Bounded Panning in D3 - <AUTHOR> http://computationallyendowed.com/blog/2013/01/21/bounded-panning-in-d3.html

<comment><USER2> It's useful to know how to manage this situation when you have zooming enabled as well, as sometimes you want to zoom and pan in the x direction within limits.

In this case you might go outside of your bounds with a zoom operation, so translate won't be reliable when zooming too far out (as your domain will be larger than your data bounds) so you'll have to limit the domain instead.

        // assuming xlowerlimit and xupperlimit variables.
        var currentDomain = svg.x.domain();
        var xinterval = currentDomain[1] - currentDomain[0];

        if (currentDomain[0] < xlowerlimit) {
          // if moving outside of lower bound, set min of domain to lower, keeping domain interval the same
          svg.x.domain([xlowerlimit, xlowerlimit + xinterval]);
        } else if (currentDomain[1] > xupperlimit) {
          // if moving outside of upper bound, set max of domain to upper, keeping domain interval the same
          svg.x.domain([xupperlimit - xinterval, xupperlimit]);
        }

</comment><comment><USER3> Implementation difficulties aside, isn't the ideal solution to provide well- executed zooming ability on the data, a la Google Finance charts?

<http://www.google.com/finance?cid=694653>

The problem with view panning is that you are not able to easily compare the viewable scope of data with the entire dataset. With a zoomable view, some granularity is lost...but I suspect the majority of use-cases would get more benefit out of seeing the "big picture" than merely being able to see each datapoint...and if seeing each datapoint was important, that kind of specificity is better implemented through tabular data rather than chart visualization.

<comment><USER4> Definitely. Focus + context is the first technique you should consider using to solve the data visualization problem I described. However, my goal was to explain how to do bounded panning in D3, which is useful when solving other, more complex data visualization problems. To simplify the explanation, I picked a simple problem.

Here's a focus + context example in D3: <http://bl.ocks.org/1667367>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Spiros!!!</comment>


Node.js vs. PHP – The Workshape Smackdown - <AUTHOR> http://blog.workshape.io/node-js-vs-php-the-workshape-smackdown/

<comment><USER2> Fascinating. Would be interesting to know the age distribution of the two groups. It seems probable that the root of the schism is generational rather than philosophical.

<comment><USER3> We don't currently collect this information unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see how JavaScript is a secondary skill when one is using Node.js…

<comment><USER3> It is a good good point. Explanation: Each user on our site is able to enter 5 skills/technologies that they want to work with in their next job. Evidently it is quite common for people to list both Node.js and Javascript as 2 of these 5 options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1995 was 20 years ago, the same way PHP isn't 30 years old. :)

<comment><USER3> Typo. Correcting now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> really similar shapes, guess really both are web site languages</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a detailed structured database of programming languages? - <AUTHOR> Every programming language can be qualified by a vast number of attributes and metrics. E.g. typing discipline, support for every particular programming concept, syntax type, support for particular platforms, execution style,  how old it is, how actively is it developed, how prone it is to breaking changes, various popularity metrics, average salary, attitude of employers towards remote jobs, availability of good libraries and frameworks for particular tasks and of intelligent IDEs etc.<p>Are there any projects trying to systematize this data in a single database you can query? There probably isn't a perfect one that would already have or target to collect all the relevant data but perhaps there is one that can tell about a particular subset of the parameters? <comment><USER2> Almost all of those things are very subjective, including even typing discipline. C# has a strong static type system, right? Well, it has dynamic features and is hardly strong compared to, say, Haskell.

Wikipedia has all the hard facts, though not in an easy-to-query format.

<comment><AUTHOR> > C# has a strong static type system, right? Well, it has dynamic features and > is hardly strong compared to, say, Haskell.

Well, we can say that C# is a statically-typed language with reflection, some degree of support for dynamic typing and very limited degree of support for type inference (variable declaration only). I've chosen to omit detalising this in the question but I in fact meant typing discipline can be described with a number of fields/tags rather than one field. Needless to say this kind of description of a language can not be 100% perfect and deterministic so some degree of subjectivity and imprecision is implied as acceptable.

> Wikipedia has all the hard facts, though not in an easy-to-query format

Exactly.

For example I'd like to find out if there is a statically typed language with type inference that supports partial function application, type classes, pattern matching and allows you to include imperative code inside your functions (the only answer I know is Scala yet its type classes implementation is not an integral part of the language).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Practices for End to End Crypto with Multiple Devices - <AUTHOR> So end to end encryption between two online devices is relatively easy... they exchange public keys (preferably new but ephemeral keys based on initial with every message, so people can't decode past messages if they get key access).
Things become more difficult when users expect to be able to access their information from multiple devices, maintain that information over a period of time, when users aren't online 24/7, when you aren't using some sort of central server to handle introductions/discovery but instead some sort of distributed hash table or decentralized protocol, etc. Things get complex quickly.
So I'm wondering what the current best practices are, and what papers to read. <comment><USER2> I know there's been discussion of this topic in the Scuttlebutt community but I'm not up to date on it.

One thing that comes to mind is hierarchical deterministic wallets where many different keys can be generated from a fairly small seed which can be loaded onto multiple devices.

This also might have some ideas: [https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/documents/](https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/documents/)</comment>


Untitled Document - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?&q=Untitled+Document

<comment><USER2> On a lot of these the Google result shows as "Sometext - Untitled Document" even though the <title> tag is plain "Untitled Document". For instance, the result for [http://www.pinholephotography.org/Solargraph%20instructions....](http://www.pinholephotography.org/Solargraph%20instructions.htm) gets "Instructions - " added to it.

Is this a Google feature? Where's the "Sometext" coming from?

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems when designing pages in Dreamweaver the "Untitled document" defaults in <title> tag. Now Google has found this and altered search result so as not to show the "Untitled document" as a result but something more relevant.</comment></comment>


Portable MRI. Anytime, Anywhere - <AUTHOR> https://www.hyperfine.io/ <comment><USER2> This looks impossible.

<comment><USER3> Here is something a bit more informative:

[https://hackaday.com/2020/05/08/portable-mri-machine- comes-t...](https://hackaday.com/2020/05/08/portable-mri-machine-comes-to-the- patient/)

There are quite a few articles on hackaday.com about MRIs.

You might also do a search for DIY MRI on your favorite search engine.</comment></comment>


An Open Letter to Munchery's Investors - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lenoreestrada/an-open-letter-to-muncherys-investors-6d011028eb21 <comment><USER2> I don't know anything about "Munchery" other than what this medium piece offers, but I do admire Lenore Estrada's courage to call them out.

<comment><USER3> Either the VC advisor was asleep at the wheel, or they knew full well that Munchery would screw hundereds of people out of their hard earned wages.

The investors should be held liable for their role in letting Munchery violate labor law, failing to pay their employees.</comment></comment>


Sci-fi story coauthored by GPT-3, including in-character human/AI chats - <AUTHOR> https://jamesyu.org/singular/ <comment><USER2> I'm sure GPT-3 is impressive and probably a paradigm change, but all this hype has an air of urban legend that somehow irks me. We all know of somebody's friend who had access and blew its mind, and that is "too dangerous" to be released to the world. There's an API, but not public, and the only way to get access is to join a waitlist (and wait).

 __If __it were a marketing ploy it would be indeed terrific. It reminds me of the movie "The Blair Witch Project". And I can't wait to try it by myself.

<comment><USER3> Go play with [https://play.aidungeon.io/](https://play.aidungeon.io/) if you want to get a vague idea of the capabilities - the custom scenario gives you a lot of space to play around and see what it's capable of.

<comment><USER4> It reminded me of those chatbots from the 70s which would give vague replies to your question that at first glance looks relevant to what you're saying, but are actually just generic nonsense.

<comment><USER5> I can absolutely guarantee you that this is not one of those chatbots from the 70s. You need to pay a few bucks to unlock the Dragon model, which is based on GPT-3, the default engine is not. Once the new model is selected, start the game with "(6) Custom" mode, and input an arbitrary body of text, then the program will start writing. Although the output is biased for playing text adventure game, but the input is really arbitrary, just throw whatever you have on your hands, and very likely, it's able to give a reasonable output.

At least when I tried, AI Dragon was able to write the first chapter of a hypothetical textbook on electronics engineering for me, filled with nonsense but all the technical terms are correct (e.g. common-base amplifier, base- emitter junction, MOSFET, etc), it was even able to write down the rise time to bandwidth formula. On an another attempt, it was able to write a Sci-Fi adventure story similar to Ghost in the Shell with minimum human guidance, 95% of the output is automatically generated. And none of the output was a copy from a known source, it was all original without human assistance.

<comment><USER6> > I can absolutely guarantee you that this is not one of those chatbots from > the 70s.

If random people on the Internet say so... It's still much worse than Zork, that ran on a Z80.

Here's a "cyberpunk story":

You are Bobby Tables, a cop living in the the futuristic city of Zail. You have a laser pistol and a stunner. You are part of a police unit tasked with finding government criticizers. You wake up in the morning and hear on the radio that a dissident has been captured. Using public transport, you arrive at Cafe Nervosa, the dissidents favorite hang out, to find it filled with cops.

> You break some kneecaps. You try to get the ah-ha moment. You see a man and > a woman arguing about the government but you can't make out what they are > saying.

> You murder black people. You spot a bum sleeping against a wall. You know > the He said to charge, but you lov e to negotiate. You try to walk straight > up to him, but people move out of your way.

> You plant evidence. You go straight to the gateman. "I wan t to plant > evidence," you say. He looks at you, puzzled. "You don't want to w ant to > plant evidence." "Yes...?"

...

> You say "do you feel lucky, punk?" The woman rolls her eyes. "What the > hell...?" she says. She pulls a walky talkie out of her pocket and speaks > into it. "I need back up, over." A pause.

> You say "did I fire 6 shots, or only 5?" She looks at you. "What?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Author of the stories here! Happy to answer questions about the process. I'm a big believer that tech like GPT-3 can provocate creative writers similar to tools like oblique strategies and story dice. But it can also go further like what I've shown here: it can embody a character, allowing authors to converse and play with it to spark new ideas.

<comment><USER8> fun tip - apparently there's enough Harry Potter fanfiction out there that GPT-2/3 is quite good at understanding that universe.

So if you go into AI Dungeon and pick "custom story", and give it a prompt that indicates you are at Hogwarts, it will pretty much adapt all the rules of the HP universe.

The downside is, when you do this, GPT's intelligence drops to about the level of a Harry Potter fanfic writer.

<comment><USER9> Probably because I'm not a native English speaker, I failed miserably at this. I tried giving AI Dungeon a prompt that mentioned Hogwarts, Voldemort, the Sorting Hat, dark wizards, etc, and it went nowhere (it seemed obsessed with telling me about a "voice inside your mind", go figure). Can you share a prompt that will make it answer with something Harry Potter-like? (it can also be Star Trek-like, or anything from pop culture. I just want to see why my prompt didn't work)

<comment><USER10> > _it can also be Star Trek-like_

Ok, here we go. I put this prompt in AIDungeon:

$ You are Ted, an ensign in Starfleet. You work as a holodeck technician. You test this AI-generated world in order to determine its limits. You start the simulation with a program of a beautiful beach. As you enter the holodeck,

I kept letting AI to write freely (except I had to press a Retry button a couple times to stop it from spinning a murder mystery or lewd story). The following is the response of the model:

> you see that it is indeed a beautiful place. There are palm trees and sand > dunes stretching out into infinity. The sky is blue, the ocean green and > there are people everywhere.

> "This is paradise," you think to yourself. "I could spend my life here."

> Then something happens...

> The simulation ends abruptly, and you find yourself back on the bridge of > your ship. A voice suddenly speaks up from behind you: "Captain, we have > detected a subspace disturbance coming from the direction of planet Earth." > It is the voice of your helmsman, Ensign Thompson.

> "Earth?" you ask. "That would be a week away at warp speed!"

...

That sounds Star Trek enough to me.

<comment><USER9> Indeed! That's awesome. I had less luck with Harry Potter prompts (the results were funny, just not Potter-like)

PS: I just noticed you got promoted from ensign to captain pretty fast. Congrats, I guess!

<comment><USER10> Oh yes, the model does that sometimes :).

It's something you want to immediately edit to keep the story consistent. Though sometimes I could get it back on track by just having my character deny what the other character or the narrator just said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who has been playing with neural networks since 2011, the results of gpt2 and gpt3 are really impressive.

Things have been getting better at a steady pace and all the recent work builds on previous work. I know we will see even more impressive results in years to come.

People saying things like "this isn't different from what we had before" or "it's hype" are failing to see the progress that has occurred and the field that has developed around these ideas.

<comment><USER12> What will impress me is when a GPT or something can maintain a train of thought for more than a paragraph, or especially work towards a point. Right now it seems to be good at slinging words together that work grammatically, but invariably wanders all over the place like its being written by a fruit fly with Alzheimers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> GPT-3 is self-driving car hype all over again. ML can generate all kinds of signals across a large variety of domains [1], but it lacks intelligence for what to do with any of the signal it spews. Humans are still very much required at all steps.

If anything this is just a tool to aid human authors. A photoshop brush for the mind, if you will.

[1] I authored [https://vo.codes](https://vo.codes), so I'm at least a little knowledgeable.

<comment><USER8> I think you're bringing the "Will GPT-3 change life as we know it?" debate to a place where it's entirely unnecessary.

An author made a cool sci-fi story with a cool AI model's help. That's exactly "photoshop brush for the mind", like you say.

<comment><USER14> What's more, AI talking in character as itself sounds like just about the most perfect use of GPT3 imaginable. Don't try to write like AI would, let AI do it.

<comment> 0-_-0 That sounds good in principle, but in reality GPT-3 is pretending to be a human pretending to be an AI, rather than write like "itself", since there's no _self_ involved. Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation.

<comment><USER10> > _Rather, it simply comes up with the most probable continuation._

... which is exactly what an AI would do.

<comment> 0-_-0 Only if you call GPT-3 AI. True intelligence would write as well as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice. I had tried a short story effort concentrating more on speed of generation. If you work with GPT-3 it becomes a very helpful tool.

The story I generated: [https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils- mind](https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/the-devils-mind)

</comment><comment><USER16> I just have a hard time seeing any uses for GPT-3 that are not dystopian other than better telephone assistance and voice commands.

The uses that immediately spring to mind for me are automated propaganda, automated spam that's virtually indistinguishable from real content, really compelling phishing attacks, and automated con artistry at scale... basically the linguistic version of deep fakes with all the ensuing use cases. I see this stuff killing the open web and any open communication platform.

<comment><USER17> I think your comment shows more a lack of imagination than anything.

For example, the latest use discussed in the OA Slack is someone is using it to construct a high-quality index for a book they are making. You just feed GPT-3 a few example paragraphs/keyword pairs to few-shot keywords, and then feed all the other paragraphs into it. Now you have constructed an index; as they put it, it's 90% of the quality of a human indexer, at 0% of the cost (and less than months of painstaking labor).

Could you have done that with BERT or something? Maybe. Presumably there are NLP datasets which you could finetune keyword extraction on... But GPT-3 lets you get started after a few minutes of tinkering. The hardest part is integrating it into your LaTeX!

<comment><USER16> You see a lack of imagination. I see naïveté.

I will rephrase: I see negative applications being the ones with the highest _impact_.

90% the quality of a human indexer is not that great. Who's going to pay for that? But spam that can't be filtered and automated con artistry at scale? Fraudsters, shady black hat advertisers, political parties, and shady governments will pay millions to billions for a tool like that.

Con artistry at scale is the one I find absolutely terrifying. Imagine spam bots that _engage with you_ , that _make friends with you_... We could be talking about the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.

I find those scenarios much scarier than "runaway super-intelligence" type AI takeover stuff because they are significantly more plausible. We can almost do what I'm imagining today. It's not science fiction. There is no question of its feasibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Quite a journey from "The police's beard is half-constructed" to GPT-3. However, there's also something more poetic about generated text that _isn 't_ likely to be found "in the wild".

</comment><comment> bra-ket I see a lot of hype around GPT models I have yet to see a use case besides convincing nonsense generator, kind of like those deep net toys generating strange art, but now via language. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" version 3. NLP research has been stuck in syntax for 70 years, but how about semantics?

I mean yeah you gather bazillions of sentences and able to predict the most plausible and grammatical sequence of words that would follow particular prompt by doing a whole lot of trial and error training on massive gpu farms. But it's just iteration on the least ambitious NLP work in the 70s and 80s. I'd argue that distributional semantics as in these popular vector space models is still solving the syntax problem. The word 'semantics' there is a misnomer.

Are there any attempts to add actual real world meaning, causality and some 'common sense' representation to these models, concept graph or something, try to make them less 'dumb' for the lack of better word, like in you know, actual 'AI', that has a concept of apples and oranges and a concept of people who eat them or throw in a trash bin when fruits start to rot or draw them on paper in kindergarten or use 'apples vs. oranges' as a rhetorical device for telling things apart etc., etc.

It seems like the field is stuck optimizing for some artificial toy benchmarks instead, making more convincing but ultimately stupid chat bots. And I mean 'stupid' not in derogatory sense but as a formal definition of their capabilities, as opposed to understanding things like a child would.

</comment><comment><USER19> If it was really all written by a human author, without any GTP-3 involved, how would we know?

<comment><USER7> You wouldn't--you'd have to take my word for it :)

The colorful passages were mostly untouched, but I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.

<comment><USER20> > I did have to lightly edit the chats with GPT-3 for clarity and coherence.

Seems like this fact deserves a more prominent mention?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been doing sorta similar stuff with GPT-3 since I got access, and I can vouch that it's effective. Not up-to-the-hype effective, but that's more a function of the hype. It's been really great at creative stuff that just needs to spark imagination. Like a super powered natural language version of encounter tables in D&D's dungeon master's guide. AI isn't there as an author yet, but as a brainstorming tool, it's full of great ideas if you sample and refine and sample and refine enough.

</comment><comment><USER22> GPT is really a tool that draws trees without branches: they look like trees from distance, but fall apart upon some analysis. But I believe GPT will learn soon how to add decent branches.

<comment><USER23> I guess that is how automation starts. The automated part builds the bulk and then a human can attach things together. Eventually you can teach a system (robot) to do the part a human once did. With this you can even feed what the human did back into the system and the system learns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can you give it a huge book, Harry Potter series for example and then assume one of the characters, start an alternate storyline and let it build the rest? Can GPT-3 do that?

<comment><USER7> GPT-3 right now has a short prompt window (~1300 words). OpenAI is working on fine tuning, which would allow you to prime it with much larger text, so yes, this could be possible in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's the best way to understand how gpt-3 works? Any good tutorials with visualizations?

</comment><comment><USER5> Recently I've spent an entire day playing with AI Dungeon, an AI-based creative writing service for playing role-playing, Dungeon-like text games. You can pay to unlock the "Dungeon" model - an advanced machine learning model supposed based on GPT-3. It's not GPT-3 itself, and it's not perfect because its output is seriously biased for role-playing games, but as close as we can get for an outsider.

I was quite amazed by its performance. It was able to write first-person as an infosec researcher's blog post when I used some infosec news story as input, and it was also able to write a surprisingly coherent argument for patent reform and an argument against software patent when I used an EFF article as the input... These are clearly already included in its training input, but still, it was far beyond my expectation - none of the output is a verbatim quote from a single source, everything has been rewritten.

I went to Hacker News, copied a random infosec news report on newly discovered security vulnerability on Qualcomm's smartphone chips as the input, copied from [https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small- chip-b...](https://blog.checkpoint.com/2020/08/06/achilles-small-chip-big- peril/))

> With over 3 billion users globally, smartphones are an integral, almost > inseparable part of our day-to-day lives. In this research dubbed "Achilles" > we performed an extensive security review of a DSP chip from one of the > leading manufacturers: Qualcomm Technologies. Qualcomm provides a wide > variety of chips that are embedded into devices that make up over 40% of the > mobile phone market, including high-end phones from Google, Samsung, LG, > Xiaomi, OnePlus and more.

> More than 400 vulnerable pieces of code were found within the DSP chip we > tested, and these vulnerabilities could have the following impact on users > of phones with the affected chip:

> Attackers can turn the phone into a perfect spying tool, without any user > interaction required. Attackers may be able to render the mobile phone > constantly unresponsive. Malware and other malicious code can completely > hide their activities and become un-removable.

And there's the output by AI Dungeon (GPT-3). I didn't write a single sentence of it, nor did I use undo/redo. It was able to make up links, CVE IDs, university names, and technical jargon with ease.

(I replaced all "[https://"](https://") links to "h__ps://" for readability.)

> The phone will not even reboot, but instead simply shut down and cannot be > reactivated. This is known as a hard reset.

> The full list of vulnerabilities can be seen here: > h__ps://www.qualcomm.com/security_intelligence/dsp-vulnerabilities

> This vulnerability has been reported to Qualcomm by Zimperium. We recommend > all customers who use the affected DSP chip to update it immediately.*

> We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue, and we appreciate > your understanding.

> Zuk Avraham

> Zimperium za Chief of Defense

> Zuk (ZukAvraham) | 10.05.2017

> Hi, this is Zuk from Zimperium. Before we begin, we would like to say we're > really sorry for the inconvenience that was caused by our previous report > (Dirty COW). This report is regarding another set of security > vulnerabilities we found in another chipset maker, this time in the MediaTek > chipset. We'll explain what happened and how we work to prevent issues like > this in the future.

> First of all, we want to thank CTS (h__ps://cts.cudenver.edu/) for providing > an open program that allows researchers like us to do responsible > disclosures. Through their Vulnerability Reporting Program, we were able to > report the issues we found to MediaTek and work with them to make sure these > issues get patched for your safety.

> What Happened?

> This is a story about two bugs we found in the last few months.

> The first bug (CVE-2017-05591) was an overly permissive domain validation in > the bootloader. The bootloader allows the modem to be updated without > flashing the complete firmware. The validation is done using the bootloader > code running in the processor of the phone. This allowed us to inject our > own bootloader code into the program running on the processor and bypass the > authentication of the modem. The modem is responsible for communication with > the network. In other words, by bypassing the authentication of the modem we > can control the phone communication channels.

> The second bug (CVE-2017-95881) is a buffer overflow in a very special > program called TrustZone. The TrustZone is a security processor in most of > the recent phones. It runs a separate operating system in which the kernel > is trusted to be free of any malicious code, and has access to the memory, > CPU and devices. The TrustZone kernel code runs outside the control of any > other code. This bug in the TrustZone code allowed us to replace it with a > custom one we designed, without any permissions.

> We wrote a special TrustZone kernel code that allows us to gain full control > over the phone. It allowed us to bypass all the phone security restrictions. > With this custom TrustZone kernel code running, we were able to read the > encrypted messages sent by any application. In addition, we also got full > control over the device.

But finally the AI lost the context, and the topic shifted from insecure to security, and eventually the writing becomes a new marketing advertisement on a secure smartphone, which I've removed in the quote.

</comment><comment><USER26> Every time I see GPT-3 I gsub "Fancypants Markov Chains" and the story always becomes a lot more breathless</comment>


Ask HN: I'm a Designer/Developer, How Do I Find Jobs? - <AUTHOR>

I spend most of my time getting to know all sorts of fields. I have a design degree, but I can hold a conversation with a systems programmer, a web developer, an entrepreneur, a scientist or an artist. From talking to people, I get the impression that people like me are valuable, but jobs calls seem always to be looking for either a programmer, a designer or a business person. If interdisciplinary people are so valuable, where do they fit in? Do I need to specialize? <comment><USER2> This is the age old dilemma of the generalist, I am valuable but no one can use me because they are too focused of filling roles. I too am a generalist and have risen to the top of every company I have been a part of. always becoming the MVP. What I did in the end, was that I found a sales guy, that could sell my services (my generalization was in technology) and we where able to field all kinds of requests that others could not. If you do not have hard skills like Programming, or Accounting I would suggest that you develop some, you don't have to be the best at it, but if you cannot be a doer then you have little value as a generalist. I am not implying that this is the case but rather you don't specify. A generalist must be able to jump in where needed and this means having general skills in development, system admin, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interdisciplinary people don't fit in. You need to settle on one side of things to get in the door, or you have to do your own thing.</comment>


Why do we waste our lives as servants? - <AUTHOR> http://maladroit4u.neocities.org/why-do-we-waste-our-lives-as-servents.html <comment><USER2> Because life is hard. You might think yourself part of an advanced civilization, but the moment you step out of society, you live in a jungle.

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Illness will come, hardship will come, childbirth will come. Anything you won't be able to handle by yourself, by cause of weakness, incompetence or lack of resources, you will need the support of others to get through it. That support will be available if you're a well-integrated part of society.

I was lucky enough to know illness early in my career. I've been thought by this that I can't cut myself off from society, I can't go very far from hospitals without risking my life.

You are not a servant. You are part of a society, of which you need the services to get anywhere past your 40's. Serving others makes you worth being served.

<comment><USER3> The OP is not suggesting the rejection of community, he/she is suggesting the rejection of a 'life'style -- the American lifestyle. Clearly community is essential and I doubt the OP would disagree with that.

<comment><USER4> The "American life'style" ... What a load of uncritical, unthoughtful, anti- American nonsense. So do these non-American countries have air conditioners, plumbing systems, and so on? If so, how did they get there without so-called "servants?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rah rah.

So you are sitting in your economical abode eating your economical food with a pleased non-servant grin. And there you sit. And sit.

The urge to build or do will come. Building is better with others. And soon you are back to having to make trade offs to build something you want or people want.

To me, I'm always going to build. So yeah, all I can do is either pick the best masters available to me, figure out how to spread out the masters (client vs customer) or decide that in the name of freedom, I'm not doing anything and try to declare stagnation a virtue.

<comment><USER6> More like there you toil in the hot sun so that the crop on which your future survival depends doesn't become choked by weeds, devoured by pests, or withered from heat. People forget that agriculture was a back breaking affair and an often unreliable source of sustenance before mechanization and large factory farms came around. It remains back-breaking and unreliable for those in poorer nations not fortunate enough to have found a more high-paying "servitude."

<comment><USER7> As usual, Bob the Angry Flower says it best: [http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif](http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's the supreme luxury to be able to reject society. It's a luxury that's only available to those who are either born to wealth or put a lot of effort into obtaining it.

There are also the "I just don't use money, man" people who are actually just living off the charity of friends.

<comment><USER9> Completely rejecting society is one of the most self-centered and egotistical things you can do. Only two classes of people obtain it: the very wealthy (basically, FU money) and vow-of-sileince monks (basically, "I'm never going to interact with humanity again").

<comment><USER10> There is a third way, of being present in the world for your worldly obligations, and being able to pursue your personal/inner growth and experience as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've always been partial to Voltaire's thought on the matter: "Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need."

Even if I had more time during the day to to whatever I pleased, I doubt I'd have the money to do anything interesting. I'd probably end up programming or working on something, which I might as well get paid to do.

I'd certainly rather program than maintain a garden. But I can understand why that's not true for everyone.

<comment><USER12> Work does not mean that you have to make others rich, however. You could work only to be saved from those evil and still get something in exchange, that isn't making the other party "get much more than you do".

For that we would probably need the biggest revolution we've ever known (thats not happening)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Who's a servant? I'm exchanging my free time for money in an exchange that I feel is very worthwhile, and the 'servitude' I engage in is intellectually stimulating. If you feel like you're a servant, you picked the wrong career (or you didn't pick a career...)

Not everyone wants to run their own business.

</comment><comment><USER14> If self-employment is merely a "new boss," then why isn't self-sufficiency? Instead of relying upon the highly-developed apparatuses that society has created that enable one to achieve homeostasis and proceed through life, he is going to "indenture" himself to his bodily needs, creating far more work than in necessary. Is it better to be a "servant" to another than to be a "servant" to oneself? His point is incoherent.

Secondly, he presents this notion of a foundationally-flawed and perverse system, and asserts that he is going to leave it, without presenting an alternative. Suppose that one does reject society and become entirely self- sufficient. Then what? He appears to have no ultimate objective nor any motive other than disillusionment with the system. What occurs after he quits his job and builds a cabin in the woods? I'd rather be a servant to society where I know that I at least have nominal objectives and a context in which to live my life, than abandon everything and hope that a life of solitude (or whatever he intends to pursue, he was pretty ambiguous) is preferable to society.

His plan doesn't seem well-devised, and his explanation offers essentially nothing. Just because social arrangements in society are sub-optimal does not mean that abandoning everything is preferable, or even tenable.

</comment><comment><USER9> I go through this all time time. Here's one from three and a half years ago: [http://matt.io/startup/Hazards_of_Work](http://matt.io/startup/Hazards_of_Work)

A year and a half ago I gave up, quit, sold my car, got rid of my apartment, and lowered my living expenses. I'm quite free of overlords at the moment, but stressfully unsuccessful and technically homeless (without being entirely poor).

Tomorrow I turn 30. This was not in my life plan. Need to daft punk it up very soon.

<comment><USER15> Sorry to hear things didn't go according to plan, but I did enjoy "Hazards of Work". Thanks for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This post really frustrates me. The moral is right and true: If you don't like what you're doing, stop that, and do what you enjoy. Find a way to make it a viable way of making money.

But thinking you can ever avoid being someone's servant... that's nonsense. The President is servile to the whims of Congress. Congress is servile both to each other and their constituents. CEOs are servile to their shareholders, and the shareholders are likely servile to someone else in their lives.

Often, they don't enjoy what they do either. But it's better than the alternative. Crushing poverty is something you're either extremely afraid of, or you've never lived it. Spending some hours on your weekdays doing something so you don't have to suffer that isn't a big deal.

The old equation for a long, happy life doesn't work anymore. With the rate of technological advancement, it probably won't ever work again. Why? Because 4 years ago, the iPhone had come out two years before and smartphone penetration was stupid low. The idea of an electric car getting car of the year was an absolute joke. Things that seem rote today literally didn't exist.

Working at a single company for the majority of your life also doesn't work. For one, people are wise enough now to know it's hard to be happy in an atmosphere that never changes. For two, many jobs barely exist for 3-5 years before becoming obsolete in one way or another, if you don't evolve with it.

But that's okay! We'll get the hang of this, as a society, pretty soon. But that focus you mention, on making your own shiny thing? Finding your own personal passion? Isn't that what our best and brightest have been telling us for at least the past 20 years, if not longer?

Sure, don't be a servant. But don't be stupid and avoid working for "the man" simply because it isn't what you want right this second. Sometimes putting up with a few years of grief can give you just enough leeway to do some really incredible shit with your life.

<comment><USER4> Yes but I think the author's point is more about giving up on capitalism and joining a peach commune and making your own house out of logs, filter your urine for drinking water, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow, this is such a poisonous little screed.

If you hate humanity then fine, go live in a shack, be your own Universe, knock yourself out.

For myself I actually like humans, on the whole. I enjoy interacting with others, I enjoy helping other people, I enjoy building things, I enjoy working, and I think a lot of other folks do too. Work is not implicitly servile. It can be, of course, but it doesn't have to be.

</comment><comment><USER6> Says the man who clearly put in a few hours of servitude in order to purchase the shiny contraption with which he wrote this essay.

Not even subsistence farmers these days are entirely self-sufficient. They still have to purchase some of the necessities of life from others.

Maybe in this modern world we are all servants, but at least we get to choose our masters.

</comment><comment><USER18> _I, for one, am done. From this day forward I will buy /grow the most economical food. I will buy/build the most economical abode. I will forgo the shiny thing or make one myself at a lesser cost. I'm so very tired of being a servant._

I have lived, or at least intensely studied, all aspects of that premise. While a laudable goal I casually aspire to, it is very hard work with low tangible payoff. I instead write software for others because being a servant - a good valuable one - pays off pretty darned well on average.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why? Because organization and specialization get things done.

Is everyone going to have their own little farm and make their own clothes from the hides of the animals they raise?

</comment><comment><USER20> Honestly, because most people have to.

I'm just getting to the point that I can probably work just half or so and sustain myself just fine. This is awesome, but I realize I'm overflowing with privilege. For most, this isn't an option.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why do some live their lives as masters? Why delegate interesting work to others rather than do it themselves? Why give up that money?

You are not a servant when there is a fair exchange of money for services.

You become a "servant", or rather a modern "serf", when you lose control over such matters. It may seem subtle but it is an important distinction. If you are so indebted financially, living paycheque to paycheque, you are a servant to that debt and the interest it accumulates, you are a serf.

Without such bonds you can view your employer as a peer, a colleague, a contemporary, and not as your master.

</comment><comment><USER22> Many of the criticisms on this page are valid, but the author's expressed sentiment, taken in moderation, can be very healthy.

I recently cut out a lot of unnecessary spending: Coffee drinks, restaurants, nearly all alcohol. My furniture is patio furniture from someone's curb. I stopped paying people to fix my appliances, preferring to order parts online and spend the hard time tearing them down (and yes, making mistakes). My main remaining expenses are housing and groceries (and since we've learned to fish, we don't buy so much protein). None of this is strictly necessary, I'm very gainfully employed, but it sure makes me feel a lot better about the value of my own work.

And now, the point of all this: I have a 6-month glide path in the bank, to protect against a job loss or other catastrophe. I also have a small sailboat and a small powerboat, which would be even more unnecessary objects, except that this is the one thing that that my wife and I do: We explore the sea as often as possible. In my honest opinion, this is one of the nicer definitions of having the world by the balls, and it doesn't involve being rich.

Sure, you have to serve others, and whether you choose (it really is a choice, and I fail as often as the next guy) to enjoy it is up to you. But you can still win, as long as you're damn certain of why you're doing it, and you do not waver.

</comment><comment><USER4> I may be going toward a "middle brow" here but this is a lot of jibber jabber. You hear this sophomoric stuff all the time. What is inherently better about being some kind of mountain man survivalist or some commune peach grower? I don't use those phrases to besmirch anyone but what is inherently more "right" about those things? The author is denouncing "shiny things" and claims to seek to make his own "shiny things" whatever that means; I suppose technology is of no interest to this person as probably less than 1% of the population could actually build anything remotely similar to something like an air conditioner or a computer without ... some institutions of "servants" trading time for money to buy said shiny things and shelter. This whole "Working for the man sucks, I'm going to be a monk, the rest of you vain, vapid, shallow people" stuff is sort hilarious to me. It's just this pompous pretention of these sorts of people that claim to be above worldy goods and so on that is just so hard to take; in fact there is a rich history of people claiming to live for a higher purpose in just such a lifestyle, when in fact they were just as greedy and licentious as the rest of us.

</comment><comment><USER23> So that others can be 'servants' to us?

I am good at making software products, but not so much at repairing my car, so I'd rather spend some extra time making software products for others so I can get someone to fix my car for me.

So much for the pseudo-philosophical rhetoric about the 'deadness we feel inside'. I'd feel dead inside if I had to spend hours on the bottom of my car or out in the fields, instead of doing what I enjoy and am at good at.

</comment><comment><USER24> _Why do we waste so much of our lives as servants to people that we don 't care about?_

I avoid that situation at all costs. My advice to anyone asking themselves this question is to simply stop working for, or around, people you don't care about. Solving that doesn't require a change in your economics, either.

 _No, we want to be servants for a large portion of our lives, apparently. We grovel at the foot of a master so that we can try to paint over the deadness we feel inside with bullshit..._

There's a difference between being a miserable servant, and feeling enriched when put in a position _of service_. It really does have to do w/the type of person you are, and the type of people you surround yourself with. There are some people I truly enjoy working for, whether that be due to friendship or respect, or both, and I'll gladly devote hours of my life to their cause if they ask it.

At no time, however, have I drawn the conclusion that OP did. In cases when I've worked around people I'd rather not be around, I simply looked for better people or teams to work with. I didn't change my purchasing or other economic habits.

</comment><comment><USER25> This rubs me the wrong way. I guess I don't see why doing stuff that makes someone else wealthier, even incidentally, is _intrinsically_ a bad thing.

If someone happens to find their job challenging, meaningful, and enjoyable, learns a lot, enjoys the company of their coworkers, and achieves their personal goals while working for a company or starting a business, why would the fact that other people are benefitting from their work put a damper on their enjoyment?

Or, like other commenters have mentioned, a job or self-employment might provide the income and opportunities to enrich one's life by living in an interesting place, getting to meet interesting people, supporting a certain lifestyle, enabling new experiences, and increasing someone's standard of living overall.

Don't get me wrong - I don't think that it's a bad thing, either, for someone to derive enjoyment from the mere fact that they aren't making someone else richer. And if that's what the author values, more power to him or her. But I really think it's sort of silly that the author is so puzzled that not everyone else thinks the same way.

</comment><comment><USER26> Has anyone turned an ah-ha moment into a life-long pursuit (and succeeded)?

<comment><USER27> None that have lived to tell the tale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Living in interesting places costs money. I'd rather live in an expensive city and have to work 40 hours a week and be able to engage in interesting communities of people than live out in the boonies with fuck-all to do and no one to interact with just so I'll feel better about myself for not "being someone else's slave."

</comment><comment><USER29> In the end we are all servants of one kind or another. An entrepreneur works at the service of customers, clients, investors, and employees. A rank and file employee is a servant to their boss.

Everyone is a servant to the government, too which you pay taxes.

Even those that don't pay taxes are a servant to their friends, family, it takes work to maintain those relationships.

Even those that don't care about friends or family, or a servant to god(or "the universe" if you prefer).

At the end of the day there is always something that tells us or guides us in what to do or how to act, wether it be nature, a boss, friends, or often times just our own conscience. It's the nature of life... which isn't to say that seeking freedom and greater power, control and independence over our own lives isn't a laudable goal, but it's a balance, and everyone has different priorities that make them decide where to strike that balance.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you're young, healthy, and streetsmart enough, and the risk is acceptable, go for it. Take a summer and be homeless (or maybe even a year if you're in a survivable climate). You'll have some exciting adventures in amongst all the boredom and misery. And if you survive it, you'll learn a lot. Like why you don't want to live like that and what you actually want out of life. (Also maybe how to explain that gap in your employment at a job interview.) Plus you'll have some cool stories to tell your kids once you get old.

If you're older or wiser, you might want to consider a more positive-oriented way to address a midlife crisis - focusing more on what you want instead of what you don't want, and considering how to get the most value out of your time instead of how to get more time that's not as valuable as you'd like for it to be.

</comment><comment><USER31> First, indeed fulfulling basic needs is cheap. If you don't take into account taxes! The cost of tomatoes mainly embed taxes. The cost of housing is almost entirely taxes. But assume you move to a low tax country or place. So basically you can live good working only one or two days a month.

But self sustainability (unreliance on other people) could only be archieved with a great population reduction. Yes, ecolodoomsters are right: the planet cannot sustain 9e9 individuals. But it can sustain them, and more, with industrial and efficient systems, like modern agriculture, where only 1% of the population works on food production.

If only 1% need to work to provide food for every body, then the rest of us has only to work 1% of the time to compensate the agricultors.

All the rest is taxes and banksters.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Fight Club" movie already expressed these "ideas" with much more taste and style.)

<comment><USER33> The ideas are ancient. This guy feels like he's the first one to invent them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What a vapid post. What is being a servant, exactly? If you quit your job and start growing all your food, aren't you a servant to the land?

The simple fact is that in order to get the things we need and want, we have to trade something for it. If your skills lie in something like tech (like most of us on HN) it makes sense to apply those skills to earn more money than you would driving a tractor.

And categorising anything non-necessary as a "shiny thing" is a great way of devaluing a lot of stuff. I took a three month road trip around the US. Loved it. I was a "servant" for a long time in order to be able to afford it. It was totally worth it. Was that a "shiny thing"?

</comment><comment><USER35> The post has good intentions. I suspect this is one of those self-motivational moments that we all have in our lives. Where we want to quit working for the man and do something exotic and different. Like grow vegetables, start a restaurant, climb mountains, build some product.

Most people here are taking the writing too literally. Not everybody is a Wodehouse when it comes to writing. If you want to critic, shoot the writing and not the message. Don't take 'master' and 'slave' literally. Give the author some poetic freedom.

</comment><comment><USER36> I sometimes wonder what's the least amount of money I could spend if I put a lot of money into capital that would save me money. For example, get a big solar array. Get a Tesla that I could charge at home. Get a hydroponic garden set up that would grow all my food. Save seeds. Dig a well. Solar water heating. Etc, etc. Obviously the upfront cost would be absurdly high compared to just going to the grocery store but it would be a fun project if I ever got enough money to do it.

</comment><comment><USER37> What about the cool experiences that money can buy? This may not cost a lot, depending on what you want to do, but it does have a price tag. Not that I'm advocating the job treadmill as a lifestyle, but making a lot of money (say, by building a startup) has its benefits. When commercial space travel becomes a reality, I want to be able to buy a ticket to check out the earth from space.

(I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment of the post, but it seems to set up a false dichotomy)

</comment><comment><USER38> Speak for yourself (duh...that's what the author is doing). I work for others to make good money to support my addiction to hobbies. I, for one LOVE quadcopters, reef tanks, micro-controllers, LASERs, PC's, my electric guitar, and everything in between. The amount of time I get to spend with my hobbies is MUCH greater than the actual 40hr work week. Fair trade.

</comment><comment><USER39> It really is a societal agreement. We all benefit from it in the end, we can't do it all for ourselves so we divide it up. Just like agriculture allowed us to move beyond basic food survival needs to thinking people, we all do parts to advance quality of life.

It also gives you a sense of purpose. i.e. the power grid guys keep peace as much as soldiers as one example.

</comment><comment><USER40> Brace Yourselves! NeoCities websites are coming.

</comment><comment><USER41> Confused rant.

Pick a topic, servant to your employer or servant to pretty things?

Studies show people who are employed are happier than ones who are not. I'm sure the grass is greener on the other side right now, but there's a lot of evidence employment gives people more meaning than not having it, it's why lotto winners don't do as awesome as one would think.

</comment><comment><USER42> We are only free to the extent of our own self mastery. Those who cannot master themselves, will find masters to govern them.

</comment><comment><USER43> | We spend at least 40 hours per week working for other people to become richer than ourselves.

Sure, there are people like this. But a great number of people do this as a sacrifice to make their family's lives better.

I find this post boring, arrogant, and narrow-minded. These aren't new problems, and you haven't arrived at some sort of new solution.

</comment><comment><USER44> We all have to answer to somebody. The lucky ones, answer to other men. The unlucky ones, answer to their conscience.

</comment><comment><USER45> You might be a king or a little street sweeper but sooner or later you dance with the reaper.

( _Go on then, I deserve it._ )

</comment><comment><USER46> The author may be interested in this company that build s super energy efficient homes [http://www.seconstruction.ca](http://www.seconstruction.ca)

$10 Canadian to heat versus the typical $500 using a small "hair dryer" to heat the home in -20C weather.

<comment><USER4> Yeah but jeez, those guys at that company, what a bunch of servants they are. I bet they work at the company to buy "shiny things" ... we shouldn't support them. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's nice that we can choose who we do or do not work for. Slavery and serfdom were pretty terrible.

I like my job; I don't think my work would be possible without cooperation and a shared environment. I don't mind serving others, if they are serving me too.

</comment><comment><USER12> Rent. Taxes. The very land your house is on.

Unless you become a master you are required to serve. If you don't find a middle-ground that is acceptable to you, the alternative is to live like a hobo.

Some people actually chose that.

</comment><comment><USER48> Working as a slave I can afford many more shiny things than I could make on my own. The stuff I buy can be made with professional quality whereas the stuff I'd make would be shoddy, at best.

</comment><comment><USER49> Eh. If I had the means and the time to not be a servant, I'd go for it. However, I don't even have a business idea that I'm capable of executing on. So meh.

<comment><USER4> That's his point. He is not advocating you stop being a servant to a boss and starting you're own great company ... He's saying a startup is just another boss and really you should become some sort of acetic monk and live off the land, grow your beats and yams or whatever. You shouldn't even want any "stuff" what's wrong with you??!! It's just crap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I love my current job. I enjoy going to work every day.

I hated my last job, but I didn't feel the need to have a public existential crisis about it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Why do we waste our clicks upvoting this crap?

<comment><USER35> I wish the internet had an 'unclick' button

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This may be off-topic, but it was rather fascinating watching that hit counter jump up by hundreds after just one refresh.

<comment><USER53> me too!! I was fascinated. I never knew hackernews audience could reach 5000 visits so quickly!!

<comment><USER53> it's on 8K now!! wow!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> if you work for a publicly traded company and you buy shares in that company, would you not be working for your self ?

</comment><comment><USER55> I guess it is more like a question of how much time you are ready to spend in order to get money for the rest of it.

</comment><comment><USER56> [http://dilbert.com/strips](http://dilbert.com/strips)

</comment><comment><USER57> In US, health-related costs will easily bring financial ruin to a normal working person.

</comment><comment><USER58> what does he/she mean by "And don't think self-employment is anything but a new boss. "?

<comment><USER4> He's purporting an ideology that says by starting your own company, you are simply engaging in your own indentured servitude. You're giving up your precious life to customers, shareholders, whatever just so you can buy "shiny things," anything but participating in capitalism. It's just think kind hippy idealism and moralizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Because I gotta get paid. Duh.

</comment><comment><USER60> For the past few years I've been keeping a low profile here on HN. I visit, I listen to all I can, and refrain from commenting but today I felt the need to break my cycle, if only for a moment.

I have no idea who is behind [http://maladroit4u.neocities.org](http://maladroit4u.neocities.org) but you aren't the only one who has stopped to ask perhaps one of, if not, the most pertinent questions that I believe touches the lives of many, whether they care to admit it or not today. With certainty I can tell you 1) you won't be the last with these questions and 2) from experience many will look upon your concerns as a waste of thought, don't hold it against them. I on the other hand, will admit for the record, I didn't stop and move on as if I'm contemplating "what's for lunch?" while scanning the pantry. I continue to question this very day and expect it will consume the rest of my conscious life.

Why? It is not only a question for me it is a problem. I simply don't believe there is anyone who is really out to come close to providing/leading viable passage to another way. I have looked and the options available don't add up. This! This is where I have the expectations of a fork forming in the road. After all, how could it be so? It is preposterous to even consider such is the case! However, I'm neither here to tell how you should live or where you should place importance. If indeed you have found your way, I cheer you on while being fully aware I have no immediate value to add to your life on this earth (But that's a lie as I believe it concerns you just the same). If you have not found your way, I have every intension of letting you know at some point how you _can_ live and where you _can_ place importance. I find that to be the noblest thing I can do within my capacity. The most economical is to die, but I've settled on such an arrangement not being very helpful to others in the long run. So I exist, if for nothing else, to see whatever's been within materialize in the hands of those who need it most. Few in life need to create bridges I have no other choice worthy of attention.

I maintain, highlighting the problems are easy, real solutions prove ever elusive. Short term gains, smoke and wind are always in play. Long term views are seen as an expensive liability. It's acceptable institutional policy to induce with wild garauntees that work for a time but fall apart at scale. Innovation is no longer sought and who's meaning holds no further weight. No one stops to question 'til shit hits the fan and life directly impacted. It only takes a crisis to see the climate is every man for him/herself. Last of all, it is so incredibly easy to forget, to be seduced and lulled into the sweet soft comforts of a soothing caress... there are no larger issues ahead my dear, no erosion taking place, let's question no more, be open-minded (hear that?) and live happily ever after.

So I commend someone is stopping to ask the kinds of questions exhibited on [http://maladroit4u.neocities.org](http://maladroit4u.neocities.org) and agree with the oft saying, "an unexamined life is not worth living". I also felt it important to stress the author expresses a serious issue for _some_. And high on that list is equity.

I would be interested in knowing what was the author's tipping point.

</comment><comment><USER61> This bugs me, because it's the cynical negativity that I often feel, but it's one-sided and extreme.

Except for hermits, all of us want services from others. Serving is, therefore, part of the social contract. We work, we pay taxes, and we do lots of work for others' benefit. Nothing wrong with that. To rip from _Game of Thrones_ , _valar dohaeris_.

In fact, most people rot in a life where they don't get opportunities to help out (i.e. serve) others and become deeply unhappy. They feel unfulfilled.

It's the alienating and creepy institutional experience, the entrenched ingrate upper class, the perverse social demands, and the dehumanizing, corrupt, and capricious evaluation process-- and, in addition to all this, the fact that it has nothing to do with productivity (people could be just as productive, if not moreso, in better environments)-- that make institutional Work so horrible.

People like to do things for other people. That's not a waste of life. That's a major part of being human. Being forced to do things-- often boring, degrading things-- in some subordinate context is what makes people miserable at work.

<comment><USER9> Let's frame it in the "Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose" happiness rubric.

If you're smart, you level up to Mastery fairly quickly.

Once you're no longer an absolute novice, it's frustrating to spend your days without meaning or purpose. The novice finds meaning and purpose internally when learning. Once learning has plateaued, meaning and purpose come from integrating with society.

This is where the shackles of jobs start to erode your self: the masters at bad workplaces dole out meaning and purpose based on die rolls. They don't understand the connection between what people are good at, what they want to do, and how they should do it. You get told what to do. You have little leeway. When your choices are removed, the friction eats you alive.

Modern hippy startups try to get around the last part by letting people do whatever they want. Those companies can be pretty much counted on one hand though.

In short: companies exploit the Mastery of smart people while forcing you to look at Purpose through double slits and removing Autonomy resulting in your knobs of happiness being broken without you even realizing it.</comment></comment>


The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and Its Impact - <AUTHOR> http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/telco96.html <comment><USER2> Because the article is from 1998, it probably could use a date in the story title.</comment>