Ask HN: Sources of remote dev work with minimal human interaction? - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
I am in a situation that I feel some of you can relate to, so I wanted to pose this question in hopes of generating some resources for myself and similar people. I've had a few developer jobs so far in life and on balance, I haven't really liked any of them. When I ask myself why, the reason is always the corporate bullshit that I must endure. I find the actual job of being a developer quite fun and enjoy solving problems and building things with code. I also have no troubles with the interpersonal side of developing, as far as working in a team and being a decent coworker is concerned. What I cannot stand is the corporate environment and it's associated crap and rituals. I don't like being "obligated" to put in extra time with my colleagues on team events and retreats. I don't like daily stand-ups that are about talking about what you're up to so you look busy, rather than sharing (both ways) useful info with the team. I don't like a lot of the personalities I have to interact with at work (IMHO, certain departments/roles attract people who I feel are inherently dishonest or manipulative. These people creep me out and I wish I didn't have to be so close to them every workday). Many who read this will be able to add a lot to this list of complaints, as I can too.
What I want is a remote dev job where I close tickets. That is, one where the gig really is cash for functioning solution that meets spec, code standards, and QA. My ideal world would be where I log in somewhere, pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life. Does anyone know of any remote work where the hassle is just engineering related? I will specify that I am not interested in simply transitioning the interpersonal bullshit to a Skype-based model, so team-intensive remote work won't suit this requirement. My greatest thanks for any insightful thoughts or resources you guys can provide. <comment><USER2> I recommend learning how to put up with these things. Just stop caring about them. Treat it like laundry or dishes. You don't have to enjoy it, and there's no reason to get emotional over it. Just do it and move on. In particular, the job that you describe doesn't exist and where it does is exactly the type of development that's ripe for outsourcing.

If you can't find a way to play the game without emotional investment, then perhaps look for jobs in lower-paying sectors where you're less likely to encounter ambition and bullshit.

For example, have you looked for development jobs in the nonprofit and/or public sectors?

Nonprofit/gov't work _in general_ can attract bad personalities, but IME the software development shops within those organizations tend to have very few of the types of people you want to avoid. The pay/prestige is low enough relative to other development work that you mostly get "true believers".

Universities (software development departments, not research groups!) are also typically nice laid back work environments.

Medium-sized non-software companies with small development groups (5-10 people) can also be good.

However, do realize that in all of those situations you are trading standups and TPS reports for daily interactions with non-technical end users, which come with their own set of frustrations.

<comment><USER3> One thing to be aware of with the nonprofit/government work you mention is that it's the _other_ Hotel California, from the Silicon Valley one -- you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. That's overstating it, but even developers with nonprofit/gov't accomplishments that should be impressive to dotcoms will have trouble moving back.

If you consider moving back to industry after some time in nonprofit/gov't, I think many in dotcoms will tend to assume you're not good, even if you've been doing similar or harder work as you would've in a dotcom. Because who would've turned down dotcom kind of money (fair enough), and the chance to have impact (questionable logic, to people saving lives and liberty), and the chance to work with the best people who are them (now it's getting circular). Most of their data points are from people who chose dotcoms, they see lots of gov't/nonprofit-related dumbness in the news, and we all have prejudices about things we don't know.

If you're not coming from another dotcom, besides your skill/aptitude being suspect, you're also probably being judged with suspicion in some exclusionary (and questionable) idea of "culture fit". It's not just women and some other underrepresented socioeconomic groups who can be marginalized on this basis.

BTW, if OP thinks they have an unusually low tolerance for BS, I'd like to suggest two possibilities: (1) maybe they really do have an exceptionally low tolerance, and pursuing what they are asking for is a top priority; or (2) maybe they're reacting to some bad experience that's not representative of industry as a whole, and they'd find a more representative culture to be tolerable, and a better environment in which to learn to work within reasonable levels of BS.

(Regarding #2 above, I'm sympathetic. I quit a prestigious job at a place I really wanted to be, which led to an aversion to one particular bit of "BS" that I'd previously tolerated, but which foreshadowed untenable problems. I've turned this particular thing into a cultural litmus test for the prospective employer, which has caused me to turn down a lot of opportunities that probably would've been fine, after the initial BS. OP's situation might be similar: not wanting to get burned again, and being very cautious, to the point that they're ruling out too many opportunities.)

<comment><USER4> Actually I don't entirely agree. There are many actually interesting government projects that may not pay great but will certainly impress interviewers who just implement button x on app y. It's not as hard to move out as you would think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ...pull a _respectably specified_ ticket with _clear acceptance_ criteria.

      1) respectably specified
      2) clear acceptance criteria

That's where 95% of the work is. That's what generates all of the interpersonal crap. I hate to be quite so blunt, but you're asking something like "why can't I just do the easy part?"

You can but you'll likely collect proportional pay. (ie the below mentioned $5/hour overseas outsourcing).

On a completely unrelated note, most outsourcing projects fail because they hope they can magically skip 1 & 2 and the outsourced labor will just genie up a working product.

<comment><USER6> _" Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen."_ \- Edward V Berard

<comment><USER7> This is a fantastic quote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey, I also dislike large company politics and have managed to more or less accomplish what you've described here with freelancing.

You'll never get 100% away from interfacing with fellow humans, but I've found that a couple of factors in the types of gigs I favor have made my life mostly free from company life:

1\. Find gigs with small companies. And by small I mean like 1-3 people max. My favorite are the solo founders who built a SaaS app and are quietly making bank and need a developer to maintain it. Speaking of which, 2\. Find gigs where you can become "the guy" (or gal) for your client. These smaller companies often don't need a full time developer and can't even afford one anyway. My favorite setup is 10 hours a week indefinitely where I basically do what you described - acquire ticket, write code, make pull request. You are the secret weapon for the client's success.

How do you get these kinds of jobs? Do interesting or impressive technical things in public and don't be in a hurry. I've collected around 4 of these over the last few years and now make a very good living working less than 40 hours a week. I never really have to do "the hustle" of freelancing because these gigs are very sticky. I've never had anyone let me go, and in fact in a few cases I tried to leave but they then offered me an even better arrangement to stay around. Contrast this with the horrors of Upwork - freelancing doesn't have to be like that.

I don't really know how I would ever go to a normal 40 hour a week job now. Happy to chat with you or anyone else about this if I can help, my emails in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you distill your benefit to your work as

* Open ticket

* Write code for ticket

* Submit to QA / release

You basically described how many places outsource development. So you are now competing with $5 an hour body shops overseas.

The reason I and many others hire local people, or at least people who want to contribute is to brainstorm and solve problems together with. Just turning specs into code is not worth paying someone 10x the overseas wage.

Now all your problems I understand. Perhaps try working at a smaller shop somewhere? Maybe a company < 20 total people, especially one that isn't 100% developers. Tons of little companies need a dev or two, but they don't have any of the standup and paperwork type stuff. Just some problems to solve, and a reasonable pace of life. Basically "boring backoff" type jobs.

<comment><USER10> FWIW the least political job I ever had was at... Microsoft, in the dev tools division. Seriously, less politics there than at the tiny tech company of about 15 people where I met my wife. That was almost 25 years ago, but I'm still amazed at how meritocratic it was.

<comment><USER11> My vote is for boring, unsexy industries that are always needed. Non-software focused. Warehousing. Power companies.

Preferably an industry halfway to monopoly. Companies that don't compete every day for survival don't worry as much about raises and have much less politics, because people aren't always on the edge of being fired.

There are a lot of interesting problems in those industries, but they're not flashy, so they rarely attract coattail riders, corporate cutthroats, and empty suit salesmen.

And frankly there are very few compelling and accessible problems in software at all in the private sector for software as such. Interesting problems you can use software to solve, yes. Interesting software problems (that aren't better situated at a research program at a university)? Not a whole lot.

Avoid volatile markets that suffer speculation or primarily employ low wage workers or minimal skills workers, or both. Not because poor or uneducated people are tough to deal with-- ime they are more pleasant than the college educated a lot of the time-- but because it makes it very easy for companies to lay off large sections of their work force. (Think agriculture or construction.)

Speculation causes booms and busts. Low wage work does the same as the market for work expands and contracts. Insecurity makes people cutthroat, and if they can fire their main workforce and rehire identical cogs two years later, then your job supporting those people can come and go, too. High skills labor force makes a company think twice about letting people go, because they might be hard to find again later. (You can fire your Fortran programmer, but good luck finding a replacement quickly and for the same price in two years...)

As you point out, leadership at a company can change all of this. They can foster a better culture. The problem is knowing this in the first place about an employer, attempting to get located inside the company wherever that magic happens, and then the insecurity of not being clear when the magic will end. (Either because you don't know what created the magic to begin with or because it's dependent on person exoduses that can't be predicted.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm one of the founders of a company that fosters a network of coders and this was one of its main ideas when we founded it - minimize the amount of communication overhead and allow coders to focus just on coding. Practically, you're getting assigned with Asana tasks that you tackle one after the other. Naturally, you can't avoid communication at at all but if you want, you can limit it to communicating pull-requests/scoping/QA etc.

Normally I wouldn't solicit people to sign up on HN, but since you asked for sources I figured I'll take the opportunity to help fulfill your search: [https://www.codersclan.com/](https://www.codersclan.com/), if you sign up, mention you are the poster from HN and I'll make sure to speed the process up for you. Do note that the hourly rates start from $30/hour and that right now we're mostly looking for WordPress or front-end devs.

Another source you might want to look at is [https://remote.co/](https://remote.co/) I think we even advertised there in the past, but naturally the type of work you'll get will depend on the contract you land.

<comment><USER13> You might want to state here that you only pay via Payoneer, and your pay schedule is net+10. Both of these are terrible.

<comment><USER14> Being paid in 10 days isn't the end of the world. It's not fantastic, but it's far from terrible.

But I have no idea what payoneer is. Unless it's a weird way of saying "wire transfer", then yes it's probably terrible.

<comment><USER13> It's not 10 days; Net term is a month, plus 10 days, so you get paid once a month, 10 days into the next month.

Edit: That totally disregards that it's paid via Payoneer, so you'll also have delays in transferring your money from Payoneer to your pocket, which could take days more.

<comment><USER14> Oh. My mistake. Yes that is fucked.

Edit: are you sure that's the definition of "net 10"?

From [https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/7/accounting...](https://www.accountingtools.com/articles/2017/5/7/accounting- payment-terms)

> Net terms. "Net" means that the full amount is due for payment. Thus, terms > of "net 20" mean that full payment is due in 20 days. The term may be > abbreviated to "n" instead of "net".

From [https://due.com/blog/10-invoicing-terms-need- know/](https://due.com/blog/10-invoicing-terms-need-know/)

> Net 7, 10, 30, 60, 90

> These imply that the net payment is due in either 7, 10, 30, 60, or 90 days > after the invoice date. For example, if the invoice was dated June 10 and > you used one of the most used payment terms, Net 30, then the payment would > be expected before July 9.

Edit2: the referenced site even says the same, presuming they handle invoices end-of-month:

> Payouts are sent on a NET + 10 basis. It means that for every work completed > and approved in a specific month you get paid for it on 10th of the next > month. E.g. if for work completed and approved during September you'll get > paid on October 10th.

So I'll restate my original point: payment 10 days after invoice is not terrible. It's not fantastic but it's not terrible.

<comment><USER13> Oh boy; I know, and I hate these terms as they can mean different things to different people/companies.

From their faq:

"When do you send payouts?

Payouts are sent on a NET + 10 basis. It means that for every work completed and approved in a specific month you get paid for it on 10th of the next month. E.g. if for work completed and approved during September you'll get paid on October 10th."

This is basically Net 30 + 10. It can get even more complicated by internal payables cycle.

Edit: When seeing things like Net+10, always asks what the Net term is; it could be anything + 10 days.

EditEdit: That 10 days you're referencing would be from the end of the month, not the beginning. From the beginning of the month, you're 40 days out. With legit corporate work, or direct to legit customers, this can work; when you're subcontracting to seo shops like this you won't even know you're not getting paid or have to fight for it until the next month.

<comment><USER14> I don't think that's what most people would see as "net 30". Terms are always from the invoice date, which in their case seems to be last of the month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> While I have no direct experience in their system, Zerocracy[0] appears to exactly match your requirements, modulo your salary or hourly rate. Yegor Bugayenko, aka yegor256[1] online, is very prolific in writing and talking about Zerocracy, among many other topics, e.g.[2] Zerocracy imposes penalties for talking to other developers, instead of communicating solely via tickets and other shared documents, which must limit the politics you detest.

[0][https://www.zerocracy.com/toc.html](https://www.zerocracy.com/toc.html)

[1][https://www.yegor256.com/about-me.html](https://www.yegor256.com/about- me.html)

[2][https://www.yegor256.com/2014/04/20/how-hourly-rate-is- calcu...](https://www.yegor256.com/2014/04/20/how-hourly-rate-is- calculated.html)

While people may dismiss such a system for now, Yegor's prediction is that essentially all software will be delivered this way in ten or twenty years.

<comment><USER13> "Zerocracy imposes penalties for talking to other developers, instead of communicating solely via tickets and other shared documents, which must limit the politics you detest."

It always makes me chuckle when someone tries to replace bureaucracy with bureaucracy.

<comment><USER15> I had to check on the definition of bureaucracy, but I don't think this applies. The algorithms of Zerocracy are implemented via an "AI chatbot", for double buzzword bingo. I think bureaucracy requires humans, no? The better developers seem to be quite happy with the system, like being good at closing tickets or answering questions on StackOverflow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Meta: The comments here are largely criticisms of the poster.

What norms should be established for Ask HN? On Reddit it is expected that the premises of questions may be attacked, "me too" replies left, or jokes made. On Stack Overflow questions that can be answered with specific information usually are, but questions are frequently edited for clarity and to remove editorializing.

What is the unique value of Ask HN and is this the type of question and responses we want more of?

<comment><USER17> I have to admit that in a recent Ask HN I got downvoted for criticising the poster. It might have been better to say nothing. It's hard to judge, though, because sometimes, on balance, it's the best advice you can give. I can answer the question you asked, or I can answer the question you should have asked ;-)

I kind of think of it like the original question being, "I'd like to jump off of a cliff and I plan to strap pillows to myself to break my fall. What are the best pillow for the job for under $20?"

Upon reading the question you think, "Should I answer? If I don't, maybe this guy will jump off a cliff. If I tell them the best pillows for breaking your fall for under $20 without mentioning that the pillows _definitely won 't work_, that's probably the worst thing I could do. If I say, "Um... your plan is probably not great. Pillows aren't going to save you from jumping off of a cliff", it's pretty negative but perhaps that's what the OP needs to hear.

With this particular question, I suppose it might be easiest to ignore it. However, I know _I 've felt exactly the same way_ at times in my career. Honestly, even now, if someone could provide me a TODO list of technical tasks and leave me to it, I'd be on cloud 9. It's would be especially good if they didn't complain when I do what they asked but the business suffered because they asked for the wrong thing.

There _are_ actually some jobs that are a bit like that, but in my experience you _always_ get bitten in the end. The programmer is _always_ blamed, rightly or wrongly -- for the very reasons that the OP is unhappy with corporate culture!

I could answer: Do some freelancing and target small startup companies with pigheaded CEOs who have no idea that they actually need a development team. Most of those people will swear up and down that they know _exactly_ what they want and that it will be 100%, for sure, the very thing the company needs. As long as you have a thick skin, you can take their money, ship them their software and when they inevitably blow a crater in the ground for themselves, just don't return their calls. I know lots of people who make a good living doing this.

But that's not what I think the OP asked for. They asked for a thing that doesn't exist. If they are the type to get hyper stressed out about inter- personal relationships, then going down this track is the _wrong direction_ to go. So what do you do? Give them the answer to the question they asked, knowing that it's going to lead to unhappiness, or give them the answer to the question they should have asked?

<comment><USER18> To answer an earlier Ask HN, this is the kind of comment I save to reread in the future by replying to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well-paying jobs like this exist (I have one), but you need to be lucky to get one. You need to find a remote-friendly/first workplace with a good manager who knows you and trusts you, and then you need to push some more for those additional freedoms you desire. Simply say you're not doing stand-ups anymore. Chances are if they're already remote-friendly, then they can be nudged to give up even more control as long as you deliver.

Good luck and don't give up, it's worth it.

<comment><USER20> To twist this slightly more positively: standups where remote or wfh people can join in and watch silently, and instead of forcing everyone to say something, just let people share what they want. And have a doc of notes for people who missed it and care. Way better than traditional standups.

<comment><USER14> The concept of a "stand up" generally doesn't work for remote, because remote often means "9 hours time difference"

Regardless, standups are stupid. It's another ridiculous process invented by managers to look like they're doing something.

If developers need to know what others are working on because it affects them, they'll ask.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recently moved from a job that was onsite, had a management component, and was nearly 100% human-oriented to one something like what you're asking about. I'm now fully remote with few close co-workers on an essentially self-driven project.

It's wonderful for me, but I have to caution you that it is both a career limiting move and that you still have to do what corporate asks (and they will). That will include status updates, presentations, design review meetings, meetings with legal, required training, etc etc etc. I spend about 1 day out of 5 on this and still occasionally deal with "what have you done for us lately" style concerns.

Part of this is probably due to it being early days, but you should be aware that even in these very flexible, very remote jobs people still have to justify your headcount. And that means you will need to spend time telling those people how to do that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Minimal interpersonal skills are a workplace requirement. I would either try to learn those skills or see a medical professional to see if there is an appropriate diagnosis that can help you seek out a role that accommodates accordingly. I promise you that the other people in the office aren't there because they love you or each other. They are practicing social skills that they have learned, some so well that they do so unconsciously.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not gonna lie, you're not going to find a job that requires zero human interaction.

I understand the "interacting" with humans can be tough. But as humans, interacting is what we do.

I am not saying there is no jobs like that, or you won't be able to find a job where you could do that. But there will always always always be some sort of corporate "crap" to put up with.

<comment><USER24> I think there's a very large scale of "corporate" crap though, and so why not seek to be on the low end of that scale? I've worked at a bunch of companies at this point, and I can tell you for a fact that there is a big difference in company cultures and the amount of bullshit you have to deal with. My current company, for example, is around 20k employees, and the bullshit runneth over. The last company I worked for never got above 40 people, and while there was still obviously some stuff that wasn't perfect, there was almost zero bullshit to deal with.

Just as an example, at that job I still interacted with people quite a bit, but almost non of it was mandated; people worked together to get shit done, and were trusted that they could reach out when they needed help etc. At my current company, it's all lowest-common-denominator; everyone has to use the same processes because some people will just sit around and do nothing if you don't make them tell everyone what they're doing all the time.

Anyway, to the op, I would say that you probably won't find something with close to zero interaction, but I do think you can absolutely find places where the vast majority of the interaction is fruitful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've had subcontracting roles like this in the past. Still not zero interaction, but if you build a network of strong people and you're known for getting shit done, what I've found is other developers that know and trust you are more than happy to subcontract work out to you, and that tends to be very low-overhead from an interaction perspective. The last time I did this, I had zero contact with the actual customer (which can be a downside to be honest sometimes); the dev with the contract and I would just sync up so I knew what I was supposed to be doing and I would just go off on my own and get it done, then we'd sync up for the next thing, rinse and repeat. In my experience, as long as you get along really well with the other dev(s), this is pretty close to what it sounds like you're looking for. But this does require building up a network of people who are willing to subcontract you out work, which isn't always easy.

</comment><comment><USER25> What you probably want is to start your own company in the form of "solo founder". No boss, no colleagues, just "the problem".

<comment><USER26> "the problem" being getting people to pay you for something of value, right?

i wouldn't rule out "start your own company" but there needs to be some more clarity and purpose behind it beyond "i hate putting up with BS from other people in corporate jobs". moving _towards_ something defined will be more productive than just moving _away_ from something.

<comment><USER27> that's an important mindset shift from 'how can I avoid this' to 'wow there are so many cool opportunities in the world'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> AFAIK building software is a collaborative event. What I mean by that is, most of the time, we learn what works better as we get into the process of building it. So, the ideal world you are expecting is not practical. Even if some work can be specified to that level of clarity and details, it is better to build a tool that takes in this structured spec and build the feature.

But, I hear your concern about working in a setup which feels ineffective. My suggestion would be to pick teams that are small (2 - 3 devs) with a well defined goal. Keep your interactions effective and short with this small group.

Standups and iteration planning meetings have value. Unfortunately many follow it as just rituals instead of seeing the real reason behind doing them and the value it provides. You don't need to call them as standup or IPM as long as what they are achieving are met in your project. That is the whole point of being agile.

</comment><comment><USER29> Have you considered becoming an independent developer and creating a small but sustainable product. Examples like Pinboard or perhaps Overcast and similar one-man businesses come to mind.

<comment><USER30> The OP reads misanthropic to me, and that's a large stumbling block to what you suggest. Building good products generally requires _quite a bit_ of talking to people. And the (personally, financially) valuable ones very often plug into all that "corporate bullshit", so understanding it--and understanding why it exists past the _prima facie_ cynical explanation--is often important, too.

<comment><USER31> I have to disagree. You don't have to be a misanthrope to be fed up with the wasted time in a company environment. Making your own product is a lot of fun and requires interaction with _your users_ which is an entirely different, and motivating thing. Having done that for 10 years, i can not justify the time wasted doing futile things or meetings in a typical company environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I do not get why cooperations make it so hard for people who simply want to do their job with minimal bullshit. You would think the free market gets rid of such inefficiency, but evidently the free market is not efficient enough for that.

Why is it not efficient enough?

Perhaps it has something to do with propserity. Prosperity allows bullshit to grow without bounds because bullshitters cannot experience complete distruction if they can easily feast on our prosperous wealth, so they can easily maintain their illusions and fakery.

<comment><USER33> I see two possibilities:

1) You and the OP have discovered a trillion dollar bill on the sidewalk just waiting to be picked up.

2) There's value in what the two of you consider "bullshit".

<comment><USER32> It's both.

Of course there is value in such bullshit. It rewards the status drive of those who can play the game. Those who don't, get only negative value out of it. Overall, productivity probably suffers. But those in charge do not care because bullshit games allowed them to get where they are and stay there.

<comment><USER33> I meant value to the shareholder. If there is none, then that trillion dollars is just waiting for you to grab it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm not a coder. I am a remote worker. I basically have the thing you want as a writer.

I wish someone would create the service you are asking for. I don't think it exists at this point in time.

However, I share this list of remote work platforms pretty often:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15GJtJ5qpk7H9Cl3xTBwv2FR8/htmlview)

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER35> With my current colleagues, we actually started with more frequent Zoom calls and standups, but as we built trust, we got rid of these. (Sometimes however I think it's still necessary, even if we don't rationally understand why, just to see someone else's face periodically).

Now we just communicate over Slack, close tickets in Asana and document everything in Nuclino. Generally, if we're feeling anything ("Hmm this process seems inefficient or useless"), we simply express it, and change it. If that meant more bureaucracy, we'd do it. If it meant less, we'd do it too.

The most important thing is to communicate how you feel and why. I feel encouraging this culture really comes down to good organizational management and good product management (especially when it comes to feature requirements), not any kind of engineering process.

I definitely appreciate this perspective and plan to keep it in the back of my mind - this is probably what some developers are thinking even if they don't say it!

So if I keep this handy, people will say: "Oh, it's already been said, and that's okay! Now what? We can figure this out."

</comment><comment><USER36> "What I want is a remote dev job where I close tickets. That is, one where the gig really is cash for functioning solution that meets spec, code standards, and QA. My ideal world would be where I log in somewhere, pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life. Does anyone know of any remote work where the hassle is just engineering related? I will specify that I am not interested in simply transitioning the interpersonal bullshit to a Skype-based model, so team-intensive remote work won't suit this requirement. My greatest thanks for any insightful thoughts or resources you guys can provide."

I have been contracting for the last 10 years and I have a contract like this now. It's great, I've been completing tons of work for the company, but it's not the norm.

I report directly to the CTO of the company and talk to him almost daily. I have no daily standups and almost no meetings. Everything is as needed. IE: If we need to meet with someone in the company. we schedule a short meeting. Everything else is through our main ticketing system.

"pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life"

If you want a better quality of life, choose companies that don't rely on software as their main source of income and have been in business at least 5 years. I usually only choose companies that utilize software, but the main product is not the software itself.

My motive is that I have side businesses that I also run during the day.

Consulting companies are probably the worst in terms of work/life balance. I worked for a consulting company that had hundreds of clients and multiple projects all going on at the same time. The pressure was crazy.

They originally hired me to get a project done in 3 months (down from the original estimate of 1 year). When I started working on it, they told me I had 7 weeks and pushed me every day until it was done. Luckily, I was able to figure out some better ways of completing the required tasks and got it done in time.

As far as pull a "respectably specified ticket" goes, this might be difficult. Most of the time, people don't know exactly what they want and part of your job (unless it's a very large company with a layer in between you) is to decode someone's request and translate it to software. It will almost never be as easy as seeing a ticket with perfect requirements.

But it really does sound like you should be contracting. You won't need to be part of any gatherings or useless meetings, because a company is paying you hourly.

<comment><USER37> "If you want a better quality of life, choose companies that don't rely on software as their main source of income and have been in business at least 5 years. I usually only choose companies that utilize software, but the main product is not the software itself.

My motive is that I have side businesses that I also run during the day."

This post really resonates with me.

People on here always tout the idea that you don't want to work for a company where software isn't the main product because then you're in a 'cost center' so it drove me into a job at a faang company. Now that' I've been at one for a few years I see that it's just full of people chasing clout so they'll work themselves into the ground.

Trying to work on side projects is futile when you're expected to work lots of unpaid overtime so if you have any ambitions outside of work you won't fit in well. I wish I had known this earlier on.

<comment><USER36> Remote work is also a good option if you want to work on a side business/other project. At minimum, you save your commute time, which can be used for so many other things.

"expected to work lots of unpaid overtime"

A great thing about contracting is that you are paid for every hour you work. It has more risks (less stability than a full-time job), but it definitely can give you a better life balance, if you want it.

Companies are also less likely to give you overtime if they need to pay for it. Most of the time, I have to get overtime approved.

It really depends on your goals. Working for FAANG is good for some developers, because they want the prestige, you can make really good money, and you get to work on some really cool software. I don't care about any of that. I just want to make a living while I'm working on my next business.

The business is my goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have a job that's almost like you describe.

I'm a software support engineer. (A job some find undesirable, so it keeps the field open and provides a decent pay scale.) I don't get paid 'by the piece', but I do work remote and don't have to put up with much office-nonsense. I really like the job. Maybe you can find one like it.

About 'piece work', I think that'd be a hard game to play. There are lots of talented programmers all over the world, and some of them live in low cost areas to live. (Very low cost.) I'd hate to compete with those kind of folks for a paycheck, even when I win I wouldn't win much.

Good luck to you!

</comment><comment><USER39> Don't act like you want to act and be proactive.

People will use you as you act. If you are someone who is always quite, never has time for team events, never interact much but works on tickets in good quality, your team lead or manager will learn to use this for them.

I like to have a team with everyone engaged but if i have someone on my team i can give a ticket and they just do it in good quality or don't mind if i tell them how they have to rework it, great.

Make sure you are not in a start up. There is stress and direct communication needed. Look for something less edgy, less modern. Something which works but is not that interesting and good defined.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think the answer you are looking for is algorithmic trader.

Work only for the whims of the Mr. Market. When your making money, the only people you have to deal with is the people you pay.

I would say bitcoin trader, but well that didn't turn out so well.

<comment><USER41> Bitcoin continues to be one of the most lucrative trading opportunities, but automated trading has become highly competitive in the past 4 years. Much higher levels of knowledge and abstraction are now required in order to get returns which were formerly almost accidentally possible.

<comment><USER40> Not sure if my sarcasm was properly illustrated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> You and I generally feel the same way here. I freelance remotely with very minimal human interaction. Often I will go weeks without interfacing with a human.

As far as sources for that type of work, you have to treat it like a business. Get clients and keep clients that need ongoing and long-term work. Between that and referrals that just come in naturally, I essentially never have to source work. I always have more than I need.

It also helps to have strong call skills. I have gotten quite good at communicating via phone or similar whilst remaining a lifeless bag of meat in IRL social situations.

</comment><comment><USER14> In my experience you're describing remote "consultant" work.

I haven't worked in an office for over a decade, I generally work with smaller companies who aren't obsessed with "doing agile" or scrumping or koombaya boards.

My current major client uses slack and we probably chat about either bugs or new features on 3 days out of a given week, but mostly it's just working on tickets.

This doesn't necessarily work well for all roles or clients but good clients generally just want the result.

What technologies do you usually work with? Some tend to have more corporate use and thus may be harder to find less corporate-y clients.

</comment><comment><USER43> I did that work for a while. Basically, they were outsourcing to me because they can't fill their local position. I did charge higher than the local rate though (London). But you'll need to go through the client acquisition first and there will be emails, payments, etc... You know: freelance bullshit.

There are ways to avoid corporate bullshit:

\- Start your own product. But you might face some government bullshit.

\- Trading. Probably the best if you want to avoid any human interaction. While you are at it, move to a tax-friendly jurisdiction and pay 0 in taxes.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is almost exactly the specification of offshore workers. I pay anywhere from $5/hr-$100/hr, depending on skillset.

I'm not sure if this gets you a modest quality of life where you live.

</comment><comment><USER45> check this out - [http://www.admcloud.net/en/ACDN](http://www.admcloud.net/en/ACDN)

They have a pool of tickets and developers outbid each other to win work. I think this is what you want. Honestly, I find this type of work to be very depressing.

Team events are there for a reason - to build team bonding and coordination. I'll recommend you to get a coach to help you get accustomed to corporate life. As they say - if you can't fight them, join them.

<comment><USER46> They should put up a ticket to install SSL on their site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> In my opinion if you are looking to compete solely on output and not relationships and understanding of the context of the problem solving (which is what "please put it all in ticket for me" says to me), you are commoditizing yourself. After a bit, I think you'd be competing against the rest of the world.

I'd rather avoid competing against smart people with lower fixed expenses, than you very much.

</comment><comment><USER48> You get what you put out?

If you keep quiet, but regularly update your tickets and/or PRs with just the facts, do people still bother you?

</comment><comment><USER49> I work in a position that is exactly as you've described. To get this sort of position, I searched for small companies that have a developer position that I'm well-qualified for.

To be fair, I started on-site and became remote when I moved away. Also, I've never worked for a big company because I knew I'd hate all of the stuff that you described.

</comment><comment><USER50> You can work for yourself. Make and sell your own software/saas products. I pay myself well, and have a six figure number of users/customers, but have never spoken to any of them in person or on the phone. I do answer emails but that could be outsourced if you really want zero human interaction.

</comment><comment><USER51> In my FAANG experience, the people with deep technical expertise can simply say "no" to most of the corporate b.s. The environment you are in now may be too distracting a place to build that expertise however. A startup or smaller engineering org may be a better fit.

<comment><USER45> > FAANG

Let's be inclusive and start using FAANGM in an honor of Microsoft

<comment><USER52> Well, as for now $1T are MAGA

<comment><USER45> that acts like bleach for the original MAGA

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I applied for a remote place that advertised exactly this. What is your skillset?

I work that way on upwork, no phone/video calls or hourly roles. Limits me but its a second income.

Topical might work this way.

</comment><comment><USER54> This sounds like an ideal working arrangement, in contrast with the likes of Upwork where you have to sell your soul to the client, and the marketplace.

Also interested to know if such jobs exist.

</comment><comment><USER55> I think the issues you describe are a function of company size. If you find one that is under 50 (or even under 20) people, there will be basically zero corporate fluff.

</comment><comment><USER31> You re either looking for freelance-type work, or why don't you start your own thing? You can look at indiehackers for some inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER27> Have you looked into toptal? They sound kind of like what you are looking for. Haven't used them though, so not totally sure.

</comment><comment><USER56> Ask HN: Sources of remote dev work with minimal human interaction?

140 points

100 comments

And that's why I love this community so much...

</comment><comment><USER57> I am currently transitioning to sustaining myself as a full time cryptocurrency trader. It is definitely not for everyone, and extremely risky to say the least, but it fits my personality and one of the very few possibilities of earning one's living without any human interaction. It's just you and the market.

<comment><USER58> You're a full time gambler? Or have you somehow figured a way to beat the market?

<comment><USER57> My risk tolerance is very low, so I focus mostly on automated market making and microstructure trading. It is more like reversing other people's strategies and designing my own to profit from them.

Which, by the way, is a full time job, you cannot just design some good algorithm and sit back while it earns you money. It is not this easy. :(

<comment><USER59> No, you're constantly rebuilding.

Like a hedge fund.

It is smart to be doing this now, as it'll only get harder as the large financial firms get better at it over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Hi, I think we can be a good fit.

I would like to receive your application here: [https://ideatostartup.org/join](https://ideatostartup.org/join)

</comment><comment><USER61> First, the practical answer: you sound like you have been unlucky enough to work only in pretty awful corporate environments. Stand reassured: all companies are not like that. Simple rules to vastly increase your chances of working within better environments:

Rule #1:Avoid big companies.

Big companies seem to attract and promote more sociopaths. Or maybe they are just more visible because of the larger population? Possible explanations include: sociopaths are focused on their carrier path within an organisation rather than on accomplishing something, which attitude is only possible within a big organisation where many layers of hierarchy and processes offer shelter from the hard realities of customer (dis)satisfaction and competition.

Rule #2: Avoid the web.

The technical culture is just too bad there. Ideally you should look for a development job in a company that also employs other kind of engineers (telcos, construction, industrial equipment...) The culture will be more grounded in science (and the economy), and the objectives less vaguely defined.

Rule #3: As a last resort, consider leaving the USA and emigrate to Europe, where the corporate culture encourages less openly hypocrisy. Note, though, that this "fake it until you make it" attitude that tends to make American coworkers creepy to us Europeans has been shown to have a positive influence.

Now, I also wanted to address you depiction of the ideal engineering work as closing well defined tickets.

You are certainly already aware that explaining to a computer how to solve a well understood problem is a very simple task, compared to the work required to explain to a bug tracker what a problem actually is and what its solution should be.

The first task consists merely of translating a specification into a program, while the other task requires to understand a complex system, what it does, how and why, its history and to anticipate its possible futures, plan its evolutions, etc. This is so much harder, especially because to reach this point where you understand enough the problem that you can write the specifications (or directly the program) you have to collect information and ideas from many human sources and to also fight human incompetence, lazyness, malevolence and conflicting interests. To do this efficiently you need a lot of knowledge, not only technical but also about the industry, the internal working of the social organisations you are part of, etc. That's being an engineer in IT here and now, and very few jobs will match what you are looking for.

And if you ever find one, chances are that you will then just play a role in some managerial intrigue and nobody will actually care about what you are doing.

</comment><comment><USER62> you have to learn office politics

</comment><comment><USER63> With respect, are you sure you're in the right industry? You like to code however you don't enjoy the human issues associated with the job. Every job has those in tech and many outside of tech do too.</comment>


The Fight over Alternative Education - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2020/05/23/the-fight-over-alternative-education/ <comment><USER2> > no more music teachers whose only qualification is a degree from Julliard

Such positions, taken by the teacher's union, are so detrimental. I know so many people who missed out in their education because a math, compsci, or other slot was filled with a person who had the requisite teaching degree, but very little understanding of the subject.</comment>


Living without the modern browser - <AUTHOR> https://an3223.github.io/Living-without-the-modern-browser/ <comment><USER2> > JavaScript, captchas, and logins, are the main "gotchas" for text-based > browsing, if the functionality of a site (or part of the site) relies on any > of these then most likely it will not work.

Really, there is no reason why a form should require JavaScript. When jQuery was hip, the js community celebrated "Graceful degradation". I frequently have the feeling this attitude is lost. That's super sad because it also excludes all the handycapped people.

Does even anybody remember the good old HTTP basic acess authentification? This is one of the most accessible ways of protecting ressources, it can be consumed by any HTTP client (!), and it is just reduced to the basic.

One of the worst things are these terrible captchas everywhere. I wonder why we cannot come up with a web standard interface in a way the captchas could be offloaded to customizable and adaptable GUIS rendered by the browsing client. This way, clients (users) could even declare what kind of captcha they can solve (blind people obviously cannot read images).

<comment><USER3> > Really, there is no reason why a form should require JavaScript.

I'm a web developer who has never done significant forms without JavaScript.

So I'm curious: how would you handle reactive form fields without client side scripting? For example (perhaps a bad example): the user is entering data in "rows". The user clicks "add row" and then a new row of fields appears. The user can also delete rows on a whim. Their changes should only be persisted once submit is clicked.

Would the "right" way be a full page reload with the row added/deleted, and caching all the values?

Not to mention, if fields require cross validation, is it customary to have to submit the form to get the validation error messages to occur? On some of the forms I've worked on, this would be very complex.

<comment><USER4> Split the form into pages, and use session variables to maintain state. Regarding form fields appearing and all your fancy front end logic: none of this would fly in user testing.

I find it mind-boggling there's a generation of developers after me that doesn't know the basics of server side state. No offence intended to yourself, and good on you for putting yourself out there to ask :)

<comment><USER5> As a web developer for the past 20 years, I do know how server-side state works. What baffles me is that, while there is certainly much to complain about the state of front-end JS dev today, the attitude of some that moving the web back 15 years is a good thing.

There is a reason single-page apps became a thing, so I'm not clear why you think a page refresh for every user interaction is somehow a good thing. The dismissive attitude that "Regarding form fields appearing and all your fancy front end logic: none of this would fly in user testing" flies in the face of how 90% of heavy consumer front ends out there work today.

<comment><USER6> Single-page apps became a thing because of lack of development resources to build native apps or properly engineer server side solutions (as well as a business desire to centralize and lock down the product so people have to experience ads, pay subscriptions...). It has nothing to do with creating a user friendly experience. 100% of the time a user would benefit from a native app or properly engineered server-side rendered web page over a SPA.

<comment><USER7> I agree, but there is one problem: most people would rather use an SPA than have to download an app and have to keep it up to date themselves.

I wonder if there's a market for an alternative "browser" that loads "native" code (or as close as practically possible) and runs it in a sandbox.

<comment><USER8> > I wonder if there's a market for an alternative "browser" that loads > "native" code (or as close as practically possible) and runs it in a > sandbox.

Electron comes close, but many don't like it at all. (I have somewhat mixed experiences, I love VS Code but I'm not too fond of Slack.)

<comment><USER7> Electron isn't native in any sense of the word. I meant something more like OS-specific binary executables that get loaded and executed in a sandbox.

Mike Acton once said something about having created a browser plugin his team used that loaded and ran binary exe tools on demand, but that it was also wildly insecure. At least I think he said something like that. My memory could be wrong about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Recently, there seems to be this ever-growing, romantic vision of turning the clock back to a time when the browser was simpler.

Certainly, in terms of accessibility, the JavaScript (and Browser) landscape has never been better than it is now. General awareness and tooling for building online experiences that consider disabled users has led to an infinitely better time for these people when using the internet, overall.

Sure, some people build shitty products that make your fan spin and ignore disabled users. But that's because they've built a shitty product, not because of the 'modern browser' itself.

> The web can be a resource hog, sometimes devouring CPU and memory. But it > doesn't need to be that way.

It also doesn't mean returning back to horse and cart!

<comment><USER5> Whenever I see lines like that, "the web can be a resource hog, sometimes devouring CPU and memory", I really want to respond "no one cares".

OK, not no one. And people certainly DO care if a site is very slow, or user interactions are bogged down and choppy. But there is this somewhat weird (IMO) belief, very common among developers and tech-savvy users, that heavy use of resources is a bad thing in and of itself. I certainly understand where that belief comes from, but it's just not relevant to 98%+ of people if it doesn't get to the point of being heavily noticeable in user interactions.

<comment><USER10> Heavy use of resources IS a bad thing in and of itself (if it's not necessary for the task being done - I fully expect a game to eat up my CPU and GPU). We're not on DOS with only one application running at a time. If all my resources are being eaten up by bloated websites and Discord and Atom and other crappy Electron apps, that's less resources for other programs that might actually need them.

<comment><USER11> I can't help but get the feeling the only reason my Google phone has an 8-core processor is so news sites can play more ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've started using Brow.sh[1] occasionally - it runs headless Firefox and pipes the output over a terminal.

Try `ssh brow.sh` for a 5 minute demo (`ssh brow.sh -t [https://maps.google.com`](https://maps.google.com`) is pretty cool too)

I really need to try out the experimental vim branch[2] to emulate Vimium/Tridactyl. Firefox rendered to a shell with Vim keybindings would be so amazing to use!

[1]: [https://www.brow.sh/](https://www.brow.sh/) [2]: [https://github.com/browsh-org/browsh/pull/264](https://github.com/browsh- org/browsh/pull/264)

<comment><USER13> Browsh author here. I feel so guilty about not having merged that branch :( It's been there 8 months or so. It's by far the most requested feature. I'm just so overwhelmed with other things to do. I'd love Browsh to be my main focus, but I've got to earn money. There's so many more things I want to do with Browsh.

So basically I just wanted to say sorry to the people that have submitted code and not had it merged and sorry to the people that really want this feature, like a handful of blind users that keep emailing me about full keyboard support. I haven't forgotten about Brwowsh, I've just got to earn some money first.

<comment><USER14> Are you willing to cede some control and let someone help you maintain it?

<comment><USER13> For sure. In fact there are already 4 people with commit permissions to the repo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you use your browser for media consumption, this is a great shell addition (add to ~/.bashrc):

      function streamer() {
        youtube-dl -o - "$1" | vlc -
      }

Then:

      $ streamer <just about any media url>

Of course you need youtube-dl and vlc

<comment><USER16> A while back I migrated from VLC to `mpv`. I much later learned from an HN comment that `mpv` automatically calls `youtube-dl` if it's installed; you can run

        $ mpv <just about any media url>

without setting up any aliases or functions or mucking with calling youtube-dl yourself.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for suggesting mpv! I had never heard of it, but I'm not too happy with VLC or smplayer on MacOS so I gave it a shot. It's fantastic. Fast, responsive and it plays everything I've thrown at it.

<comment><USER17> To anyone on MacOS who wants the efficiency of mpv with a nice GUI: IINA [1] is a slick video player for Mac, with minimal UI, web browser plugins, and gesture-based controls, and it's FOSS with mpv and youtube-dl on the backend.

[1]: [https://iina.io/](https://iina.io/)

<comment><USER7> I gave IINA a shot. It has a nicer UI, but it's not nearly as fast or responsive as mpv. No sale.

<comment><USER17> Interesting. I've found it to be significantly more responsive than VLC while being much more consistent with the Mac UI, but to each their own!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What I don't like that modern browsers tend to trade memory for performance, i.e. get slightly better numbers in benchmarks by using significantly more memory. For example, have you heard about image decoding cache? A browser can waste as much as 20 or 30 Megabytes to store uncompressed bitmaps, although a better solution would be not to store them at all. If the website uses too much images, then it is not a browser's problem.

Well, wasting 100-200 Mb for one tab is fine, but what if I have many tabs opened? Browser quickly uses up all available memory and starts swapping out other programs including a shell.

I think that browser could at least reduce memory consumption for background tabs: they don't need to run when they are in background. A browser could free everything that is not necessary, including: image decoding cache, caches to speed up DOM and CSS, canvases, compiled JS bytecode (it takes more memory than source code) and JIT'ted code, any network caches, SQlite cache. Also they could gzip text resources in memory like CSS or JS code.

Note that this approach is better than simply unloading a page like mobile browsers do. But if the user didn't input anything into a page, I think it should be fine to unload it completely after some timeout (for example, 30 minutes).

The same approach could be used with iframes. Typically they are used mostly for ads and analytics. There is no need to waste precious memory for slightly better animation of an ad banner.

I remember that many years ago Opera could handle tens of tabs with 512 Mb of memory and not get swapped out.

<comment><USER19> > I remember that many years ago Opera could handle tens of tabs with 512 Mb > of memory and not get swapped out.

Tabs back then weren't full page SPAs, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Most of the time I use my own browser [1] because I set this javascript to False and can therefore "roughly" do without an adblocker. Unfortunately no social media or other login services work. For Youtube, Twitch and other video services I also use mpv which turned out to be a very good and fast solution.

The author is right when he says in the conclusion that it is really difficult to do without Firefox. Although many services can be fixed with external programs, these are often only emergency solutions.

But I also learned to distinguish between the "information" web and the "entertainment" web and since I do a lot of research, programming and reading in data sources I don't need Javascript to 95%. Other points are important to me, e.g. fast loading times, low CPU and minimalist design. But you have to do without many features.

Text-based web browsers are cool, yes. But if you're not in the Linux scene and ride on (e.g. Manjaro I3) it's incredibly cumbersome and exhausting.

[1] [https://voidnill.gitlab.io/cosmic_voidspace/alligator.html](https://voidnill.gitlab.io/cosmic_voidspace/alligator.html)

<comment><USER21> I used to do this many years ago. Then I added JS to upvote and downvote on HN and reddit. Then I gave up. Now I just use umatrix on Chrome or FF

<comment><USER22> You don't need javascript to upvote and downvote on Hacker News.

<comment><USER20> Whoa! And as I just notice by your comment, not for the login either. I only tested the HN search function once and it only worked with Javascript. Therefore I assumed that this is the case with all other functions. Thank you.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, it uses a service called Algolia, and unfortunately their frontend depends on JS. But you can use [http://hnapp.com/](http://hnapp.com/) for JS- free search.

(I'm not affiliated)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> After a workday, I used to be repelled by using a computer. I started to use it again when I uninstalled Firefox. Now I just use elinks for basic stuff and I'm happy again to hack or just _use_ a computer again, instead of a bloated web browser.

If I want to do "fancy" things, like book a flight, I just do that on the iPad.

<comment><USER25> I used to have access to the Amadeus API, and the experience to book flights `curling` it was very interesting :P

<comment><USER26> Booking flights via curl sounds like it's a much better experience than navigating the endless choices, options & dark patterns on a typical airline website.

<comment><USER27> Don't check this checkbox if you want to miss out on not getting amazing promotional emails, great poems and the occasional bobcat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> On the subject of JavaScript and NoScript.

I'm a JS dev working with some relatively large institutions building single page web applications using JS frameworks. Unfortunately I have seen there is often an unwillingness from both management and some developers to invest in server side rendering of SPAs. There is always a willingness to support users who have visual or other accessibility requirements, yet users who want or need to disable JS are often left out in the cold.

I love JavaScript but I still believe it is important to provide alternatives for those that don't.

<comment><USER29> >There is always a willingness to support users who have visual or other accessibility requirements, yet users who want or need to disable JS are often left out in the cold.

Because accommodating disabled people is mandated by the ADA. No such requirement exists for noscript users.

<comment><USER28> Exactly! Whilst I understand the reasons, it is nevertheless a shame that the willingness is born from requirement rather than the want of actually making things accessible for as many users as possible.

<comment><USER30> The marginal benefit from making a site available to the relative handful of people who refuse to run javascript is miniscule. The marginal cost of doing so is huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I agree. But you don't need completely abandon the GUI. There are modern browsers like Pale Moon that reject the idea of the browser as the new OS layer and don't implement all the new attack surfaces and CPU wastes. Combined with NoScript temp whitelist only you can browse normally but without most of the resource wasting (ie, ram usage from multi-process, web(gl/etc), and the like. I regularly do hundreds (ie, 300+) of loaded tabs with less than 2 GB of ram used.

That said, I still use tools like youtube-dl on most of my computers and IRC and RSS and all the rest.

<comment><USER32> Agreed on not abandoning the GUI, I'm writing this from dillo for example. Also agree on the idea of not having the browser as the new OS and not expanding attack surfaces so much. But Pale Moon seems to be a far cry from that, specially seeing as it keeps NPAPI plugins support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I now use a dedicated Chrome profile for a handful of sites I trust like my banks and gmail. The profile has cookies and JavaScript disabled by default and I have to opt in to let each domain use them.

Then I do all other browsing on a Chrome Guest session. It's cut down my web usage a bit as I have to log in to sites like HN or LinkedIn, Facebook, in the guest session to use them.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just to give a head's up in re: Dillo browser: [https://www.dillo.org/](https://www.dillo.org/)

On modern hardware it's effectively instantaneous. Click the icon to start it and it's up and rendered the homepage before I release the mouse button.

Many sites don't work well in Dillo, but then many sites do.

<comment><USER35> There's also NetSurf <[https://www.netsurf-browser.org/>](https://www.netsurf- browser.org/>), which is in active development and which is _almost_ as lightweight as Dillo, while having better support for CSS3.

It doesn't really support JS yet - it's included and you can compile it in, but there's IIRC no DOM still - and 3.8 behaves a bit weirdly with word wrapping and fonts (I _think_ the latter is because they are compiled in the executable), but it works pretty well, and it works even outside X: it has a framebuffer version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> While I use GUI JS-enabled browsers, when at a real keyboard, with a shell and terminal enabled (or even on Termux in Android), fast command-line lookups are useful. Unfortunately, much of the Web formats poorly (HN included).

I have locally defined bash functions for DuckDuckGo (ddg), the Online Etymological Dictionary (etym), weather, and stock quotes (well, plus extensive cruft-stripping for the latter). DDG + bang searches gets me numerous other services, particularly Worldcat, which wins the award for least-useful web design: it breaks on _both_ mobile GUI _and_ console devices, though at full screen rendered by w3m it's passable (I'm considering how to extract and present useful info bypassing the web design entirely).

Third-party utilities give further resources: surfraw for a whole slew of sites, rvt (no longer maintained :-( ) for Reddit, and a set of Wikipedia tools. There's dict/dictd for dictionary lookups (including forwarding OSX queries to my Debian Linux box which has both a server and far better dictionaries).

For RSS I wrote a far-too-complex "rsstail-pretty" which reads from a set of feeds and restructures output -- because there's all kinds of useless and annoying crap in RSS feed content. Similar tricks for stockquote (a bash function wrapper around an awk script) and weather (bash function, sed, and awk -- because features of each are required).

The browser or http agent (w3m, curl, wget, generally) fires once, grabs content, and gets out of the way in many cases. No 25GB VSS memory allocations (yes! Firefox) resident for hours or days.

The amount of useless cruft wrapped around desired information payloads makes the Saturn V launch / return capsule mass ratio look downright sleek.

Particular disappointments: Archive.org, entirely useless without JS.

</comment><comment><USER37> When traveling, to keep bandwidth usage down I exclusively use Firefox as my iPhone browser because of its ability to turn off images. Turns out most web pages are actually a lot better with only text.

</comment><comment><USER38> > Probably the most effective thing is going to be an ad blocker.

If for some reason I was unable to use an ad blocker then my web browsing would drop to such an extent that you could say I no longer used "the web" but rather a handful of sites. Similarly, if my only TV option was cable with commercials, I'd just stop watching TV altogether.

I normally browse without JS, and JS-only sites are increasingly common. 95% of the time I just close the tab, even if I'm researching local businesses. From the other 5% of the time, requiring JS to read some text has become such a reliable predictor of regret that the choice (to just close the tab) is easy and immediate.

On the flipside, people here often complain about not being able to view a site or that its format is unreadable, when it works great without JS, so it goes both ways. You only ever hear that blocking JS makes things fail, but not that it makes things work.

</comment><comment><USER39> I remember disabling Javascript for a couple of months in Chrome some time ago and it barely broke anything. Had a great browsing experience. This might be because of my own personal preferences when it comes to sites, but I don't think that JS is a necessary evil in today's modern web.

<comment><USER40> A few months ago I decided to try uMatrix out, which defaults to blocking third-party JS, but allowing first-party JS. It broke a _lot_ of things. But I persevered, and manually whitelisted various things as time went by; I decided to always whitelist by individual third-party for each domain, rather than just throwing in the towel and letting a site do what it wants. Some things were very painful to get working; Dropbox login, which I occasionally need to use for work, was excruciating.

More recently I've been playing around with heading in the other direction: when things break, I try blocking first-party JavaScript instead. This has often been successful, so that I'm considering disabling all JS by default and only turning it on when needed.

All this _definitely_ speeds things up. I installed NoScript on my fairly slow phone (Firefox for Android) a month ago, which I don't use for much, but do a little web reading on sometimes. Disabling JS definitely sped things up a lot.

A few sites do stupid things like visually hiding all content if you don't have JS. Those I don't use, use reader mode or once or twice have added a user stylesheet for if I'm going to touch them more than once but decide not to whitelist them for probably capricious reasons.

But this disabling-JS lark is definitely not for the consumer.

<comment><USER41> Sites don't "visually hide all content" without JS, they are using JS to render content in the first place, thus no JS, no content.

<comment><USER18> No. Many sites have a style like "display: none" on body element, to hide content until JS is loaded. But of course they have content in HTML for search engines optimization. So they show content to Google robot instantly, but the human user has to wait.

Google also uses this trick in search results if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER40> Exactly. Here's an example I encountered today: [https://status.digitalocean.com/](https://status.digitalocean.com/), all the content is in a div that is affected by `.layout-content.status.status-index { opacity: 0 }`. JavaScript code then sets `.style.opacity = 1` on the element to undo that.

This is a bad technique. If you really want that effect, something friendlier would be this in the head of the document:

      <script>document.documentElement.className+=' js'</script>

… then prefix that earlier selector with `.js`.

Or another approach: remove the `opacity: 0` from the stylesheet, and immediately inside the element to be hidden while loading, add

      <script>document.currentScript.parentNode.style.opacity=0</script>

Remember that external JS is never guaranteed to load; even on normal people's computers, networks are not reliable and even first-party resources can fail to load, though it's ones on a different origin that are the least reliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> One way to avoid the browser, is to scrape. These days I mostly use nodejs for that. I tend to do that for websites that I would otherwise visit often, or websites that have terrible UI, yet simple data model.

</comment><comment><USER43> This post is a bit short on information. I like the take is instead of "living without GUI" (hence CLI/TUI) it is living without the modern browser. But you'd be surprised how much stuff is flying over HTTP(S). For example consider VLC, and use the download subtitle extension. You could think of Beautiful Soup 4 or similar clients (didn't check if it uses that but as a Python example).

Which leads me to the question: when is a browser considered modern? If it has a GUI? If it supports Web 2.0? If it supports Web 3.0? If it supports JavaScript? If it supports all JavaScript by default?

"There are multiple text-based browsers to choose from. The oldest and maybe the most well known is Lynx. Personally I use Links instead, which provides a similar experience, but also includes a "graphical" mode that is capable of displaying images, and the default background color is black as opposed to gray (only for the non-graphical mode, though the background color can be changed in graphical mode). Here's a list of text-based browsers from Wikipedia (not all of them are maintained)."

Every once in a while I check this out. They're all either horribly out of date, or they do not work with current technologies, or they have some experimental features but they're out of date ports from Firefox (with security vulnerabilities!). Hence I recommend Browsh instead which is based on Firefox. But I would not say it fits the narrative of "living without the modern browser" as it is Firefox under the hood. It fits better in the living without GUI narrative.

</comment><comment><USER18> Also, when I was using Chromium, I disabled JS by default and enabled it only on a number of sites that really need it. But now I don't want to support Google by using Chromium and Firefox cannot disable JS without installing heavy memory-hungry extensions.

<comment><USER44> Actually if you install NoScript it should not eat your memory too much. Even if it eats something it will save your memory by blocking javascript which is pretty good trade off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I don't think issue is with browsers, it is with websites getting more and more complicated. It's ironic that people (web dev) who are complaining about browser, are actually root cause of problem.

Quick solution can be if website is trying to act as "app", should only be app, leave web for just reading hypertext and links. Any lightweight browser can handle that.

But again we will have to draw an imaginary line between websites and apps.

</comment><comment><USER46> What would be the leanest linux browser option if one HAD to use Google Docs. I am assuming there would be no practical way for a typical user (read "not a software engineer") to do that in a text only environment.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is a great read. I spend so much time fighting the web. If you want to maintain a shred of privacy you then have to regularly read about all the latest trackers, dns monitors, browser fingerprinting techniques, shady vpns, blocking social domains, etc, and even then you're probably not very anonymous or private.

I hadn't ever really considered just giving up on the browser before. But I think yeah, maybe it's time. The web has become such an awful cesspool of surveillance capitalism, I'm tired of fighting it all.

</comment><comment><USER48> there are many websites that are fine and good in a console browser. i hear about captchas and such and i never get them but my web browsing behavior may be different. that said i do still need a browser for specific purposes but not captchas but script specific that console browser can not simulate yet that is very rare. this is coming from some one who uses a console browser as their main browser. i do have a phone that i use for browsing on the go and other wise but do not consider it my main.

</comment><comment><USER49> I hope something like elinks, but on top of Servo (the parsers and JavaScript interpreter parts) would appear soon. While able to process modern Web, it would "render" in the console instead. And disable a lot of features.

</comment><comment><USER50> I never knew about the YouTube RSS feed. As someone who watched 36 hours of YouTube last week and has hundreds of subscriptions, this combination of RSS aggregator + MPV looks like the way to go.

<comment><USER51> Yeah, I used to rely on subscription notification emails, but those are uselessly unreliable. If I didn't watch one video of an uploader, Youtube would stop sending emails for some of that uploader's new videos that I _would_ have wanted to watch.

So when I discovered the RSS feeds, I just unsubscribed to everything from the website and added the feeds to my feed reader instead.

<comment><USER52> inoreader at least opens the links in line with full description, shielding you from having to go to the website at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> If "the most effective thing is going to be an ad blocker" then I'd encourage people to check out the Brave Browser ([https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)) which has ad blocker built in and will actually pay you for viewing ads.</comment>


Scientists Discover Material Harder Than Diamond - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news153658987.html <comment><USER2> Why is it that boron, nitrogen, and carbon have a lock on the really hard materials list?

Many really hard materials are xxx nitride or xxx carbide.

<comment><USER3> Off the top of my head, I would say it's because the atoms are small and they form lots of bonds, carbon in particular. Diamond is a tetrahedral structure and I think the other really hard substances are also,

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always wondered: just how hard are diamonds?

What would happen if I hammered one? Are they so strong as to become lodged into the head of the hammer, or the surface beneath the diamond? Are they _that_ hard?

<comment><USER5> _What would happen if I hammered one?_

AFAIK it would shatter because diamond is very brittle. Hardness != strength.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardness>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressive_strength>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neat. Does. Anyone know what impact this discovery could have? Is a harder- than-diamond substance useful? (The obvious use case is for diamond cutters.)

<comment><USER7> There are quite a few uses listed in the last paragraph of the article.

<comment><USER6> D'oh, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Welcome to The Lonsdaleite Age?</comment>


Uploads of 3D models are now unlimited for free on Sketchfab - <AUTHOR> http://sketchfab.com/overlord

<comment><USER2> Congratulations guys :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Open bar for how long?

</comment><comment><USER4> Free food !</comment>


Fourteen Year Old Firefox Bug Resolved - mike-cardwell https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=288704 <comment> mike-cardwell I've been following this 20 year old Firefox bug as I came up against it once: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4522](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4522) \- I just got a bugzilla alert because a 14 year old bug it depended on has now been fixed.

This bug has been fixed using a language that never even existed when it was submitted (Rust).

Just thought it was interesting.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What is interesting about this bug, except that it is 14 years old?

</comment><comment><USER2> It almost got a summer job and a learners' permit. Sad day. :'(</comment>


Statement on UK by UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23881&LangID=E <comment><USER2> The cause of this can be traced back to Thatcher and the tory government of the 1980s. They are responsible for planting the seeds of poverty in the UK which continue to flourish under the current tory government.</comment>