps, and also blocked Google domains in /etc/hosts. I don't know if that counts as "quitting Google", but I feel like it does.

And occasionally, it's impossible to avoid Recaptcha, so I have to sometimes unblock Recaptcha domains in /etc/hosts, pass their obnoxious test, then reblock it.

Honestly, it's much easier to quit Google services than it is to quit Facebook services. The latter has network effects and social pressure, while the former is just a well built free service monetized through surveillance capitalism. Note: I have also quit using any Facebook services.

<comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19366710](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19366710)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm running LineageOS + MicroG on mobile, Firefox with DuckDuckGo as default search (both mobile and desktop). My Firefox on desktop has heavy tracking and JS blocking. Temporarily whitelisting every domain in NoScript is a bit annoying, but I can live with that.

But the Google services are just good, I often fall back to them if the alternative doesn't keep up:

\- For some searches the result quality on DuckDuckGo isn't want I expect, but Google has exactly what I want on the first page (still I try DuckDuckGo first, it's good for most queries).

\- Google Maps is difficult: I've tried using OSMAnd+, but more than once I ended up at the wrong place and had to use the mobile Google Maps website to find my destination. When plotting routes on desktop I still use it as default (after richjdsmith's comment I might try Here Maps).

On mobile I have the Google Play store installed to get e.g. WhatsApp, Spotify and a few other apps. I know there are other options, but those didn't work well for me.

And of course what blub said: Sometimes there is no other option, e.g. when forced to do a captcha.

<comment> Engineering-MD For search, use the !s band on duck duck go. It redirects to start page which uses google search but without google tracking you. I often start with ddg, and the. Use start page if necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> you can.. It's an adjustment.

I have my own website, to which I run a mail server. It's a bit of work, but worth it, unless you aren't familiar with sysadmin or Linux, you can check out proton mail or several others out there. You won't get all the fun stuff, like Google adding things automatically to your calendar or trying to give replies for you to emails it might know better. You also miss out on ads from anything you've recently searched or said something in an email and strangely you get ads for similar products now.

Use davical for contacts and calendar.

my android phone, I only use Fdroid or yalp anonymous for apps. I do have a generic account on an older phone I develop on that if there is something I want to purchase I buy, then transfer the apk to my actual phone. You'll find pretty quickly which devs hate you as they enforce play services.

Checking all the things, you'll find can be done over browser, though more and more sites are pushing to force compliance & use their app.

You'll find that it can become (and has been intentionally I'm sure) pretty painful outside their apps, so might spend less time doing those things. Be prepared, you might get more productive or maybe You'll take up a bad habit like smoking

</comment><comment><USER14> I switched away from Gmail to Protonmail. Docs I replaced with LibreOffice + git and Latex for Letters. That's so much more convenient because it works offline and I have far more import and export options. Where I can use Latex, I can use anything as a template and it's diffable. Oh and I use Perkeep as well, that's probably the actual replacement for Drive. Search I replaced with DDG. Also I'm using Apple CalendarServer which integrates with anything, so even when I switch phone OS, my appointments remain. I came to appreciate how great the support for iCal and ics files is.

With the exception of my underpowered Laptop - which I'm going to replace soon - I prefer to use Firefox.

The only thing left apart from that is my Phone where I have OxygenOS with the Play Store but as soon as LineageOS is supported, I'll switch over.

Admittedly the process took a long time but so did the switch to the Google Platform - or any other platform switch I did in the past like switching from Windows to Linux or from Linux to macOS.

I'm really happy that my new tools also integrate far better with many native tools.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been Google-free for about a year now. Already posted my "clean" setup in another thread[0]:

1\. Replaced my Google G-Suite with Proton Mail and a self hosted Nextcloud The process was fairly easy: Just export all your mails and import them into Proton Mail. After that I've exported Google Drive data, contacts and calendar and imported everything into Nextcloud. This all took around two hours (including the Nextcloud setup).

The only "issue" was dealing with services where I use my G-Suite account as a login, but most of them allowed you to set a password so you can log in with email.

Nextcloud has amazing one click install apps that offer the same features that Google has (video calls, docs, notes etc.).

2\. Removing Google from my Android phone For that I flashed LineageOS for microG. The great thing with this is, that you can install and use all apps you normally have but without having Google Services installed. As a PlayStore alternative you can use F-Droid and Yalp Store. Anyone who installed a custom ROM before will have it running in under an hour.

3\. Securing my network with a PI-Hole and Proton VPN For devices like my phone, laptop and desktop I installed Proton VPN. As a browser for mobile and desktop I use Firefox with uBlock origin. For everything else (like "smart" devices etc.) I installed a Pi-Hole (basically Easy-List on network level) to remove ads and tracking scripts.

These were only the major steps that I've taken. So far I don't have any regrets about it and I haven't faced any limitations with the alternatives I use now.

Links: [https://protonmail.com/](https://protonmail.com/) [https://nextcloud.com/](https://nextcloud.com/) [https://lineage.microg.org/](https://lineage.microg.org/) [https://protonvpn.com/](https://protonvpn.com/)

Additionally I've setup a self hosted searx[1] instance as a google search replacement.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17283889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17283889) [1]: [https://searx.me/](https://searx.me/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I already made the switch to Firefox and DuckDuckGo. I still got to stop using Youtube and either root my android and get rid of all google apps or replace my Pixel 2 with (never thought it would come to this) an iphone, which as it stands I don't trust them much more with handling my data either.

There's also my gmail which will probably be the longest transition changing all my accounts emails.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have done this.

1\. Migrated all mail, contacts, calendar to Fastmail. Runbox is another good option. Email is custom domain. 2\. For my cellphone, I use Blackberry Classic running BB10.3 (No Android or iOS) 3\. Removed all services from Google login and deleted the acct. I never logged back in. 4\. My Browsers are "Brave" and "Firefox". 5\. Email client is via Blackberry Hub. For desktop, its through Brave browser. I don't need a standalone email client. 6\. Search is DuckDuckGo. Been using them for three years now. 7\. Youtube is done through mobile Blackberry browser and/or NewPipe on Blackberry mobile. 8\. OpenStreetMaps and Blackberry Maps is used.

Its been a great experience so far. Less clutter on my mind with services and products.

</comment><comment><USER18> Have rarely used google outside the search engine. Moved to DDG primarily several years ago.

Have a tablet to watch Netflix on, uses a dummy goog account with no info given, and most apps uninstalled. I've bought a Play card at the grocery a few times, not often. Try to avoid Youtube and use youtube-dl, but not entirely successful. The commercials have made it easier. Apple maps and _downloadable_ maps.me offline. Perhaps ~90% g-free.

I do remember around 5-10 years ago there were a lot of folks that believed everyone was on gmail and incredulous if anyone mentioned they weren't. Found that odd as someone who's had a domain and multi-account email since the mid 90's, years before goog even existed.

Thankfully those comments have given way to this sort of post.

<comment> m-p-3 For YouTube, I use NewPipe[1]. It works well and include the ability to easily download audio and play in the background.

[1]: [https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/releases](https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/releases)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yep, it turned out for me the slow transition was best. Over the course of a year anytime I register anything new, I just didn't use my gmail, and would just check both. Eventually I just wasn't checking gmail.

Google -> DuckDuckGo

Gmail -> Protonmail

Chrome -> Firefox

Google Maps -> Paper Maps

The hardest part I could see, would be for someone younger who didn't use search engines before they parsed plain phrases getting used to thinking in terms of keyword blocks, or learning to orient themselves in place by reading a map.

That said, it's fully possible. I found it to actually be more of a process of changing behavior, like say, quitting smoking, than simply substituting services.

</comment><comment><USER20> It depends on what you mean by "completely quit"; in a practical sense, yes, but not in a comprehensive philosophical sense. I never used Gmail anyway, so it was just a matter of switching to Duckduckgo for search and Bing for maps. I use Android phones, but I never link them to any Google account credentials and I don't use the Google app store, and generally I disable all the Google apps since they constantly nag you to log in. I have Chrome on my Mac at home, but I only use it for checking Facebook; for all my real browsing I use Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://switching.social](https://switching.social) has some recommendations for those wanting to leave google and other large tech companies that have become pervasive.

</comment><comment><USER22> Apart from Google Maps I do not use any google anymore.

I have an Android phone (Mi A1) with Micro G running lineage OS and don't use gmail (I use protonmail with a custom domain). Instead of Google Search I use duckduckgo. Very rarely, at work, I will use Google for some niche search. By blocking cookies and using uBlock origin I try to limit my exposure to Google analytics.

</comment><comment><USER23> I use Firefox on laptop, Brave on mobile. DDG for search. Outlook for email (and have started trying Protonmail).

Android is the biggest obstacle. The other option is iPhone which is too expensive (I personally don't see any point in buying a mobile which costs more than 250 USD). Too bad WIndows OS and Blackberry died. Google map is also hard to give up.

<comment><USER24> Try flashing LineageOS on your phone. That should solve the Android issue. You can also choose not to use Google Apps after doing so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nope. Tried everything to replace maps on Android, countless times and nothing comes close when I'm trying to find a place.

Same goes for dialer, contacts and calendar android apps. Every other app was either buggy or didn't see the davdroid syncs.

Everything else, I could. Radicale for cal/carddav, self hosted email, k9 mail app, etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> Here is a list of alternatives to all Google products: [https://restoreprivacy.com/google- alternatives/](https://restoreprivacy.com/google-alternatives/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I tried and I'm basically Google-free except for...

google.com

I tried DDG and co very hard but Google search really is that much better

( well I also use Google Drive for Business but I can switch and all my data is encrypted )

<comment><USER28> You should try Searx which is able to proxy Google Search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nope, Google Maps is sticky. I've tried alternatives and just haven't had any luck. OsmAnd (Open Street Maps on Android) is good for plenty, but not driving.

<comment><USER30> The closest I've found is Here Maps. The navigation and driving instructions work fine (at least in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany), but the POI search sucks. In Google Maps I simply enter the name of the place I want to go and hit directions. With Here Maps I more often than not first have to use Google to find the address of the place I'm going and then enter that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There are a surprising number of apps that use Firebase which is a Google product. Very few of those apps disclose Firbase in their ad listings.

firebase.google.com

</comment><comment><USER32> For search needs you can try www.startpage.com ..just found it recently and the search is fantastic.

<comment><USER33> "StartPage uses results from Google"

[https://hackernoon.com/untraceable-search-engines- alternativ...](https://hackernoon.com/untraceable-search-engines-alternatives- to-google-811b09d5a873)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> No, but there's a lot to be said for knocking down the easy 90-95% of it...

</comment><comment><USER35> I use duckduckgo and protonmail. Works fine for me.

</comment><comment><USER36> You can always move to China</comment>


We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor - <AUTHOR> http://sciencenordic.com/we-should-only-work-25-hours-week-argues-professor <comment><USER2> In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption. The cost of living hasn't meaningfully increased, we've just continually redefined luxuries as necessities.

My grandparents are perfectly typical working-class people. They grew up in cramped, damp houses with no central heating or indoor plumbing. They ate mainly seasonal vegetables, considered a chicken or roast of meat a rare treat and often went to bed hungry. They bought new clothes or furniture only when their old ones were beyond repair. They aspired to owning a bicycle, not a car. The only people they knew who had been abroad had done so while in uniform. They didn't regard themselves as materially deprived, because that was the only lifestyle they knew.

As much as we might deny being materialistic, the naked truth is that what we consider to be a basic comfortable lifestyle today was, within living memory, unattainable luxury. We continue to work 40 hour weeks because we have adjusted our expectations to our income. We overwhelmingly choose to work the greatest number of hours we can sustainably tolerate (somewhere between 40 and 60 hours for most people), in order to maximise our spending power.

The recent kerfuffle over "The 1%" is illustrative of this phenomenon. There was widespread mockery of people earning 500k who regarded themselves as just making ends meet. In a very real sense, we are all a part of that laughably oblivious 1%. The lifestyles we consider just about tolerable are, by any historical or global standard, utter luxury. Almost everyone who has ever lived (and almost everyone living today) would consider themselves lucky to have the spending power of an American on minimum wage.

<comment><USER3> >In the 1950s, there was the great promise of "the leisure society" - a future of such material abundance that most people would hardly need to work. That society became possible, but we systematically rejected it in favour of more consumption.

I'm not convinced this is true: there are also intense coordination costs and learning costs. Two programmers working 20 hours a week, for example, are way less productive than one programmer working 40 hours a week. And the one programmer will learn faster because she's putting in an extra 20 hours a week.

That's true in virtually all knowledge / creative / intellectual professions.

If people are simply executing a set of tasks, maybe working 20 hours a week can make sense, but those jobs are basically commodities, and commodity jobs are a) highly competitive, b) not that remunerative, and c) because of a and b, not that much fun.

EDIT: In response to the commenters below, take a look at Brooks' _The Mythical Man Month_ if you'd like data, at least as far as programmers are concerned.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc.

I am in my early 60s and for my whole life I limited my work hours to 32 hours per week, even working for large companies. I had lots of time for educational side projects, exercise, extra time with family and friends, and mediation.

My only regret was not perhaps cutting this to less than 30 hours. I did not work Mondays, and every Tuesday morning I was refreshed and enjoyed my work. Leaving about 20% of my salary on the table was a good trade. Some of my bosses did not like this, but when I worked I gave them 100% effort.

<comment><USER3> >Sorry, I must disagree. Two people working 20 hours a week are refreshed, not burned out, have time for educationally side projects, etc.

Take a look at Brooks' _The Mythical Man Month_ for data that demonstrates the opposite, at least in programming; I haven't followed the field closely, but education and industrial organization researchers have done similar work in other professions.

<comment><USER5> Brooks' was at IBM, they adhere to a 37.5 hours per week work schedule. Programmers who can produce 3-4 hours of real work per day are considered productive. Any more and you will start to burn them out.

<comment><USER6> We stuck to 37 when I was there, so everyone could take off a little early on a Friday.

I mean officially I was there 37, it was a good week if I was doing real, actual work for 20. Yes, I made up for it by working my tail off when it was needed.

We coders can be absurdly productive for short bursts, or be slow and steady. You can't have massively productive and steady for very long. In your early 20s you have a few years of this, but the more you push it then the more jaded you'll be later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I left my job a year ago, and started doing remote work for a small company. Since then, I've worked between 15 to 25 hours a week. As a result:

\- I'm more rested and stress free

\- I get a lot more exercise and I eat healthier

\- I'm much more efficient and motivated in my work

\- My creativity and exploration into new fields has bloomed

I used to put almost all of my effort into my work, with not enough time devoted to maintaining and improving myself.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely agreed. I just did the opposite--quit remote freelancing to take on a full time job (this one with insane hours unfortunately, 14hour/day average)--and my level of stress and unhealth has skyrocketed. Autonomy and agency matter, and part of that is the ability to choose the amount of and timing of working hours that are best for you.

<comment><USER9> Technically, that's not a "full time job". It's nearly two full time jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Until we come to grips with what will likely be a post-labor world, this is a good transitional approach. The 40 hour week is an arbitrary standard, and it may now be rational to reduce that number. Few jobs are now so arduous that 70 year olds cannot perform well. We are suffering from outdated standards for work weeks and retirement age, and un-sticking our assumptions is likely to benefit the situation.

<comment><USER11> > what will likely be a post-labor world

Says who ? This preposterous way of thinking has been around for x years already. "when the world population will reach 4 billions people, there will be no jobs for everyone", yet the population is still increasing beyond 6 billions and most people still work to live/survive. There is no hint we are moving to a post-labor world.

You will see that there is a strong relationship between reduced employment/working hours, welfare benefits when not working, and government spending. And somehow most of the countries which went down that way have now humongous public debt problems to solve. Their model is not sustainable in the long term.

<comment><USER12> You seem to be misunderstanding something. A post-labor has nothing to do with population and everything to do with automation. As it becomes more efficient to have robots and computers to do what was previously human work, we will eventually reach a point where just about every conceivable job that we currently employ people for could be automated.

Most likely, a post-labor world should be capable of arriving well before that. Once we can automate the production of basic necessities, working should become largely optional.

<comment><USER11> Even if you have robots you will still need a massive workforce to produce them, to get the resources to produce them, to check them, to maintain them, to repair them, to program them, to update them and so on. Or maybe you believe in a state of singularity in which all of this will happen at the same time? :)

Automation has already been happening in many industries, in case you have not noticed, and that did not result in lost job opportunities on the whole of the economy. Agriculture is also largely mechanized all around the world and you have only a very little portion of the population (5% or so) in developed countries to produce far enough for everyone.

Most jobs in developed countries are service related. These jobs will not disappear even if you automate the production part of the economy.

<comment><USER13> So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement _is_? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'm not suggesting we should go back to an agrarian society, but we have a serious economic and political problem where the benefits of technological advancement are going in overwhelming proportion to a very small subset of the population. If something isn't done about that, and soon, the resulting upheaval may force us back to pre-industrial living anyway (or more likely, much worse).

<comment><USER14> > Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is > way, way up.

Can you support this? Millions of people all over the world are being lifted out of poverty.

Here is a chart of per capita GNI for the past 20 years [http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...
edi: linked wrong chart

<comment><USER15> GNI is just a grand total divided by population; people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, particularly in the U.S.

<comment><USER14> > GNI is just a grand total divided by population;

Right, per capita, as I stated, but really just GNI is fine too.

> people would be making more if the money was divided up evenly but it's not, > particularly in the U.S

Unfortunately the google public data didn't have enough US data but take a look at these two charts for India.

First is just India's per capita GNI the second is India's income distribution over the same time frame. Notice how the income distribution is relatively flat and how the GNI is growing.

[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...](http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&met_y=ny_gnp_pcap_pp_cd#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gnp_pcap_kd&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:IND&ifdim=region&tstart=-312739200000&tend=1296720000000&hl=en_US&dl=en_US&ind=false)

[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&#...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This guy might be on to something, but I have an even better idea, and it required 0 scientific research to synthesize.

We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.

<comment><USER17> > We should all do whatever the fuck we want, until we die.

Yeah but we're not allowed to. Most employers will demands you show up for 40 hours a week and then frown at you or, at least, never promote you if you don't stay for a lot more.

<comment><USER18> You are allow to do what ever the fuck you want until you die just don't expect me to give you money for doing what ever the fuck you want. As I too am doing what every the fuck I want, which happens to include only giving money to people who do something useful for me.

<comment><USER19> I think it is a good thing that individuals control their own money, and can choose to give it to whomever they want.

Can we agree that people with no money will starve to death unless they use violence to take food from someone, or the government uses violence to take food from someone on their behalf? The foodstamps of this great depression are equivalent to the soup lines of the old great depression: they prevent people from robbing, looting, and starving in the streets.

<comment><USER20> I don't know in the US, but here in Europe the gov't does not need to "use violence" for that. It is pretty much general consensus that people with no monies should get money (not "foodstamps") from the gov't, payed by our taxes, so they can live with dignity, independently of what the reason for their unemployment / poverty might be.

<comment><USER21> When Americans use the "use violence" argument, your argument doesn't work as a response, I'm afraid.

It is a libertarian tactic of assuming that anything the government does they don't like is use of violence, except for government protection of artificial property rights which is somehow usually magically exempt.

<comment><USER19> Just because naive libertarian polemicists use an argument doesn't make that argument incorrect.

>>>It is a libertarian tactic of assuming that anything the government does they don't like is use of violence, _except_ for government protection of artificial property rights which is somehow usually magically exempt.

In my experience, libertarians _universally_ agree with me when I say "artificial property rights are completely protected and propped up by the government's threat of violence". It is their _favorite_ part of the how governments operate, because they do not recognize the benefits of collectivism (socialism, communism, prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the commons).

Notice how I have not told you anything about my personal political views.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is interesting. I live in Indonesia, where except on our capital (Jakarta and most Java), working 60 hours a week is the norm. I have noticed (and I think this has been proved over and over again) that people who works 60 hours a week is actually less productive and less happy than those who have a free weekends and work only 8 hours a day.

I wonder how much working time can we cut until the benefits disappear.

<comment><USER23> do you have extremely long days but 5 days a week or do you spread it out over 6 or 7 days?

<comment><USER11> In Japan, by the way, it is not uncommon to work 6 days a week (Saturdays). It depends on your contract.

<comment><USER13> I heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the national government commissioned a study a few years back to investigate ways to curb this practice.

The committee was disbanded after a minor scandal when it was discovered that they were making everyone come in on Saturdays to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well, 25 hours a week is for how long your average worker is productive throughout the typical work-week anyway. The rest is spent dicking around on the Internet and socializing with coworkers.

I feel like if we cut down the "official" work to 25 hours, people would suddenly realize that they need to be a lot more productive to get the same amount of work done. No more pointless interruptions. No more bullshit meetings. Everyone would try to get shit done, and enjoy the extra three hours they get everyday and be a lot happier.

<comment><USER25> Being on site is just as important as being productive. Employers buy your time and in these 8 hours a day, whenever something pops up and has to be done quickly, you have to be ready to take on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a 26 year old, I can agree with his conclusion (or at least want his conclusion to be true). With 40-60 hour work weeks for both my girlfriend and I, it can be difficult sometimes. Similarly, new friendships can be hard to come by. With current job dynamics, moving can be an almost certainty, increasing the difficulty of maintaining friendships.

However, I have to wonder, would 25 hour work weeks actually increase the length of our employ-ability, allowing us to work until the age of 80? I thought part of today's current long term unemployment problem (in the US), is that finding employment for older, more skilled, adults was difficult, due to perceived overqualifications or lack of training in newer technologies. I thought part of the point of work hard while you're young, was to save enough money to allow you to survive the possibility of permanent unemployment in old age (either due to health or over qualification in unused technologies).

</comment><comment><USER27> Centrist professor takes a moderate position about halfway between the "standard" workweek and Tim Ferriss's 4-hour workweek. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> 25 hours to earn less? What's the point of having more free time if you have no money to do anything with it ?

There's a reason why we have a current optimal 40-60 hours kind of range for working hours in most countries. That's an equilibrium point between how much people are willing to work vs how much they are willing to earn. Everyone still wants to have free time, but not at the expense of their well-being or the future of their family (education, etc.).

Working 25 hours and earning the same amount as working 40 would not sit well with companies (if this was made mandatory by state regulation, for example). Local companies would lose their competitive edge vs other companies elsewhere and this would end up in increased unemployment.

Let people work how long they want. That's their choice.

<comment><USER27> Because of standardization on "normal" workweeks, it's pretty hard to have the choice even if you're willing to forego salary for fewer hours. Google won't let you work a 4-day week for 80% of the regular salary, for example (or even for 60% of it!), and more traditional companies are even less likely to. You take their 5-day, 40-hour offer or you don't. You typically only have an option to work a 25-hour week if you have either a consulting/freelance career, or a very low-end hourly-wage job.

<comment><USER11> Note that the standardization you are talking about is also heavily driven by work regulations, saying that a work week is x hours and nothing else. If such restrictions were abolished I believe there would be much more flexibility (up and down) in the job market.

<comment><USER27> The regulations just put a maximum; there is nothing preventing companies from offering lower hours if they wish. Before those maximums were brought in, you had the same situation as now, just with more hours being standard: you had to agree to 6-days-a-week, 10+ hour days, or nothing. The union movement successfully negotiated that down to 5-days-a-week, 8-hour days as a cap, which was at least an improvement.

<comment><USER11> Note that there are drawbacks in several countries of not working "full time". You do not get the same rights towards a pension, you do not get the same rules for overtime, and other benefits do not apply. Therefore there is also a strong incentive, based on regulations, not to work less than 40 hours either.

<comment><USER28> Computer professionals in the US don't get pensions or overtime pay at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The idea is obviously appealing, but is a pipe dream to which employers will never agree. Employers don't care about one's utility over a lifetime, because they only have access to laborers for a finite period of time. (In most cases 3-6 years.) Employers thus want to maximize utility in the short term. Fewer hours means less work and thus companies have to lower salaries, which may make this untenable for workers, and hire more people to compensate for these reduced workweeks, adding to fixed-costs like healthcare and making this untenable for employers.

Would it be great to spend more time with friends, sleeping or otherwise pursuing leisure? Obviously. But the labor market doesn't care about one's happiness (and the companies that do institute "leisure cultures" usually explicitly state that they do so simply because it increases productivity. In this case, companies don't care about you for your sake, they care about you for their own sake) and pursuing it comes at a loss of compensation.

</comment><comment><USER30> One problem I've come to appreciate in Britain is that we are all in direct competition with each other for access to good housing. As disposable incomes go up, property prices rocket as the middle class use their new wealth to bid up the price of houses in an attempt to trade that wealth for a nicer place to live. I'm keenly aware of this because that's exactly what my wife and I have been doing. A big chunk of our income goes into our mortgage.

The dynamic my well be very different in other countries. In the USA for example there's much more scope for increasing the supply of housing, something that's harder to do in a more densely populated country like the UK. I think this is why the US had a property crash while we didn't - the housing market here is a lot less elastic.

Still, my point is that if incomes generally go up, a proportion of that will be expended in price wars over scarce local resources, property being the most obvious example.

</comment><comment><USER31> I am sure that I get 25 hours of real work done per week, if that. Once I factor in the meetings and phone calls that knock me out of the "zone", it is certainly less than 40.

</comment><comment><USER32> If I didn't have to answer email or deal with any middle management, this could work. But the paradox is that the only scenario in which legitimate optimal efficiency can be attained is in a small-group, highly-communicative environment (like a startup); in that kind of environment, you're putting in 80-hour weeks so you can get profitable as quickly as possible, so there's no way anyone is saying "I've put in my 25 hours, see you guys next week!"

<comment><USER33> But those startups are people basically willingly surrendering themselves to the ideology. The article isn't about the empassioned individuals who want to make it big, it is about Average Joe who works at any middle class company 40 hours a week without any desire to do it and no passion to continue.

If you have the drive to try to do something big, putting all your time into it is kind of mandatory. But if you just work for the money to survive on, you shouldn't need to put in such a significant portion of ones time.

<comment><USER9> The average joe might have passion for work, but also a family and other responsibilities that preclude extended periods of long workdays. They might not want to get divorced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The New Economics Foundation (nef) proposes 21 hours:

<http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours>

 _A 'normal' working week of 21 hours could help to address a range of urgent, interlinked problems: overwork, unemployment, over-consumption, high carbon emissions, low well-being, entrenched inequalities, and the lack of time to live sustainably, to care for each other, and simply to enjoy life._

</comment><comment><USER35> Twenty-five hours a week at what rate of pay? There are people working at Walmart and such who make in a week what I would make in a day or two in past years. I also did 60-80 hour weeks in my life (eejit that I was). With all the opposition towards a living wage (read: serf wages), I'll file this under the category that includes jetpacks and flying cars -- and I'd bet on those appearing first.

<comment><USER27> Well, the biologist quoted in the story is Danish, so may be starting from different norms. The de-facto minimum wage [1] is already around $18/hr, and would probably increase if the work-week were changed. That could perhaps be funded in part by putting less money towards retirement (current employer contribution is 17% of salary), since his proposal is to raise the retirement age considerably as well. Serf wages are a bit less of an issue in any case when that's the starting point.

[1] A bit complex: "de-facto" because Denmark has no statutory minimum wage. Nonetheless, a negotiated wage floor of a bit above 100 DKK/hr (~$18/hr) covers most workplaces. Denmark's labor system, partly driven by law and partly by cultural norms, makes heavy use of sector-wide bargaining agreements between large employer confederations and large cross-company unions. The whole process tends to be very consensus-oriented (strikes are rare), and reaches blanket agreements that apply sector-wide. Small mom-and-pop stores, freelancers, independent moving-van operators, etc. are the main exceptions, since they aren't part of one of the employer confederations that's party to those agreements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The time you spend past 25 hours a week is making you less productive anyway...

<comment><USER37> I assume you speak from personal experience. Allow me to disagree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I do this but in a different way. I work 40 hours a week for most of the year and then take off a few months at a time. This allows me to travel with my family before I'm retired and too old to climb mountains etc. You have your whole life to live, it doesn't begin when you retire. I'm fully prepared to work past the standard retirement age.

</comment><comment><USER39> Great idea in theory, but there's a reason young people work such long hours: money. If a 22 year old graduates from college and works 25 hours a week, they won't have enough money to pay off their (almost certain) debt and live comfortably, much less have excess money to spend traveling and doing fun things. Young people work so hard so they can have the money to buy and do the things they want. Most just never stop working that hard in order to enjoy those things. Working 25 hours/week would basically push "life" back a few years, meaning maybe you rent a small apartment and drive a old car until you're 35-40. As they saying goes, young people have lots of time and no money, but older people have lots of money and no time.

<comment><USER40> Costs of stuff like rent and cars are normalized to average income levels. (Though of course with cars there is a base cost of manufacture that makes them less flexible than something like rent).

Which is to say, if everyone works 25 hours a week, rents will go down (because if they don't, you have most properties sitting empty). If instead everyone works 60 hours a week, rents go up.

Of course, economics is really complicated and rarely works out this simply. But that's the idea. It's a little silly to post here presuming that someone in Mr. Vaupel's position has somehow not thought of the fact that when you work fewer hours your nominal earnings go down. (I think this qualifies for what pg was calling Middlebrow Dismissal). It's a more reasonable response to say, well, of course he has thought of that, but I wonder what the answer is?

<comment><USER39> Sure, I'm sure he thought of that, and I'm sure prices would change since there would be less money earned and therefore less money in circulation. This would also require a change in standard of living though. My point is simply that people cannot maintain the same standard of living and work less, even if the entire world cut back hours at the same time. Less goods would be produced, so with the same demand then prices for everything would rise, or standards of living would fall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> But ....what about college students???? People rarely talk about the fact that college students can be as stressful if not more stressful. In graduate school, students are expected to work/study almost all the time... Should we also have a reduce in our work/study load?

<comment><USER42> You could in principle do the same. I'm currently in a Masters program and have been doing what this link describes since I first started university: Four or five hours of very focused work each day, followed by real leisure time.

Granted, it might be different if I were doing a PhD, but at least up until where I am now this has worked perfectly. I get done just as much while being less stressed and feeling a lot better about life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The true sign of progress will be that everyone has a bit more freedom to decide how many hours per week they work. In order for that to happen, the job market needs to become a lot more liquid. That will happen when needed benefits like health insurance and basic income are met by the government, and most people are able to work on a freelance or contract basis, and are able to take time off in between jobs without so much risk, because they are not dependent on a specific employer. I don't think 25 hours will necessarily be the standard, so much as I think that there won't really be a standard that everyone is expected to adhere to anymore. 40 hours is totally arbitrary in a way that smacks of Communism.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't get it. Why we have fixed number of working hours when we have deadlines for our tasks?

You want me to solve that problem for you by Friday? Why should I come to office and stare at monitor four days if I figured it out right in Monday?

<comment><USER45> When I worked as an employee, I learned to slow all my tasks down to finish them right on time. That way I wouldn't be assigned more tasks than my coworkers, in punishment for being efficient and fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Spending more time with kids is good, still . .

I want a beautiful and open network all across the planet. I want to see North Korea become free, and sit drinking coffee in a café in Pyongyang. I want Africa to become a garden stretching from Cape Town to Khartoum. I want to visit the Silicon Valley of the Congo, and take the suborbital to Tokyo if I'm in the mood for sushi that night. I want cold sleep and ramships and I want to see sunrise on Alpha Centaur Bb (after moving its orbit out a bit:)

No matter how good leisure is in the short term, if it slows those goals down I'm against it.

There PG, call that middlebrow criticism!

</comment><comment><USER47> A counter philosophy to this is that we should be striving to find jobs that we enjoy and find so fulfilling that we don't mind working 40+ hours per week... until we're 80...

I say that wondering how realistic that is and whether that's a yet another imaginary carrot dangling over our heads to make us work harder. I like my job a lot (software developer making medical software for clinics in Kenya) but flip I'd love a 4 day week because there's always something more enjoyable than work. And I'm not sure if every single job we need people to do can be that fulfilling raison d'être for someone.

</comment><comment><USER17> Incidentally, an enforced max number of hours per work week is a potential solution to the high unemployment a lot of countries have right now.

<comment><USER48> Please no. More useless busybodies and paperwork. It would probably be cheaper to extend unemployment benefits.

<comment><USER49> So you prefer that we actually cultivate a loafer class and a worker class?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek>

</comment><comment><USER51> The reality of what will happen in the U.S. is the exact opposite. If anyone watched the recent Davos Economic Summitt - U.S. companies can no longer easily grow using debt instruments, which just leaves productivity and competitiveness.

Translation: Employees will be working more hours for easily the next 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER52> It would be interesting if people were paid on some measure of productivity rather than just raw hours. Then we could get paid based on our contribution to economic output. Of course, the problem with that is how to do you measure productivity?

<comment><USER9> How do you measure productivity for management, especially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> For those who are interested in more than the cursory description offered in the article, I also came across this:

<http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13339-the-25-hour-work->

</comment><comment><USER54> I wonder if this could be where we're headed: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_(1960_film)>

</comment><comment><USER55> Of the 40 hour week, from 10 to 30 hours are spent working for the government. Your tax rate is dependent on where you live and how much you earn, of course.

</comment><comment><USER9> "We should only work 25 hours a week, argues professor after pulling another 14-hour day of intensive data gathering and number-crunching."

</comment><comment><USER56> We should work exactly the correct amount of hours a week. The correct amount varies between fields and people.

</comment><comment><USER57> That would be nice, then startups where people work 80 a week will be even more magical and money earning. :)

<comment><USER58> Except that there's no guarantee that working more hours makes you more productive. If anything, studies seem to have shown the opposite. Ultimately, efficiency trumps hard work--there are only so many hours in a week where the limit on your efficiency is much further away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Let's get 6-8 weeks of vacation like Europeans too, that's what I keep arguing for...

</comment><comment><USER60> If everyone only worked 25 hours per week, nothing of value would be accomplished.

</comment><comment><USER61> 25 hours is a good number for average people. I'd say 15-20, even.

Ambitious or highly dedicated people will always work more than that, and that's a good thing. What they should have is a lot more freedom in how they spend that time-- working two jobs, one job and school, side projects.

The problem is this bullshit conformist fiction in which everyone has to pretend to be ambitious (but only internally) and dedicated (despite mediocre social status and compensation, that fail to justify such dedication). I don't think that such a problem can be legislated away. The best that the law/government can do is to break up the collusions (e.g. among VCs) that keep talent trading at such a dog-low rate against property.

The other problem, and one of the main reasons why the 40-60 hour anachronism lives on, is that companies aren't really buying (as they see it) 40 hours of time. They're also buying (in their entitled view of the world) single-minded loyalty. That's why they demand hours at such a level that a person can't possibly hold two jobs, even if she is easily capable of the work. The goal isn't just to get some quantity of the person's work, but to take that person off the market so no one else can hire her.

<comment><USER62> I think that the title should be: "It should only require 25 hours per week to make a comfortable living"

We should all put in the most amount of time to our lives and passions, but to maintain a comfortable life should not consume 100% of our available productive hours. (assuming productive hours == 8/day, 5 days/week)

If maintaining a living (comfortable or not) requires 100% of our productive work time (40 hours/week) then how are you not a slave to that subsistence lifestyle?

<comment><USER63> The problem is what constitutes "maintaining a living", both in your own choices and governmental influence. I can show you how to live well on $10/day, but then you'd complain about not having X Y and Z (starting with two cars and a mortgage in a narrow geographic range).

If you can't do without what amounts to luxuries to 75% of the world population, discussing how many hours a week you "should" work is a non- starter.

<comment><USER62> OK - I am your student

I live in the bay area, Married, have 2 kids and work in SF.

Show me how to live on $10/day.

Consider me your student.

Unless your comment of "showing me how to live on $10/day" is really titled "show a homeless 15 year-old with no job, family or financial obligations how to subsist on $10/day"

If you really can show me how to live on less than the cost it is for me to get to work ($7.10, BTW) then i will accept you as my teacher. (I already ride my bike EVERYWHERE - literally - I do not personally drive at all)

If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live.

<comment><USER64> >If not, then fuck you you smug ass - it costs to live.

Wow, HN has dropped this low?

Here were I live the standard _household_ income is around $600 USD a Month. A family of 4 can (parents and two children) can live with that.

<comment><USER65> Good for you, my rent is more than that and I don't live in an expensive place.

<comment><USER66> Sure you do! So do I! You and I probably live in the most expensive 1% of places on the planet. We live incredible lives - our existences are better on average than anything any king had 150 years ago. We have whatever food we want at whatever time in the year we want it. We have phenomenal connectivity and mobility and, if we need to be on the other side of the planet in 48 hours time, that's doable.

Of course, I want more. The guy next door has a Range Rover _and_ a Porsche. But I know there are literally billions of people who cannot imagine the luxury in which I live.

<comment><USER67> The _gargantuan_ difference between kings of old and us today, the critical difference that these comparisons always miss, is that whatever lifestyle you choose, you have to work roughly the same number of hours to maintain it.

If you are a programmer, you can't just decide to work 10 hours a week for $25k and live a $25k lifestyle. If you want to earn $25k, you'll probably still have to work full time to do it. Regardless of the comforts we enjoy, we are still slaves to the workweek (there's not enough contract work for every programmer or designer to go freelance), and _that_ is why it's right to complain.

We may have more "things" per person than Arthur himself, yet we lack the freedom and status of being royalty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Why just extend work in the direction of the aged? I think that instead of going to school, children over the age of 12 should have the option of working 25 hours a week as apprentices.</comment>


Operation Highjump and the UFO Connection - <AUTHOR> https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/antarctica/antartica11.htm <comment><USER2> Fake News About a Secret Nazi UFO Base In Antarctica Refuses to Die This researcher at Cambridge has a PhD and still had to take time to prove why the Nazi Antarctic UFO base is a hoax.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz53eq/fake-news- about-a-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz53eq/fake-news-about-a- secret-nazi-ufo-base-in-antarctica-refuses-to-die)

* Operation Highjump | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Highjump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Highjump)</comment>


Condo prices fall and inventory rises; Seattle shoppers enjoy summer of plenty - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/condo-shoppers-across-king-county-enjoy-a-summer-of-plenty/ <comment><AUTHOR> The contrast between the Seattle experience (build more and see prices stabilize or fall) and the SF/SV experience is notable.</comment>


Curiosity, Feedback Loop and Happiness at Work - <AUTHOR> https://muvaf.com/curiosity/ <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I wrote about how genuine curiosity about your work helps your happiness. I think this is especially true for us software engineers where so many people got into the field by being curious. Happy to discuss.</comment>