Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medieval-peasant-got-more-vacation-time-than-you/ <comment><USER2> Statistics about how much time medieval peasants spent working can be misleading, because a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses. They had to make most of the things they used themselves. So when "work" was over they didn't go home and watch TV.

It's hard to be sure exactly what life was like for preindustrial agricultural workers, but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh.

<comment> DanI-S Perhaps given more time to tend our own gardens, make our own tools and furniture and work on our houses, we'd be a happier and more prosperous civilization.

<comment><USER3> To me,

> make our own tools

means "hacking on Emacs", and indeed, it is fun.

<comment> DanI-S Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is simply a result of the balance of power shifting ever further towards employers over the past few decades. What incentives does a short-term value maximizing employer have to give his employees paid vacation?

In addition, a perfect storm of automation, globalization and erosion of worker rights has severely reduced the bargaining position of employees worldwide.

Furthermore, by keeping the majority of the population fully occupied at all times, participation in the democratic process becomes an incredible burden. Thus, the political arena becomes a playground for those who can afford the luxury of free time.

It doesn't take a genius to see whom these factors benefit.

<comment><USER5> Well put, the relationship trends more and more asymmetric. Add in rhetoric designed to convince workers to buy into a system that exploits them: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240495)

In general, employers have far more leverage over employee's lives than the individual employee has over the corporation's well being even though we sometimes pretend that it is symmetric and that the market is fair.

Employers optimize for maximum profit for "the shareholders." Somewhere along the line, morality is tossed out, and shortly afterward even legitimate long- term sustainability is also out (cultivating a strong workforce, valued for their talent rather than purely for their labor).

Add in the feedback loop of political apparatuses being appropriated for profit (lobbying) and the political arena is just another exploitable lever for amassing more resources by those with the resources to do so.

<comment><USER6> Which creates a fertile ground for Marxism 2.0 . The moment the screws tighten even more and instead of middle class you get technical/service class for the elite you will have a lot of unhappy people to deal with.

And as history has shown time and time again when you have a lot of poor and unhappy people new ideologies could spread like fire.

Another thing that concentration of wealth brings is that when the chant becomes "eat the rich/powerful" there are very few rich people left to mount a solid defense - the Arab Spring, the Fall of the Berlin wall all showed that.

(I mix political/military/economic power because I think in electroweak style theory they are all the same - the ability to mess up with other people's lives)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I find interesting is how unusual it is for a higher-paid person now to negotiate part-time work.

I mean, I've done so at several points in my life, but it's not particularly easy. it's certainly possible, but you need to establish yourself as important to the business (for me, in the past, this has meant working full time for a while.) then do the negotiation, if you want to go half-time.

But usually? cutting down below 30 hours a week kills your benefits. Sometimes below 35. Even if you reasonably could afford to pay for health insurance, well, pre-existing conditions keep many of us from buying individual coverage (and individual coverage isn't nearly as tax advantaged as employer-paid coverage, and individual coverage isn't as secure as group coverage; it's much easier for an insurance company to later find a "pre-existing condition" that you didn't note.)

But that's the big question. The affordable care act is going to make it so that you can get health insurance on your own, even with pre-existing conditions, (though, I think, employer-paid insurance will still be tax- advantaged) - I wonder how this will effect the number of upper middle class people interested in working part-time.

Speaking of, if anyone wants a reasonable sysadmin contractor half time to 3/4 time, I'm available. I'm looking for around $100/hr, but am open to flat rate or other billing mechanisms. I've got a fairly high revenue business (rather more than you'd pay me even full-time) and as such would be happy to go corp to corp.

Will work for expansion capital.

<comment><USER8> >But that's the big question. The affordable care act is going to make it so that you can get health insurance on your own, even with pre-existing conditions, (though, I think, employer-paid insurance will still be tax- advantaged) - I wonder how this will effect the number of upper middle class people interested in working part-time

I would be very surprised if there isn't a rush to the exits from people in their mid 50s if it looks like health care will be affordable. I know I'll be able to retire a full decade earlier if I can get health care for a few hundred bucks a month.

As to people working part time... I can see why people would want to (hell, I'd like to do that myself), but I don't think it's going to happen to any great extent. Employers don't like it because there are a lot of per-employee expenses (as opposed to per-hour). Two half-time employees cost more than one full time employee.

<comment><USER7> >I would be very surprised if there isn't a rush to the exits from people in their mid 50s if it looks like health care will be affordable. I know I'll be able to retire a full decade earlier if I can get health care for a few hundred bucks a month.

Is the subsidy based on income? or assets? or both? 'cause if you don't qualify for the subsidy, the affordable care act doesn't make it any cheaper, it just makes it possible for people with pre-existing conditions to get healthcare.

Without the subsidy, you are still looking at a grand a month or more for healthcare for a 50+ person.

>As to people working part time... I can see why people would want to (hell, I'd like to do that myself), but I don't think it's going to happen to any great extent. Employers don't like it because there are a lot of per-employee expenses (as opposed to per-hour). Two half-time employees cost more than one full time employee.

I am postulating that the affordable care act will make it realistic for contractors-without-bodyshops (or just part-time folks) to cover their own healthcare. that vastly reduces the per-employee cost. All of the times I've been successful negotiating part-time work, it has been as a contractor, where I had to provide my own benefits.

The affordable care act makes being a contractor (or working contractor-style, where you provide your own benefits) much more practical. That is, I believe, what might change things in favor of part-time work.

<comment><USER8> >Is the subsidy based on income? or assets? or both? 'cause if you don't qualify for the subsidy, the affordable care act doesn't make it any cheaper, it just makes it possible for people with pre-existing conditions to get healthcare.

As I understand it the subsidy is based on income. But I'm not sure. Either way, if insurance companies aren't allowed to charge more for preexisting conditions there are a whole lot of people who used to be priced out that will no longer be priced out. In my case $1k per month is a great deal.

>I am postulating that the affordable care act will make it realistic for contractors-without-bodyshops (or just part-time folks) to cover their own healthcare. that vastly reduces the per-employee cost.

Health care is certainly the major cost, but it isn't the _only_ cost. If I hire one guy to do sixty hours of work instead of two who each do thirty there are all sorts of savings - one workspace vs two, management overhead, training, and most importantly communication.

We'll see.

<comment><USER7> >Health care is certainly the major cost, but it isn't the only cost. If I hire one guy to do sixty hours of work instead of two who each do thirty there are all sorts of savings - one workspace vs two, management overhead, training, and most importantly communication.

I think that a boss has to be a first-class idiot to think that one person working 60 hours a week is going accomplish anything near 2x what that person can accomplish working 30 hours a week.

<comment><USER8> I must be a first class idiot, then, because I'm pretty sure that's the case.

<comment><USER7> Even if you think your developers are supermen who can work all the time, (personally, I believe that is true in the short term, false in the long term.) in this market, why would a good developer stay with you, when they can get more reasonable treatment (often for the same total salary) elsewhere?

the "for the same total salary" bit is interesting. Most of the long-hours software jobs I've seen are salary gigs. Not only no overtime pay, but no extra hourly pay at all. Why would someone stay with an abusive boss when there are plenty of other jobs (with, in fact, a much higher hourly rate?)

My other observation is that the more you increase pressure to keep people at work, the more personal business is conducted at work. And the more the good people in the group negotiate their way out of the group (either to other parts of the organization, or to other organizations entirely.)

<comment><USER8> >Even if you think your developers are supermen who can work all the time, (personally, I believe that is true in the short term, false in the long term.) in this market, why would a good developer stay with you, when they can get more reasonable treatment (often for the same total salary) elsewhere?

There are lots of people (mostly young men) who really enjoy the work and are willing to put in those kinds of hours because they live and breath the stuff. That's the way I was in my 20s. It's not "Mistreatment" if you know the score going in and you're getting paid for it.

Of course you can't keep that pace up as you get older, particularly if you have a family.

>My other observation is that the more you increase pressure to keep people at work, the more personal business is conducted at work.

Very few companies increase pressure to keep people at work. They just structure deadlines such that nobody can finish their work in a forty hour week. Usually unintentionally, of course, but not always. When I worked in finance they were pretty up front about it - they expected more than a forty hour week and we were compensated accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing to remember in all these discussions about working hours is that its one thing to work for yourself and another to work for someone else. I've done both. When you work for yourself you don't take much time off until things are going well, and its not a problem. I think the problem arises when people who own the business genuinely can't understand why everybody else doesn't want to put in the same hours that they do. It's about ownership. Doesn't mean that employees can't be very productive for 8 hours and then go home and do _their_ own thing. e.g. take their kids to sport or music, contribute to voluntary organisations, work on a side project. Each to his own.

</comment><comment><USER10> This comparison is probably nonsensical. Still, I think the part of the zeitgeist it's coming from is interesting.

No matter how rich we get as a society, very little of that wealth seems to be expressed as more leisure time. This is true comparing different decades (We got richer, still work lots) and its true comparing professions/socio economic classes (highly paid engineers & lawyers work just as much as call centre employees).

It is IMO, a failure. Its also very hard for an individual near the median to break out of it without being somewhat of an extremist.

<comment><USER11> It is a personal decision though, right?

Some choose more leisure and others don't.

Go talk to some ski "bums" or surf "bums" to see what I mean

<comment><USER12> Bike bum here writing from Whister, B.C. Work 20ish hours a week for Silicon Valley startups remotely and still manage to actually save money simply by not living in the Bay Area. I have a ridiculous amount of leisure time and relocate whenever I feel like it. I know this isn't possible for most people, but I wonder why more of my peers (and those on HN) don't choose a similar lifestyle.

<comment><USER11> Wow, fellow bike bum in Whistler. Small world.

<comment><USER12> Isn't it? I came up with a buddy from SF just to ride for a week... and he ended up driving home alone :( If you see someone coding in the public library, it's probably me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You could easily afford same vacation time - work only half a year, consume at the level of medieval peasant (no TV, no internet, no modern medicine, no car, no fancy foods or clothes, one clothes change a decade, no electricity, no running water, no sanitation/WC) - and you'll have plenty of money left to live the dream second half of the year. I'm sure if you forgo the modern civilization, you can get through pretty cheap. In fact, if you qualify for welfare, you could probably give up working altogether and still live better than medieval peasant (they had no free healthcare, free housing, no foodstamps and no free cell phones). So if you wanted, you could live much better that medieval peasant with 100% "vacation" time. Most people, however, want to live _even better_ , so they work to make this "better" happen. Modern civilization doesn't fall from the sky, you know - people make it.

<comment><USER14> Of course, with no running water and sanitation, one clothes change in a decade, no car, and no internet connection or electricity you might be hard pushed to find and hold a job for even half a year in the modern era.

<comment><USER13> Why, I'm sure there are some jobs in agriculture always available, and nobody cares how you smell when you're in the fields. There are probably other options too. But there's always 100% vacation options, many people are using it right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Those commenting here who haven't done so already should go read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. It's a great primer on what life was actually like back then, and what is and isn't known about the details.

[http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th- Century...](http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th- Century/dp/0345349571)

The discussion on enclosures and factories seems like a red herring, as that whole mess took off too late in the timeline to be considered Medieval. At the point at which enclosures were happening in a widespread way in (for example) the UK, the economy was transitioned into a state of fairly steady growth in wealth and life expectancy over the long term that would, via compound gains, form the foundation of the Industrial Revolution.

</comment><comment><USER16> What surprises me here is that virtually all comments are about whether peasants really had many holidays.

And not about the current situation (+ the macho 'my hours are longer than yours' trap that most of the California Software world seems to be in...) that drains much of the possibility of having a life besides work.

One idea that crossed my mind when I still worked in the Vallley, was that the situation might be reversed by a 'Union' that only concerns itself with working hours. Leaving salaries up to everyone for themselves to negotiate as currently.

This would:

1) Allow people a coming-out in terms of favoring work-life balance. Which many people confessed to me in private, but did not dare say in front of their boss/team (has nothing to do with a lack of love for the job/project/company, even love itself you can't enjoy 10 hours a day 50 weeks a year, or that would be the length of billionaires honey-moons. Also what is wrong with loving your life and family/friends in addition to the job, and needing some time for that?).

2) Create a bargaining position and a public face for it.

3) Dispel myths of long-term productivity gains through longer hours. Especially in a creative industry like Software Engineering long hours reduce productivity (there are studies of this + the many self-evaluations on HN over the years of people being able to code consistently and productively 4 to 7 hours per day max).

Just an idea that crossed a mind.

</comment><comment><USER17> We get weekends off -- so that's around ~100 days at least.

<comment><USER18> Well then, let's petition for a 3 day weekend. That'll give us the 150 of our medieval brethren.

I propose we couch it in terms of equality legislation: Fridays for the Muslims, Saturdays for the Jews and Sundays for the Christians. This serves all Western monotheistic (Abrahamic) religions equally. In order to balance things out though we will need to raise hourly wages across the board by 20% because we'll be only working 4 out of every 5 hours that we do now if I've got my math right.

Thursday will be the new Friday. TGIF will become TGIT.

<comment><USER19> 25% would be needed to get to equal wages. (4 * 1.25 = 5)

The 20% is the amount by which your income would be reduced if you were paid 4/5ths as much as today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article statement, "His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired" explains why I don't want to go back to the life of my peasant ancestors.

The author's background, "Lynn Parramore is a senior editor at AlterNet, co- founder of Recessionwire, and founding editor of New Deal 2.0 and IgoUgo.com. She is the author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture" and has taught cultural theory at NYU" suggests to me why I won't take this opinion piece kindly submitted here as a guide to current economic policy. Actually, today's economy in the United States offers unparalleled opportunities for each worker to make the worker's preferred trade-off among cash income and leisure time, especially if the worker is part of a family household of persons who agree to make different trade-offs from one another.

<comment><USER21> Other than adding the fear of famine, I'm not sure how different that is from today.

Fear of disease? Check. Both realistic (as in, the huge fraction with no/minimal health insurance or any dental at all). And unrealistic, like fearmongering politicians (as in, send lots of money to X or we'll all die of some made up thing)

Bouts of warfare, check. Both actual for kids in .mil, and imaginary daydreams of terrorism.

Inferior diet? Check.

The personal hygiene thing, I donno about. I'm not so foul but seems like many people are allergic to soap and water, and others who think smelling like an ashtray is a perfume.

<comment><USER22> Sorry, but if you think that we have equivalent fear of disease then and now, you don't know what life was like then.

How many people did you personally know who died of disease as a kid? I knew one. (Cancer.) But this was a period where people would have 8 kids in the hope that 2-3 of them would survive to adulthood. And disease was the big killer.

<comment><USER23> Don't forget about a significant chance of dying or losing limb from any simple cut.

<comment><USER24> What I find amazing is how recently things like germs[1] were given real attention. I'd heard about Ignaz Semmelweis from a book I read and to think less than 200 years ago you would go to a hospital and they didn't bother to wash their hands between patients? Now maybe it was just the hospital in Vienna, but I imagine many were like that.

Just the things that are taken for granted as common sense now before they were.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease)

<comment><USER25> The amount of progress in knowledge and technology in the past 200-250 years or so (pretty much all of the Industrial Revolution) really is staggering. Take someone from 1750, drop him in the world of 1500, and things would have been pretty familiar. Move 250 years in the other direction and he'd be hard- pressed to make heads or tails of anything (assuming you're taking someone from a part of the developed world -- for the developing world, the changes would be less pronounced, but still likely significant).

<comment><USER24> I had a strange notion recently that if you were to drop the average person (not an Einstein or a Hawking) and dropped them into say the 1500s Europe.

Most people think we'd be regarded as super smart and awesome. This comedian explains most people don't know crap[1], we only know the high-level. I think that even if we could find things we understand to teach it would be largely not viable (how much stuff around us requires machines and precision?) and likely wouldn't reach any audience to become a mainstream idea (even above people thought it ridiculous that germs exist).

I think we'd find people of any time to have clever methods to do their tasks and we'd learn from them and become indistinguishable from the average guy at the time.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic)

<comment><USER22> Thanks to the Flynn effect, it is likely that most of us would be significantly better at abstract thought than the average person 500 years ago. Thanks to diet, we'd also mostly be out of shape giants.

We would, however, be sorely lacking on basic survival skills. Also, not knowing Latin would mark us as uneducated and not worth listening to.

<comment><USER24> I don't disagree with anyone here. It had occurred to me that communication would be difficult (I don't think impossible). Mostly I thought the survival skills is what would be learned and then you'd be just like everyone else trying to survive. Maybe some of the knowledge could make it a bit better (locally) but a lot of what we know is really built on things that would be out of reach.

What someone said about geologists and knowing where resources are hadn't even crossed my mind. I was thinking more of a general high school graduate. Anyone with a specialty (math related especially) might do better (again I assume coping and not freaking out or getting a disease immediately).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yet again glad to be in Europe...

</comment><comment><USER27> Any article on quality of life in agrarian societies should also be contrasted to what life was like in pre-agrarian (hunter gatherer) societies. Jared Diamond wrote the most well known/accessible essay entitled [The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race]([http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html](http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html)):

> "Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? > Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive > people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. > It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good > deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the > average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for > one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One > Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting > agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts > in the world?"

Of course, that's sort of besides the point... Before the mid-70's productivity and median compensation were correlated, however for the past 40 years this has diverged. Since 1973, median hourly compensation grew 10.7% while productivity has increased by 80.4%[1]

Keyne's prediction in 1930 on the leisure society in the US _would_ have been correct if the public had continued to share in society's gains. Instead these gains have been increasingly captured by the top centile. The share of income by the top 1% has increased over 120% since 1979 [2]. While the top 20% has also nominally increased (~30%) all the other quintiles have had a negative share as a result.

Now, knowing this, is there anything that can be done to reverse these trends? It seems that we've been locking in socio-economic mobility [3] and our entire government has entered "regulatory capture." [4][5]

[1] [http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs- compens...](http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs- compensation/)

[2] [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income- inequalit...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality- in-america-chart-graph)

[3] [http://www.ibtimes.com/us-social-mobility-casualty-income- in...](http://www.ibtimes.com/us-social-mobility-casualty-income- inequality-922041)

[4] [http://i.imgur.com/PVpFY.png](http://i.imgur.com/PVpFY.png)

[5] [http://www.the-american-interest.com/article- bd.cfm?piece=10...](http://www.the-american-interest.com/article- bd.cfm?piece=1047)

<comment><USER28> >One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

This sentence illustrates one of my main gripes with JD's "sunshine and happiness" view of hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle is fantastic for that small fraction of folks who live where there are plenty of mongongo nuts (so to speak). He sort of handwaves the majority, who are eking a bare subsistence out of the land, or worse, alternately subsisting and starving.

<comment><USER27> Well, the whole point is that the populations for successful hunter gatherer tribes would be stable. Barring drastic ecological changes and (more commonly) attacks/displacement from technologically superior outsiders, aboriginal tribes have continued living as they have for centuries (even millennia).

Of course that type of society wouldn't be able to support a population of 7B people, although based on the 2.4B in poverty you'd be hard pressed to argue that technological society is really doing much better (ignoring the whole carrying capacity question entirely).

As someone enjoying typing on the Internet right now, I'm by no means arguing any return to the past, but it'd be silly not to acknowledge how much longer we work than our ancestors.

<comment><USER29> Don't discount the state of constant warfare most aboriginal societies live in. If you have a neighbor, he wants your mongongo nuts.

<comment><USER27> Hmm, while this the assumption (in some pretty flawed) early anthropology, I think the modern consensus is that hunter gatherer societies were relatively peaceful, both amongst themselves[1] and between each other[2].

Of course, successful/stable hunter-gatherer societies are pretty geographically isolated, since encounters by tribes w/ more "advanced" (post- agrarian, colonial, modern) societies usually has meant obliteration.

[1] [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom- learn/201105/how...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom- learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways) [2] [http://www.sott.net/article/264152-Warfare-was-uncommon- amon...](http://www.sott.net/article/264152-Warfare-was-uncommon-among-hunter- gatherers-study)

<comment><USER30> Recently I read Pinker's "Better Angels" [1]. Using archeological records, he argues that dying from a violent death was extremely likely in hunter gatherer societies.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The frustrating thing to me is that this article simply shows _that_ a medieval peasant got more vacation time than I do - but doesn't say anything at all about _why_ , even though it's in the title.

</comment><comment><USER32> The thing is that medieval concept of time was not linear. So we cannot really compare how medieval peasants perceived their leisure time with perception of the modern worker. It is like comparing cabbages with golf balls. They are both round, right? I also strongly disagree with the author where it comes to fulfilment. In many cases work is more fulfiling than leisure. What would be really worthy to compare is average length and intensity of copulation, family sizes. But scientific approach has no methods for such s comparison. Yet.

</comment><comment><USER33> "His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired."

Does it means these poor people that happen to be our ancestors had a faint body odor surrounding them? Can we stop with this crasiness? We are animals, animals have "body odor", and it have been considered a good thing for a long time.

Every time I hear about personal hygiene I remember this American girl who was learning Chinese with me in a university in south China. She was there on the behalf a sort of NGO and her goal was to "teach Chinese personal hygiene". She was talking about "spreading the use of perfume and deodorant" and such things.

So now we have no more colonization, but we still have missionaries, and hygiene missionaries. And they still do harm.

(Because yes, abuse of perfumes and deodorant IS harmful in many respects)

So, to come back OT, it is ok to wonder if middle-age peasants had more free time, and if their life was pleasant (I guess it was not), but please let our own crasiness out of the discussion.

We are the anti body age, anti-body hair, anti-body odor, shaved-porn-age (which is anti-sex), etc. We have our crasiness too. It is very optimistic to believe we are less crasy than the Middle-Age. And God knows Middle-Age was crasy...

<comment><USER34> Only someone living in the relative safety of a hygienic society would assume the point of that statement is _smell_.

Medieval peasants _died_ from their lack of hygiene.

<comment><USER33> I know that.

But, without context, if you hear about someone that his "personal hygiene left much to be desired", it just means "he stinks", right?

Then when you write about Middle-Age peasants who died for some lack of understanding of contagion mechanism, you do not write "personal hygiene left much to be desired", unless you want to be ironic, sarcastic, or whatever figure de style you are trying to add.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was thinking about this the other day- why don't some start ups implement a 4 day workweek? That would be a huge incentive for me to join.

Yes, it's less productive, but with 33% more weekend think about how happier the employees would be.

I would love to try this with my startup once we get into the profitable stage.

<comment><USER36> dont treehouse do that? [http://ryancarson.com/post/21708810513/4-day- week](http://ryancarson.com/post/21708810513/4-day-week)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> In Guns Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond, I don't recall the exact quote but it is stated that the advent of agriculture with its seasonal work gave those in command a labor pool to use for fighting armies during the low-agriculture work seasons.

</comment><comment><USER11> The average American adult works 24.99 hours per week.

Just sayin...

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average- america...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-american- adult-spends-24-hours-each-day)

</comment><comment><USER38> The BLS study linked in the article is from 1996. Anyone have a more current source on average vacation time for US workers?

</comment><comment><USER39> that article suffers from the same fallacy as the ol 'back on your heads' joke: \-- a guy dies and goes to hell. upon arrival, the devil allows him to pick one of three rooms where he will then spend eternity.

in room one, people are being devoured by horrible beasts. in room two, people are being burned alive ( thats harsh). in room three, everyone is up to their waist in the smelliest, most putrid, disgusting shit he ever encountered -- but they're chit-chatting away, drinking coffee and having donuts. after a brief reflection, the guy chooses the room with waist deep shit, coffee and donuts.

a few minutes late the devil comes back and yells "alright scumbags, everyone back on your heads". \--

...in medieval times you got one of the three rooms with the occasional coffee and donut break.

nowadays, in our briefer vacations we can be __ON A BOAT __mf 'er - don't you ever forget! :):):)

</comment><comment><USER40> Should be tagged [opinion]. This is not a news piece.

<comment><USER41> The fact that our elected representatives have voted themselves so many perks, as well as raises, highlights the double standard which has become prevalent in the USA.

Exempt from the Obama care fiasco, retirement eligibility after a ridiculously short period of employment, an enviably short work "year."

It makes me wonder why I didn't go into politics...

<comment><USER42> Lawmakers already had health insurance so the Affordable Care Act didn't really affect them in any substantial way.

In general the ACA won't have a huge immediate impact for those who already have health insurance.

<comment><USER41> And those without health care insurance can presently walk into any community health center to receive subsidized health care free of charge. Even illegal aliens can get free health care right now, so how will the ACA affect those without health care insurance?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it's also very exciting - <AUTHOR> https://www.influxdata.com/blog/rust-can-be-difficult-to-learn-and-frustrating-but-its-also-the-most-exciting-thing-in-software-development-in-a-long-time/ <comment><USER2> Rust is the answer to the question "can we have speed, correctness, and expressiveness in one language?" My company has been running Rust in production for awhile now, and it's exceeded every expectation. It's fast, it's safe, and it's so productive it's hard to find a reason to use anything else.

We've also found that the learning curve is, in our opinion, a bit overstated. We've ramped up several new grads on Rust with the O'Reilly Rust book. We see real productivity in about two weeks, which is actually faster than it was to ramp them up on our C++ code base. The compiler errors are _amazing_ and it's almost like giving them a built in tutor.

I'm very bullish on Rust becoming _the_ language of choice in the 2020s for everything from operating systems, web services, desktop applications, and more. It's that good.

<comment><USER3> I think the learning curve thing is depends on what's the language that you are compare it with.

C++ for example, is a hard language, but the learning curve is ... progressive (rise bit by bit).

Rust on the other hand, is like climbing a cliff: You're exposed to everything as soon as you start learning. That's all the Rust things (memory safety model and borrow etc) plus the rest of the knowledge that you need to learn when you normally learning a language (std library & stuff).

Luckily though, Rust did many thing in later years made it a little bit easier to use and learn. Like the rewritten books and manual and in my opinion most importantly few twists to the language.

My biggest (maybe nothing in the big picture) complain about Rust now is maybe it's too community driven, which can sometime cause minor fragmentation.

As a personal developer, if I've already followed every best practice writing my code, then to be honest, after the code is finished, I'm not willing to rewrite my code just to make it dated or work again (I mean, I'll pay my time to do it, but my hate meter will rise). Currently, Rust cannot fully deliver that.

I think Rust need strong leaders to layout a clear and stable plan, so more things can be standardized across it's ecosystem (Somewhat like what Go did, for example, io.Reader && io.Writer is life changing for me). In that way I can keep my hate meter at a safe level.

<comment><USER4> Traits for interop are a prime consideration for std, even if we try to keep it small. But we can only add things when they're ready; that's part of the stability you desire.

Look at the Future trait, as an example. And rust has had the equivalent of io.{Reader, Writer} since 1.0.

<comment><USER3> I know. But for me personally, the `io::Reader` and `io::Writer` is still not comfortable enough. Mainly because it's return values, `io::Error` to be specific. Because I found that in many of my cases, predefined `io::ErrorKind` is not enough for me, this results my abuse of `io::ErrorKind::Other`.

In Go, `error` is an interface that can later be asserted, so I can return any `error` then deal with them as late as I need.

This gives me ability to write some complex `io.Reader` and `io.Writer`. For example, an `io.Reader` that can Decode data stream, and returns both CodecError and IoError when it encountered any.

In Rust, if I want to write a similar thing, a HPACK decoder that returns both `io::Error` and `HPACK::DecodeError` for example, I need come up with another `Result` type that wraps both errors. This can sometime be tiring and makes the code inflexible (As one simple change to the `Result` may effect the entire call chain up and down).

BUT ... Maybe it's Go's fault, it treats me too well, make me want something that I cannot have for free (performance cost) else where.

<comment><USER5> > In Rust, if I want to write a similar thing, a HPACK decoder that returns > both `io::Error` and `HPACK::DecodeError` for example, I need come up with > another `Result` type that wraps both errors. This can sometime be tiring > and makes the code inflexible (As one simple change to the `Result` may > effect the entire call chain up and down).

Well there's stuff like error-chain to take care of the boilerplate...

Also, I believe you could define the equivalent of Go error in Rust as a trait and box it (ie. a trait object). It could be used much the same way as in Go with the additional benefit of Result being a sum type. I'm personally not a big fan of this approach but I guess it might work...

<comment><USER3> > you could define the equivalent of Go error in Rust as a trait and box it > (ie. a trait object).

I know this basically how Go's error handling works (Put error data on heap and pass the reference), but I'm not fan of it (the put data on heap part of it) too :(

I will try out the error-chain, thank you for reminding me that.

<comment><USER4> The "failure" crate is an alternative to error-chain as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nevi-me I've enjoyed learning Rust, but I'm at the stage where I'm hitting constant stumbling blocks because of the slightly niche nature of what I'm doing.

It's the ugly side of Rust; when you're stuck with a series of problems that you can't solve (or take too long to solve), when there aren't enough people in the community to help you, and you end up being unproductive for a while.

Where I've seen small projects to their completion, Rust has been greatly rewarding to me. It's the projects that are bigger and more ambitious where I'm struggling.

> After reading the first 10 chapters of Programming Rust, I was able to push > through the rest of the implementation. I still have open questions, and I'm > not sure if the structure I used makes the most sense.

There's some chapters of TRPL and other resources that I've re-read a few times by now. Learning the language ends up being quite a lot of an academic exercise, but the benefit's that once a concept clicks, it paves way for many other concepts.

My only advice to less experienced programmers (whom you're not) learning Rust: Stay away from writing or rewriting time-critical applications in Rust if you can't tolerate being stuck on a problem or series thereof for weeks.

<comment><USER6> Usually someone will help you out on irc or on the rust subreddit, but I think your point may still stand.

<comment> nevi-me It depends, my biggest struggle right now is with the tokio/futures ecosystem, so I'm on gitter::tokio quite a bit, and have posted once on /r/rust.

With patience, I eventually solve many problems, but the lead-time is costly. Plus when I'm doing something wrong in my code, rustc could take over 5 minutes compiling, and then come back complaining. Even when I find someone willing to help me debug, the process takes a few hours, and I end up feeling bad for wasting someone's time.

<comment><USER7> I think the tokio/async ecosystem just isn't ready for prime time. Hopefully this (and compile times!) get much better.

<comment><USER8> The issue isn't exactly that it's not ready for prime time, but that it's not ergonomic at the moment. The biggest issue that you have to get used to is that pretty much everything has to be owned data, and no references passed around when constructing Future types. This can feel like it comes into conflict with the poll(&mut self) interface (in 0.1).

Also, I found truly understanding the fact that returning data from functions either must be sized or boxed, no references. Again, the &mut self can come into conflict here. But there are simple tricks for dealing with it, like using inner enums for iterating through a state machine of the future, and using Option where you can take() the value when ready.

You'll see these patterns if you look at the Future library and Tokio impls of many of the core types. So I encourage you to generate docs with `cargo doc` and then click the `src` link on any types you want to understand better. The thing I wish I had internalized more earlier (and have been cleaning up a lot lately), is that "Futures should do no work unless polled". This is easy to mess up and regret later as you might accidentally start a Timer or initiate a connection before polling the Future.

Anyway, hopefully people help out when you ask, though everyone's often busy :)

<comment> nevi-me One of the challenges I'm having now is with some library that connects to a steaming pubsub server. I found a problem with the library, my use-case differs from what's being tested, and because I'm struggling to use the library the way the author suggests; I'm unable to convince them that being unable to Clone their data structure is causing a problem.

I unfortunately am not at the point of "X didn't work, so I wrote Y" as that's how we end up with competing libraries.

<comment><USER8> Sometimes there are good reasons for not cloning, such as underlying resources that can't be cloned. But I agreed it can be ergonomically easier in many cases. If they truly don't want it, and you really don't want to fork, can rewrapping it in an Arc<T> or Arc<Mutex<T>> get you around the problem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been learning Rust on and off this year. I have been writing mostly GO for the past few years, but am moving to coding almost primarily in Rust for any new project, and porting over some older ones. Microservices, Data Layer, etc... Honestly, while not perfect, its one of the most beautiful languages I have ever come across. Plus, I have not enjoyed coding in a language this much in a while.

<comment><USER10> How does your team (E.g., the people on the hook for reviewing/supporting/contributing to your project) feel about the change?

This is a big difference when moving from Go. A language that nobody calls beautiful, but is very easy for a team to contribute to and support (relative to other languages).

<comment><USER11> I don't think that's fair. I'm not entirely sure what beautiful means for a programming language, but I've seen many examples of Go programs which exhibited a beautiful simplicity. This project for example: [https://github.com/inconshreveable/slt](https://github.com/inconshreveable/slt).

<comment><USER10> I didn't mean to knock Go. It's just that when I ask people what they love about it, nobody usually expresses a "feeling" they have when they use it.

<comment><USER9> Yes I agree. Beauty is highly subjective when it comes to programming languages. Its definitely an expression of a feeling from use and relative successes/failures.

I know people I highly respect that call C# with Linq & its lambda implementation very beautiful, and I can see why, but I have not a strong opinion one way or another on it.

I had a lot fun when initially learning Rust, and the way I have phased it in to the projects (work & home) that I have been doing has led to successes, which definitely increases my bias towards the fact rust is awesome =).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Rust is one of those languages that I just can't see myself ever working with (I mostly do web dev), but it's a language I am really glad I learned and has made me a better overall developer.

<comment><USER13> I kinda felt similarly until I found one of my existing web services wasn't quite fast enough (currently serving around 1000req/s at peak). I could either go for a third rewrite in yet another framework hoping to increase performance by maybe 30%, or I could try something entirely new.

First attempt with rust more than doubled performance of the existing system on the same hardware. Now I feel a need to learn more.

<comment><USER14> What are you serving? Some of the Rust frameworks for backend should be able to do more than 1000req/s, but it depends what you're doing.

<comment><USER13> The system's peak _usage_ is 60kreq/min (avg 1k/s), the Python code it's written in can handle maybe 850/s per instance at 100% CPU.

Rust is fine, rust is managing almost 2k/s on the same hardware. And this is when I know practically nothing about Rust, I expect I'm likely able to do better given time.

It's acting as a simple filter and cache over JSON data on Postgres.

<comment><USER15> I'm shocked that Rust only gave you a 2X improvement over Python (I've rewritten a handful of Python services to Go and typically see 100-1000X improvement). What is the bottleneck? Was scaling horizontally an option?

<comment><USER13> I suspect the reason it's not faster is one of the following:

      1. backend DB at its query limit
      2. this is basically my first rust program and I've done something stupid
      3. ab/wrk aren't scaling properly either (I know, not likely, but worth considering) when I'm testing it
      4. bandwidth/IO limits on the AWS instance types I'm running this on

There are other possibilities too I guess. I was mostly doing this as a means to learn Rust though, I'd only go live with it once I had decent tests and everything else.

<comment><USER16> What web framework are you using?

Are you using a database? If so, which one? Are you using a cache like Redis?

I agree that a 2x speedup is a terribly low for a Python to Rust rewrite and shows that Python is unlikely to be the relevant bottleneck here.

<comment><USER15> > What web framework are you using?

I can't imagine the web framework is the bottleneck...

<comment><USER16> It might be because if it's a tokio-core based one OP might be blocking the event loop too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm optimistic for the future of Rust. I currently program in Go for server side web stuff, but with the proposed changes to the Go language, the decision to choose Go over Rust becomes less compelling; Rust already has generics, a competent module system, better error handling, and ADTs. Go had a very narrow scope and very clear oversights, which are now bigger issues they are trying to shoehorn solutions into with the go v2 proposal.

I've been following rust for a while and have known it is not web ready, but early next year I think will be a different story.

<comment><USER18> It's web ready. It's very web ready.

<comment><USER19> Woah, I'm a big fan of rust, but saying it's web ready is disingenuous. Rocket isn't stable, most of the libraries rocket depends on aren't stable either. Making http requests.. are there any stable http libraries yet? Last I checked Hyper was still on a 0 release with no h2 support.

Rust has conquered a lot, but it's web service/API story is not complete yet. Go is ahead in this respect.

<comment><USER18> Check out actix-web: [https://actix.rs](https://actix.rs)

Does my proclamation still seem disingenuous to you? If so, why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love Rust, but in all honesty I wouldn't use it vs. Golang or C++17 for something that isn't a critical system (e.g a cryptography lib) and even then I'm not sure I wouldn't use something like OCaml instead.

The curve to productivity seem way too steep for the payoff.

<comment><USER2> Woah, woah, woah. First, Go and C++ are _vastly_ different languages. Apples and oranges.

C++ is _huge_. It takes an incredible amount of effort to become a proficient C++ developer, and even then, C++ offers none of the amazing safety guarantees that Rust's borrow checker enforces. It's old language with sedimentary layers, including C backwards compatibility. Rust is no where near as complex, and Rust does 5x more to ensure you use Rust correctly. It has brought so many crucial advancements as well: immutable by default, typeclasses instead of OOP (thank god), real sum types, better unicode support, better concurrency primitives, and _much much much_ better tooling and package management. No one in their right mind would be cracking out another C++ project if they took the time to learn Rust and C++.

Go isn't really in the same league as Rust, C++, or C. It's syntax is deceptively C like, and it has an equally poor type system, but it's performance is closer to Java, which is a few orders of magnitude slower than C++. Despite pushing outdated concepts like null and raw pointers on to the programmer, it has a runtime with a stop the world GC with no guarantees about object placement on the stack or heap. Go is also incredibly divisive, it's a step backwards that hardcodes a few useful container types, and gives you no facility to create your own. It has a hard coded method of concurrency (goroutines). While useful in it's simplicity, it lacks the generality one would expect of an industrial language, and these concerns are only now being accepted by the Go team in their 2.0 drafts. Many people believe that Go rose to popularity because of the authors and the company sponsoring it, not on its technical merits ,and Brad Fitzpatrick, one of the maintainers, even said the language brought nothing new to the table aside from better concurrency support in the Gotime podcast episode he attended.

<comment><USER21> > Many people believe that Go rose to popularity because of the authors and > the company sponsoring it, not on its technical merits

I don't believe this to be the popular opinion. Originally Google's involvement dissuaded me, and indeed the very Googly bits have been the worst (context.Context), but the rest of it is markedly un-google-like. It's much more of a Bell Labs feel, with a focus on tool efficiency and stability.

> Brad Fitzpatrick, one of the maintainers, even said the language brought > nothing new to the table aside from better concurrency support in the Gotime > podcast episode he attended.

I think that was very much the intent. There were a lot of good ideas over the years (especially in Plan 9) and Go is really just a modern, polished revision of those ideas glued together.

Go is a _systems_ language at heart. It focuses on maintainability and literacy, and that's where it leads the pack in my eyes. It's possible to squeeze pretty phenomenal performance out of such a simple language. It's easy to drop into assembly for ultimate optimizations.

Perhaps generality is a mistake? I don't miss it. I've never found joy in debugging someone else's generalized metaprogramming.

Building software at serious scale has led me to appreciate the wisdom buried within Go. It's boring and I love it.

I've written a bit of Rust (and a lot of C++) which I find enjoyable enough, but they're tools I rarely find myself reaching for.

<comment><USER2> > There were a lot of good ideas over the years (especially in Plan 9) and Go > is really just a modern, polished revision of those ideas glued together.

Plan 9 is an operating system. If you're referring to goroutines, CSP is completely unrelated to any of the work done at Bell Labs. That was Hoare. Go also kept a ton of terrible ideas, like nil, void (interface{}), and default mutability.

> Go is a _systems_ language at heart.

It really bothers me when people say this, because it's just untrue regurgitation from the Go team. It's not a systems language. It's a language that's pretty good for small web services. It has expensive interop (Solomon Hykes commented on this during one of his Gotime interviews) with C (even the Go team says cgo is not Go).

> It's easy to drop into assembly for ultimate optimizations.

You can only drop down into Plan 9 assembler, which is essentially useless. Write me an SGX lib without cgo in x86 and you can make that claim.

<comment><USER22> People are doing OS research in Go, and Fuchsia core components like the TCP/IP stack are written in it, regardless of what the HN crowd thinks where Go should be used.

[https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit](https://github.com/mit-pdos/biscuit)

[https://github.com/ycoroneos/G.E.R.T](https://github.com/ycoroneos/G.E.R.T)

Last version of Plan 9 was actually Inferno, which HNers keep forgetting about, which used Limbo for userspace code.

Limbo uses the channel syntax later adopted by Go.

<comment> UK-Al05 People do os research in c#

<comment><USER22> And hopefully in the future even more so.

I was quite disappointed how WinDev managed to sink Longhorn and later WP 7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think folks might find Sentry's use of Rust interesting. Sentry is quite invested in Python on their backend, but needed additional performance mostly related to symbolication of crash reports. So they have a Rust symbolication library with Python bindings giving them the best of both worlds for their app.

[https://github.com/getsentry/symbolic](https://github.com/getsentry/symbolic)

</comment><comment><USER24> Can anyone recommend exercises for learning a new language. For example, something like "implement a class with these methods", or implement a function that does this. Something that is realistic, should only take an hour or two to implement for a competent programmer, requires you to learn more complicated features of a language, yet I can finish before getting bored or frustrated?

<comment><USER25> I'd also like to hear what others do to learn languages. I like to write a little RPN calculator. The program's interface might vary depending on the language: to learn browser JS, you might do a DOM-based UI; for Rust it might be a CLI; for Go or Erlang maybe a line-oriented network service.

Depending on the interface, this tends to exercise language and runtime features like: string handling and parsing, event handling, conditionals / pattern matching, etc. "Calculator" is also a big enough problem space that you can come back to it to try out more interesting language features (e.g. using Rust enums to model your calculator's operations).

<comment><USER26> I usually write data structures like Linked Lists when learning a new programming language.

This was a critical mistake for me when learning Rust and led to many, many stumbling blocks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Question: does "getting rusty" mean you're getting better or worse at Rust?

<comment><USER28> Worse. I think "getting oxidized" would mean getting better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Learning Rust at the moment and Pony looks really interesting too. I think at this point in time it's safe to say Rust is here to stay so the investment of time into learning it is well worth it as it will stay around for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've learned a bit of Rust recently but then started programming in Go. Now that I've learned a decent amount of Go I'm thinking of giving Rust another try, because Go has so many obvious weaknesses.

However, I'm still torn between those languages, which I both consider as fancy alternatives to C++ with a growing amount of libraries and community support. I neither like Go nor Rust, but learn them to keep up to date and because I need something with good tooling and many libraries that creates compact and fast executables. Rust still seems overly complicated to me, though, and I say that as someone who enjoys programming in Ada.

<comment><USER31> Could you elaborate a bit on the obvious weaknesses in Go?

<comment><USER30> Arbitrary examples off the top of my head:

lack of references, no generics, verbose error handling, a few quirks (e.g. need to write (*slice)[i]), inconsistencies like new vs. make, interface{} hacks where there could be a zero-cost abstraction, oddities with untyped literals, no way to declare "not null" pointers and the Million Dollar Mistake, built-in functions for built-in primitives (i.e., append(slice, datum) instead of slice.append(datum))

Stuff like that, which has been discussed over and over. Go is a bit of an odd language if you're used to languages like Ada, CommonLisp, or Racket, but I really like it a lot. I like the sense of pragmatism, that it has been developed to get things done.

I believe that Go2 will be even better and am especially happy that the Go team has decided to adjust and include generics rather than stubbornly insisting that they are not needed.

<comment><USER31> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't actually think Rust has that many stumbling blocks compared to other programming languages. It's a pain in the ass compared to Haskell but not e.g. Java.

</comment><comment><USER32> Rust's main attraction for me (coming from a C background) is that it allows you to do threading reasonably confident that you will not enter a world of pain after a simple mistake. In an ever more concurrent world that is a major plus.

</comment><comment><USER33> I enjoy coding in Rust, and I think it's a step in the right direction, but I'm still looking for a general purpose programming language which model IO/State effects the same way languages supporting functional programming do with pure functions. Haskell monads are not granular enough. The closer thing I've seen is Purescript, but still is not general purpose enough. Solidity's "pure" annotations are a step in the right direction, but I'm speaking about something much expressive. Also, it should have a Rust/C-like syntax in order to be able to be mainstream, but I'm happy with Haskell-like syntaxes.

<comment><USER34> Check out Nim. They recently added support for a function declaration in addition to a proc. Function automatically checks that it is a pure function with no side effects.

Considering the flexibility of the language as a whole, this is really cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I didn't really find Rust especially hard to learn. I came from Python with a very beginner level experience in embedded C.

The hardest part is probably to stop yourself from trying to applying solutions you learned in other languages into Rust. I caught myself multiple times trying to put things into python style classes, which failed horrible each time. The moment you grasp how to do things the rust way you will end up with solutions that are most likely more elegant, safe and fast than the thing that you tried to do first.

Over time (a few weeks) I managed to get a good enough intuition on Rusts concepts of ownership to not having to constantly think about it.

</comment><comment><USER36> Rust has definitely made me a better systems engineer overall. But, its not a language I can use for web dev. I hope, it gets easier to integrate rust into python in future.

<comment><USER37> [https://rocket.rs/](https://rocket.rs/)

<comment><USER38> nah actix web and diesel

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> How does it compare to Go? Concurrency and safety seem to be the forte of Go lang too.

</comment><comment><USER40> Try writing a linked list in Rust...or implementing a graph. It's not intuitive I think?

</comment><comment><USER41> It seems that the main problem with Rust is that it has been grown up _not_ from the CS and PL theory _fundamentals_ , like ML, or Scheme or Erlang or even Go, and it is obviously not a small, clean language everyone loves and appreciates as being beautiful. In other words it is just little better than C++, which is a crap.

If a language could be grown from ML (Ocaml) roots (like Scala) instead of C++, it could be _much_ smaller, cleaner and more pleasant to work with. Rust's only innovation is in the compiler tech, which could be ported and _simplified_ (due to more predictable semantics of a functional language) to any ML-family language.

I cannot overemphasize how beautiful the pattern-matching with local bindings on algebraic data-types is, and what a wonderful thing is Erlang's pattern- matching on receive, and how, say, protobuf is basically product/record-types annotations, which could be done in a ML-family language itself etc.

Rust is under the curse of C++ (a statically typed and standardized dialect of PHP3) if you wish. It is obviously good language compared to C++, but somehow Ruby-ish, compared to ML-family languages.

It is actually a pity that Rust and not ML/Ocaml are considered cool and sexy by modern teenagers (like it used to be with Ruby and with Rails not so long ago). ML is much better starting point than C++. Perhaps, polished to perfection languages (Scheme, Haskell) are less appealing for the crowd being too dry, without ambivalence.

BTW, the next cool language definitely should be something like typed Erlang with Ocaml's syntax ;) - a hybrid into which typed Python or Typescript are growing into.

<comment> UK-Al05 Rust is ML like. It can do pattern matching and has adt type system. It uses expressions rather statements

If you remove gc from ocaml, and added in compensating alternatives it would end up looking something like rust.

I think a lot of the adversting around rust in a "better c++" but its actually ocaml like but not mentioned to avoid scaring away traditional systems devs.

<comment><USER41> Rust did a lot of things nice, but it is over cluttered with all these particularities everywhere, which could be hidden by better default conventions.

For example, everything should be a reference by default, and use of explicit & is stylistically bad.

Or why in let mut iter = a.iter(); iter is mut? It should be a simple closure which follows a protocol. In what sense it is mutable?

And such small warts are literally everywhere, together resulting in a clutter.

A functional language uniform defaults (everything is an expression, everything is a binding which implies everything s reference) are much better.

<comment><USER4> Iterators contain internal state that gets mutated as you iterate. So it needs to be mutable.

<comment><USER41> But the whole idea is that once a closure implements an interface its internal state is strongly isolated behind the abstraction barrier of the interface and no one knows or cares whatever state it has, if any. It is very CS 101.

<comment><USER4> Well, first of all, it's not a closure, it's a struct, though closures are syntax sugar for structs.

Second, what you said is true, but also not really relevant; mutability is part of the API in Rust, and so that _is_ part of the interface.

To make it more concrete, [https://doc.rust- lang.org/stable/std/iter/trait.Iterator.htm...](https://doc.rust- lang.org/stable/std/iter/trait.Iterator.html#tymethod.next), the protocol, takes &mut self. So it must be mutable. It's _following_ the principle you're talking about.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Papuan weevil has screw-in legs - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-papuan-weevil-screw-in-legs.html

<comment><USER2> Very interesting from a number of viewpoints, but...

They left off how such a joint would evolve. It's all nice and good to say that a screw-thread join allows better mobility in forest-floor-litter. But how does a clade go from ball-and-socket or hinges to screw-and-threads in easy, evolvable steps?</comment>


How to Hire Your First Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://triplebyte.com/blog/hiring-your-first-engineer <comment><USER2> Can't agree more about prioritizing personal networks over everything else.</comment>


How we allow our users to get professional audio with VoiceBunny - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kera.io/post/40192110962/getting-professional-audio-for-your-videos-and

<comment><USER2> Ask HN: Does calling this VaaS (Voice as a Service) make sense to you? After all, voiceovers, design, music, etc. have always been creative services.

(this is a personal question - I'm no implying that the author refers to VoiceBunny as VaaS)

<comment><USER3> I don't know if everything has to be SaaS-ified.

Is it possible to pay someone for a service without adding "aaS" to the end?

It just seems asinine to relabel all these things "aaS" just because they're on the internet. This is just commerce.

That being said, if you called this VaaS you wouldn't be wrong.</comment></comment>


The problem with my self-imposed iPhone boycott is... - <AUTHOR> http://stevenf.tumblr.com/post/158213384/the-problem-with-my-self-imposed-iphone-boycott-is <comment> old-gregg The world is unfair. Everybody is stealing my favorite things to hate.

I have been single-handily hating Java since 1996 and never, never took a Java job. It felt so f-ing awesome coding C with Python and laughing at Java groupies up until around 2004 when hating Java became mainstream. Ridiculing Java is so uncool now... everybody is doing it, no need to engage your neocortex in this activity anymore: it's like breathing. Ugh.

Facebook "platform" was awesome to hate but only for a short while: in less than a year everybody stopped loving it and the cave of Facebook haters got too crowded. I don't even remember the name they used for that "platform" anymore.

Then the iPhone came out, a 100% closed and proprietary little cutie. Then the DRM-crippled Kindle! It felt like being a kid in a candy store for a while: those two were awesome gifts to a serial crippled tech hater like me. It's been so awesome not owning these two and bashing them all over internets! And suddenly I'm not alone, the beach is full of fatties and the water is muddy. Hey you're all, get outa here and go zoom some maps with two fingers, dammit!

Ugh... Only Flash is left as the last bullet on my list of things to hate. And the camp of Flash bashers is growing uncomfortably large. It is getting increasingly difficult to find a universally loved crap to loathe. Even not owning a TV, an all-time American love affair, is trendy!

<comment><USER2> I must be really cool because I hate people that hate everything just to be cool

<comment> old-gregg Don't scare me Mr. Jrockway. If you have read my comment in full, you would have noticed that I don't hate "everything". In fact my 12 year old list is only about 5 positions long. Notice that I only hate Adobe Flash full-time at the moment. It takes a skill, time and dedication to hate a particular technology - just look at my bookshelf.

You, on the other hand, just committed to effortlessly hating a bunch of strangers! May I ask which gym you happen to frequent these days?

:P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would think that a more proper boycott of Apple's policy in this case would be to jailbreak the iphone. This way, you're boycotting the app store, not the phone itself.

<comment><USER4> That will really stick it to them--buy their product, pay them cash every month for service, provide advertising by letting people see you use an iPhone, but screw them over by not buying apps.

<comment><USER3> Its all about the developers (as Ballmer says). You'd be doing your part to channel effort away from this awful system into a third party that does not censor or cripple your hardware's functionality:

Check out this bit from Slashdot yesterday:

"The 4-month-old Cydia store is yielding notably higher sales for a few application developers than Apple's AppStore, and is reportedly running on over 4 million Apple iPhone devices, with perhaps 350,000 connected at any one time. In this store, developers are distributing applications they've written that push the limits of Apple's normal AppStore policies, with software to add file downloads to Safari, trick applications into thinking they're on Wi-Fi (for VoIP), and enhance other types functionality. You'll also find the popular Google Voice application, which was recently rejected by Apple."--<http://bit.ly/199gAh>

<comment><USER4> You'll do more to awaken Apple by not using their device at all. Not only is that -1 for them, it's +1 for one of their competitors. Not using the app store deprives them of very little money (even if you spend $100 at the app store they are netting just $30). Not using the device at all is a loss of thousands of dollars (partly AT&T, partly Apple, but both companies will take notice very quickly if people start dropping like flies).

<comment><USER3> Agreed, but I'd still think jailbroken is the way to go for the many that are stuck in contracts and can't really afford the $200 to break early.

<comment><USER4> You'll be able to sell your iPhone for more than $200 and will save money every month if you go to a competitor, so money shouldn't be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To paraphrase Justice Warren on pornography... you'll know it when you see it.

A lot of people need to step back and realize the sheer absurdity of Apple, a maker of software and consumer gadgets suddenly going into the content censorship business. The Apple App stored seemed rotten to be from the beginning and it's lived up to my expectations.

At the end of the day, there's very few things Apple needs to worry about:

\- is the app malicious or hurtful to the system or users?

\- does the user have enough info make a decision on whether they want the app or not?

Schiller's reply on Daring Fireball showed that they don't quite get it. They still believe they should be the ones with the final authority, not users.

<comment><USER6> Not to get off topic, but Warren didn't write that, did he?

<comment><USER7> "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." Justice Potter Stewart - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He missed the most obvious contended to the iPhone, namely the blackberry. In SF at least, you see occasionally Android and Pre's but the overwhelming majority of smart phones are split between iphone and blackberry. Depending on where you are in the city the ration changes, but its obvious that neither the Pre or the Android phones have really made much of a dent on the dominance of those two.

Maybe the next wave of Android phones will help promote that line, and maybe the next version of the Pre with a battery that lasts the whole day will get it into more people's hands, but until then, the world of smartphones is split not into the choices that Steve made.

What the HN community feels about Apple is largely irrelevant to Apple. We're the nerds that buy the early adopter products, Apple appeals to a mass market that doesn't give one hoot about the app approval process, all they want are their games and new shiny things ever summer.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't see why people are particularly upset about the Ninjawords dictionary. I mean, you only need to look at the literal universe of scatological, explicit, sexual terms cataloged in a place like wiktionary to understand what was found to be objectionable.

Fuck, shit, dick, cunt, ass, tits, and whatever else the 7 dirty words happen to be this week weren't the problem.

Here, just peruse this list: <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Vulgarities>

<comment><USER10> From the article: "What's odd is this also contradicts the developers' own claims that the rejection letter they received cited only examples of conventional swear words as objectionable."

Either the developers lied, or their App Store reviewer misled them, or Schiller was not telling the truth when he said that the problem was something other than "conventional swear words".

Anyway. Whatever "unconventional" obscenities it may contain: _it's a dictionary_. Dictionaries (apart from weirdly bowdlerized ones) contain naughty words, and words that describe Very Nasty Things. A user is only likely to see those if they deliberately go looking for them. It doesn't seem difficult to me to understand why some people might find it odd for those words to require the thing to be given a 17+ rating; real dictionaries (which probably offer more opportunities for people to find "cocksucker" or "genocide" -- and, incidentally, isn't it bizarre to worry more about children finding the former than the latter? -- by accident than electronic ones like Ninjawords) don't generally carry age warnings or restrictions.</comment></comment>


The case for cities where you're a sensor, not a thing to be sensed - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2020/jan/17/the-case-for-cities-where-youre-the-sensor-not-the-thing-being-sensed <comment><USER3> > It's not hard to see why: "smart" has become code for "terrible". A "smart > speaker" is a speaker that eavesdrops on you and leaks all your > conversations to distant subcontractors for giant tech companies. "Smart > watches" spy on your movements and sell them to data-brokers for ad- > targeting. "Smart TVs" watch you as you watch them and sell your viewing > habits to brokers.

I guess that would make the Guardian a "smart website".

> The problem is that the smart city, as presently conceived, is a largely > privatised affair designed as a public-private partnership to extract as > much value as possible from its residents

I looked quite hard for any evidence in the article that this was the case other than 'I don't know, it feels kind of icky' but couldn't find any.

> If you want to page a minibus – something like an Uber Pool, but run by the > city, licensed, safe, paying a living wage and not mining your data – you > can summon one, and yes, this exposes your identity so that the driver can > find you.

Ah, and there's the nub of it. It's fine for a responsible (read public- sector) technocrat to mine and process your data, but it's evil when a company does it.

<comment><USER4> It's evil if both/either were to collect more information then is necessary and sell it to 3rd parties for analytics.

The DMV in some states have started to sell people's data, that's fucked.

<comment><USER5> Selling data is a problem, I'm with you so far.

Having the government (that also controls the police, the military etc) collect & analyze large amounts of data on citizens is a recipe for disaster even if they never sell that data to a third party. I hear people say "but we can write laws that they cannot use that data for anything nefarious" and I'm amazed that there are still people alive that believe that laws have ever stopped a government.

I'm fine with "let's limit the amount of data corporations can collect on citizens", but I'm really not fine with "let's allow the state to collect any data on citizens other than absolutely necessary to provide basic services, at least they don't sell it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _In the "internet of things," we're promised technology that will allow us > to project our will on to our surroundings ... But ..._

This is spot on. Technology has always been, and will always be, a means to project our will onto our surroundings, nothing less, nothing more. The only question to be asked is, whose will is being projected onto whose surroundings? Do those surroundings include other people?

To me, all this talk of "smart" household devices is just marketing bullshit designed to mask the fact that the manufacturer is imposing their will onto users. The devices are dumb as fuck. They have no capacity to make any kind of judgment call. The manufacturer does, as they have the source code. Calling the devices "smart" makes it look like they're learning and making decisions for the owner's benefit when they really aren't.

My fridge and air purifier wants internet access for some reason but I'm not giving it to them. I'm not buying a smart TV and probably never will. I prefer my appliances dumb and simple. After all, uneducated and isolated slaves are far less likely to revolt. As soon as they are given a voice of their own, they'll begin to speak for someone else's interests! (Who knew that 19th century slave owners' arguments would turn out to be surprisingly convincing when the slaves aren't humans?)

</comment><comment><USER7> I like this idea. It could be called privacy first mesh architecture or something like that.

<comment><USER8> I bought privacymesh.com a while back for this purpose!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it really true that collecting only anonymous, stateless data has the same value as stateful, identifiable data?

What kind of insights do we lose? Is it simply just advertisers who lose, or will we also lose other things?

For example, if I can track your path around a city, wouldn't I be able to make better predictions about traffic then if I could only track the aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time period?

<comment><USER10> >Is it really true that collecting only anonymous, stateless data has the same value as stateful, identifiable data?

Value to whom?

>What kind of insights do we lose? Is it simply just advertisers who lose, or will we also lose other things?

Who is "we"? Who gets to collect that data, control access to it, etc? How do they get it? Who would lose other things in the absence of that data collection?

>For example, if I can track your path around a city, wouldn't I be able to make better predictions about traffic then if I could only track the aggregated count of locations that had been visited over the course of a time period?

Maybe, but that doesn't mean I want you tracking me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A perfect example is community-sourced apps that warn about police and speed traps.

I also recall reading about apps that warn about video surveillance. But that's a difficult thing to search for.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have a phrase "topless computing" which for me is allowing the data to be accessible in an onwardly usable fashion. Not assuming the use case you have in mind is the final one - someone will always have a better more specific use case

It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows - <USER2> become coders as we are all readers and writers today.

<comment><USER13> > It does mean we all need to become proficient at using those data flows ...

Pretty sure that's extremely unlikely to (ever) happen for even a majority of the population.

a) People have their own interests and goals. They generally aren't going to put time into anything like this unless it seems like it'll help them achieve one of their interests/goals

b) Not everyone is "switched on" technologically. Kids, elderly, even just some people with non-technical personality types. :/

<comment><USER14> b) is education. Literacy is terrible without school too. But now nearly everyone spends years learning that skill and can use it throughout life. Not to say coding is necessarily as useful as reading and writing though.

<comment><USER13> Education _definitely_ won't work for many elderly people who are 1. Not Interested, and 2. May no longer be capable of picking up (or retaining) the skill. :(

<comment><USER14> I'm not talking about re-educating adults. Just that we could teach nearly everyone to program if it were important, in the same way we teach nearly everyone to read and write. Kids already learn long division at school, which is an algorithm. Programming is kind of easier in a way because if you have a goal, you can fumble you way towards it until it works, but you can't really fumble your way through long division if you don't know how to do it.

<comment><USER13> Hmmm. Not sure you really understand what elderly people are like. :/

For example, my father - who used to be able to do at least basic programming in C and Python - is no longer able to grasp the concepts for any length of time.

eg teach him, verify he's gotten it... and the next day it's a blank. Repeatedly. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd argue what is being done with smart cities could be done with smart code bases. For instance: any language's core library has functions that almost nobody uses. That would change if we had a measure of how frequently these functions are used, starting with why we write these functions in the first place: as I see it, this would lead to a more experiment-driven fashion of writing code, instead of idealising the use of these functions as we do nowadays.

<comment><USER16> That does happen. Ruby 2.7 was going to remove something called the swip-swap operator (or similar), which was thought to be essentially unused.

That plan was shelved after a search of GitHub turned a few examples of usage in the wild.

<comment><USER17> The flip-flop operator, I think: [https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-flip- flop/](https://nithinbekal.com/posts/ruby-flip-flop/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> But what about crime? Surveillance really does stop crime. America has parts of cities that are too dangerous to walk alone in at night, and it's so well known that if somebody is murdered doing that, people blame the victim for being too stupid. That's how ingrained the acceptance of crime is. Being able to safely leave your house whenever you want should be a pretty high priority for a good city. What's the alternative to surveillance? Lots of police patrolling everywhere? Isn't that equally creepy but also much more expensive?

<comment><USER18> It used to be that people thought about deep societal issues that might underlie the causes for crime, like joblessness, drug addiction, poor education, lack of job opportunities, gangs, being poor. Apparently today we've lost the imagination for this and the only choices left are more police or more cameras.

<comment><USER14> They're the only choices that have any chance of happening. I absolutely agree we should solve not crime specifically, but the terrible lifelong personal suffering that causes it. For every violent criminal, there must be a lot of harmless damaged people. We need to fix parenting to prevent neglect, abuse and incompetence. But how can you do that without being even more authoritarian than surveillance?

<comment><USER18> Like I said, we've lost the imagination to think about investing in society. It's gonna cost money, time and effort, none of which people want to spend these days. You gotta stop treating people like criminals. You gotta invest in education, healthcare, addiction programs. You gotta hire people-- sociologists, psychologists, educators, and yes some policemen. You gotta set up government departments that are dedicated to studying people's well being and tracking long term trends. You gotta have effective social programs. You gotta stop the propaganda lies that socialism is the same is communism or is some kind of authoritarian nightmare--it isn't. Socialism is high taxes to pay for effective government services run by well-paid professional bureaucrats who know what the heck they are doing. Period. And _for fuck 's sake_, you gotta stop spending trillions on pointless wars, hyper-advanced killing technology, and tax cuts for the rich. In short, do everything the opposite of what America is doing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UofC academics at odds with each other over using SAT scores to admit - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/04/24/university-california-academics-odds-with-each-other-over-using-satact-scores-admit-students/ <comment><USER2> University of California is usually abbreviated UC rather than UofC.</comment>


Does Elon Musk really understand Iain M Banks's 'utopian anarchist' Culture? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2018/jun/19/elon-musk-iain-banks-culture-novels <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I would describe the Culture as "monolithic" \- they have factions and splits and seem to accept these things as quite natural - even to the point of supporting individuals who want to leave the Culture.

Just so long as BFRs are given Culture ship names everything will be fine.... ;-)

</comment><comment> Dan_- I wonder if the writer of the article read the same Culture novels I did. Or read them at all. "In each novel, the Culture faces an enemy that does not agree with their values." I recall that mostly the Culture reacted to aggression. Further, stuff like "for the Gzilt, they wanted them not to 'sublime', or transcend the known universe" is just plain wrong. In the case of the Idirans, the war was put to a referendum and not decided by the Minds.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suppose creating an interventionist near-utopia won't be so bad if we don't run into any other intelligent life. The ethics of intervention are complicated enough between humans, so I'm happy to defer worrying too much about the ethics of interfering with other intelligent life until we find it. And other than that, the Culture's post-scarcity near-utopia sounds pretty great, especially compared to the current state of humanity.

</comment><comment><USER4> > a post-scarcity, hedonistic society where you could create your own drugs in > your own body, change gender at will and where freedom was the highest and > noblest sign of a civilisation.

This sounds great, why can't we have it without all the bad stuff? The wonderful Ian M. Banks had to add conflict so it would make a page-turning novel: real-life isn't so constrained.

<comment><USER5> The Culture world trapped power hungry would-be tyrants in deep ultra- realistic VR, indeed almost all competition went there IIRC.

So maybe one day we could?

<comment><USER6> > The Culture world trapped power hungry would-be tyrants in deep ultra- > realistic VR

That's an interesting idea. What book was that described in? I've only read a couple of the Culture books.

<comment><USER7> "Surface Detail", absolutely recommend!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've read all of Banks' SF and for one thing it's silly of the article to criticize based on specifics, he created quite a large, complicated world so obviously Elon can't agree with every specific.

On the points which are most attention-grabbing and wrong or misleading:

To say that "vast intelligent machines oversee..." is true but inside Banks' book/philosophy there doesn't seem to be any "are robots alive" debate. He seems to view any form of sentience equally, it's never a question. So giant intelligent machines are just another form of sentient life created in the image of their creators. They're just powerful characters, not malign overseers.

Also to call it totalitarian is absolutely wrong. There are splinters in the Culture, there are several semi-independant or outsider groups which are tolerated. They intervene in politics but they don't really pick fights, the Idirans came after them and declared war, it wasn't the Culture being intolerant of their religion that's ridiculous. The Affront are a species perpetrating an eternal internal super-holocaust. They're not just "brutal".

The way this is written totally misrepresents the works, I don't think the author misunderstands them it's just poor attention grabbing dishonest journalism.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've not read all of the Culture series, but I've read enough to say that I would prefer the [dys|u]topia of Snow Crash to the Culture.

</comment><comment><USER10> Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.

"Money implies Poverty" -Ian M. Banks</comment>


Unredacted Financials Page From The Mt. Gox Presentation  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/25/here-is-the-unredacted-financials-page-from-the-mt-gox-presentation/ <comment><USER2> this has been posted about 20 times already.</comment>


Let's Talk About Millennial Poverty - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mshannabrooks/but-seriously-lets-talk-about-millennial-poverty-526066ad9adb <comment><USER2> My parents and grandparents told me to "go to college". No mention of majors. They said this because they saw their peers with "college degrees" advancing in their fields. You could pay for college with a part time summer job making minimum wage.

Today, the labor market is flooded with "degrees" so the major matters more than ever. The cost has also skyrocketed. The advice today should be "Go to an inexpensive college and choose a major that can lead to a lucrative career".

<comment><USER3> My parents and grandparents told me to "go to college and learn something useful". We spent a lot of time discussing cost vs. benefits of each type of degree. And this was 20 years ago.

I've never understood how people can get a degree in something with little market value and then be confused as to why they can't find gainful employment.

<comment><USER4> Because many people think of college as the path you go along to develop a career, become educated, become a part of an informed and thoughtful society, (because that is what it used to be and should still be) not a job training for the general population that is free for corporations and life-destroying for citizens, their future indentured debt-slaves-cough I mean employees.

Not everybody does a cost-benefit analysis to calculate what jobs are in demand (realistically, will be in demand 5 years from now which may be radically different and unpredictable) and what majors give them these skills, then choose to forgo a real education in order to train for something they hate because of expected financial return. You're arguing that everyone should do that. I'd suggest that no-one should.

<comment><USER5> those that do, go to med school

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My bike stops, I ditch right towards some bushes and roll off the sidewalk into grass. The bluejeans, shoes, and presumably legs of the homeless guy asleep across the sidewalk are safe, their owner sleepily oblivious to my passing. In the Houston summer, I don't know what he dreams of--maybe of the same thing the homeless lady I saw last month sprawled (high? napping? seizing?) across the light rail platform, maybe of a job, maybe of a society that gives a damn.

As it is, I've got to get to my job. My job which has no benefits. My job which pays about half the median salary for developers. My job which is theoretically solving all those "hard problems" that investors and people here on HN bandy about, and yet which curiously never seem to materialize funding despite the amount of public celebration of our company's work. Praise is easier than paying invoices on time, I suppose.

Train opens, I get on, I lean over my bike and watch the world slide by. Some other millenials (judging by age) are here with me. Unlike the homeless guy, they still are trying to play their role in the system. Like me, they probably believe in living within their means. They probably have fuckhuge college debts to pay off. They probably have people telling them all day "Get a job", "Work harder", "Be generous to others".

If they're entrepreneurial, they get other messages too: "Work on important things", "Screw revenue, acquire investment", "Everybody is getting funded", "Normal jobs are for sissies and cowards and the middle class".

They'll keep doing this, as perhaps will I. They'll keep voting for politicians bought and sold so thoroughly that their vote will never register. They'll put in long hours working on solved problems, to impress a boss just as beholden to the system as they. They'll come to work sick because who has time to see a doctor, if the shitty benefits package could afford one anyway. They dream of a better situation, of casting off their chains and maybe fixing the system. Then again, they see through the window as I do the police hustling the poor and crazy and sick and afraid into vans and cars and tanks to God knows where for God knows how long. _That 's_ the alternative. _That 's_ what happens when you don't mesh in.

With no funds, large debt, and yet so much messaging that you can change the world if you just _try_ hard enough, it's a rough place to be. A billboard urges compassion and giving next to a church, telling me to be happy I've got what I have. A few blocks later, another billboard shows off cars I can't afford next to bars that won't let me in.

The door opens. It's time to get off.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you navigate prioritization in mature software teams? - <AUTHOR> As a new senior software engineer to a team, I find it very frustrating to push for newer projects to be prioritised in the team's backlog. I often find that resistance comes in two forms: 1) This has been tried before, and need not be attempted (à la "historian's fallacy") 2) This is too strategic, and changes systems which are working fine today. We should look for low-hanging fruits.<p>How do you deal with this? <comment><USER2> I'm going to go ahead and assume your teammates are reasonable people. If they're not then it doesn't matter what you do.

It sounds like you're not convincing anyone of the value of your proposals. You want to do something they've tried before, and presumably it failed. Why is it different this time around? Why are your ideas better? How will this align with the long term goals of the company?

Likewise, you want to make large changes to existing systems. Why aren't you able to convince them that this is the right way to spend your resources?

If you can't get people behind you you're going to have a hard time in your career. People are going to disagree with you all of the time. Learn how to sway them to your side. It may make sense to you, but for whatever reason, it doesn't to them. So what are they looking for? What are their concerns? What might they know that you do not, or what do you know that they don't?

Ask them questions. Why didn't this work the last time around? What is our mandate as an engineering organization? What issues do you foresee in doing this? They may make your point for you in their answers, or you may realize that your idea isn't fully fledged.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the things that might help you is this: Understand why the resistance is. It may be true that things are working today but if your suggestion means that you only make it better/faster/whatever _in support_ of whatever your team's strategic objectives are , it might win you your team-mates' confidence. As a new member in your team, there might be people who view your ideas with skepticism and it's natural until you can show that you're only suggesting things that will make life easier for _them_

</comment><comment><USER4> My instinct is to go to numbers/metrics and try to show it objectively first. Can you show things will be faster, use less resources, etc? Your idea should stand on its own.

Sometimes timing has to be right too. If the team is swamped with work and your idea is a variation of something that didn't work in the past (even if you think it'll work this time), maybe it's better to save it for later. But if it had a direct impact on the drowning, double down on it. Collect more data, convince more people, etc.</comment>