In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other 'Radical' Ideas - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/opinion/five-hour-workday-experiment.html <comment><USER2> I'm a really big fan of this movement towards shorter workweeks.

Personally, I enjoy working hard - usually more than 40 hours per week. But we should distinguish between working for others and working for oneself. Working for oneself can be education, passion work, or anything that energizes you. Working for others is also necessary for most people but reducing the weekly commitment gives people more freedom in their lives and makes them happier and more productive.

For some, the extra time away from work gives them the freedom to spend more time with their family or children, or spend more time on their hobbies. But ultimately it makes these people better contributing members of society.

One belief I certainly don't agree with is the idea that working less for others makes you a lazy person or a less contributing member of society. People need free time to care for themselves and others, vote and participate in democracy, and do their laundry. We will be better off with less time committed to working for others.

And of course I cant help but plug 30 Hour Jobs here since it's very much relevant: [https://30hourjobs.com](https://30hourjobs.com)

<comment><USER3> Curious - if you are a knowledge worker and getting through your tasks in say 4 days, does your boss/company really care how you are spending remaining 1 day?

I often use company time to learn about new things that are related to my work, but not necessarily immediate tasks. For example - While working on a Java app, I will spend some time learning AWS or Kotlin. Not one person in the companies I have worked for ever told me off for doing that, most in fact encouraged it. My personal diary/notes suggests I spend between 25-30 hours/week doing actual tasks or attending meetings and remaining I spend socializing at work to build relationships which will help get things done for me or learning. This of course is average over a year, some weeks are more work heavy (even stretching to more than 40 hours) and some less so.

I have come to prefer it instead of shorter work week, which means same amount of work needs to be done in less number of sleep/break cycles, reducing the quality I produce. When I worked for myself, I used to work only 3-4 days a week and observed that in theory it sounds good, but my personal experience was, I was spending far less time subconsciously and output was not inline with my usual quality.

<comment><USER4> >... getting through your tasks in say 4 days...

In my experience, there is no such thing as "getting through your tasks", as you are expected to pick up more tasks from a never ending bucket of tasks [1]. Of course this varies from place to place, but is in general true. Your peers and managers are more likely to notice you leaving early, or "not working" on the Friday, than they are to notice you working your butt off on the previous 4 days, to be honest.

[1] Edit: this is because of the nature of knowledge work, and the difficulty in estimating duration of work, difficulty, and quality. If you finish early, the powers that be are more likely to attribute it to bad powers of augury as opposed to extra hard work. This might sound overly negative, but I have seen this consistently throughout a few decades of experience (yet, I still work hard... go figure).

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Where I work, we have a well defined scope for a sprint. That will get divided into tasks and then are assigned to team members. So I usually know what is my pipeline for next 2 weeks and it is fairly finite. Unless of course I am working on a more exploratory project where scope is not well defined. Of course people falling sick, or getting stuck in their task and needing help, and few other attributes can change that to some extent, but not a lot. So in summary, even though there is an endless supply for tasks that can be done, for the sprint, it is fairly finite.

Also I dont spend less time at work, I just use post lunch hour, and 30-60 mins throughout the day to do learning.

<comment><USER5> Why are they happy for you to stop working before the working week is over?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Sick of round-the-clock work emails and Slack messages? Here's some hope.

This is exactly why articles about 4-day workweeks, 5-hour workdays, and the idea that productivity is inversely correlated to hours worked are so popular; Many of us are buried under expectations of around-the-clock availability and commitment to our jobs.

One of my employers made an official policy banning vacation statuses in Slack because, in their words, it implied that people were off the hook from responding to Slack messages. I was threatened with demotion for taking a 2-day _weekend_ backpacking vacation out of cell phone range once (not an on call job). My management team just couldn't tolerate the idea that one of their employees was out of their control.

At this point, I'd gladly take strict 8-hour workdays, 5 days a week. These articles about 5-hour days or 32-hour workweeks feel like a pipedream.

<comment><USER7> I've had the luxury of a 36.5 hour work week, with no on call for about 18 years. It exists, but don't expect $300,000 salaries with it. You want to be rich, or do you want to live a rich life?

<comment><USER8> I'm a consultant, so this doesn't really match 1:1 with expectations of a salaried employee.

My work phone goes into DnD from 5pm until 8am. I don't answer emails or phone calls, and I don't make exceptions for free.

If I'm on call for a weekend, I bill 16 hours, regardless of if I worked, because I cannot go anywhere if I'm needed at my laptop.

When I go on vacation, I leave my phone at home and take an sim-less android, and buy a new sim/number when I reach my destination.

<comment><USER9> Is this reasonable for many other jobs?

If you were working as a painter, a carpenter, a landscaper etc. Would people find it acceptable if you painted for an hour and charged for 15 hours? Just because they needed you for one?

To be clear, I am not attempting to demonize you or anything, but to me, this seems like a sort of entitlement that tech workers have that some other workers just cannot experience.

How can other professionals obtain that level of freedom?

<comment><USER8> If I hired a painter and I told them they couldn't go home, go out to lunch, or leave the premises for 16 hours, even if they only take 10 minutes to paint, I'm paying them for that time.

If a company puts a demand on your time, they need to pay for that time no matter what your profession. So when I'm on call on a weekend and I'm expected to answer my phone and be immediately available and connected to the client, I'm billing them for the fact that I cannot leave the confines of my internet.

<comment><USER10> Absolutely this.

I worked for one of the big tech vanity names held as a poster child in the AU. They started to introduce mandatory on-call, which was non-negotiable. For an extra $200 AUD (ex tax) a week, you had the privilege of sacrificing all your personal time. Carrying a laptop, having constant phone-signal, not drinking, and being completely available within 15-30 minutes of the first ping was mandatory; otherwise, you could be facing disciplinary action.

Effectively it's a huge pay cut at less than minimum wage. For the loss of personal hours, you'd get significantly more money taking any minimum wage job. I don't go to work for free, I go to pay the bills.

Then the management blackmail starts, you get free food...a deli counter and fridge of soft drinks which I never used anyway. Then you get the be a team player, take it for the team emotional blackmail.

I'd happily do on-call on a best attempt if I'm available I'll answer the call for free. Restrict my personal time/activities outside work, I want paying at least minimum wage per hour after your company just IPO'd and worth several billion.

<comment><USER11> That narrowed it down quite nicely.. what a harrowing policy!

I find it a bit despicable in the AU when owners who are the only ones to really benefit in case of success (never seen a stock option here) say we are a startup and have to make sacrifices to make it (big) etc.

First sight of trouble and your job is gone; I struggle to see the upside for anyone other than the owners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Employers and managers seem incapable of understanding the cost these conditions impart. I understand it: morale is hard to put a dollar amount next to.

But most tech companies don't need everyone 24/7\. They just don't. They should condition employees to value their free time, it will pay off in a lot of ways.

Unless it's an absolute emergency I don't send emails past five. People are conditioned to respond to them. Same with slack messages. There's this belief that being available 24/7 is a positive attribute in employees and we really need to squash that. It's unhealthy for everyone.

<comment><USER13> I think it's absolutely fine for people to send slacks, emails, etc after 5pm.

Being _expected_ to, however, is a different story.

<comment><USER12> The reason I don't is because it tacitly sets an expectation for the recipient(s) that they do the same.

<comment><USER14> I agree, though sometimes you are working at a particular time and need to get things out of your queue. The onus is on each person to switch off non- emergency notifications out of hours and preserve their personal time.

I also think it's crucial to never reply quickly to non-emergencies. Just creates the expectation you're available and encourage more of the same.

That is, unless it's a situation/relationship you want to foster to establish yourself in a team, outpace someone for promotion, etc.

<comment><USER12> I'm not saying you shouldn't work when you want to / have to. Just do your best not to broadcast that you are, because that's how expectations get set unrealistically across a company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't have any of these concerns. I just don't answer emails or Slack messages right way.

Nobody has fired me for it yet because I am there when it matters, I consistently provide value, and I show up to all meetings scheduled in advance.

Just get a big ball o' FU money and let the good times roll. You're the one who decides if you need to be "always on," and guess what, you don't. The world can learn learn to wait like 30 minutes or a few hours if you're really far away from tech.

I routinely leave my place in the middle of the day to ride my bike, climb, or whatever and I have suffered minimal repercussions.

It's all in your mind

<comment><USER16> > Just get a big ball o' FU money and let the good times roll.

I wish someone had told me it was that easy sooner!

<comment><USER15> If you're in software, it's easy. You just have to learn how to control your spending and save the rest. Get comfortable living at about $30K per year

<comment><USER16> I do work in software, and I do save my money. However, unless I'm suddenly given a massive raise it's going to take 5 or more years until I have what I consider "FU money" saved up. I wouldn't really consider saving up money over years and years as "just getting it"

<comment><USER17> Wow. A whole 5 years to get "FU Money" saved up. That's a blessing, and can strongly be considered "just getting it". Short of an inheritance, or winning the lottery, normally salaried or hourly workers will never have "FU money"; let alone in 5 short years.

<comment><USER15> Where does your money go? Do you regularly audit your finances and account for it all?

I have a bigass spreadsheet I use to track every last dollar, and I ruthlessly optimize everything.

Cell phone plan, down to $30/month. Health insurance, just $300/month. No tv. No subscriptions. No commute. Even if I did, I own my car outright so no car payment. No B.S. pre-packaged food. I cook pretty much everything at home. Have done so for years. Minimal eating out, once a month or so at inexpensive restaurants. No debt. Of any kind. So therefore no interest payments.

A few small "luxury" expenses here like a ski pass because you only live once.

All of this is completely within the realm of someone who makes $70k per year or more, the bottom rung of software development.

You should be able to hit $100K in savings in five years if you are smart with your money. Likely more if you really hustle and audit every dollar. Maybe a little less if you're supporting kids, but you can optimize how you spend your money on them too.

<comment><USER18> There are a lot of people who are programmers but aren't "software developers", particularly not "full stack" buzzword enabled types. If you've been programming for a decade or two, and haven't had that title, you're likely not going to get that $70K that fresh grads will. Likely not even hired, for "cultural fit".

Hope you don't fall off the treadmill, because if you do, you'll find out there is no way back and no pity.

<comment><USER15> Oh I've had plenty of struggles myself. I've gone six months without work and had to spend several years just building my skills to the point where others would find them valuable.

On top of that, I was super stubborn about always working remotely, which I got but only after rejecting one place after another. I would have kept employment easily had I just been more willing to drive into an office every day.

I happen to be young, but I work with plenty of people who are much older than me and greyer too, so I don't really buy the ageism argument. The market is hot and if you can deliver the goods, chances are you can get a job.

<comment><USER18> "if you can deliver the goods"

Demonstrating what you can do at a temporary job is a viable tactic, but it takes luck to find the right one and sacrifices if it's paying half what you're used to.

When you're just out of college, you can tell people in an interview that you've been learning a language on your own, and you've done this and that, and you're confident you can be useful. And they will hire you. That's how I got my first post bachelor's job.

But ten or twenty years down the line, you can't do that. Any job with 5-10 requirements, they aren't interested in hearing how you have been studying it at home, how you were working with something similar 6 months or 10 years ago. You have to be using all of the things on a daily basis _now_. And confidence you can learn any language equates to arrogance and "not a cultural fit".

You don't appreciate the difference between a college grad and someone a bit older. The issue isn't that everyone who's older insists on a senior level salary, when they don't know, say, Java or Python. The issue is that it's assumed they can't even learn anything new, regardless of experience, if they aren't doing it right now.

What I did personally was to find a job with _zero_ technical requirements that happened to be ripe for automation, so I could do whatever I wanted in any spare moment and learn whatever I thought might be useful. But in retrospect, I think it was extreme luck that I found it, and that I was at my best for the interview. Because 99% of similar jobs are just, file stuff, answer phones, move boxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My cofounder and I switched to working 4 hours of "productive" work per day and it is pretty awesome. I use RescueTime to track what app is in front and when it ticks over to 4 hours I generally call it quits unless I am in the middle something I want to wrap up.

I really like this because it incentivizes productivity over hours in seat. IE, right now this comment is being added to my "non productive" time and I am making no progress on getting my workday done. (I have 15m left at the moment)

I am generally pretty focused, but sometimes that wanes and I find this keeps me on task. On the best of days I start around 7am and call it quits by noon, but occasionally that stretches into 2pm.

I do occasionally hop on a bit in the evening and we are all basically all on call but our stack is pretty stable so that doesn't come up often.

Has been absolutely awesome, I don't think I could ever go back. I am far happier, spend far more time outdoors and I honestly do not think my productivity has dropped much at all. I think it is far too easy to just use wall clock as a measure of working and fool ourselves that we are doing more than 4 hours of real work in an 8 hour day.

Throwaway because I'm not sure my clients are ready to hear this.

<comment><USER15> Yup. I suspect this sort of thing is going on all over the place but most people don't speak openly of it.

All work is value-based. Never forget that.

No clients care if you spent 80 hours a week not solving their problem, so why would they care if you spent 20 solving it?

<comment><USER19> > No clients care if you spent 80 hours a week not solving their problem, so > why would they care if you spent 20 solving it?

This has not been my experience at all. It's a different subject entirely, but it is very common for clients to be much happier to pay for 20 days at $550 a day than 5 days at $2,200 a day, even if they got it two weeks earlier. People are not rational.

<comment><USER15> Right right. They have other weird concepts like "market rates" and average timeframe lodged in their heads.

It's complicated and pardon me if I have glossed over the details somewhat.

If you're smart, you get all of the work done in advance, then stage it over the course the next few days, providing a steady trickle to create the perception of steady progress and to have something to mention at the standup meetings. I suspect a good percentage of experienced developers with good customer management skills do something akin to this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The simple fact is this: My company is not getting 8 hours of me a day. They just aren't. I'm not thinking about my job all day, I'm not working all day. About 3-4 hours of my day is spent dicking around online, eating lunch, having silly conversations on slack or texting my girlfriend.

I would bet that this is the norm, not just in my job, but most jobs where it's not very simple to tell if someone's "working" or not (essentially all non-labor jobs).

So they can either roll with it and just give me that time free, or I can sit there and pretend to be working with just as much effect, only I'm less happy because I have to sit in a chair for 3-4 hours a day just to warm it.

I don't have the mental capacity or the patience or the energy to sit and think through difficult problems all day. I don't have any of that for meetings, for decision making, for groom sessions or anything else that requires that much extra attention. It's exhausting and pointless, as, even if I'm there, I'm at a diminished capacity for productivity.

So, just agree that you're not going to get me to work those extra hours, give me that time back, take it yourself, and let's all just be happy and die someday.

</comment><comment><USER21> Throwaway here, some clients may not like it.

I am having basically a 3-4 hours workday and have had for a few years now.

As a freelancer doing most work remotely, I can easily set my schedule. I charge clients per day, and so far I have never had a complaint about being too slow or too unproductive. I seem to very often be more productive than "full-time" employees.

A few years ago I was almost depressed because I thought I was very bad at work ethics. Doing other things during the day, spending some days as little as one or two hours on the client's project. Then I realized that the days where I would force myself to work 8 or 9 hours on a project usually end up with me staring at the screen and doing useless or even counter-productive things for hours.

I then switched into accepting it. My quality of life improved, the quality of my work seemed to not have changed or even improved a bit (I spend more time improving myself actually, learning new things) and I managed to raise my rates. So technically, I raised my yearly productivity by halving my workday.

Obviously, that's not the case for all jobs, but for software developers, I think I am not alone in that case: I can be productive 3 or 4 hours per day. After that, I can convincingly pretend to be productive but with very low value and probably a toll on my productive time on the next day.

<comment><USER22> For sure- There is already a massive tech culture of working say 20-30 hours a week. Particularly in management and consulting. Its just that its kind of taboo to acknowledge it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I worked this schedule while I was studying, 5-hours a day 5 days a week (part-time) and to be honest my productivity was around 85/90% compared to working 8-hours a day 5 days a week.

I would have the stand-up as 10/15 minutes after arriving, and then I would most of the times enter flow and work for 1h30 to 2h, make a break and work for more 1h to 1h30, sometimes longer if I got distracted with time. On those flow blocks I would only pause in intervals of 2-3 minutes for filling the water bottle or going to bathroom. Between those flow blocks I usually had a longer break to talk with my colleagues (work related or not), sometimes play a bit foosball or board/card games and eat.

It was great, except when we had bigger meetings/workshops and other time consuming events. When those occured I had troubles getting into flow. In those days I managed to do it I would often get distracted with time and work 5h30 to 6h unintentionally.

It worked really well, I think the lunch break has a large context switching cost, making it hard to have productive 8h. Making it feel like either the morning or the afternoon short on time.

I would also love to try 8-9h (getting more hours after the context switch of lunch) a day 4 days a week. Getting 3 days to focus on you (your hobbies, chores, friends, family, whatever) and 4 days to focus on work might be a great alternative as well. I might suggest and negotiate it in the near future.

<comment><USER24> I had a similar schedule studying. It works really well to focus productivity in the morning. In particular I found that It was very difficult to focus after lunch for a few hours. I stopped fighting this and embraced that it was a good time to exercise, socialize or get random stuff done that didn't involve focus.

If necessary I could work for a few more hours between 4 and 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In 1966, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, in the famous "Man the Hunter" symposium coined the term "the original affluent" society which he ascribed to the hunter-gatherer peoples. His argument largely rested on studies conducted on the !Kung people of Southern Africa which found that the !Kung only needed to work about 15-20 hours a week to meet their daily needs. When compared to the 40 hour workweeks that (some) industrial nations enjoy (and have fought to achieve), they do indeed seem affluent

However, a mistake in this analysis was quickly pointed out. That 15-20 hours figure only represented the time necessary to gather food. It ignored the time necessary to gather firewood, take care of children, prepare food, etc.

So Sahlins went back to his analysis and took those factors into account. When taking those factors into account, the !Kung (and most San peoples that have maintained their traditional foraging societies) worked 40 hours to meet all their basic needs. However, when looking at the time spent by Western peoples outside of formal work doing informal work (laundry, cooking, etc), their workweek shot up to 80 hours.

In the end, the San (and likely most foraging societies) worked half as much as us, enjoyed great health [1], and even had better food security [2] (contrary to common assumptions about foraging societies).

The questions this opens up, in my view, are: 1) If our society is so much more efficient now than societies were before civilization, why is it that we have to work so much harder to meet our basic needs? 2) If it's not the majority benefiting from this increased efficiency, who is? 3) Is our industrial society more efficient after all?

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30511505](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30511505) [2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/)

edit: 15-20 hours a week not a day

<comment><USER26> 1) You can 100% meet your basic needs(in the !Kung sense) working 15-20 hrs/week.

I imagine most Kung live with their family, don't have healthcare, no climate control, walk everywhere. Clothing, food and a place to live is not that expensive. A part time service job would give you about ~$700/month, which is more than enough to meet these basic needs. You could rent a room for as little as $200, live on $35/week on food, and easily be clothed $20/month.

2) We benefit by having more stuff, not working less.

3) It is definitely more efficient. You couldn't support anywhere near the world's population based on !Kung style hunting/gathering.

<comment><USER27> You are missing the forest for the trees, they were not surviving, they were living.

Do those $35 a week get you a healthy meal? Or will you eventually develop malnutrition? I live in a mid-sized city in UK, and back in my student days I rented a room for ~$300. It had rats, mould, and a leaking roof.

Those people raised a family while working 20 hrs/week. Are you going to feed and house your kids with that part-time service job?

Maybe you can, but that's not the point. After 4,000 of progress, the difference should be so vast, that the two experiences are totally incomparable.

Since those barbaric days productivity went up over 10,000%, I should be able to survive working 2 hours a year!

<comment><USER28> I think you're not really appreciating what a tribal lifestyle is actually like.

Live in a rural area.

No education except what you can do yourself. No travel. No books. No movies. No music except what you can make yourself. No shoes.

No food that didn't grow within a few miles of you. You will eat the same 12 things your whole life. No spices, no seasoning, probably no salt either. No cooking oil.

No refrigerator or freezer.

Healthcare is whatever you can assemble at home. Dental problem? Sharp rock. Cancer? Goodbye. Infection? Goodbye. Same for your kids. Be sure to have extras to replace the ones who die.

Wash your clothes by hand, if at all.

No shampoo. No soap.

No bed. You sleep on skins.

No AC, ever. No thermostat. No heat but fire and body heat.

No birth control.

No retirement - work until death.

No police. Someone threatening you? I hope your family can back you up. You will be called upon to do violence. There will be no morality in it, only advantage.

\---

You could easily - easily! - work 15 hours a week and live at this consumption level (in fact, far beyond). And, eating better than a !Kung would be extremely simple on $5 per day.

<comment><USER25> This shows a really deep misunderstanding of tribal lifestyles.

> Live in a rural area.

The only reason this might be true is because colonizers killed off or enslaved all the people who lived in places you can grow food. That's why the only places the San maintain their ways of life are mountains and deserts. But originally they lived in all sorts of ecosystems

> No education except what you can do yourself.

They have education... they educate themselves and even if not they can still send their kids to western schools. Also, why wouldn't they be able to get books?

> No travel

A foraging society travels every day. Native americans traveled great distances between seasons. During winter and fall many peoples lived in large urban centers (cities). Some of these cities were larger than European cities. People got around and you got to experience much more cultural diversity than the average industrial citizen does today

> No music except what you can make yourself

indigenous music... exists. And its often a central part of their culture. Music used to be more plentiful than it is today. In large part because they had so much more leisure time

> No shoes.

I don't know where you got this one from

> No food that didn't grow within a few miles of you

Like I said earlier, indigenous peoples absolutely did interact with other peoples and trade has always been a thing even before agriculture. Many peoples had large portions of their calories coming from trading

> You will eat the same 12 things your whole life. No spices, no seasoning, > probably no salt either. No cooking oil.

Indigenous peoples had a much more varied diet than modern western people do. They knew hundreds of plants, fish, birds, reptiles, and even bugs. Part of the reason they enjoy better food security than their industrial counterparts is because of how varied their diet is. If their hunt is unsuccessful, if the sweet potato harvest was small this season, if their staple foods burned down, etc then they had a ton of backup foods and things we consider delicacies today. From acorn flour to lizards to even ants. And they also used spices extensively in tropical areas because it keeps food better preserved and safer

> Healthcare is whatever you can assemble at home. Dental problem? Sharp rock. > Cancer? Goodbye. Infection? Goodbye. Same for your kids. Be sure to have > extras to replace the ones who die.

I don't know where to start with this one. For one, hunter gatherers enjoyed much better dental health than their agricultural counterparts [1]. They also had many medicines and techniques for oral health that modern science is still learning from. For example the miswaks (a chewing stick) that's still widely used in Muslim parts of the world was found to be more effective than brushing your teeth [2] and has been recommended by the WHO.

> No shampoo. No soap.

No need! Your skins microbiome is essential to your health. Studies have found it to be really lacking diversity in Western populations compared to non- western populations. Two studies that censused populations of hunter gatherers both found zero cases of any level of acne [3]. One of 1200 Kitavans, and one of 115 Ache over 843 days. Both peoples across the globe from each other yet no instances of acne. This seems to be true for many of the skin diseases we face

Also it's not true that they had no soap. Indigenous peoples know which plants have saponins and other anti-microbial properties and use them as needed

> No bed. You sleep on skins.

lol

> No AC, ever. No thermostat. No heat but fire and body heat.

Precisely why hunter-gatherers are the ultimate eco-friendly society lol. But seriously tho, they constructed their shelters in ways that make a natural sort of AC system (the way that termites build their mounds and the way that modern western architects are trying to replicate). They have many other solutions to cold as well. Not to mention the human body adapts in a lot of ways to different climates (have you ever seen a Russian swim in a sub-zero lake?).

> No retirement - work until death.

Like I said, they work much less. In most societies the elders are well respected and play other important roles. As multiple studies have found, the biggest predictor of how long you'll live is your social network/community. Being able to grow old in a community of people you're extremely close with is something I wish our society still allowed us to do

> No police. Someone threatening you? I hope your family can back you up. You > will be called upon to do violence. There will be no morality in it, only > advantage.

This is a western bias of how, not only human nature, but nature itself works. Cooperation is a powerful force that is constant throughout nature. It is selected for in everything from slime molds to ants to naked mole rats. Darwin wasn't even a Darwinist. He recognized the importance that cooperation plays in evolution. The idea that competition is the driving force in evolution is one that runs deep in our evolutionary biology because for most of it's history, evolutionary biology in America was done by white Southern landowners. It wasn't until a Northerner got in that theories of group selection and kin selection started to be looked at. Now even game theory recognizes the importance of cooperation for survival

> You could easily - easily! - work 15 hours a week and live at this > consumption level (in fact, far beyond). And, eating better than a !Kung > would be extremely simple on $5 per day.

Good luck affording 100% organic, wild caught, no pesticides, etc food. Did you know that since 1914, the mineral content of our vegetables has decreased by over 90% [4]?

[1] [https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2013/02/24/1726888...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2013/02/24/172688806/ancient-chompers-were-healthier-than-ours) [2] [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/000163500429398](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/000163500429398) [3] [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/479093) [4] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/)

<comment><USER28> Wait so you think neolithic tribal people didn't live in rural areas? As in, you think they lived in cities?

I feel I need to cover the first point because it's so bonkers there's not much point going into the rest, which seem equally insane and/or reflexively contrarian.

I think you're picking nits and playing word games and pretending disagreement when there is none (i.e. only music you make yourself is what indigenous music is, when I say no travel I obviously mean in the modern sense; not in that you literally can't walk some distance, etc).

But in the end you're attacking all this because you're dedicated to a view of tribal life as pure and uncorrupted by modernity. This links to a secular- religious far left concept that human life is naturally free, full, rich, clean, and equal, and all bad things are caused by society. You can't even accept that there are bad aspects to it - it's the natural nirvana that's been lost. And you're dedicated to believing that heaven is possible because it fills a hole in your soul. You'd do better beliving in a religious heaven instead of a prehistoric one - both are nonsense but the religious version at least doesn't demand so many absurd beliefs about physical facts. In the end people like you do a lot of harm because you actually resist and attempt to reverse the advances that save people from their dismal, short lives without modern civilization. God forbid our society is ever taken over by a faction who believe that our society is the root of all evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I work about 5 hours a day and love it. I've left work multiple days at 2-3pm and that's okay because on those days I'm usually in the office at 7-8. Scrum allows my teammates to know what I'm up to and as long as work isn't being pushed and communication is robust everything is fine. To be honest I couldn't really program for more than 6 hours a day anyway. It's mentally draining and I can't sit that long.

<comment><USER30> How did you land this gig? Did you negotiate a 25 hour work week, or was it a part-time job from the get-go?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've had a 5 hour working day for my entire career. It's the 8 hour sitting day I've never been able to break free from.

</comment><comment><USER32> Another (psuedoscientific) argument [1] in favour of 30 hour weeks:

30 = (7 _24) /4_(5/7)

On each day, you should have half the day for "resting porposes". Of the remaining half, you should work only half of that. Finally, you should only apply this to 5 days with the other two reserved for "full day resting and recreational purposes". Of course it could be calculated differently to give 3 or 4 day weeks.

[1] I actually did this calculation absent-mindedly through my search box hotkey while reading _nbrempel_ 's comment about 30 hour jobs and LOL'd when my independent approach actually came out to 30.

<comment><USER32> Sorry but I keep forgetting about the damned asterisk:

(7 * 24)/4 * (5/7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > _Sick of round-the-clock work emails and Slack messages? Here's some hope._

I leave my laptop in office and don't even want to think about work the instant I walk past the door.

<comment><USER34> I take mine home so if I want to work from home the next day I can

<comment><USER33> Yeah that's always the dilemma at the end of the day...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This premise doesn't jibe with _products_ that are "always on". Support 5hrs/day? I hope "great support" isn't part of your value prop. Devs can't even be reached because they log out of slack, etc at 1pm and over the weekend? I hope "uptime" (riiight) isn't part of your value prop. As a consultant we do lots of new product development for clients where uptime and support are a big deal, especially during rollouts/launches where we're encountering a flood of new issues (UX and technical), going totally dark after 1pm weekdays isn't a remote possibility.

Having said that, we _very rarely_ actually work more than 35hr/week or on weekends. But we do put my personal phone number in our SOW for CRITICAL issues (haven't been called yet). So yeah maintaining a sane work culture is critical but telling everyone to completely unplug at 1pm is nuts IMO.

This article isn't outlining every details obviously and maybe the example company really doesn't care about uptime or quick support (desktop app for enterprise??). And maybe they are glossing over the fact that every week there actually is someone on call but most people unplug at 1pm. If so, that sounds pretty reasonable!

<comment><USER36> You could hire another shift of support engineers for those times...

<comment><USER37> which costs more money. Getting more work out of fewer people thereby cutting costs and increasing shareholder value is the capitalist thing to do. Not saying it's right or wrong.

<comment><USER18> No, that's like saying cheating people or killing them is the capitalist thing to do. Defending capitalism becomes indistinguishable from attacking it; either way, the assertion is false. A market economy is a way of optimizing welfare through profit-seeking, but it has no meaning or existence or justification without constraints and boundary conditions. What constraints we should have is a political question completely separate from whether we should have private ownership of capital and free markets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> There are a couple of ways of looking at the question of workweeks.

One is this, which lends to individual pondering. Could I do as much in half the the me? Would I still get paid as much? Etc.

Another is systemic. Could society radically cut hours? Would everyone still get paid?

Both really come down to efficiencies, and negotiating who gets rhe returns on these efficiencies.

Imagine, for example, that as omnipotent king you clean up patent law such that identical results are achieved with 1/10 as many lawyers. Let's go ahead and do something similar in contract law. I imagine a god-king could reduce the required admin work by >50% in financial services.

We could also throw in world peace. That makes all military and adjacent industry obsolete.

Other markets do this regularly, often via technology. We need far fewer people that make far more food and clothes, for example.

Some of those efficiencies have gone into making more/better stuff. A little has gone towards reduced work hours. Most of this "spare" capacity,though, has gone into other things... often administrative/white-collar.

It's notable that healthy economies generally have >90% employment as a stable rule. We, as a society, seem to fill out time with work... and in aggregate it doesn't seem related to the amount of work that needs to be done.

</comment><comment><USER39> I feel like there is this enormous fallacy baked into the attempt to make this some kind of movement which is that all of these specific proposals for how to do work need to be structural and enforced via laws or labor agreements.

I am a huge supporter of an individual business opting for a 5 hour workday and if the reality is that this turns out to be the way to maximize productivity (I hear this argument all the time) then they are going to do it anyway.

But it's not like the US (or anywhere else) needs to enforce this across the board in one big yes or no decision.

Like this doesn't need to be advocated for at all at some grand political level or as a movement. If you want 5 hour workdays either convince your company to give it to you or find another company that will.

It's the logical equivalent of having a political movement to ask for better snacks in the kitchen. It's an individual decision between you and your employer, no one else needs to care.

I understand historically that it was important to have organized labor fighting against unhealthy/ unsafe/ or broadly manipulative labor practices but those days are long gone and there is no big ethical or human rights issues here, just personal preferences.

<comment><USER18> "It's the logical equivalent of having a political movement to ask for better snacks in the kitchen."

But _if_ that mattered, you _would_ need a political movement, because anyone reasonable is not going to make snacks a dealbreaker for accepting a job offer. Where's the mechanism for companies to compete? People imagine competition exists much more broadly, but you only get to choose between jobs as a package, and only when you have multiple offers in a brief window.

<comment><USER39> Your missing the point. There is no correct answer to the question. Some people like brownies. Some people like chips. The idea that there is one correct answer that needs to be enforced on everyone is not only silly but inherently tyrannical.

Turns out people don't need to pay people to organize votes and collect pensions for every decision in their lives. Sometimes you just need to knock on your bosses door and tell them what snacks you want. People are capable of dealing with problems without government

<comment><USER18> _You 're_ missing the point, which is that markets don't necessarily determine what we get. It's not whether your preferences hold or mine hold, but that neither of us have any influence, unless we are willing to walk away from an offer. So political activity is needed in many cases you don't think that it is.

I used to work for a company where not only was it futile to ask for perks, but someone started a business selling candy and snacks out of their desk (in competition with the vending machine in the basement) and was shut down by management when they noticed. Same company wouldn't let me volunteer at the Red Cross because their intellectual property agreement conflicted with my employer's claim to own everything.

Nowadays, I'm working in the public sector, and my boss _cannot_ just hand out perks, not even free coffee, because, you know, there are laws that say you don't have the authority to do that with tax money - all events like a holiday party or anything have to be financed by employee fundraisers and/or the union.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What will stop people from working two jobs? I feel like this is the 'uberization' of work, salary will go down and people will have to work 2-3 jobs on multiple days. For example 3 days doing one job, another 3 days another job and 1 day weekend or mornings at one job and afternoons at another totaling 10 hours per day worked.

This has to be tightly regulated if not it will regress and only profit making will be optimized.

<comment><USER15> Umm... nothing and that's the point. It's free market capitalism. People should be free to do whatever they want with their time.

So long as the value they provide is greater than their cost, the deal is good for both parties

Ideally people would only work 30 hours but get paid for the full week.

Hourly billing is bullshit anyway. The natural cadence of work doesn't map to always being able to extract value from every single hour. Sometimes the value is in being more or less available for that week.

It's astonishing how many developers can't grasp that concept and insist on being super strict about hourly work

<comment><USER40> History says otherwise, unless you mean people should be free to abuse of others lack of judgement when their survival is on the line. That's why they started to cap working hours and protecting children from being part of the workforce. Also, you don't have to go that far into history. Some uber drivers I've talked to want to get out of that business but can't because they were bamboozled into signing a car loan they can't pay without working for Uber and they mention that when they signed it they had an expectation of earnings that has been steadily going down.

No comment on your assumption that I'm a developer unless you meant it as a standalone fact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> [http://archive.is/QpjJc](http://archive.is/QpjJc)

</comment><comment><USER42> It is interesting, but then you get into jobs where you cannot shorten the work week, such as Police or TSA workers or other such things. There are tons of thankless jobs that pretty much are built around having to work the 40(+) hours, some just require travel, some are hard to get people to apply for (honestly, when was the last time you thanked the TSA people at the airport for making you take your shoes off and scan you, or the cable guy who had to rerun the wire from the pole to your house in the dark at 8:30pm).

I would love to work only 5 hours a day, although i might get bored. I guess it might work better with salaried employees.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know, possibly I would rather work 10 hours four days a week. It's hard to say, but some days I don't feel really focused and others I have all sorts of ideas at 5 PM that I could stay and work on for hours more.

</comment><comment><USER43> I work for about 8 hours every M-F. If there's something that I want to check out or do (except for meeting up with friends after work), then it's easier on the weekends.

For instance, there's a world music store that I've been dying to check out. Since it's closed on Sundays, Saturday's the absolute best day for me to go. If I had to I could go after work, but I'm typically pretty tired by that time (not to mention the fact that it's in the opposite direction from my apartment).

If I had an extra day off during the week then I could check it out sooner.

</comment><comment><USER44> I work for 3.5h/day and the free time is worth the loss of pay.

<comment><USER45> How do you even do this? Is it all remote?

<comment><USER44> No I work in an office 9h to 12h30, officially at half time (with half pay).

I'm not particularly efficient after lunch anyway, so it's better to just go home, in my case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> One of the best working periods of my life was when I was studying part time and working full time.

I'd take one day a week to attend lectures/practicals, go to my day job the rest of the week, and study at home nights and weekends.

I didn't have much free time, but that one day a week at university broke up the work week and made me more productive in both activities.

Now that I've had a taste of it, I want to recreate it for the rest of my working life.

</comment><comment><USER47> will 5hour workdays or 4day workweeks in the US be considered more productive than china's 996? since China produces a lot more than the US right now, how will this change once the US produces even less? will 996 be replaced by these new models any time soon? and will this European/American tendency to work less mean that other countries will simply leapfrog them in terms of innovation and productivity?

</comment><comment><USER48> The crux of the article seems to be:

 _To support this new approach, he has employees leave their phones in their bags at the office and blocks access to social media on the company network. [...] Perhaps most important, his employees now check work email only twice each day._

It's not just the reducing the hours, but making those hours more productive.

</comment><comment><USER49> I reread Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness annually and maybe you should, too.

[https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of- idleness/](https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/)

</comment><comment><USER50> A 5 hour workday is okay if tempting but awful if commuting and the trend is towards larger commutes due to property costs as a percentage of people's total expenditures skyrocketing even beyond transportation costs.

The real money is less days at work per week... Not shorter workdays.

</comment><comment><USER51> I think this is fine for computer programmers but being a nurse or a policeman or even a founder requires a lot more than 25h per week unfortunately. I can't see a way to suddenly find nearly 40% more staff in these kinds of industries?

<comment><USER27> I can't see a problem with it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I like short working hours. We should have more time to spend with family and friends and more freedom.

Life is not like working also you need to enjoy every bit of it. We never get back your life again.

</comment><comment><USER52> I like short working hours. We should have more time to spend with family and friends and more freedom.

Life is not like working also you need to enjoy every bit of it. We never get back our life again.

</comment><comment><USER53> I hope people can see that this is intimately related to the issue of inequality. They are essentially the same issue. Wealth redistribution is about allowing people the freedom to do locally valued work.

</comment><comment><USER54> Why stop there? Lets get it down to a 15 minute workday. Sure, you'll spend less time working, but you'll be so much more productive you'll actually get more done.

</comment><comment><USER55> I wish we could have a 7 day, 5 hour work week. I guess some other people woud rather see 4 days, 9 hours. I just wish there was more flexibility in general

</comment><comment><USER56> I thought the title here read: "In praise of the 5-day Workweek and other 'radical' ideas" and I just assumed it was from the 1890s...

</comment><comment><USER57> I'd much rather work fewer days with longer hours. This seems like it would introduce too much overhead in picking up where I left off each day

</comment><comment><USER58> Thinking about this, if you work less but by doing that increasing the output you do in 4 days, shouldnt you then be paid for 5 days?

</comment><comment><USER59> If you consider a work day as a movie, and say you go there 4 days a week, that's watching a 5 hour movie, 4 days in a row.

</comment><comment><USER60> I always chuckle when reading articles like this.

I have since I was 20 worked only three days a week(Some minor and one time off exceptions excluded). When colleagues would give me questioning Looks I would tell them that I was only available for the company three days a week. thereby hinting I might have another job (which I didn't).

From experience I can tell that the focus, relax-ness in life in general and more time for family, friends and hobbies,is more then worth the lowered income.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm convinced that this will happen one year before I retire.

</comment><comment><USER62> Wow I've been ahead of the curve here!

</comment><comment><USER63> The shortest work week is the remote one.

<comment><USER64> Only when it's done right. It can be easy to fall into bad habits like mixing work and non-work hours.</comment></comment>


Airport security: Intent to deceive - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100526/full/465412a.html

<comment><USER2> <http://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc.php?rfc=3514> in real life?

<comment><USER3> Uh oh. I found this: <http://www.rfc-archive.org/1+april+rfc.php></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What precautions should non-US citizens take before US customs? - <AUTHOR> I'm very intimidated after reading this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13659854 <comment><USER2> You're probably looking for advice on graver issues, but I've been lucky with border crossings and can only offer this: when flying to the US, you technically cross the border at the origin airport. I lost a banana and an orange that I thought I could eat on the plane.

On a more serious note, I never try to pick a fight with officials to prove any point. They can stress you out, make you miss your flight, or straight out refuse entry. Most of them know this and will abuse their power just for sport, and your defiance will only trigger this sense and give them more pleasure in hassling you.</comment>


At least one Vim trick you might not know - <AUTHOR> https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/intermediate-vim/ <comment><USER2> Thanks. Found vim-swap and and vim-surround from there. Undotree also, but this is some corner case when I usually need that.

Obviously I'm not a purist.</comment>


The Definition Of Open Is… Missing - <AUTHOR> http://parislemon.com/post/14908566270/the-definition-of-open-is-missing

<comment><USER2> This whole thing is ridiculous. What does the fact that a tweet from Android's head was deleted (presumably because the instructions are not valid and possibly point at a server that has been compromised- but really, who cares why it was deleted) have to do with the open-source nature of Android?

This type of frothing-at-the-mouth commentary is why people call them fanboys.

</comment><comment><USER3> the curious case of the missing tweet... hmm?!</comment>


CodeNow.Com Lets You Build And Test Code In Real Time, In Your Browser  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/04/new-start-up-codenow-com-lets-you-build-and-test-code-in-real-time-in-your-browser/ <comment><USER2> I would like to try it Yash, can you let me in? :) Anyway; it seems rather fishy how enthusiastic the comments on TC are. Without seeing anything... I do like this kind of stuff but these people are acting like you cured cancer which you might have done only no-one can see it actually?

Edit:

I'm also wondering (and very curious!) what you are doing different than <http://www.coderun.com/ide/> <http://c9.io/> ? Is it the immediate result iframe on the right?

<comment><USER3> We've had the product in private-beta for the last few weeks. Most of the users commenting are in the private beta

I'll be sending out invites soon It's different from CodeRun, etc because we are API-focused

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I signed up tycho at e-lab. I would love to try it; APIs are a pain sometimes so I believe you have something there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.codenow.com/>

The site wants you to enter your email and request an invite.

<comment><USER3> What we are doing is very tricky, so we are throttling the flow of users into the system

Hence the email signup form. No spam, promise!

Yash (Chief Hacker, CodeNow.com)

<comment><USER5> It looks like it supports PHP; anything else?

<comment><USER3> We support every web stack - PHP, Python, Ruby and Node

<comment><USER6> Can you define "support"?

<comment><USER7> I want to know if their JS [attempts to] parse the code (ex: PHP), or if it sends it to one of their servers (that's running PHP) and gets the output.

I get that it works in the browser using JS, but does this work offline?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks really promising! But I can't really say until I try it out ... would love to be let in the beta since I do a lot of exploratory coding with API's and always setting up a minimal environment is a pain.

Does it also support collaboration? That'd come in handy for teaching people web programming.

</comment><comment><USER9> FYI there is also CodeNow.org. It's an initiative similar to Hungry Academy but it's aim is teaching youth how to code thru workshops (D.C based as of now).

</comment><comment><USER3> We're building a PaaS/DaaS that supports all major web frameworks.

No Server Setup, No API Setup, Easy Sharing & Version Control

\- Yash (Chief Hacker, CodeNow.com)

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://ideone.com> is far better, with support for way more languages, including C++, LLVM, C#, brainfuck, and every other language on the planet. Oh, and it doesn't require registration.

<comment><USER3> We are focused on API support, and building an awesome end-user experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can see this paving the way for a generation of engineers. I meet so many people who would love to hack and also enroll in a CS degree but the barriers to entry are way to high, this is a great bridge.

</comment><comment><USER12> How does this differ from a site like Kodingen (<https://kodingen.com/#>)? They're doing a renovation and a re-brand to 'Koding' at the moment though.

<comment><USER3> We believed in a simplified, consumer-friendly experience with drag & drop support for major APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Epic! About time someone made a real-time online editor/tester for PHP. If this can combine the best of JSFiddle and CSSDeck with PHP included, I'm super keen. Can I grab an early invite? ;)

<comment><USER3> We support Ruby, Node & Python as well.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps quickly add them to the screenshot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just spent way too long trying to figure out how to do something simple with facebook open graph. Haven't used codenow yet, but it looks like it could have saved me a ton of time.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can it run a Lisp?

</comment><comment><USER14> Flippin sweet</comment>


Facebook claims data portability is criminal - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dataportability.org/2010/05/06/facebook-claims-data-portability-is-criminal/

<comment><USER2> I read through the EFF brief yesterday (in connection with a related post) and summarized the key points of the legal dispute on this issue here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1320040>.

Essentially, the criminal statute prohibits unauthorized access to user data on a network (among other things), a precedent exists by which ConnectU was found to have violated the criminal statute for having scraped user emails (and spammed the users) without their permission and in violation of Facebook's terms of service, and Facebook is now claiming that Power Ventures is similarly violating the statute by accessing user data in violation of its TOS - EFF (filing its brief as a "friend of the court" and not as a party to the dispute) claims that this is absurd given that users own their own information and therefore it cannot be a crime for Power to access it with their permission (even if it is a done in violation of the TOS).

FB's position on this does in fact appear to be absurd, and I would strongly suspect the claim will be bounced from the case.

</comment><comment><USER3> Until now I've been mostly ignoring the uproar over Facebook privacy concerns - if I didn't want people knowing stuff about me, I just wouldn't put it online.

However, if Facebook wins this particular battle (and if I've understood the battle itself correctly), then I will leave. It would be evil for them to claim that my data is theirs, and that I can't authorize a third party to access it.

<comment><USER4> If they win, I say we investigate (en masse) as to whether or not their datacenters are compatible with both pitchforks and fire.

<comment><USER5> Anything is compatible with sufficiently accelerated pitchforks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _IF_ that is the case aren't they in violation of the same statute via the contact importer which accesses contacts from a user's email account?

<comment><USER7> Only if the user's email account is hosted on a service with a similar TOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > If any violation of terms of use is criminal, users who shave a few years > off their age in their profile, claim to be single when they are married, or > change jobs or addresses without updating Facebook right away would also > have violated the criminal law.

From the EFF. Very convincing (IANAL)

</comment><comment><USER9> Facebook is disturbingly anti-user. Such hypocrisy! With one hand they build their platform on open-source tools that thrived on data sharing, and with the other they take away the basic rights of online users.

I'm very close to saying forget it. I can see all the pictures anyways. (At the rate their privacy is decreasing.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Woah. link bait title much?

As I said the other day I don't currently read much into what Facebook are saying - it's a legal argument as part of their much wider fight with Power.com. The EFF are, quite rightly, stepping in to try and stop any ruling in _this_ case opening the way for ToS violations to come under criminal law.

I'm yet to be convinced Facebook are claiming this generally; the case is much much wider than this one issue.

EDIT: I see "data portability" is a site dedicated to open/portable standards - rather than a service which was my initial reaction. In which case the title has a little more merit.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds "open" to me؟</comment>


Ask HN: I have a lot of time, how should I invest it? - <AUTHOR> I've been reading NH for many years, but this is my first time posting, I hope this goes well.
Here is my little story. I'm in my late 20s, have no Bachelor's degree and no job. I've been applying for various positions in software engineering for quite some time, to no avail.
The thing is, I have a lot of programming experience. I started coding at the age of 12: first in C++ Builder, then I moved to Pascal and C. At the age of 14 I've become obsessed with low-level programming and reverse engineering. I've spent my high school in IDA and SoftIce, writing programs in wasm. Subsequently I've also become interested in web development, and my first real job was a Front-End Developer. At different points of life, I've written programs in C, C++, Pascal, ASP.NET, x86 assembly, php, python, Octave, Haskell, OCaml, coq, Isabelle.
I guess I pretty much stopped coding at the age of 21. I've become interested in mathematics. I've spent a lot of time studying university-level mathematics, and at some point I've actually enrolled in a program in pure mathematics, but eventually dropped out. I've also discovered the world of formal verification and type theories. I actually managed to find a job in formal verification and worked at this position for one year.
And now I'm stuck. I'm not a mathematician, and I obviously can't find a job as a mathematician without a Bachelor's degree. I also can't find a job in formal verification. In my country this market is narrow, and you need to have a PhD to squeeze in. And I'm not a software developer either: all my skills are rusty or obsolete, I haven't really been doing this thing for a while.
So, I have a lot of time, I have a strong background in mathematics. I want to find a job. What do you think are my best options? <comment><USER2> Okay, here are a few thoughts in no partcular order:

\- finding a job is awful. Networking is key -- but read that as 'spending time with other people doing interesting things leads to opportunities'. Consider attending or hosting meetups, or going to/presenting at conferences.

\- Programming is a lot more than knowing a particular library or language, and good companies realize this. At its core, it is the problem solving skills and getting things done, and you haven't programmed in that many languages without learning to do that.

\- Consider contributing to an open-source project. It may be a great way to 'unrust' your skills.

\- Consider taking further education; there are distance universities or online universities (ex. [http://www.cvu-uvc.ca/](http://www.cvu-uvc.ca/) \-- should be something similar where you are from). edX has great courses; there is OpenCourseware, Udemy, etc.

\- Two books I'd like to recommend: "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport, and "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World" by David Epstein.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Infosec. your skills are in great demand and it pays well. I've seen people with no compsci/IT background jump from mathematics to infosec and become rockstars.

At your age,hopefully you know if this or other fields are for you or not.

Outside of professional pursuit, I would recommend investing your time developing a healthy social and personal life as well as taking care of your body. Else, burn-outs and regrets lie ahead.</comment>


Distributed algorithms in NoSQL databases - <AUTHOR> https://highlyscalable.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/distributed-algorithms-in-nosql-databases <comment><USER2> This article leaves out the new generation of distributed consensus algorithms used by databases like Spanner and my employer FaunaDB.

You can read a comparison between Spanner's atomic-clock based approach and FaunaDB's consensus algorithm here: [https://fauna.com/blog/distributed- consistency-at-scale-span...](https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-consistency- at-scale-spanner-vs-calvin)

And if you want to look at how these consistency tradeoffs show up in application programming, check out the bit about serialized indexes in the second half of this blog post: [https://fauna.com/blog/consistent- transactions-in-a-globally...](https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions- in-a-globally-distributed-database)

<comment><USER3> You are leaving out CockroachDB from that group as well. But it's not really a new generation of consensus algorithms. There is still Paxos, 2PC, etc., just more granularity. The trade offs article discusses still apply though, you still trade something in each case for consistency, including latency.

It's a shame these "NewSQL" databases attack AP databases, claiming that most projects don't need them. While in reality latency is super important and consistency is something of an afterthought, even for hardcore RDBMS users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sharding sucks and we really need to get away from it. I wonder if there's any databases like these that use a hierarchy to distribute and manage access of data rather than with a flat topology of arbitrary chunks of data. Currently there's a lot of shitty hacks, like memory-resident databases in front of disk-backed, proxies, etc. We can do better than that if we build hierarchical data and node management into the network.

<comment><USER5> I mean, isn't that still just sharding? What does hierarchy give us?

Look at Bigtable [1], for example. Tablets are organized in a three level B-tree-like hierarchy, where data is only stored at the lowest level. Is this like what you're talking about?

[1] [https://research.google.com/archive/bigtable- osdi06.pdf](https://research.google.com/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily. It's good to use a hierarchy, but they're still sharding. And the client has to contact all the tablets directly. And the client has to use certain key naming conventions to benefit from the sharding. And there's a seemingly unnecessary amount of round trips. And a lot of other extra complexity, to the point where a bigtable _can_ perform very efficiently, or it can perform many times poorer, depending on many factors. It sounds like a pet rather than cattle.

The downside of sharding is operationally it's a pain, and operational pain translates into pain either in your wallet or for your employees or customers, none of which you want.

Hierarchy is supposed to give you management, access, and performance gains, but if it's too specific you have to use the data exactly how the database wants you to and then you can't take advantage of general interfaces. It shouldn't get in your way, it should just give you free performance boosts with known guarantees and be as simple as possible while also surviving scaling.

I'm not saying this is easy, or even feasible, but it's where we should be headed if we want dev, ops, and the people in suits to be happy.

<comment><USER5> > The downside of sharding is operationally it's a pain

I am really curious about this premise. Isn't it only a pain if there's no direct system support? (i.e. you have to manually rebalance shards, split up queries at the application layer, etc.) Isn't this the whole thing that NewSQL systems are trying to solve?

Moreover, I don't quite understand what benefits a hierarchical structure provides that a flat (or mostly-flat) partitioning scheme doesn't, ceteris paribus in terms of system support. Especially: doesn't a hierarchical structure mean it takes O(log n) round trips to resolve a lookup rather than just O(1) as in a flat partitioning?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's an interesting article. Given some of the grammar errors, does anyone think that it's written by a computer?

</comment><comment><USER7> Should be noted it is from 2012 in the title.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice article, but the arrows are wrong on the push-pull diagram under gossip protocols.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this website related to the popular [http://highscalability.com/](http://highscalability.com/) ?

Holy cow, this is an intense article, with great definitions for a bunch of detailed variations of distribute system jargon, and even has some nice images to explain the ideas!

My specialty is in eventually consistent data types, which there section is much smaller on, but they have some links to follow up on CRDT stuff.

> are often limited in functionality and impose performance overheads

This is for the most part true, with CRDTs. However we just formalized and proposed in a new paper, with some Stanford colleagues, how to construct a generalizable CRDT. One that actually lets other more case-specific CRDTs be built on top of it, which we use at gunDB, so that way you can get the advantages of the more optimized CRDTs but still have the rest of your data glued together.

Another set of really interesting CRDTs which they didn't mention, are the ones used for making decentralized versions of Google Doc:

\- Martin's Kleppmann has an exceptionally great/interesting talk on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcWpzY8dIA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCcWpzY8dIA&feature=youtu.be&t=29m36s)

\- And we recently did a "layman" animated explainer of a similar algorithm, that explains it for the non-academically minded, with simple analogies to "distributed systems" that happen in every day life: [http://gun.js.org/explainers/school/class.html](http://gun.js.org/explainers/school/class.html)

I'll definitely be referencing the OP's article in the future though. Even though I'm in this world, I constantly get the vernacular mixed up. And this will be a really great dictionary to use.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think most databases are missing a fundamental requirement to make high latency distribution possible without massive headaches:

Async HTTP clients with thread pool and non-blocking IO.

[http://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki/Fuse](http://github.com/tinspin/rupy/wiki/Fuse)</comment>


Show HN: Buster: Static site generator for Ghost and Github Pages. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.axitkhurana.com/introducing-buster/

<comment><USER2> Awesome! It's really cool to see a static generator for Ghost being released so soon after the public release of Ghost - [http://blog.ghost.org/public- launch/](http://blog.ghost.org/public-launch/)

Kudos!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Do try it out :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Comūn - <AUTHOR> https://comun.us/ <comment><USER2> You guys have posted this 9 times in the last few weeks. A small number of reposts is ok ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)), but this is on the other side of that line, and users have complained, so please stop.</comment>


Quest for AI Leadership Pushes Microsoft Further into Chip Development - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-24/quest-for-ai-leadership-pushes-microsoft-further-into-chip-development <comment><USER2> Protip: it's not hardware that wins the AI game, it's the software and ecosystem. AMD generally has better chips but their software sucks butt so they are behind.

<comment><USER3> None of those mentioned in the article (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) are working on chip development beyond the design phase.

I'll be brief: There's tons of low-hanging fruit in the semiconductor industry, starting with manufacturing.

You might read about how competition among chipmakers is fierce, and ask why any company from the Valley would make a foray into taking that kind of risk. The thing is, that's only true if you ignore the obvious; which is to say, take all the chipmakers and keep letting them do what they're doing, and sure, that line about competition will remain true.

But there's a world of difference between how things operate in a fab versus the environment that any software dev or executive will be used to. Things run at an efficiency that no engineer from the software world would tolerate for very long.

It's hard to say this without it seeming like bluster, but it's not, I promise: Any of the aforementioned Valley giants could buy up some chipmaker who's for sale, install one of their own executives at the top, and with a team of, like, six people (junior-level, even) from the same parent company, by the start of the fourth quarter following the buyout they would be virtually guaranteed to be on trajectory that would eventually destroy the competition.

You really, _really_ have no idea how low this fruit hangs.

> In a May speech [Nadella] touted the idea of using AI to track industrial > equipment, telling the user things like where to find a jackhammer

Quaint.</comment></comment>


How Microsoft Appointed Itself Sheriff of the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/10/microsoft-pinkerton/ <comment><USER3> "Microsoft had a plan in place to keep legitimate customers online, while stopping the malware, but it didn't work."

Presumably Microsoft were able to convince a judge that their plan was acceptable on the basis that they had a plan and it would work.

IMHO, that should be enough in itself to hold Microsoft culpable for all damages as a consequence of their plan failing.

Nothing against Microsoft in particular here; anyone can screw up. It should just be a general rule that applies equally to everyone in this sort of case. Doing this "ex parte temporary restraining order" without any opportunity for the targeted party to respond presents enough of a risk to the target that it should only be permitted if the party requesting it is prepared to take the financial hit should they screw up.

Perhaps the funds should even be required to be held in escrow. Enough to cover the target's financial collapse.

<comment><USER4> >Nothing against Microsoft in particular here; anyone can screw up.

Well, except for the bit where they appointed themselves Sheriff without any legal authority. Sure, what they _did_ may have been legal, but anointing themselves doesn't sound legal to me.

It's the moral equivalent of someone appointing themself the President because he or she has the biggest and most guns.

<comment><USER3> > Well, except for the bit where they appointed themselves Sheriff without any > legal authority.

AFAICT, this is factually incorrect. They acquired a court order, did they not? They didn't appoint themselves as anything. They asked a court, and a court agreed.

This is how the legal system should work.

If you have a problem with it, then you can petition for laws that bind a court to do something else instead. This is what I am saying: a court should be bound by law to ensure the target is adequately protected financially in this sort of case.

<comment><USER5> > This is how the legal system should work.

Nonsense. The legal system is a two party system where both sides get to make an argument and an independent arbitrator makes a judgement.

The way Microsoft are using the law, effectively the other party never gets to argue and the first they hear about the lawsuit is when Microsoft has already won.

That isn't how the legal system is meant to work. The Lanham Act is broken.

<comment><USER3> > The legal system is a two party system where both sides get to make an > argument and an independent arbitrator makes a judgement.

And in exceptional cases, an independent arbitrator can agree to something different where justice would be better served by doing so.

Search warrants are an example.

I don't have any problem with judges having this sort of power, because somebody has to be able to intervene when justice requires it. A judge whose job is to remain impartial is the best we can do. Provided that judgements are able to receive public scrutiny as soon as is possible, and that the public can (through their elected representatives) write laws for what they want done in specific situations.

This case is receiving public scrutiny, so the system is working well up to now. What happens next remains to be seen.

If your country has a problem with getting what the public wants written into laws, then you have a political problem, not a legal one.

<comment><USER6> Eh, typically, a private company shouldn't get the privilege the NSA enjoys regarding one-party secret warrants.

<comment><USER7> I think Microsoft is liable for all the damage they did, (which could be in the 10s of millions of dollars), but There was nothing secret about this - <USER2> process server handed over everything, nobody was bound by law to not talk about this. This is nothing like the NSLs.

<comment><USER6> >Microsoft's court maneuvering had played out in secret. Durrer's company didn't have the chance to argue its case in court. By the time Durrer was served with court papers on that June day, Microsoft had seized control of the company's services and ejected the hackers using them, while also locking out all the legitimate users. Durrer eventually regained control of his company, but only after it had been offline for days.

The owner of a legitimate company was notified of the confiscation by MS of his business as and after it happened...

EDIT: Actually, read the entire paragraph under 'As the hours creeped by, more and more people were falling offline.' header.

<comment><USER7> I understand what happened in the Microsoft case - but it's important not to confuse this with an NSL. In the case of a search warrant, and Microsoft's court maneuvering's everything is done in secret, until it's executed (otherwise the parties could simply take action to avoid the warrant)- at which point everything comes out into the open.

In the case of an NSL, when it is served - the person who it's served upon is _bound by law_ not to discuss it, and must keep it secret.

Totally different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _" The irony is that No-IP had worked with Microsoft in the past. The company had collaborated with Microsoft's anti-piracy group, and it also worked on the takedown of the Mariposa botnet, which was dismantled in 2010. Especially give their prior relationship, No-IP's Zigenis wishes Microsoft had reached out for help with the takedown instead of going to the courts. "All this action, all the work that Microsoft did," he says. "Whatever they spent on their lawsuit could have been saved by a phone call."_

 _" His point is that, with the No-IP takedown, Microsoft didn't work with others. It didn't even work with No-IP. It served the company papers without asking the No-IP to shutdown bad actors or even telling the company what it planned to do."_

Fuck. Microsoft.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, there's really no excuse for not talking to the people at the company first. The only reason I can fathom would be that if Microsoft suspected the owner of No-IP to be actually involved with the botnet operators. (Especially given that they had a previous relationship, this is inexcusable, but it shouldn't have mattered anyway.) If Microsoft had contacted them first, and No-IP had given them some _reason_ to suspect that they were culpable, then, by all means, work through the legal system. The whole notion of sealed legal precedings, as with the FISA court, gives me the willies. It's almost like the exact opposite of what the Bill of Rights was supposed to ensure for protections of the populace against their government. How much more offensive is it that this type of action was used against a individual running a commercial company, not involved in any way with "national defense" issues?

<comment><USER10> This was an international case. The Bill of Rights of the United States of America does not apply. To impose the BoR on a non party would be a violation of their human rights, guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

<comment><USER11> The court was in Las Vegas, and Microsoft, No-IP and the company that was ordered to redirect the domains are all based in the US. In what sense is this an international case?

<comment><USER10> The documents were served to no-ip in Nevada, but the other parties were in an arabic-speaking country. The case was filed in multiple jurisdictions if you read the court documents. I invite you to read noticeoflawsuit.com and see what actually happened.

<comment><USER11> I don't see anything on that site that gives evidence of cases filed in other jurisdictions. Which documents are you referring to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands _It was an unfriendly conversation. Microsoft was willing to hand over No-IP's domains, but only if the company met certain terms. Microsoft's specific demands are protected by a confidentiality agreement, so we can't say exactly what they were, but Durrer says that, if he had complied, they would have put No-IP out of business._

This should make anyone scared to death. The fact a company with little or no oversight can simply lock down a companies servers and then hold them for ransom is quite freighting.

Add in the fact No-IP had no say in the issue and this was all done in secret is rather unnerving.

</comment><comment><USER12> The exact same legal precedent could be used to seize hotmail.com for all the spam, scams, and viruses floating through it. I am willing to bet the judge was handed a 2 foot tall stack of papers with technical gibberish which she of course, didn't read, but had _complete assurance_ from these slimy Microsoft lawyers that they knew what they were doing. If any other company tried the same move, the judge would dismiss it instantly. But of course, the law can't operate the same way for a 16 person company vs. a 100,000+ person company.

I think this clip fairly accurately summarizes the ordeal: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vxEimC3HME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vxEimC3HME)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm sorry that people are hacking Microsoft's OSs, but this is "legal" piracy. The US courts should not and cannot condone one-sided private legal decisions. Sure the Federal government can vaguely justify doing this themselves but allowing a private corporation this right is beyond even a random reading of the constituion.

<comment><USER14> Well, Microsoft only acted after they got a court order.

So, it seems to me that your "real" objection, if I may presume to say, is that the Courts are giving Microsoft a lot of say as to which entities on the internet are bad actors.

But do you _really_ want FBI agents or other federal executive-branch employees to have that say instead? Isn't it better for decisions like that to be made by organizations with greater technical competency than the executive branch of the US government?

Of course, if Microsoft starts using these court orders to hobble their competitors, then that is bad, but no one is asserting that they have started doing that; are they?

Also, if other computer companies, e.g., Google and Apple, started doing what Microsoft is, the Courts would give their expertise approximately the same amount of deference that they currently give Microsoft -- or more precisely, I have seen no signs that that is not the case.

An analogy: would you not prefer for the laws and executive-branch policies related to _software patents_ to be decided by computer companies and software professionals rather than elected officials, their legislative aids and lobbyists? (According to Eben Moglen, current US laws and policy around software patents are largely influenced by lobbyists for the _pharmaceutical_ companies who feel the need to oppose any weakening of patent "rights" in any industry.)

More precisely: if individuals and organizations without deep technical knowledge were prohibited from influencing policy on software patents, would not that be an improvement over the current situation?

<comment><USER15> > But do you really want FBI agents or other federal executive-branch > employees to have that say instead?

Dear god yes. Law enforcement may need these enforcements from time to time, but you can not let a private company slap around their competitors at will using the same methods.

<comment><USER14> What competitor did Microsoft slap around?

Do you consider No-IP a competitor to Microsoft?

<comment><USER16> With Azure they are more or less in the same business.

<comment><USER17> Really? That's like saying a guy on the corner selling tourist maps is more or less in the same business as Delta Air Lines, because Delta has a brochure stand in the airport lobby. No-IP offers domain/DDNS service, Microsoft Azure is a full stack cloud service similar to Amazon's AWS, and is a small part of a much larger company. There is no competition there.

<comment><USER15> No-IP sells managed DNS, which you can get with Azure as well, so in that particular service they are direct competitors. But with an as large company as Microsoft there will be overlap with pretty much every other company on the planet, so that's not necessarily relevant.

I was speaking in a more general sense. If Microsoft could do this, other companies can. If they could do it against No-IP, they can the same thing to others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> SG- What I don't understand is how a botnet could negatively affect Microsoft other than showing the world through news articles how it infected vulnerable Microsoft software?

Is the bad press basically the reason and justification?

<comment><USER18> Botnets are responsible for lots of (most?) spam and DDOSs. Those hurt everyone on the internet, not just Windows users.

<comment> SG- I understand that, and they should be taken down. But Microsoft is using justification that it's hurting their business in order to take over other businesses and shut them down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good article and timely, because they just did another big response two days ago: [http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/10/14/msrt- octo...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2014/10/14/msrt- october-2014-hikiti.aspx)

While this didn't involve a broad takedown of a public provider (as far as I'm aware), it did involve coordinated release of tools and more-targeted takedown requests through their semi-private "Coordinated Malware Eradication" program. On balance, I think what Microsoft is doing is a good thing, but public scrutiny and discussion of any organization/cartel that operates in secret is equally important.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've shamelessly copied Microsoft's noticeoflawsuit.com and have used it as a template to recover two domains from people holding them ransom from the rightful owners. It's a fantastic process, and I have to thank Mr. Haimovichi for the cool legal tricks he taught me in his paperwork.

Just make sure you have someone competent in the other jurisdiction that can file/serve the paperwork (Australia/Canada in my case), and it's remarkably straightforward. The defendant can only argue once the domain has been transferred over, so you'll get your domain back asap. In our case, the defendant didn't want to hire a lawyer (we're all self-representing advocates on the plaintiff's side), and we're expecting him to default in 15 days. The last four months of head games and BOFH behavior were quashed in less than 72 hours after the filing was completed in both jurisdictions.

Before Microsoft vs. No-ip.com, I was not a fan of ICANN. This process has certainly changed my tune, however.

<comment><USER20> > the defendant can only argue once the domain has been transferred over

Sounds like a very scummy thing to do. Any legal system that allows this sort of tactic is ripe for abuse.

<comment><USER10> Welcome to international contract law. You are guilty (and are expected to make reparations) until proven innocent.

The legal system is more ripe for abuse than anyone really knows. Another reason contract law should be taught in high schools

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a prime example of why critical internet systems (namely domain name resolution) need to be completely and absolutely out of reach of government officials (some of whom are guaranteed to be corrupt) and private corporations (some of which are guaranteed to have interests contrary to the public).

<comment><USER22> And controlled by... who?

<comment><USER21> No one. See namecoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't help but feel that with a judiciary that seems to be largely "out of touch" with technology, that when Microsoft walks into the courtroom and says something is bad...that the enamored judge thinks to herself, "well then it must be bad".

</comment><comment><USER24> So Microsoft build a product, Windows, that a customer was using to run his business and that he purchased legally.

Then, when the product that they built wasn't working correctly, they seized this guys business and held it for ransom.

Not exactly what I would call "free market", but this is how Microsoft has done business for years.

</comment><comment><USER25> It wasn't mentioned in the article but there was also a lot of controversy on how Microsoft handled the Operation B71.

[http://blog.fox-it.com/2012/04/12/critical-analysis-of- micro...](http://blog.fox-it.com/2012/04/12/critical-analysis-of-microsoft- operation-b71/)

</comment><comment><USER26> "Boscovich remembered a case he'd seen argued back in his Florida days. A maker of designer handbags had been granted the right to seize the bags from the counterfeiters. Because its brand was being harmed by the infringement, the court gave it the ok to seize the bags. A year after Waledac, Boscovich used this argument to seize the Rustock servers."

This is fascinating. This is an actual, tangible case where intellectual property law had more teeth, and more negative side effects, than the existing cyberlaws. It's evidence both that trying to take law that applies to physical goods and apply it digitally is not trivial (if even possible to do fairly), as well as how much cyberlaw has lagged behind the evolution of technology, in a context completely separate from the usual ones (DRM, copying = piracy?, etc).

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm glad Microsoft is doing what law enforcement seems incapable of doing. Microsoft also has a huge vested interest in cleaning up Windows related malware, and huge cash reserves. I expect they spend more than most countries do on combatting cybercrime.

<comment><USER28> >I'm glad Microsoft is doing what law enforcement seems incapable of doing.

Yeah! why make our seized domains go to waste redirecting to a landing page like the FBI when we could make them work for _us_ while ruining some company's user experience like Microsoft did!! Yeah!

law enforcement & microsoft are equally capable of feeding judges bullshit in order to put their hands where they don't belong and destroy fragile systems.

<comment><USER29> Why not aim your anger towards No-IP, given the following?

"Our research revealed that out of all Dynamic DNS providers, No-IP domains are used 93 percent of the time for Bladabindi-Jenxcus infections, which are the most prevalent among the 245 different types of malware currently exploiting No-IP domains. Microsoft has seen more than 7.4 million Bladabindi- Jenxcus detections over the past 12 months, which doesn't account for detections by other anti-virus providers. Despite numerous reports by the security community on No-IP domain abuse, the company has not taken sufficient steps to correct, remedy, prevent or control the abuse or help keep its domains safe from malicious activity." [http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/06/30/microsoft- takes-o...](http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/06/30/microsoft-takes-on- global-cybercrime-epidemic-in-tenth-malware-disruption/)

<comment><USER30> Why stop here? Maybe just let Microsoft police whole Internet, after all, 100% of malware operates on it. MS should clean their house first and start taking OS security seriously instead of putting blame on legitimate business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _> "Whatever they spent on their lawsuit could have been saved by a phone call."_

Wasn't Microsoft's precise concern that such a call could have been tantamount to giving botnet operators advance notice? I seem to recall when this was discussed previously that some HN commenters had similar experiences with traffic from No-Ip domains and considered them to be in cahoots with the botnet operators.

<comment><USER15> But those allegations just doesn't make sense. Does anyone seriously believe botnet operators to be _paying_ _customers_ of No-IP?

Why else would they give them advance notice? Out of spite? No-IP has absolutely nothing to gain from it and everything to lose.

It just doesn't make sense. Has there ever been any real indication that this was the case?

<comment><USER32> They would not do it on purpose. The fear was about accidentally somehow letting it slip. No idea how.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is ethically reprehensible.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting read,

I hate when I see that like the post says about this Attorney... he has no idea about computers yet he is trying to fight something in computers. I get that in real life all the time people that have no knowledge of computing and the internet want to change it... cause they are trying to show other people that they do.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wired: Stop making cursor keys initiate navigation!

This drives me nuts!

<comment><USER36> What do you mean?

<comment><USER35> When reading a Wired article, holding down shift and pressing left or right cursor loads another article.

Often, when reading articles, I highlight the part I am currently reading and then track where I'm reading by extending the highlight with shift and right or down cursor.

This has been fine for me for over 15 years, until reading a few Wired articles over the past while and coming across this new feature of theirs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> TD;DR? [http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/07/10/microsoft-takedown- detai...](http://www.noip.com/blog/2014/07/10/microsoft-takedown-details- updates/)

The "new Microsoft" is worse than the old one.

<comment><USER17> There's nothing really "new" about this though. Microsoft has been doing this for a while; it didn't start with Nadella taking the reins.

My take: Microsoft dropped the ball while genuinely trying to do a good thing. First, they should have communicated with No-IP as they have in the past instead of seeking a secret court order; they have worked together in the past and there was no reason they couldn't this time as well. Failing that, the court should have required Microsoft to reimburse No-IP for any lost revenue due to the action, given that No-IP was not allowed to even know about the order, much less present their side or make an attempt to work with Microsoft.

I honestly don't think Microsoft set out to destroy No-IP's business, there simply isn't a logical reason for that. They aren't a direct competitor (Microsoft is not in the dynamic DNS business to my knowledge), and if they were, using the court like this to destroy a competitor would end badly for Microsoft. No, I think they just plain goofed. It definitely sucks that they aren't more willing to help No-IP get back on their feet.

<comment><USER15> > instead of seeking a secret court order

The blame here must reside with the justice system. There will always be companies attacking their competitors by legal means, it must be the responsibility of the system to not let them get away with it.

<comment><USER17> Indeed, the situation reeks of a rubber-stamp mentality among the court staff involved with this case. Having worked in law enforcement in the past, I've seen first hand how some judges can just blindly approve whatever warrant or order comes across their desk without so much as a cursory glance at the details, consequences be damned.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stuck with a tagline for your Startup? - <AUTHOR>

I was looking for some ideas for my startup,and got stuck.
After a quick research I found this on the Interwebs.<p>"Is this for that", (http://itsthisforthat.com) it's a Startup Recipes Generator.<p>It will definitely not solve your problem but will inspire you with humor and sarcasm, besides that it's great helper for a personal brainstorm session. <comment><USER2> Thats a pretty cool tool. I think it raises the question though - do startups need a tagline? I don't really believe they do.

<comment><USER3> My impression is that a tagline can be useful for Silicon Valley buzz, which can help funding, partnerships, and hiring. Also, AngelList (<http://www.angel.co>) requires one.</comment></comment>