Technology was meant to herald a new way of working, but that's not the case - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160816-theres-no-such-thing-as-flexible-work <comment><USER2> Orwell made some interesting observations in one of his essays in how the increase of technology doesn't lead to greater freedom, but greater scale, bureaucracy, and increased governance at a distance: with the invention of the telegraph, decisions were now made by ministers in whitehall vs english army officers reliant upon a shared belief/culture system and taking the initiative in the field.

That being said, while there is an interesting and at least plausible reason to believe there is some connection between such phenomenon and technology, i think the article is a bit too quick to proclaim that its things like "technology", "emailing" and things that have lead to a lack of empathy in the modern workplace.

On the contrary, i think organisational size and governance lines (which is in some ways connected to technology, admittedly), globalisation, outsourcing, and just the general economic and social realities of the modern workforce lead to a necessary degeneration of trust and respect between workmates and the organisation.

My company, for all its "values", will throw me under the bus to save itself, or for a quick buck. I cannot rely on it to support me into the future: even if it wanted to put money into a pension, i can't rely on that actually remaining solvent. I don't even know if my field/expertise is going to be around for the next 5 years. It is always looking to screw me over, outsource my labour, etc, etc. Its not "too much emails" that does it: its that I know I'm essentially working for a short-term psychopath that couldn't keep its promises to me even if it wanted to (and it doesn't want to).

If you raise people in harsh cutthroat conditions, don't be surprised if empathy falls by the wayside, or expect the lamb to lie down with the lion.

<comment><USER3> _My company, for all its "values", will throw me under the bus to save itself, or for a quick buck. I cannot rely on it to support me into the future: even if it wanted to put money into a pension, i can't rely on that actually remaining solvent. I don't even know if my field/expertise is going to be around for the next 5 years. It is always looking to screw me over, outsource my labour, etc, etc. Its not "too much emails" that does it: its that I know I'm essentially working for a short-term psychopath that couldn't keep its promises to me even if it wanted to (and it doesn't want to)._

Reid Hoffman makes a great point about how companies truly aren't like families. [https://hbr.org/2014/06/your-company-is-not-a- family](https://hbr.org/2014/06/your-company-is-not-a-family) quote:

 _In a real family, parents can't fire their children. Try to imagine disowning your child for poor performance: "We're sorry Susie, but your mom and I have decided you're just not a good fit. Your table-setting effort has been deteriorating for the past 6 months, and your obsession with ponies just isn't adding any value. We're going to have to let you go. But don't take it the wrong way; it's just family."_

I'll take it to another extreme. Loving families (I won't say real families, because there are clearly examples of families that don't do this) will stick with you through thick and thin during your substance abuse, put you through rehab, and still do their best to help you when you fall off the wagon again and again.

<comment><USER4> I agree that companies are not like families. In GitLab we try to never refer to it as family because families don't have performance improvement plans, underperformers, and offboarding processes. I just made this official in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/95964433...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/9596443387a6fb7897bd0b188cde5abfd3e7cb59)

I do this that technology will give more flexible work hours. I think it is just that changing a social process is hard and is unlikely to happen in an existing structure.

At GitLab we've embraced remote work and work hours are truly flexible. The only exceptions I can think of is that our team call (attendence optional) is at a fixed time. And that we expect service engineers to work 5 days a week on normal weeks to make sure we meet our next business day SLA without bouncing a ticket between many people.

I think remote only [http://www.remoteonly.org/](http://www.remoteonly.org/) will become more popular but it will take new companies to get there.

<comment><USER5> s/close nit group/close-knit group/

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I changed it in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/877ecee5...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab- com/commit/877ecee50264c357288daf03ae3f03c1a3440b00)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have managed remote employees for years and while I still think it's a good tool in the box for providing a healthy and happy workplace, as well as recruiting/retaining talent in situations where you couldn't otherwise, I've grown increasingly jaded about the idea of functional, fully-remote organizations.

The trust issue referenced in this article is one element but there are many others:

\- Many people don't handle the level of autonomy well, or don't stay motivated in isolation \- Harder to engage a remote employee in company culture and values \- There is a big difference between remote in the same time zone/country and remote on the other side of the world \- Management invariably has less control over a remote employee and less ability to command their immediate attention

I think comparing "remote work" with "not remote work" is a massive oversimplification of the issue that does everyone a disservice. There is the group of remote contractors you've never met, there's the team of fulltime employees that live within a few hours' flight of each other and meet several times a year, there's the guy who works in the office 3 days a week and at home from 2. So what are we really talking about? Generalities are not productive.

The dark spectres hovering over the head of remote work are that remote employees often end up being less productive and less available when you really need them.

For certain types of work and certain types of people these issues are more or less pronounced... this is not a black and white thing. But I am pretty sure we will never see a future where everyone is a fully remote worker.

<comment><USER7> Have you given any thought to a "results only" workplace? I have never worked in one but I think I'd thrive in such an environment. Would that solve your concerns about remote work?

<comment><USER8> I believe this has already been done extensively. It is called "outsourcing". For many companies this didn't end well. One of the reasons may be the following:

It is more expensive to control the results than to control the process.

Especially in software development, you need quality assurance throughout the whole process, because checking the results or result modules in a blackbox- fashion may lead to catastrophic results.

I know some programmers who were always able to produce code that fulfils the spec, after a few corrections. But any small change in the spec, and the whole thing falls apart. Show them their own code a few weeks later, and they won't be able to maintain it. Leave them alone a few months with their code, and they will refuse to work on it anymore, because they literally can't make any sense of it anymore.

<comment><USER9> Amen. E.g. - I had to pick up a project after these 2 guys in the place I was at in the late 90s that solely survived on the skills of the (rather good) QA in the project.

Alas, it was a C program, and any significant change in the (batch) input data would cause the thing to dump core. I'm not blaming the QA for failing to provide all possible variations of the client data (spec???), just the chumps who couldn't do "defensive programming" (e.g. - I/O error or null pointer checks)

Leaving these guys unattended for any length of time would be a disaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I alone here in actually wanting a place of work with a desk and co- workers.

I worked from home for a year and found it very stressful. There was a lack of human interaction and no clear line between home and work.

My current employer gives me a good balance. I usually spend 3 days in the office and 2 days at home. This is mostly because of the 2 hour commute into London. I'd love to work close to home and visit the office every day.

Looking at some of the comments here (for example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311632)) it seems that the new work culture is being based around the approach adopted by a proportion of the population whose need's are different. These people thrive in this environment.

There is an assumption that the way that this group works is the future, and that it is just a matter of time before everybody else follows (See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311689](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311689)).

There are others, like myself, who find this way of working to be unpleasant. We would like to continue working the old way, but that doesn't seem to be an option anymore.

I used to enjoy having my own desk. I had a shelf of reference books and my personal belongings were locked away in the draw.

This is no longer allowed. Every job I've had for the last decade has been 'hot desking' and I have to carry everything with me every day.

Is a desk of my own where I can do a little nesting really too much to ask for?

<comment><USER11> Please allow me to affirm you're not alone in craving structure and a sense of professionalism in the modern workplace. Personally I genuinely dislike the "casual-ification" of work, if that made-up phrase makes any sense. At a prior job, I genuinely enjoyed wearing nice slacks, a nice button down, and a nice tie...which was the standard for back-office employees. Reason being if a client ever came in, they should see consistency and the effort (very relationship oriented firm).

I have poor personal discipline at times so working from home is distasteful to me. My wants and desires for fun / chores / etc don't mesh well with "being by computer or phone waiting for contact" \- I get edgy. Then how can I unwind, I'm already home?!

I'm aiming to one day be self-employed, preferably in screenwriting. Should the financial compensation reach the point of the luxury of quitting my full- time employment with benefits, my first order of business will be to sign a lease at some type of office. I want to work 8-12 and then, as my brain shuts off, go home and spend time on personal things, chores, amusements, cooking, etc. I crave structure and therefore feel empowered by recognizing this characteristic in myself.

<comment><USER12> Casualization or proletarianization are the word you're looking for, when formerly/currently professional jobs are turned more and more and more into the precarious and interchangeable position of, say, a day laborer at the factories of yore. Adjuncts at universities are a good example. It's a natural part of the development of market economies. This is how you notice when your being prepared for automation. See Taylorism, scientific management, etc.

<comment><USER11> Interesting! Thanks for the context. I agree with the Adjuncts example very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
        > And, truth be told, you probably don't trust most of your colleagues
        > or your boss, either.

From all the places I worked at as an employee or a freelancer in the last twenty years, in the US or in Germany, that was _not_ true for about 2/3rd of them. And the remaining 1/3rd wasn't so much that I didn't trust my colleagues, the whole place was "lost". For example my 2nd job, in a startup with waaayyyyyy too much money and attention for its own good.

Even if I include the time of my apprenticeship in an East German (GDR) chemical factory of several thousand employees, even there the majority of people did a _good_ job at work and were competent.

Even when I extend that to numerous summer jobs in a brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory and a dozen others (non-food), I rarely had the impression that the sentence I quoted demonstrates.

That a job may be useless - okay, that happens a lot, but I can rarely attribute it to complete incompetence, most of it is much larger forces at work than an individual - even a CEO - can fight. And yes, sometimes people are in over their head, but that happens, so what. In the day to day operations I must have been incredibly lucky that my experiences are overall very positive? Hard to believe.

Since "trust" is the centerpiece of that article I question whether their entire premise is even true.

<comment><USER14> From reading your comment and the article, I think you're talking about different types of trust.

I trust my colleagues at all levels, say, not to steal £10 I leave in my desk. But the article is talking about the kind of trust to be working hard the whole time, competently, totally for the best interests of the company.

Given how common it is for us to moan about our useless and lazy bosses (and fellow programmers), I have to agree that trust of that nature isn't very common. I can't say whether it has got more or less common prevalent over time, though.

<comment><USER13> No, you got that wrong. I mean _exactly_ that kind of trust in their abilities as coworkers. The thought of interpreting that in a "criminal" sense never even occurred to me. You may (re)interpret that as you will.

I can see now how a possible interpretation that surely _somebody_ will come up with - whether they post it or not - is that _I am_ clueless myself and that that's the reason I had such positive experiences. May be, I would be the last one to know, right? On the other hand, work as a well-paid freelancer who likes to not just not get fired but also to get the contract renewed would be hard if that was so, I think?

That previous paragraph shows I actually _do_ have a trust issue: (now speaking generally, not in response to the comment) _online_ I've come to expect bad things happening. You post something you think is positive and interesting and out of nowhere comes an interpretation that is dark and turns it all on its head.

Even in the GDR chemical factory, where it would have been _extremely easy_ and would have had few repercussions, most people (actually everybody I ever worked with there, and I saw many different departments) voluntarily decided to do what it takes to keep things running as well as they could. When they didn't work it was because there really wasn't anything to do. I never saw anyone neglecting their duty. My apprenticeship was for a very technical job "BMSR Techniker" \- measurement, control and regulation technology, so I never was an office worker but in the production line or in construction (electrical infrastructure).

I _do_ remember that a (random) manager in the chocolate factory I worked for three weeks during winter break at university didn't trust me:

I had just fed a machine - more thoroughly than necessary - and had nothing to do until it would be finished 10 minutes later, so I sat down and read in my French lesson book - always with an ear for the machine next to me. I could not have done any other work even if I wanted, there was only that machine in that room.

In comes a manager (that I didn't know) - immediately assuming I'm a lazy SOB. It was the complete _opposite_ \- I LIKE to work, and I had until then - without any supervision or pressure - done much more than asked. That changed somewhat after that !$%"§$ manager treated me like dirt.

Okay, so there is _this_ guy that I didn't trust, but he wasn't even my manager, he just happened to walk by, never met him again but he ruined the entire three weeks of work experience. I never bought anything that I knew was made in that factory again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Work is a spectrum between specific repetitive tasks and the need for deep creative solutions to problems. On one hand we have the need to pull this lever every 36 seconds. on the other, is The Problem. We've all faced The Problem, but perhaps not for work. It's the thing that's at the top of the stack for days, weeks, or months on end. Perhaps solving a Rubik's cube. Perhaps understanding recursion. We've all gone through that phase of not understanding something and thinking about it constantly.

IMHO, the 9-5 is is useful because, in the pull the lever case, the lever gets pulled. More importantly, a substantial fraction of time exposed to The Problem. You have nine hours to kill, odds are good people will spend those hours possibly getting hooked on solving The Problem. There's little chance they'll solve the problem in those hours, but they'll get hooked on The Problem and think about it while washing dishes, in the shower, and sleeping. Once you're hooked, it's tough to get away from it without solving it.

Ultimately, i think anything repetitive will be automated away. But we still need some way to hook people on The Problem. Hours and hours of exposure is probably inefficient, but it's effective.

<comment><USER16> It's not effective because I value my time so I don't work a full time job. You'd get me interested if your work day was 4 hours a day.

<comment><USER17> If you're not interested in your work enough to spend 8 hours a day on it, you're doing the wrong work. (Or the sucky part of the right work... we've all been there.) I don't think it's possible to do your best work on something non-trivial without fully immersing yourself in it.

<comment><USER18> This is simply not true, the 8 hour workday is a complete arbitrary concept. There is a wealth of research to show our creative thinking is best done in short spurts. Time off in between actually helps your subconscious continue to work on the solution, something known as "diffuse mode" when I am attempting to solve a problem. There is a reason why so many of former geniuses, great authors, mathematicians said their best solutions came after a walk through nature.

<comment><USER17> Maybe I should have phrased it as "to spend 8 hours a day thinking about it." And I'm not suggesting you need to be spending every waking moment on it, either. But you have to be focused on something for some minimum percentage of your time (which does vary for each person) before your subconscious really starts digging into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've tried the flexible job thing. For the office "butt in the seat" part, I have to concede that it works better for me as it prevents me drifting towards more and more comfort (which at some point translates to less and less productivity). It forces some standards and work ethics giving me that feeling that I am at work. For the flexible hours I think it's best to let everybody to choose their own program, but it should be around six to eight hours because that is the productive interval for the most people (except maybe the low-energy or burnout individuals). It's OK if you want to work less hours to foot the bills and pour the rest of your energy into other (side work) projects, but it would be a waste to get yourself some time out of this creative period to only allow it to be poached in some others' service disguised as social play. This "work" tag on your time is a good thing, for many reasons. Don't hate it.

</comment><comment><USER20> The word "remote" is so general it's basically useless. We need new common terms to describe the different types, such as:

\- Long remote: When someone is offshore or many time zones away (such as India or Eastern Europe).

\- TZ remote: Same timezone, but requires airplane flight to meet.

\- Local remote: Within driving distance.

Local remote is the best of both worlds and all companies should be doing this. It can be a 3-2 balance (3 days remote, 2 days in office) or 4-1, whatever makes sense for the team and company. Employees get the benefit of remote (flexibility, no commute) and in person meetings (such as designing a new system on a whiteboard). It's sad that so many tech companies (such as Google and FB) don't do this. Considering that it's tech that allows this (with video conferencing, git, slack, etc.), it's ironic that tech companies are so resistant to doing local remote.

TZ remote can work, but it should be only for employees who are already established at the company (spent many years doing local remote). The connections developed during the local remote years will help make TZ remote work. And they can fly to the office a few times during the year to refresh those connections.

Long remote has a lot of issues. The big time zone difference, lack of any history of in-person meetings, and culture differences make it very difficult for this to work.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nope! This is not a problem brought on by the digital age. It has just become more obvious.

The problem is that popular theories of management are about control. The CEO controls everything. His immediate in-group controls slices. Their in-groups control smaller slices still. If you control nobody, then you are lowest in the primate status structure.

Remote working undermines that, because it removes you from direct control. Managers and execs are in large part unable to usefully evaluate the work of the people under them. (The whole theory of the MBA is that it's a universal management degree, that understanding of a domain is irrelevant.) Which is why we have to spend so much time on control-oriented systems like plans and trackers and reporting. Managers, unable to actually judge the work, fall back on the obvious: physical presence and conformance to ritual.

To fix this, we need an entirely different theory of management, a shift from controlling to supportive. There are plenty of options here (Lean Manufacturing, Servant Leadership, "Teal" organizations, what the Zingerman's businesses are doing, even our pre-MBA business past), but approximately nobody is adopting them because the people with control like having control. And because we have these cultural assumptions that somebody is _supposed_ to be in control.

<comment><USER22> I agree for the most part, but I also think we want somebody not only to control, but to blame for failure.

<comment><USER21> Definitely. Controlling and blaming behaviors go hand in hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have a question regarding the 9-5 working day. Do Americans really work 9-5 and regard this as an 8 hour working day? Or is this a legacy of the old days with paid lunch or such?

I officially work 8.25 hours per day or 8-17 with 45 minutes of lunch, this is roughly the standard working day in Sweden.

<comment><USER24> 9–5 is the standard British working day, which includes an hour for lunch.

As an example, my contract when I worked for the British government said, "You will normally be required to work a five-day week of 41 hours gross, Monday to Friday, including meal breaks".

The time allowed for lunch breaks was one hour per day, which led to a working time of 7h12m, and a total weekly working time of 36 hours.

I only notice now that this doesn't quite add up to 9–17h. That's probably because most people took about ¾ hour for lunch rather than the full hour, and left at 17:00 rather than 17:12.

(Or maybe I was doing it wrong.)

<comment><USER25> It may have been the standard once, but these days the standard seems to be 8 hours of work, plus 30 or 60 minutes for lunch.

I don't know anyone that works 9-5 with an hour for lunch.

<comment><USER26> That'll be me! I am in the Midlands.

....although I must admit this is rare. The last place was 9-5 with half an hour for lunch, which was widely abused by others (eg. 2 hour pub lunch every Friday, clear off early, roll in late).

A previous place wanted 40 hours a week when I inquired about returning. A reevaluation of priorities led me to turn that offer down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is not the "work world of the future".

What we were promised is 30 maybe even 20 hours of work a week, the location hardly matters.

Instead we get to work even longer hours.

<comment><USER28> Only because employees allow it. Work 20 hours and you'll get paid for 20 hours, but life hasn't gotten cheaper and wages haven't gone up as much, so you'll have to make some concessions.

<comment><USER29> The question is then, why is it that with all the technology/automation we got hasn't life gotten cheaper?

<comment><USER30> Many parts of life have gone cheaper - while feeding and clothing your family used to take a full time job, now you can buy (that level+amount) of food and clothing for just a few hours of work at minimuma wage.

However, major parts of our current expense, like housing at desirable areas, are "competitive" in that if everybody earns ten times as much then the good would also cost ten times as much.

"Housing" in the sense as shelter somewhere is very cheap to make, only "housing" in an area where you (and everyone else) would want to work and raise your kids is expensive.

"Education" in the sense of simply obtaining knowledge and information is very cheap now, only "education" in the meaning of degree=certification that you're "better than average" is expensive.

I once calculated that I literally could live in semi-abandoned areas with the 1916 level of goods&services (+ a PC and internet) for 5-10 hours of work/week even if that was at minimum wage, and remote contracting often does much better. Including paying for the home - they're dirt cheap in places that people are leaving for the expensive places. However, the trouble is that I don't really want to and can afford to "do better" \- and everyone else does as well.

<comment><USER31> Yes, it seems that life has generally gotten cheaper if you don't require health care, childcare, or education. The one thing that hasn't gone down in price that everyone needs is food.

[http://theblinker.com/mainpage/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/co...](http://theblinker.com/mainpage/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/cost-for-americans.png)

<comment><USER30> When we consider that "life has gotten cheaper" then looking at 2005-2014 is rather counterproductive, since the big changes there were before 2000; at least I was talking more on the scale of 100 years than 10 years which has rather different trends.

Also, the healthcare price increase is mostly by changing the "basket" of what we mean by "healthcare" \- if we compare current healthcare with e.g. 1916 or 1966, then it's much more expensive but mostly because healthcare now includes expensive procedures for ailments that simply would not be treated back then other than painkillers to ease the death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> (Edit: The original title is "There's no such thing as flexible work". The title posted here is causing commenters to rail against management.)

The relevant paragraphs:

 _In other words, the propensity for email, texting and quick-type apps has led us to forget some of our people skills, including distinguishing the nuances of language and meaning, fostering of a feeling of belonging among groups of people, and knowing our bosses and colleagues well enough to have confidence that others will pull their weight. That, in turn, has diminished implicit and earned trust among the people we work with._

 _Technology has disrupted the workplace – and not always for the better. That lack of trust brings about fear, which goes a long way to explaining why we put in face time, even when we probably don't need to in order to do our work well. It also can explains why we feel we've got to have our "butt in the seat" even if our work could truly be done from the corner café or the back garden._

</comment><comment><USER33> A big problem, bigger than this even, is that we don't know what a post- industrial economy looks like yet. We don't have all the norms ironed out, and we haven't come to grips with the fact that it'll look different (in basically every way) than an industrial economy. So many of our assumptions are rooted in 19th and 20th century ideas of what day to day work should look like, most of which is based of factory work and routine work. And that's where the 40 hour work week comes from, as well as the 9-5 schedule. Factories have shifts, 9-5 is just the most normal one, 40 hours a week is 1/3 of all weekday hours, it's fairly simple. These norms were designed to fit humans into the system of machinery, to figure out a way they could service the machines 24/7\. They've been brought down to reasonable(ish) terms based on decades of work to improve working conditions, but they're still fundamentally norms based on factory work.

Creative work, knowledge work, development, etc, are very much different kinds of work, and they tend to be done in a different way. They don't have the same requirements of factory work (no need for shifts to man machines 24/7 except in a few cases). And they don't take a personal toll the same way. Lots of people fall into the trap of thinking that sitting in an air conditioned office necessarily makes a job easy, even "cushy", compared to physical labor, but that's an archaic notion. The impositions of cognitive labor can be just as severe as physical labor. Stress and bad working conditions in cognitive work can lead to health problems, emotional problems, and shorter lifespans just as easily as physical work can. Stress, psychological abuse, oppression, emotional crisis, all of these things are potentially as life threatening and traumatic as black lung or broken limbs. But whereas we've spent decades and trillions of dollars setting standards for the physical well being of workers in manual labor conditions we have only scratched the surface, with mixed results, when it comes to cognitive well-being.

On the one hand, hours are somewhat tangential to those factors, but on the other hand, when there are conditions which are detrimental to cognitive well- being being the number of hours that must be spent at work often significantly increases the problem. There are many jobs that are tolerable even when they are at 60+ hours a week, and there are other jobs that are intolerable even at 20 hours a week.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think firms that offer work from home and flexible hours will be able to attract better talent in the coming years, then slowly more will offer it. Eventually people will get smart and start to ask for more money from companies that dont offer these things ("You want me to drive an hour to sit in a box so you can watch me? Sure, that's going to be an extra 20%") once that tipping point is reached things will change.

<comment><USER34> That 20% sounds about right to me. I'm much more efficient when I work from home. My commute is walking across my kitchen to my office. Lunch break is getting up to get a salad or sandwich from said kitchen. I can work an 8 hour day in 8-9 hours total including breaks for lunch etc.

There is no way to do that in the Boston area where I live if I have to drive to a office. Commutes here are usually about an hour per 20 miles driven during rush hour. That makes an 8 hour work day more like 10-11 hours. So somewhere between 20% and 25% makes up the difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> >> "Our ability to trust each other has not advanced in parallel with the technology we have created"

This is completely false given most employers have way more trust based on using tech to know what they're doing, where they are, etc.

Largest reason that "butts in seats" will go away is in fact due to tech via increasingly "smarter" tech.

My experience is that onsite work is largely driven by more trival concerns such as ego, socializing, etc.

Office space is a huge waste of resources for the major majority of businesses.

</comment><comment><USER36> Not trusting your employees is simply poor management. There really is no excuse in this day and age to deny remote work to tech workers, other than management is incapable of managing them. When job hunting, I see lack of full time remote positions as a red flag.

<comment><USER37> Not really. No more than Counter Strike let people decide for themselves how many points they deserve... In our freetime, we play games in systems that decide our worth for us. I see no reason why work should be any different. In a management role, I get far happier, more productive people, when I reach out and find out what they're doing. People like it when people take an interest in them, and what they are doing.

<comment><USER36> That sounds like you are a good manager. This is more about the remote aspect though. With email, text, phone, and video chat it is easy to find out what somebody is doing and take an interest without physically being there. When management can't do that but instead rely on butts in seats and office rituals is when I worry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This blames digital culture. But the collapse of institutional trust came with the rise of neoliberalism, and convincing people there was no longer any such thing as a job for life. So this set in well before the Internet. It may have furthered it, of course.

<comment><USER39> What's good in having a job for life, without any further opportunities? Looks boring as hell.

<comment><USER40> Stability, and freedom to focus on other things in life is not a bad goal. It's the "Work to live" vs "Live to work" mindset.

<comment><USER39> Hardly possible to focus on other things if you spend most of your time at the office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm currently working 4 hours a day, usually from 10pm until 2am. I'm living in Thailand, so these hours overlap with clients in the US.

I'm still productive, but I'm the only developer working on this project, so I don't think it's ideal. I think I could be about 3x more productive if I was in "startup mode" with a lot of equity. But I don't want to do that for this project, and 4 hours per day suits me very well.

It can be hard to keep saying no, and hold onto my 20 hour weeks. The client keeps talking about bringing me on full-time, and I keep politely declining. But then I've been thinking about saving up to buy an apartment, or a new car, or a vacation to Europe... I might go full-time for a little while to save up for that vacation. But apart from that, I really value my free time.

I spend a lot of my free time working on side projects. But I also really enjoy the freedom to read, or work on filmmaking, music, or other hobbies. Or to go for a walk, sit by a lake, watch TV, or just do nothing at all. I'm also working during the night, so it feels like I have the whole day to do whatever I want.

It's sad that this article only talked about "flexibility", and didn't mention anything about shorter work weeks.

<comment><USER42> Curious, did you already have US clients and then decided to go overseas, or did you organize all that completely remotely?

<comment><USER41> I organized it all completely remotely. I found a few clients from posts on various job boards, including Hacker News threads. I've recently just been working with Toptal, which is a lot easier, although I've had to lower my rate quite a bit.

I've applied to [http://10xmanagement.com/](http://10xmanagement.com/), but haven't heard anything yet. They have a huge number of applications.

<comment><USER42> Very interesting, thanks for responding!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> For the most part its pretty much the luck of the draw and I have been pull Aces for many years. Gaining trust is communicating it and backing it up with proof through good work, initiative, and intuitiveness. If those traits are not earning the trust you need then you are likely in a place where it won't matter what you do.

I had a long story written but figured it might reveal too much and give away where I am. I work in a corporate hq, multiple subsidiaries in the same site. The difference in how they are managed is striking, I am in one I describe above. I work more at home than work and most of my on site time is more for me to maintain friendships than anything else.

The difficult part is that by looking at the people in upper management someone coming off the street would mix the two groups up if you told them the stark differences. So its something you either are going to find out from friends who are there or have friends at a location or be willing to spend the time to find out yourself. Just saying, some of the more progressive appearing teams were the most repressive I have ever been around and the so called old school worked up from the field groups were more you earn it you have earned it.

</comment><comment><USER44> It worked for me. I'm a true digital nomad. I moved out of the US and work whatever hours I want totally remotely. I firmly believe this is the future. Maybe it's taking longer than anticipated but it _is_ happening more and more. Just search "digital nomad" for a taste.

<comment><USER45> Who do you work for that allows such flexibility, or is it more just contract gigs?

<comment><USER44> Elasticsearch - it's a fully distributed company. Almost all engineers work remotely from around the world. [https://www.elastic.co/about/careers](https://www.elastic.co/about/careers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The entire premise of the article seems to be based on the following paragraph and I simply did not understand it:

"In other words, the propensity for email, texting and quick-type apps has led us to forget some of our people skills, including distinguishing the nuances of language and meaning, fostering of a feeling of belonging among groups of people, and knowing our bosses and colleagues well enough to have confidence that others will pull their weight. That, in turn, has diminished implicit and earned trust among the people we work with."

How has has the use of quick-type apps eroded trust exactly? I don't follow this. Can anyone clarify?

<comment><USER7> At times I've been called autistic so I've often observed this in many realms of human endeavor. Many people don't trust or distrust others biased on a concrete factual reason like I do("Bob is a soup kitchen volunteer and a Catholic big brother he must be a nice guy"), it is often that they appear to have a "feeling" about a person. The positivity of this feeling is dependent on how much time they have spent in close vicinity to said person recently. It is a odd, probably measurable effect and one I've used myself to advance my career.

<comment><USER46> Thanks for giving some context. This makes sense. I think this might explain the phenomenon you see at many tech companies where you often see entire departments go out to lunch together every day, something I think is odd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Employment isn't just about work output, it's also about availability.

To me this means 'butts in seats' will never disappear, because when you agree to an standard employment contract, you are generally agreeing to be available at the employer's location.

There's a reason it's called human resources. The human is a bit like a tool lying in a toolbox. Even if if the tool is not being used all the time, there is an advantage in keeping it available for when it is needed.

</comment><comment><USER48> I prefer flexible arrangements to full remote work. Some days one needs face time or in-person collaboration. Some days one needs silence and long stretches of uninterrupted thought for coding.

</comment><comment><USER49> As technology invades work and automates/assists in most menial tasks, the focus of a job becomes more about improving communication (from increasing productivity earlier).

[https://2600hertz.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/the-secret- reason...](https://2600hertz.wordpress.com/2016/08/15/the-secret-reason-for- jobs-and-employment/)

</comment><comment><USER50> I suspect more mentality change is going to be required in the following areas: trust, economic efficiency, value of money, materialism, stigma's, what makes people happy. Or another economic revolution.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm absolutely useless if given excessive amounts of freedom. So there's that.</comment>


Is Captain America a Biological Weapon? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bifurcatedneedle.com/new-blog/2017/12/20/is-captain-america-a-biological-weapon <comment><AUTHOR> My guess is that human enhancement for military use will be subject to international negotiations in the coming decades, but will probably not be considered under the Biological Weapons Convention.

For further reading, the Atlantic published an article a few years ago on this topic: [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/could...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/could- human-enhancement-turn-soldiers-into-weapons-that-violate-international-law- yes/266732/)</comment>


Walmart sells its UK Asda business to hone its focus on competing with Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/30/walmart-retreats-from-its-uk-asda-business-to-hone-its-focus-on-competing-with-amazon/ <comment><USER2> Not read the full article above - but I'm aware that Walmart is keeping circa 40% ownership in the final merged group... that's if the competition authority in the UK gives it the go-ahead (Which is a big hurdle).</comment>


The PhD Octopus (1903) - <AUTHOR> https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html <comment><USER2> Fortunately, what's written there is not true in all places at all times. For example, I got my PhD in math at Harvard in the 1970s. My PhD adviser, Andy Gleason, was a terrifically nice guy, yet seemed oddly unsympathetic to the stresses of the PhD process. I later realized that he didn't have a PhD himself ... when I noted that absence in his bio as he was elected to be president of the American Mathematical Society.

And by the way -- while I think he sort of understood what I was working on (the theorem that came to be known as the Mertens-Neyman result for stochastic games -- they scooped me by a few months, but I got my degree anyway), I'm nearly certain that nobody else in the rest of the department did. It didn't matter. When it came to approving/disapproving theses, our department seemed quite politics-free.

On the other hand, I heard horror stories from my dorm-mates about other departments, such as history and Slavic linguistics. Perhaps the "harder" subjects had better standards of objectivity. Perhaps I was just lucky.

And by the way -- it also was not the case that an undergraduate degree was needed for admission to grad school. Discovering this fact on my junior year Spring break grad school trip let me greatly change the negotiating dynamics around degree requirements at my undergraduate institution. When it as all over, the dean who had originally given me the most grief politely thanked me for bothering to get my undergrad degree.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the real problem:

> When the thesis came to be read by our committee, we could not pass it. > Brilliancy and originality by themselves won't save a thesis for the > doctorate; it must also exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of learning; and > this our candidate had neglected to bring to bear. So, telling him that he > was temporarily rejected, we advised him to pad out the thesis properly, and > return with it next year

This is not much of an exaggeration. Getting a Ph.D. is as much (maybe more) about demonstrating your ability to shmooze, defer to authority and put up with bullshit for an extended period of time as it is about learning or doing good research.

<comment><USER4> Did we read the same paragraph? The problem with his first thesis was that, though he presented a brilliant and original result, he didn't show that he'd studied enough prior research.

Nothing to do with schmoozing, everything to do with scholarly integrity.

<comment><USER3> The actual complaint was that the thesis failed to "exhibit a heavy technical apparatus of learning." I'm not sure exactly how you get from there to "didn't show that he'd studied enough prior research".

That extrapolation notwithstanding, what exactly do you think "shmoozing" means? In academia it does not mean going to your committee's cocktail parties and letting them win at golf. It means citing their work (i.e. "demonstrating that you have studied prior research") so that they can then use the fact that they are highly referenced to advance their own careers.

<comment><USER5> When I was preparing for my oral exam, I was given something like 1,200 pages of material to read by my committee. I read it.

During the exam, in addition to the expected technical questions, I was asked things like, "What lab did this work come out of? Who runs that lab?"

In other words, "Do you understand the political and funding environment in which you're going to be operating if you continue working in this field?" Fortunately, I had been to a few conferences and met some of these people (also not an accident on the part of my professors), so I knew the answers to these questions. But the lesson stuck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an excellent support to the thought that, once provided with a standard metric, people tend to focus only on satisfying that metric.

<comment><USER7> It's kind of understandable. In some professions we have accreditation and licenses; others sometimes clamor for the same thing. That fellow's Ph. D. diploma on the wall was the effective equivalent of "licensed practitioner of teaching the Liberal Arts" or something like that. That's why the employer insisted on it.

Would we say that a dentist's license had nothing to do with whether they can do dentistry and cheerfully go to one that doesn't have one?

Fact is that by getting the Ph. D., the guy did prove that he was "good" in some way; he had the academic "muscle" and that is relevant to the teaching, even if the subject isn't the same.

You absolutely _cannot_ say that philosophy is irrelevant to literature. That is to say if we examine the statement _" [w]e wrote again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one's ability to teach literature"_ it doesn't really hold up. That fellow simply doesn't cast aside his philosophy background when he gets up in front of the literature class! The way we analyze literature all has philosophical underpinnings. Literature can carry philosphical points of view, and consciously so, even. Fictional literature has been used to transmit philosophical thought, from Socratic dialogues of ancient greece to works like the novels of Ayn Rand.

<comment><USER6> In some areas you absolutely want a strict standard, to your point on dentists. PhD is an interesting requirement, however, due to the variance in skillset, experience, and training an individual going through the educational process receives compared to vocational programs. The degree can substitute for a license, but it's going to be very noisy. Requiring it leads to less absolute diversity in a hiring pool (as opposed to categorical diversity) which may or may not be the goal of the institution. But once you've found a good hire, who can perform the function of the job to the client's satisfaction, the vocational or educational background is more or less unnecessary. To refer to your dentist example: it may take me a lot of encouragement to trust my Uncle Joe with no dental degree to work on my teeth, but once he's proven himself the need for institutional acknowledgement of his ability is trumped by his performance.

Another tangent point to consider: dentists and other vocationalists have existed long before a licensing board did, and someone, somewhere, got the first History PhD.

<comment><USER8> I would disagree about professional licensure, and think the same arguments apply there as in other areas, although maybe in different ways. In fact, I think the problem in licensed professions is even worse, because assumptions are never questioned, to avoid being called reckless, and have the weight of law.

In fact, I think this is a prime problem with healthcare in the US in the moment.

The problem James outlines is the same with professional fields: we assume that license X, which often requires degree A, is necessary for competence in an area, and that competence cannot be achieved in an area in any other way. As a result, we stop actually paying attention to competency per se, and focus on licensure, which is not the same. As a result of that, we lose choice: any other way of meeting a demand is assumed to be illegitimate and unsafe, which is untrue. Competition is lost, and monopoly is gained.

In your example, for instance, you suggest a hypothetical case where someone doesn't have a dental degree. But in reality, it's almost certainly not that that person would have no degree at all, and no experience, it's that they would have a different sort of degree, with a different sort of experience.

Dentists are maybe a poor example, because if anything, their profession is an example of one that is being stifled by current practice. I suspect that they are in a position to learn to do a lot more than they are, and are held back by professional licensing laws relative to MDs.

The appropriate example isn't "would you hire someone without a dental degree to treat your cavity?" It's "would you hire a dentist with appropriate surgical training to do jaw surgery?" Would you hire an optometrist with years of opthomological surgery training to do LASIK surgery? Would you hire a psychologist with pharmacology training to prescribe you lithium, or a psychologist with appropriate training to do TMS treatment of your depression? Would you trust your pharmacist to pick the right antibiotic for your infection, that has been precisely characterized by a lab already? What about a neuroscientist with clinical training to interpret your MRI scan?

Licenses, although well-intended, have become hindrances to lower cost and better choice. The tail is wagging the dog in professional fields exactly the way James suggested over a century ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> See also: [http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2007/04/value-of- harvard...](http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2007/04/value-of-harvard- ph-d.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> I generally found the professors with a PhD to be more engaged, driven, and generally capable than those without. just my 2c.

I would guess that the internal qualities that drove them to seek the phd were the ones that made me prefer them.

<comment><USER11> How long ago was this? These days the only people who are likely to be teaching you at a university who don't have PhDs are PhD students. And they're less good at it largely because they don't have years of experience.

<comment><USER10> I wrapped up my BS in 2006.

A variety of people teaching underclass courses as the instructor of record were people with Master's degrees. A couple were ABD.

I would hesitate to say that older profs were better; it seemed bimodal: either they really were significantly better, or they really were not very good teachers. I _almost_ always preferred the people with deep knowledge and passion for the subject, regardless of actual quality of teaching, myself. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In modern times, I've found much the same with jobs and the requirement for a "B.S. in CS"

(three magical letter holder here)

<comment><USER13> Amusingly, I have a "B.A. in CS". Given the subject, most people assume a B.S. if you just say "bachelors'", but in my particular case, they'd be wrong ;) I imagine this is somewhat like how you can get a doctorate in nursing.

(just wrapping up my own three magical letters too!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Tangential question:

> _It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a > critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. Other nations suffer > terribly from the Mandarin disease._

Does anyone know what this use of "Mandarin" is supposed to suggest? It sounds like a sort of Orientalist fear of exotic diseases, but seems like it could refer to something more specific. Just curious.

<comment><USER15> The Chinese Imperial Examinations system determined who could hold which rank of government office based on grueling study and testing on Chinese literature.

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

The comparison the article is making is that the selection process is entirely orthagonal to the job, and the hoops that needed to be jumped through precluded any actual study of the things that mattered.

This was regarded at the time of the article as a really bad idea both within and outside China, and ended two years later after 1,700 years of use.

<comment><USER6> That is the current state of academia, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Drat, I was hoping for a story about an actual cephalopod with a doctorate, like Octodad or something.

<comment><USER17> Give it up for Octograd

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Note the assumption that intellectual distinction is native. That is an assumption that is counter to the American assumption that any man can become anything he wants given the effort and desire. The people who want and try to earn a phd without the native ability are the problem James is stating the universities are creating. This is the third class of persons.

The other interesting thing was how the third class of persons obtains a phd is subjective. "Thus, partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands; and in both a bad conscience,--are the results of our administration."

Interesting thoughts from a man who has "distinguished intellect"

</comment><comment><USER19> Same kind of shit is still going on in silicon valley.

<comment><USER20> You think it's bad here? If you ever take the DC metro, look out the window at the Pentagon metro station (but others are often bad too). You will see exclusively two ad buys over all of the signs. The first is for some large defense contractor, usually Northrop, advertising weapons systems or IT services.

The other half of the ads are for "Graduate School" which is some sort of organization that confers masters and phds. Perfect for the aspiring bureaucrat that needs to check that qualification off the list.

I had a friend pulled in to one of these "health policy PhD" (she wasn't in the DC area) and she was excited to be in a degree program with high ranking bureaucrats in the HHS.

Edit: found a link to the organization, apparently they don't give out masters and phds... How confusing! [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_School_USA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_School_USA)

<comment><USER21> I never heard that this school (which used, I think, to be the Department of Agriculture Graduate School) gave out any degrees.

Having said that, you are correct about Washington, DC. Part of it, I think, is the rules around government contracting: if I can bill John Doe, B.A., for $x/hour, I can probably bill Richard Roe, M.S. for $(x+y)/hour or John O'Nokes, Ph.D. for $(x+y+z)/hour. The government contractors also can offer tuition reimbursement for their employees, untaxed, if the classes "maintain and improve" skills for the job then held.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the words of Schopenhauer, "nothing in the world is so rare as a good judge."

</comment><comment><USER23> Makes me glad I got my Ph.D.</comment>


Placebos prove powerful even when people know they're taking one - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-placebos-powerful-people-theyre.html <comment><AUTHOR> Study in Nature Comm. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17654-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17654-y)</comment>


Scientists Closer to Reading Words From Your Brain - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/08/scientists-closer-to-reading-words-from-your-brain/ <comment><USER2> I really do believe the next big disruptor (on the scale of something like space travel or the internet) is going to be in our ability to harness brain power to directly manipulate our world.

There is so much research going on and a lot of it is quite advanced. Some day we'll put it all together and the results are going to be amazing. Not only in curing disease, but in fundamentally changing how we interact with our machines.

I can't wait.

<comment><USER3> _I really do believe the next big disruptor (on the scale of something like space travel or the internet) is going to be in our ability to harness brain power to directly manipulate our world._

Can't we already do that? I mean, you might have to work a huge machine using a joystick or something, but would eliminating the joystick be _that_ much better?

I see it more as way to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome for programmers.

What's much more interesting for me is the ability to take a full image of someone's brain. It would be an interesting type of backup...

<comment><USER4> Do you feel that is possible?

<comment><USER3> 50 +/- 50 or so years from now, maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's some interesting research they're doing. I'd be be more interested to see if somebody can translate it to an electroencephalographic device. I suspect that placing electrodes directly onto the surface of the brain would be a dealbreaker for those of us without an immediate need to have our thoughts processed by a computer in real time (however cool that concept might be).

<comment><USER6> There's an external headset that "unwrinkles" your brain algorithmically and gets very accurate readings without requiring direct contact with your brain. [http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tan_le_a_headset_that_read...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html)

<comment><USER7> Hi, neuroscientist here. The stuff about it "unwrinkling" the brain is nonsense. Emotiv is a running joke in the scientific community, unfortunately. EEG has some fundamental problems as a control mechanism, and isn't interesting from a brain-machine interfacing perspective. It's unfortunate because we all want to see neural interfaces, but it will either have to be invasive or come from a major Nobel-worthy innovation.

<comment><USER8> Hmmm, their demos look good. Are you saying the headset doesn't work at all, or not well enough, or not for a broad range of tasks?

<comment><USER7> EEG measures mass synchrony between different areas of the brain. That's _extremely_ hard to control consciously and takes a lot of practice. Even when you can do it, it's a 1-dimensional signal. It's not even clear you _want_ to control it consciously; EEG therapy is used in psychiatry every now and then for treatment of a few disorders, and can lead to personality changes. The "inverse EEG" problem, which relates to the distortion caused by the skull, is basically computationally intractable (which is why ECoG is used). EEG is also totally drowned out by EMG (muscles) if you aren't careful, and it's nearly impossible to tell EMG and EOG (eye movements) apart from "real" EEG.

In Emotiv's specific case, though, these fundamentals are the least of their problems. They're three (four?) years behind schedule without anything really shipping even now, and the units that I _have_ seen in the wild are of low build quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What if you don't think in words? What if your natural mode of thinking is in terms of fuzzy images and funky metaphors? Looks like I'll have lots of gainful employment in the new dystopian future.</comment>


Yuri Milner to Talk About Facebook Deal on Bloomberg TV Tonight - <AUTHOR> http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20110105/yuri-milner-to-talk-about-facebook-deal-on-bloomberg-tv-tonight-streamed-live-online/?mod=ATD_rss <comment><USER2> The posted link looks like it's for the rss feed.

This is the link I was able to use: [http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20110105/yuri-milner- to-...](http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20110105/yuri-milner-to-talk- about-facebook-deal-on-bloomberg-tv-tonight-streamed-live-online/)</comment>


Fairphone - <AUTHOR> https://www.fairphone.com/en/ <comment><USER2> I love the idea of this phone, but it's hard to take it seriously when it ships with an Android OS that is three years and three versions old. The idea of ethical, maintainable hardware is laudable, and the hardware specs look OK given a price that is far below current high-end models from the likes of Apple and Samsung. But I think a product like this needs an OS that has up-to- date security features and preferably much better privacy options than Google- ised versions of Android.

Edit: Looks like the price today is around the €500 mark, which does mean you're paying quite a premium for the flexibility with those hardware specs.

<comment><USER3> If you're looking for up to date software with security and privacy in mind you should take a look at librem from purism : [https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/)

<comment><USER2> Yes, I have high hopes for that one as well, but sadly it's not available here yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Google warns journalists and professors: Your account is under attack - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/11/google-warns-journalists-and-professors-your-account-is-under-attack/ <comment><USER2> Not sure whether I'm happy to read that or affraid!

<comment><USER3> I think afraid or concerned is the appropriate response. We want to be able to trust that our accounts are secure across the board. I'm not sure how to interpret your "happy" option. The only "happy" option I can think of that's useful off the top of my head is that it increases awareness of the importance of security.</comment></comment>


Samsung Galaxy Tab (iPad rival) revealed - <AUTHOR> http://galaxytab.samsungmobile.com/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone else find an auto-playing video, which makes a loud noise, on loop, with no pause function, that plays before loading enough to play smoothly... a little rude?

Also, yay, new tech.

<comment><USER3> hehe yeah, indeed. Also reminded me of that Gantz Graf video from autechre. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyJfHU4GoOQ>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> COOL</comment>


The Role of Luck in Life Success - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/ <comment><USER2> I've had a saying for a long time: it's better to be lucky than good. It doesn't matter how good you are if you're unlucky, and it doesn't matter how bad you are if you're lucky.

There are lots of complicated statements around luck and success. For instance, how lucky was Zuckerberg to have been at Harvard for college when he was? He obviously saw an opportunity and turned it into Facebook, but do you think it's even conceivable he could have done that had he not happened to have been a student at Harvard? What if the Winklevoss twins had never approached him in the first place? What if he never met Sean Parker? There were a string of things that had to line up for the story to evolve the way it did, and none of them were in Zuckerberg's control.

It's very easy to come up with examples of people just being unlucky. You could be born with a serious illness. Your child could die during birth. It's easy to think of situations that are just awful and there is nothing you could have done to prevent those awful things from occurring.

There are lots of simple statements around luck and happiness. Nobody argues whether or not you're lucky to be born rich, healthy, tall, attractive, etcetera. But people argue over whether or not intelligence is driven largely by nature or by nurture. Experts even argue over whether or not happiness itself is largely determined by genetics.

The general takeaway is luck is by definition what you cannot control so it's a fool's errand to try to do so. But success is what happens when luck stumbles across someone who was prepared to take advantage of it. Zuckerberg may have been lucky to have been at Harvard when he was, but he immediately saw the opportunity and turned it into Facebook - and (love him or hate him) he deserves credit for that.

<comment><USER3> Most of the time you have to work hard to be lucky...

<comment><USER4> Or if you are lucky you need to work hard to do something with it.

Quite a few years ago I lived a few bus stops from the venue of the yearly PHP conference in Hungary but somehow I never went. Just didn't seem worthwhile or something. In 2004 May, a friend of mine called on a Sunday he is going to attend the roadshow of said conference in a shitty rural city in Hungary with his brother driving and whether I wanted to tag along. I shrugged and went. Still have no idea why. That's when I first heard of Drupal, it wasn't visible at all back then despite I was heavily researching CMSes just then. Being present at that roadshow was luck. My meteoric rise from financially struggling Hungarian web developer to internationally acclaimed Drupal developer and architect of a Top 100 web property only five years later was, however, the result of me pouring practically every awake moment into Drupal (I believe it was a Google Summer Of Code mentor questionarie which asked how much extra time are we spending with our project and I still remember when I was like, I am not spending any extra time because that'd be impossible). The finances aligned. When I attended my first Drupal developer come together in 2005 February in Antwerp I needed to borrow money from my parents for the plane ticket and couch surf for I had no money. I bought a apartment right down on the beach in Vancouver in 2009... And yes, this seemed unreal and it still does, walking home every time fills me with a sense of "this is too good to be true".

<comment><USER5> > That's when I first heard of Drupal, it wasn't visible at all back then > despite I was heavily researching CMSes just then.

As the old saying goes, "luck is when opportunity meets preparedness".

You were prepared for this by evidence of you research into CMS's at the time. This enabled you to see the opportunity Drupal created. You clearly ran with this and your success followed.

How many other people were there that didn't find the type of success you did? They were just as lucky to be at that conference at that time as you. If anything, you were lucky to have had the insight to see the potential an investment in Drupal could make and clearly it went beyond your wildest dreams in terms of financial and professional success. But even then I'd hesitate to call it all luck since you clearly saw that CMS's were becoming an important technology and Drupal in particular must have fused what you knew about CMS's and what could be possible.

<comment><USER4> > How many other people were there that didn't find the type of success you > did? They were just as lucky to be at that conference at that time as you.

Ha that's right.

What I must have seen but failed to put into words is [https://dri.es/drupal- sucks-less](https://dri.es/drupal-sucks-less):

> All content management systems suck, Drupal just happens to suck less. — > Boris Mann at DrupalCON Amsterdam, August 2005.

Typo3, Tikiwiki, Phpnuke (heaven forbid), XOOPS, even Mambo/Joomla, these were the systems of the day. Drupal ... sucked less and gained a lot more marketshare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've had this old post from Marc Andreessen pinned in my mental browser for a long time now. There are four types of luck and you can influence three of them:

 _Chance I is completely impersonal; you can 't influence it._

 _Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore._

 _Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations._

 _Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors._

[https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html](https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html)

<comment><USER7> Boy, how lucky I am.

The probability of me stumbling upon this informative gem would have been pretty low if I hadn't been lurking around HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an avid poker player I think that the game reasonably approximates luck's role in life. There will be many situations where you will lose despite having done everything right and you will see other people win despite having done everything wrong. Both of these situations generally cause people to complain about injustice in the world, make illogical damaging decisions in desperation (go on tilt), or give up. Which of course causes them to lose any chance of success.

The path to success is to make the correct decisions over and over again even if you fail the first 5 or 10 times. Of course if your definition of success is to be a billionaire you will likely never succeed but if it's to accumulate a reasonable amount of wealth or to achieve some measure of success in your field then it isn't as impossible as everyone is telling you.

<comment><USER9> I like the comparison to poker which is a mixture of luck, skill and effort. The thing is also, if you win a lot of times in a row or at least are on top of the game, it is much more comfortable to play. You can continue with calculated risks. I think that's very much a position one wants to be in to feel successful and in control. Switching back from a disastrous round back to this mode is tough...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first example of luck they provide is how the country you are born in makes a huge difference. Of course it does! But with such a broad definition, even talent becomes a matter of luck, as talent requires the luck to be born with the right genetic preconditions and the luck of growing up in a environment that allows you to develop your talent.

A better title would be: "An overly broad definition of luck leads to luck having a greater role in life."

<comment><USER11> What kind of sensible definition of luck _wouldn 't_ include the place where you were born?

<comment> Joe-Z The kind that doesn't try to undermine every successful person born in a developed country ever?

I do believe that luck plays a huge role[0], but I get GP's point and I think it's fair.

[0] I think what really drives it home for me is not knowing successful people, but knowing people for who it didn't work out, despite them seemingly making all the right moves.

<comment><USER12> It's not about developed/undeveloped. It's about the possibility of your talents being utilised in the place where you were born.

Let's say you have the potential to be a great cricketer, but you're born in a country where cricket is not even played.

You're SOL.

Or you (the great cricketer) could be born in India and be a millionaire by 20.

<comment> Joe-Z Great point! When typing my reply I actually wasn't sure about using 'developed countries' as the term, but it was the one that came to me fastest. In a discussion further down the thread I just called it 'country of origin', maybe using something like that would have been more fitting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of comments discuss Zuck's luck, but a better example would be William Henry Gates III. Here was a kid born to a wealthy family, given a chance to learn about computers at an early age (before he was 11!). He leveraged that knowledge into a software business that was doing.. ok ish, whilst at Harvard.

But his luck continued when IBM decided they wanted to outsource creation of an OS for their personal computer. He deflected IBM to another company, who, to this day, must be kicking themselves for messing up the opportunity, only to take on the task himself. His skills/company weren't great in that direction, having his mother on the IBM board saved his bacon many times over.

Once he cashed that lottery ticket in, his more business minded friends saw to it that it was exponentially more valuable than anyone could have imagined.

Whilst Bill was certainly skilled, there was more than enough luck involved for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER14> This article starts out with such broad implied definitions of "luck" it is hard to figure out what they're really saying.

<comment><USER15> I hate things like "Far Greater Than We Realized" too. Who thought luck wasn't important and how long ago was that?

<comment><USER16> Fortunately we can just lop that bit off the title above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Success in life has more to do with who you know, who your parents know and luck than anything, even hard work or intelligence.

The more you live, the more you realize that much of life is beyond your control. When you were born, where you were born, even the opportunities available are all out of your control.

Not to mention that there are only a few spots for success and even if everyone worked equally hard, most will fail while the few succeed.

</comment><comment><USER18> Jobs made 3 fortunes. One is luck, three is skill.

Gates had 3 major turning points in the fortunes of Microsoft. It's hard to attribute all three to luck.

</comment><comment><USER19> I would think in certain societies luck (randomness) has much less of an impact on peoples lives than others. Like dropping a pin somewhere in Norway vs the US to represent where someone will be born. In the US there is may be a pretty large amount of luck associated with where that pin lands whereas in Norway it might be significantly less.

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe part of the problem is that luck has connotations that, for better or worse, change the way we perceive the argument. Would it make a difference if we replaced luck with chance or probability?

Lucky sperm for example has some heavy overtones. Our language might be getting in the way.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not clear how talent is being measured. Is it IQ, resiliency, motivation ?

And luck goes both ways, good luck or bad luck, we are all way way luckier just by being alive today

</comment><comment><USER22> The article lists a bunch of things you can change personally and are therefore not "luck", like your last name, country of residence, display of middle initials and ease of pronouncing your name.

It seems to conflate luck with randomness.</comment>


Personal memories of Dennis Ritchie (dmr) by those who worked alongside him - <AUTHOR> http://maneydigital.com/2012/03/05/dmr-stories/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the video! dmr is a personal hero of mine.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for this video. DMR was one of the giants on which we're now standing and building upon.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really enjoyed all the warmth that comes through in this video.

Sometimes computer work can feel cold and cynical to me.

This video helps remind me how it can and should be.

<comment><USER5> Thanks Javert. I only wish I had better vid/audio. I think it's important to capture the history of those who our careers (and lives) are built on. Just hope I did dmr justice.

<comment><USER6> It was a good video. I just wish that there had been more people from the remains of 1127 (specifically, the Unix research group). The ones that had built with him, in other words.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, but went with whoever I could talk to. Even a single video memory of Dennis is an important video for history (IMO).

<comment><USER6> That's true. Did you get a chance to walk up to building 2, 5th floor and talk to some of the people there? That was where the Unix room (and his office) were.

Many of the people that used to be there have scattered, but the ones that remain would probably have some stories and pointers.

<comment><USER5> Ori, I actually met these researchers in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress. I'm sure I walked by a few of them (and others) when I was part of the launch team on Plan 9 (I did the PR). Movies have Hollywood; tech has Bell Labs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for this video. It means a lot to me.

<comment><USER5> Glad I was there to capture and share it.</comment></comment>


The first use of the term "programming language"? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2019-12.html <comment><USER2> The post is a speculation whether a January 1957 paper, "Programming the Logic Theory Machine", by Newell and Shaw might be the first published use (or "definition") of the term "programming language".

It is always interesting to look at beginnings and early signs of notions - concepts - that we use in our everyday lives. The particular phrasing, I don't know if that should matter so much.

Chomsky's work on formal languages falls roughly in that epoch of 50s, ALGOL and COBOL, too.

"Computing" wasn't what it is today, I think mathematical and electrical engineering background of the computing experts would affect what language (pun intended) they used. The idea (and term) of "languages" stayed but what makes a term popular is hard to settle.

I think in terms of concept, formal (mathematical) logic predates all this by a few decades. The subtitle of Frege's 1879 "Begriffsschrift" was "Eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens" which I would render as "A formula language of pure thought, modeled after the arithmetical one". I think the roots are rather there...

<comment><USER3> > It is always interesting to look at beginnings and early signs of notions - > concepts - that we use in our everyday lives.

To add one in here: Cipher Block Chaining was invented in 1976. Blockchain is now common parlance.

<comment><USER4> Despite both having the word block and chain, they aren't really related. CBC mode is not even requisite to implement a block chain.

<comment><USER5> Merkle Trees are from 1979 and _those_ are one of the core concepts for most blockchain implementations (a Blockchain proper is, technically, just a merkle tree with a branching factor of 1).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also the paper by Knuth and his student Luis Trabb Pardo, "The Early Development of Programming Languages" (1976) -- its long story _ends_ in 1957, the year this speculation is about. There's a typewritten version available online (e.g. at [http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/stanford/cs_techRepor...](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/stanford/cs_techReports/STAN- CS-76-562_EarlyDevelPgmgLang_Aug76.pdf)) (TeX didn't exist yet), but a nicely typeset (and slightly updated) version occupies pages 1 to 93 of Knuth's _Selected Papers on Computer Languages_ (the fifth volume of Knuth's collected papers).

The many programming languages/systems described in that article go by various names like "automatic coding" and whatnot. For example, Burks in 1950 used "intermediate program language" (as something above the "internal program language"). (The PDF linked above actually uses "intermediate programming language" but the more recent printed book uses "intermediate program language" so that's probably correct.)

I confess I haven't properly read the Knuth and Trabb-Pardo article yet... maybe there's a historical mention of the actual term "programming language" in there somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER7> The notion of "Programming" was mentioned and even defined in 1947 by Donald Booth. See [http://bobmackay.com/Booth/Booth.html](http://bobmackay.com/Booth/Booth.html) Principles and Progress in the Construction of High-Speed Digital Computers.

"The word 'programme' as used in this context may require explanation. Before a problem is ready for solution in a computing machine it must first be broken up into processes which the machine is capable of performing. Thus, as mentioned above, when using a digital machine the continuous process of differentiation must be replaced by a finite difference formula. This translating of a problem in terms of the available functions of the machine is generally known as programming."

However he did not use the word "language" as only assembler was known at the time, and he was the first to use even that.

</comment><comment><USER8> In a formal paper, the author is likely correct but the term almost certainly back much further colloquially.

Fun to see a post on HN from UNI, my alma mater. I attended a few schools and it was by far my favorite! Ranked second[0] in the best public non-research universities in the midwest too.

[0][https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/regional- unive...](https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/regional-universities- midwest/top-public)

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl)

<comment><USER10> Even in German, appears the term was closer to "formal system", not "programming language".

"Kalkül is the German term for a formal system—as in Hilbert-Kalkül, the original name for the Hilbert-style deduction system—so Plankalkül refers to a formal system for planning.[2]"

<comment><USER11> Kalkül is calculus. (E.g. Lambda-Kalkül)

<comment><USER12> A calculus is a formal system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A quick search on Google books for the term "programming language" with the date confined to between 1945-1956 (although you may find more earlier) does turn up multiple results.

<comment><USER6> Every single one of them seems to be a case of Google Books misunderstanding the date of a publication -- in some cases, because several volumes have been bound together into a single physical book, and Google Books is showing the earliest date as that of the volume.</comment></comment>


Taking Funding for your Startup is not Evil - <AUTHOR> http://www.rookieoven.com/2012/11/19/startup-funding-is-not-evil/

<comment><USER2> As the founder of a startup myself, and the recipient of funding, I believe it depends entirely on the nature of your business, and most importantly the market that the business is entering into.

Each new business must consider

a). the critical mass they need to achieve to reach a market and b). the velocity they need to run at to meet that time of opportunity.

These 2 considerations will often determine whether externally (VC or Private Equity) funding your business is necessary. If you attempt to enter into a market place where all of the players (new and existing) are heavily funded, you will probably fail to penetrate regardless of the quality and performance of your product.

On the other side, if you gather funds to support your business in a field that has limited margins, or is slow growing, then you may fail to achieve the returns that your investors are looking for.

So - it all depends - but you need to make a decision based on the facts in your business plan.</comment>


Show HN: VimFreeDrag – Move Blocks of Text in Vim - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hq6/VimFreeDrag <comment><USER2> Seems intriguing. Does github let you insert a gif animation on the Readme page? That could be helpful showing your plugin in action.

<comment><USER3> It does. There are a _lot_ of examples.

[https://github.blog/2018-06-29-gif-that-keeps-on- gifing/](https://github.blog/2018-06-29-gif-that-keeps-on-gifing/)</comment></comment>


Very cool automatically created 3D map of Oslo - <AUTHOR> http://kart.sesam.no/3d/

<comment><AUTHOR> Quite a hassle to start (need to install their own plugin as a .exe), but worth it.

They have used a special aerial photography technology for this. My Norwegian is quite rusty, more info here:

<http://labs.finn.no/blog/sesam-3d-kart-3d-revolusjon-folket></comment>


Please stop calling databases CP or AP (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-databases-cp-or-ap.html <comment><USER2> Martin Kleppmann applies critical thinking to the claims of NoSQL marketing; I wish I was aware of his work at the time.

I always found it frustrating that the semantics of the word "Consistent" in ACID has nothing to do with the semantics of CAP "Consistency". ACID Consistency refers to integrity constraints while CAP Consistency seems to refer to Cache Coherence across nodes in a cluster. I was a little surprised that Kleppmann uses the idea of "Linearizability" to explain the discrepancy but it does clearly identify the same mistaken assumptions.

I was also frustrated with the NoSQL movement's focus on Partitioned clusters when my intuition was that it was a very rare failure mode. Perhaps we can now return to the metrics of data loss (RPO - Recovery Point Objective) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) since we seem no closer to fully transparent failure recovery.

Regardless, the goal was always to have available and scalable databases that operate on clusters of commodity cloud servers and all of the SQL, NoSQL, and NewSQL solutions have converged around that goal. The transition to cloud computing seems to have been more about NoRAID than NoSQL. Some technologies like LSM-Trees address important use-cases in commodity clusters so maybe we/I shouldn't focus on the truthiness of the original rhetoric.

<comment><USER3> >I was also frustrated with the NoSQL movement's focus on Partitioned clusters when my intuition was that it was a very rare failure mode.

Network errors are very common among errors database has to deal with, and particularly common when we are talking about networks between datacenters.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, network errors are very common but the partial failure scenario, with a fully functional client-server connection but failed server-server replication connection, seems rare. Maybe I don't read the network failure post-mortems carefully enough. When routers fail or are misconfigured, all hell breaks loose rather than clean partitions occurring.

<comment><USER4> The classic would be a geographically distributed datastore with intra- datacenter link being fine, but inter-datacenter being down/degraded. Clients within the datacenter would still be able to talk to the server fine, but server to server inter-datacenter is not going to be OK.

Another part of it is that all hell breaking loose can sometimes look very similar to clean partitions, depending on the network. When network QoS classes are available, what appears to be increased latency or packet loss for one class may be 100% packet loss for the other. Though, you're totally right that all hell breaking loose can be very different - the set of systems that handle flapping & other ugly connection failures well is smaller than the set of systems that handle clean disconnections well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The CAP theorem is so dumb and yet so influential. If you want to gain a more useful understanding of the trade offs of distributed systems, I highly highly recommend the "PACELC theorem" by Daniel Abadi:

[https://www.cs.umd.edu/~abadi/papers/abadi- pacelc.pdf](https://www.cs.umd.edu/~abadi/papers/abadi-pacelc.pdf)

<comment><USER6> The posted article briefly discusses PACELC and Kleppmann says he doesn't find it any more enlightening than CAP.

PACELC is an improvement over CAP in some sense because it is a finer-grained characterization of distributed systems, but it still suffers from the problem that the stated properties are too strong. As Kleppmann explains in the article, there are systems that strictly only fulfill the partition tolerance part of the equation, yet are still very practically useful. This is because while they may not satisfy strict linearizability and availability, they have softer guarantees (e.g. defining "availability" as "99% of requests complete in 1 second") that we can rely on in practice. This reasoning extends to PACELC as well.

I am inclined to agree with Kleppmann. CAP, and by consequence PACELC are useful mental models in the extreme, but their characterizations are really strong. It seems to me that e.g. probabilistic guarantees based on actual failure statistics are much more useful for the real world, _because_ they aren't as strong as CAP/PACELC guarantees.

Edit: I am also not sure if I agree with calling CAP "dumb". It's a very useful theoretical result in a particular model. I think the problem is when people try to extend the implications of the theorem beyond the restricted model it operates in.

<comment><USER5> Klepmann is a wannabe thought-leader, who repackages old ideas into pseudo- profound "insights", designed to capture the attention of amateurs rather than move the state of the art forward. He's the Nassim Taleb of distributed systems. If you're looking for enlightenment, read Daniel Abadi or Andy Pavlo.

<comment><USER6> That seems really unfair to Kleppmann. I know of all three, and all three are, at the very least, accomplished distributed systems researchers with several peer-reviewed publications. (They still have different levels of expertise/publications depending on the area, of course)

In a different arena, I also know of no better book at the interface of distributed systems theory and practice than Kleppmann's. It's useful for engineers while being enriched by deep references to the literature. If that doesn't demonstrate mastery, I don't know what does.

<comment><USER5> OK, my comment was over the top, apologies to Kleppmann if you're still reading. He is a thought leader, and he's the first introduction to distributed systems for a lot of people, and sometimes people stop with his work and don't learn how much depth this field has. But that's not really a criticism of him. And nobody should be compared to Nassim Taleb, I was clearly letting the heat wave get to me ;)

<comment><USER7> To anyone cutting their distributed-systems teeth on Kleppmann's excellent Designing Data-Intensive Applications: each chapter ends with an _essential_ references section (which include multiple citations to Abadi and Pavlo!).

The book chapters do an solid job laying the ground-work for those papers. The depth is in those references. Read them if you can!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In reality the application running on top of the database wants C-kinda-A. [https://research.google/pubs/pub45855/](https://research.google/pubs/pub45855/)

> Despite being a global distributed system, Spanner claims to be consistent > and highly available, which implies there are no partitions and thus many > are skeptical. Does this mean that Spanner is a CA system as defined by CAP? > The short answer is "no" technically, but "yes" in effect and its users can > and do assume CA.

The point is that if my application will actually go down anyway if the WAN craps out, then really, I don't actually need P. The application would also be significantly simpler if it assumes that if the application can work, then the DB is also up. And one seems that realistic systems built on Spanner simply assume CA and then get on with life...

<comment><USER9> >The point is that if my application will actually go down anyway if the WAN craps out, then really, I don't actually need P.

Can you guarantee no further modification to the data in the database occurs when the WAN craps out? What happens to in flight requests, batch/scheduled jobs, etc.? There's no situation where your application continues modifying the contents of the database even when there's no WAN link?

I've seen very few real world services where there is a 0% chance of data changing just because the application servers can no longer talk with clients but can still talk with the database. What happens when those databases try to rejoin the cluster and their data is now inconsistent, if you did not take into account partition tolerance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> CAP is trivial and doesn't tell you anything except that you can't have all three things perfectly. It says nothing about the various trade-offs.

Often you can just let the people choose whether to accept the latest state of a particular partition of the database, or wait until it becomes consistent again.

<comment><USER11> CAP is trivial like Seinfeld isn't funny. It's so fundamental and well taught now that we forget there was a time before it was known.

CAP theorem is older than the career of nearly everyone on HN.

<comment><USER12> What I do not understand though is how anyone could have thought that Seinfeld was funny at some point of time. Edit:

This is not a snarky comment, I really do not understand it. (But extremely off topic, I admit)

<comment><USER13> Seinfeld was designed to be eventually funny.

<comment><USER10> Almost every episode culminated in an absurdist interaction of the various arcs, and it was hilarious.

This isn't funny?

[https://youtu.be/wGhg-htVnJ0](https://youtu.be/wGhg-htVnJ0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Always wondered, if the CAP theorem does not account for latency, one assumes infinite latency does not impact availability. Shouldn't then be possible to define a theoretical system with an infinite buffer that, in the event of a network partition, will simply keep all incoming requests on hold (infinitely or until the partition is undone), satisfying CAP?

I know this is a useless construct in practice, and there is probably a flaw in my reasoning, but it seems to me that you have to establish a non-infinite timeout for the proof to be consistent.

<comment><USER15> If there is a partition and you want to execute a write on both sides of the partition, both sides can wait, but eventually one side wins and the other side gets back a failure, so the db turned out not to be available on that side. At least that's my interpretation.

<comment><USER14> Well, for a system to be consistent (in the meaning of CAP) AND available, the problem with the concurrent writes would have to be solved anyway (i.e. via distributed locking), so I don't think this would be an issue after a partition event.

<comment><USER15> That assumes a particular locking system, what if you're using optimistic locking?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525266)

</comment><comment><USER17> The best thing ever to happen to interviews was CAP questions to go out of the way of the dodo in terms of Silicon Valley fashion.

<comment><USER18> Not sure why you are so happy, every time I worked with people who did not understand it the outcome was really a massive mess of mismatched expectations.

<comment><USER17> We're saying the same thing :/ I think I articulated it poorly

</comment></comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 So the CAP theorem is a bit like Godel incompleteness theorem.

CAP tells us that databases are fundamentally broken, Godel theorem tells us that math is broken. But besides being important theoretical points, they don't matter that much in practice. In the same way, the two generals problem doesn't prevent TCP from working fine.

<comment><USER19> Nah: the article says the CAP narrative is based on very specific assumptions which make it unfit to talk about actual distributed systems.

Gödel's incompleteness (that, by a diagonalization argument, formal systems of minimal expressivity will contain true statements that cannot be proven) applies and will continue to apply to all such formal systems. The bar is so low that any interesting formal system is affected by it. Also, it does not make math broken at all - those formal systems can and in fact must be consistent for the proof to go through (1st incompleteness theorem), and it's just a pity that whatever formal system one comes up with, if it contains arithmetic, it won't be able to prove it's own consistency (2nd incompleteness theorem).

In the words of von Neumann: Gödel's two past papers ("Widerspruchfreiheit" and Continuum Hypothesis), are in any case worth more than the total literary output, past, present and future, of most mathematicians [...]</comment></comment>