Show HN: 30 Hour Jobs – a job board for shorter work weeks - <AUTHOR> https://30hourjobs.com <comment><USER3> If you want a shorter workweek you should definitely sign up for the 30 Hour Jobs list ([https://30hourjobs.com/](https://30hourjobs.com/)), but—keep in mind there just aren't that many companies that have advertised positions that qualify.

Which doesn't mean you should give up. What you can do as a programmer is _negotiate_ a shorter workweek. I've done it at multiple jobs, personally.

Here's one programmer I talked who has been working 4 day a week for 15 years: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time- programmer...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer/)

And if you want to do it yourself, the easiest place to do it is at your current job: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/25/4-day-workweek- easy-...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/01/25/4-day-workweek-easy-way/)

(And for those who will chime in explaining how no company will ever agree to this, here are some more examples of people who have done it: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/05/09/part-time- software-d...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/05/09/part-time-software- developer/))

<comment><USER4> Tim Ferris got famous (arguably) writing a book about this. It's a bit winding and some of the content is out of date, but the general concepts are good - Four Hour Workweek, probably most here have already heard of it / read it though.

I'm mildly surprised at people's skepticism though, this has been a thing for a while.

<comment><USER3> His main point is to have people start their own businesses. Whereas what I'm talking about (and in fact also wrote a book about: [https://codewithoutrules.com/3dayweekend/](https://codewithoutrules.com/3dayweekend/)) is working shorter hours while still being an employee.

<comment><USER4> Well, I won't argue what the main point is, I have no idea (I remember the book as being very meandering). But he definitely addressed how someone should get less hours at their job. As I recall:

1\. Find an excuse to work from home. Sick, doctor's appointment, just say you wanna work from home, whatever.

2\. On that day, get more work done than you've ever done before.

3\. Do this consistently.

4\. Request regular fridays off, point to your increased productivity.

5\. Rinse and repeat until you're totally remote.

6\. Reduce actual working hours, taking advantage of less distracting environment and more flexible hours to maintain productivity.

7\. Automate wherever possible.

<comment><USER5> Does he really suggest lying to your employer?

<comment><USER4> To take a sick day off? I don't really remember, don't let me put words in his mouth. As I recall it was framed like "find a way to get a day off. Wait until you need to take a sick day if need be."

I really wouldn't read too much into my decade-old-take. I read the book last in 2014.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the past few years I've gone to 30 hour weeks. It really frustrated my managers at Google, but as an hourly contractor I neither needed the extra money nor wanted to be at work any more than that. Working 40 hours feels like I'm just burning my life away.

Even though the managers didn't like it, they kept extending my contract until the two year maximum came up. Then I found a new employer who was eager to hire me. I told them if I could work four days a week and about 30 hours a week, I'd take the job.

He agreed and actually it's working really well for both of us. He doesn't actually need a huge amount of work done, I'm just working on some side projects he never has time for. The perpetual three day weekends give me a genuine sense of freedom on weekends that I haven't felt before. Previously the two day weekend was stressful. With the three day weekend I have plenty of time for side projects (which I do constantly), and I've recently bought a mountain bike. Ive finally got time to do my weekend chores while still enjoying myself. And I work 10-30 hours a week in a really chill environment. All my bills are paid and I have time to live my life. I'm 34.

It's hard to find this kind of situation, but let me assure you - it's well worth pursuing and it's life changing.

Also my managers at google didn't like my 30 hour a week schedule and they didn't want to hire me full time at the end of my contract, but they also didn't let me go. If you want to explore this, make yourself useful and be a little pushy. It's well worth it.

<comment><USER7> Have you considered taking Wednesdays off? I can't remember where I saw it (probably HN), but it breaks up long work weeks so that you only have two consecutive work days in a row. I'd be eager to try that if I had a 30 hour work week.

<comment><USER6> I haven't! The four day a week gig is relatively new, but Monday off is pretty nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was once in a position where I really wanted this, I even made a post on Ask HN ~2 years ago in hopes to generate some discussion and find resources about it [1].

Things have changed for me since then. A year ago, out of mostly good luck, I landed on a fully remote software engineer position (not having remote experience before). We don't have an overwork culture and stick to mostly 40-hour work weeks. Some days are longer and some are shorter, sure, like in most tech startups.

Ultimately, it feels like I'm saving much, much more time just by not commuting. This is not just saving the 2-3 hours per day commute (typical for SF bay area), which is huge on its own, but also a lot of little pieces of time throughout the day -- you can sneak in time to do some housework chores during idling minutes at work (unload the dishwasher when you take your coffee mug back to the kitchen!), you can make a quick lunch in ~2 minutes at home instead of having to go out (even down to the cafe to line up for free food, in the case of big cos).

The end result is that even though I still work mostly 40-hour work weeks, it feels almost like moving to part time work. The best thing about it is you still get full benefits (health insurance is expensive on your own!), and base pay is relatively decent (not as high as SF startups, but still a lot higher than part time employment). And I'm doing fulfilling work that I like, and spending my time productively, to boot.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808178)

<comment><USER9> >you can make a quick lunch in ~2 minutes at home

Do you mean either 1) just heating up some left-over food, or 2) just heating up an instant meal packet of some kind?

Because otherwise I don't know how you can make a lunch in 2 minutes - <USER2> other possibility I can think of is sandwich(es) with already ready-made or already-prepared ingredients. Note: emphasis on the word "make", not "buy".

<comment><USER10> I'll have you know that chocolate is a perfectly scrumptious lunch. You don't need to heat it, but that is fine.

Sandwich recipe: Spread chocolate sauce on a chocolate bar. Spread chocolate frosting on another chocolate bar. Place them together, frosting against sauce, to finish the sandwich.

<comment><USER9> I've read that ancient Central / South Americans used to have chocolate mainly as a drink, and sometimes with chillies (both plants - cacao and chile - originated thereabouts, I've read). I've recently started having a cup or two of warm milk with sambar podi (powder, a hottish Indian spice mix :) First thought it was an unconventional idea that I had come up with, then later remembered that there are masala milk powders sold in India (not containing milk powder, just with masalas (spice mixes) which you mix (boil or heat) with regular milk and then drink it). Good for health, particularly in winter or for colds, and tastes good too.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambar_(dish)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambar_\(dish\))

[https://www.google.com/search?q=sambar+powder](https://www.google.com/search?q=sambar+powder)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=masala+milk](https://www.google.com/search?q=masala+milk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone,

I created this newsletter and job board because I've noticed a trend in companies measuring employee output with results instead of hours worked.

I strongly believe that overwork is a problem in society right now. I'm hoping to bolster the community of people that share this belief and to help solve this problem.

I should also clarify that 30 Hour Jobs is the title here but I would like to capture companies of all sorts that support a flexible work week or simply embrace work/life balance and/or reduced hours in some way.

<comment><USER11> You stole my idea. :)

Anyway, maybe you should put interviews of people who made it successfully. Surely there are some people who work 20-30 hours per week in this world and make some good money.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea, thanks! :)

<comment><USER12> We have 2 engineers at IPinfo.io that have ~30 hour jobs, and I'm sure they'd be interested in talking. Email me at firstname.lastname@example.com and I can out you in touch. We're also open to hiring more people with similar hours!

<comment><USER13> Hey I think I'm one of them! I've actually worked 30h weeks for the past 2.5 years. It's amazing, i'll be happy to talk about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I renegotiated my job down to 4 days taking a 20% salary cut (a bit less because of progressive taxes). I'm a bit flexible, sometimes working 5 days a week and then 3. This is a win-win for me and my employer because in dire times I can sometimes work 125%.

On the downside it feels I do about the same amount of work as I was doing when I worked 100%. Just less slack. But then I'm well paid for my 80% (after some raises).

<comment><USER15> I did the same thing around 2 years ago, going from 5x 7.5h days to 4x 7.5h days, taking a 20% pay cut in the process.

The extra family and side-project time I get has been well worth it.

I honestly don't feel like I'm any less productive, my employer is getting a pretty good deal!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think 30 hours is much more realistic for cognitively intensive work. Assuming people are not wasting a lot of time.

So this makes sense to me. And I love that the jobs I am seeing on there are remote.

However, the 30 hours thing reminds me of one issue that has occurred for me as a remote contract worker over the years which is a lack of benefits. Now, I know that supposedly everyone can just charge a ton of money and then easily cover all of their own insurance and other needs. For many people that works out. However, there is a large section of the market that, whether people want to admit it or not, does not have resources that really stretch to cover benefits with the pay that they offer.

And so these small companies hire people like me who want or need remote work, and they specifically avoid going over 30 hours so that they can get around laws related to benefits. I have had several 'contracts' like this. They were all in my opinion normal employment except that they made a weak attempt at avoiding employment laws by forbidding invoicing over 30 hours and maybe a few other things.

To be honest, I am very bad at networking and have been glad to have those opportunities. However, not having things like health insurance or a retirement fund is a pretty big issue.

</comment><comment><USER17> I know everyone wants to judge productivity instead of hours per week. But, I feel that 40 hours per week is a reasonable amount to request and that MOST (not all) employees are better managed by an hour standard instead of a productivity standard (which is hard to measure anyways). All of my employees work from home and at first I was all about judging by productivity, but then I realized it was being abused for the most part and that if I set rules for timings and hours worked, it would be simpler and easier, at least for now.

<comment><USER18> > I feel that 40 hours per week is a reasonable amount

I disagree. I want to work less and live more.

<comment><USER19> I'm genuinely curious why anyone would think differently. Life is not work - get out and live a little.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I once had an employer who was financially constrained and needed to reduce my time on my project to 50%. I was given the choice of working the other half of my time on another project, or simply only working 50% time at the company (along with a 50% pay cut).

I chose the latter and had the time of my life. It felt kinda like my contracting days in the sense that I had a ridiculous amount of free time, except I didn't have to chase contracts or report hours. I still got paid twice a month and kept my benefits.

Some people thought I was crazy for choosing that option, but I typically value my time more than money, and any engineer can live just fine on 50% pay.

</comment><comment><USER21> So nice to see more and more companies focusing on sustainable working hours.

I'm curious how you go about finding these companies to write about. Have you already heard of them? Do they reach out? Do you have some special search terms to find them?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment I spend time researching companies and other related media myself. [https://keyvalues.io](https://keyvalues.io) has been a great resource!

There are some readers of the newsletter that have shared their own employer's work/life balance philosophies and open positions too which has been great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> in crazy liberal Europe you see plenty of IT jobs advertised as 80-100%, i.e. potential for the candidate to negotiate a 4 vs 5 day work week. (examples [https://www.jobs.ch/en/vacancies/information-technology- tele...](https://www.jobs.ch/en/vacancies/information-technology-telecom/) )

My colleagues in Switzerland who took this path were either fathers that directed that extra day to their child, or people with a vibe for the outdoors and exploring . It gave an impression of financial stability and level- headedness in my mind. And demonstrated that these people were employable and valuable enough to contribute good value over 4 days per week.

So I think it is a good look for an employer to have these approaches in place. As downsides for the rest of us, yes meetings would sometimes need to be delayed and certain crunch periods had the awkward obstacle of a 3-day weekend for some team members, but I hope the 80% employee demonstrates flexibility to help hit deliveries when necessary.

<comment><USER23> > yes meetings would sometimes need to be delayed and certain crunch periods > had the awkward obstacle of a 3-day weekend for some team members

If both are an issue, then it is a sure sign the company has other issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I for one don't agree about hours in general, be it 30 hours or 40 hours per week. I like to think in goals, do we have to finish X this quarter? Break down the task into segments, and break it down more into weekly sprints. You can then estimate what tasks can be done for the week without taking into account hours worked. The only caveat is you need an experienced engineer/product that knows the complexity of the feature and/or codebase. We've found this has let to happier employees since the work is variable with some weeks being heavy work, and some light so there's a good balance of stress. You are also able to manage your own time so if you work better early morning or late at night, you can do it as long as you're productive. This also opens up more opportunities for you to use your "regular" 9-5 time to workout or go places. For example, you'd be surprised on how nice it is to go shopping in the mall on a wed at 1pm or watch a movie mon at 10am.

<comment><USER25> Many people strongly prefer a predictable work week (be it 30 hours or 50 hours) since they have families, hobbies, etc.

If my boss came to me and told me the next few weeks I had to work every day until 8pm instead of 6pm, it would obliterate my life outside work. And I'd start looking for a new job...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The first job I clicked on is advertising a 40 hour working week.. [https://jobs.30hourjobs.com/jobs/4d4823a6-661c-451a-8418-6e8...](https://jobs.30hourjobs.com/jobs/4d4823a6-661c-451a-8418-6e896199a41f)

<comment><AUTHOR> You can read more about thoughtbot in issue #2: [https://us19.campaign- archive.com/?u=f8a0d9af744b2eb7002632d...](https://us19.campaign- archive.com/?u=f8a0d9af744b2eb7002632dbe&id=52d13af55d)

<comment><USER27> While I absolutely support allowing employees to spend a day a week on self- improvement, even if I were willing to consider those hours not work hours, it'd still be 32 hours.

<comment><USER28> I think it's because 30 supposedly sounds/looks better than 32. 32 is 4x8 after all, so I imagine many "30h jobs" would turn out to be 32h.

Example: [https://wildbit.com/blog/2017/10/19/4-day-work-week- update](https://wildbit.com/blog/2017/10/19/4-day-work-week-update) (also found a job offer by this company on the board).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As someone approaching middles ages with a family to take care of, this is something I really appreciate and have bookmarked. I hope it takes off and does well.

</comment><comment><USER30> why is 30 the go-to length for shorter work weeks? I chose 32 because it's 4/5 of 40. I work four days a week instead of five and im not worried about how many hours I put in.

I've been part time for a year and a half. I realized I was earning more money than I needed and that I wanted more time to enjoy life. My employer, a FAANG company, offered a proportional cut to salary and stock grants.

<comment><USER16> After 30 hours is full time and they may need to pay benefits.

<comment><USER30> at-least 30 hours is full time, 30 hour or 32 hour employee requires benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Number of hours still seems like the wrong unit of measurement to me. Shouldn't companies care more about productivity?

<comment><USER32> And what's a good productivity metric?

<comment><USER33> Widgets created

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Managing to secure work-from-home employment, initially three days, and currently four days, allowed me to keep working when we hit a high needs situation with one of our kids.

Sometimes working less than five days a week can be not so much a work/life balance choice for the privileged, but a work/life necessity thrust upon you by circumstance.

So I applaud your efforts to provide more options.

I also applaud your providing RSS feeds for dinosaurs like me. I recommend adding a <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> element to the <head> of the page to improve it's visibility.

</comment><comment><USER35> I really hope this picks up and I'll keep a close eye on this job board for sure. Great idea!

</comment><comment><USER36> Interesting, but I don't think it is as easily cracked as simply creating a 30hr job board.

Certainly there are people who want to work 30hrs because on balance they will be more productive per hour. Perhaps even enough to offset the overall reduction in work hours. However, there are also people who simply want to do less work. Being the job board that collects applicants who's primary variable is minimizing hours worked is not a super positive signal.

From the employer perspective many of the most important and high value jobs are more likely to be perceived as 50hr/week jobs rather than 30hr/week jobs. Not to mention that 30hrs is a common break point between fulltime and part time, with the associated legal differences in benefits and such.

Sadly a 50hr job board might be vastly more successful.

<comment><USER3> "Minimizing hours worked" is a great positive sign. You hire a programmer to solve problems (or better yet, identify and solve problems), not to sit on their butt for the maximum number of hours.

There's always a limited amount of resources (time, money, etc), regardless of how many hours are worked. So someone whose goal is minimizing hours worked will tend to come up with much better solutions than someone whose only solution is to work longer hours. Because instead of saying "I'll just work longer!" they'll actively try to come up with a fundamentally more efficient solution.

(Long version: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/02/11/working-long- hours/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/02/11/working-long-hours/))

<comment><USER37> > "Minimizing hours worked" is a great positive sign. You hire a programmer to > solve problems (or better yet, identify and solve problems), not to sit on > their butt for the maximum number of hours.

That assumes the client is paying by the problem and not by the other. Sadly, while there is project work, every place I've worked has also had a huge emphasis on billable hours.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, billable hours is bad (for everyone). Jonathan Stark talks about this a lot: [https://jonathanstark.com/](https://jonathanstark.com/)

Lots of programming jobs aren't tied to that, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am planning my first hire and I will follow the 1 day per month off.

It can be a Monday or a Friday per month, it cannot be moved to other month and accumulated for longer vacations.

This day can be used to catch up obligations, relax or be combined with a normal vacation time to extend the off period.

<comment><USER39> That just sounds unnecessarily complicated, why not just some number up to 12 extra days' regular holiday?

<comment><USER28> Balancing out a missing team member 12 times a year for one day vs. once a year for up to 16 days (12 days + 2 weekends with 2 days each) is much more justifiable for the employer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Self-promotion, but I wrote about my search for part-time work in a full-time world: [https://smalldata.dev/posts/pay-me- less/](https://smalldata.dev/posts/pay-me-less/)

<comment><USER3> What you're doing (only mentioning you want part-time after you get offer) is a good first step. More suggestions:

1\. You're underselling yourself in this page, so you might be doing that in your interviews too. E.g. "SALE! For a limited time only - 40% off!" Yes, it's a joke, but you don't want to make jokes about how you're cheap when you're looking for a job.

2\. Let's say you talk to company A, they give you offer for 100% time, you say "can I have 60%?" and they say "no". Don't walk away. Instead, say "let me think about that for a week or two." Now, when the next week you get offer from company B, you can say "I have an offer from another company, but I like you more... maybe we can work something out. How about 60%?"

Having that extra offer makes you seem more valuable.

3\. Don't give up. Sometime this takes a while, and if you treat this as something you're practicing, every interview you do you will help you improve.

(I also wrote a book about negotiating a 3-day weekend; 60% is harder, but it's the same basic advice: [https://codewithoutrules.com/3dayweekend/](https://codewithoutrules.com/3dayweekend/))

<comment><USER41> 6 years ago (pretty early in my career) I was working for a small consulting company in San Fransisco and negotiated a 4 day workweek for a paycut (as well as going remote). The schedule was awesome, but I did see one big downside - you inherently start falling behind the full time employees. Everyone else is working full time, so they tend to accomplish more than you. Also, you end up missing out on important meetings that will inevitably happen on your day off. Over time, when important projects came up, they would not be given to me since I would deliver them slower and also sometimes didn't have background on them since I missed meetings where they were discussed. Eventually I quit out of boredom and career stagnation.

I am curious if you experienced any of these things, how you handled them, or how you managed to avoid them.

Now, I find that the model that works better for me is to work full time, but take big (many month) breaks between projects. I would still love to work 4 days a week though, just didn't work out for me in practice.

<comment><USER3> What you're describing are symptoms of not-so-great management, basically. Similar problems will occur if you're the only remote employee. And to be fair not-so-great management is fairly common.

I actually think if you work less you can and often will learn to become more productive ([https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/02/11/working-long- hours/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/02/11/working-long-hours/)). But—a priori one would expect you to accomplish 80% of what others do, and that should be fine with a good manager.

So some ideas:

* You want to choose your day off so there isn't conflict with important meetings. If important meetings happen randomly, yes, this can be an issue.

* Become more productive. That is, produce more within the limits of your time. A lot of this is attitude—"I have limited time, how do I get this done more efficiently?" Sometimes that means spending more time planning! I talk a bit about that here: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/25/the-01x-programmer/) and [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-softwa...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/10/10/beyond-senior-software-engineer/) and [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/05/20/staying-focused/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/05/20/staying-focused/), in a variety of different approaches. And other articles on my site.

* Get a job someplace with good management. They do exist.

* If there's a variety of tasks, focus on ones where you can have high impact without requirement for fast turnaround. E.g. I did this at one job where there was the "we need this tool tomorrow!!!" tasks, but also the "if we don't get this algorithm working in 6 months, all this work is wasted". So I took on the algorithm, because a lot of the work was _thinking_, instead of desperately churning out code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I will use this when I can hire. BUT there is an interesting angle on this is it means managers need to get enough value out of a 30hr team member.

There are lots of smart optimizations I could use to do that (clear roles, efficient meetings, managing task intensity), but there is this general problem of who is holding the risk in the business.

If you miss a client commitment or the sales people want to blame losing a sale on someone else, the first place they are going to go is the 30hr person "not pulling their weight."

In development, I think most pro developers would be massively more productive if they didn't have to waste away in an office 8h/day. But when you get out into the field where the business is about relationships, which are in turn about perceptions and commitments, in an enterprise environment, I guarantee a customer will say, "nice product, but if you can't demonstrate your ability to get me feature X by next quarter, and this competitor can, I'm going to scuttle this deal."

The salesperson whose commission is riding on this goes back to the product manager and says, "We're going to lose this high profile deal the CEO is watching because your engineers are soft and lazy? wtf?"

The PM goes to the CTO and says, "the survival of the company depends on deals like this, I need your people to burn the midnight oil."

CTO goes to engineering manager, "so this 30hr/week person, get them full time or get them out, we can't have this liability."

Eng manager says, "but they are my best developer! This is how we attract and retain the talent that makes this possible!"

CTO says, "get it done."

Eng manager writes email and starts the manage-out paper trail to 30hr person, "as per my last request to get these items done, we need to improve your performance..."

30hr super-developer receives weirdly formal email from manager, updates linkedin, starts pinging recruiters.

I'd wager 30hr weeks are a great way for startups to get talent they couldn't otherwise afford, but it will be temporary in their growth phase, as the above scenario is inevitable once they have momentum.

<comment><USER28> Have all your team members work 30h and the "not pulling their weight" argument is gone.

Or if that is not sustainable/beneficial for other types of jobs than developer, only apply the 30h to your developer team. But do it consistent per team.

Another thought, I haven't seen this dynamic with part-time employees, so I don't think it applies to 30h employees either. Have you seen this with part- time employees?

<comment><USER42> Interestingly, part time is a different relationship than a compensation structure that is vague and discretionary. Part time people don't get high profile projects because when it's high profile, the point is to have every resource on it.

Regarding the CTO being incompetent in the other comment, the CTO is not incompetent for delegating authority to "get it done." Their priority is delivery and positioning the company. Do they seem weak? Sure, but how much political capital should a CTO spend on a part time jr. staff member vs. the sales organization?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The thoughtbot jobs say they are 40 hour a week jobs in the description.

<comment><USER43> >"30 Hour Jobs is a job board for job seekers and employers who believe that shorter workweeks can lead to increased productivity and higher job satisfaction."

Doesn't mean you actually have to offer only 30 hrs.

<comment><USER44> Does kind of defeat the purpose though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I work 4 days a week from home, one day off. No commute, having a whole day with my daughter (wife works on that day) and it's great! I also think I will look back at this time and really appreciate my decision when I get older.

I also know we are very lucky to be in a position to live like that. Others just don't have the luxury and need to work more because of the money.

</comment><comment><USER46> The issue is that when you work 30 hours you are still really working with the same output as 40 hours. You will basically squeeze the 5 days into 4.

I honestly feel it's easier to find a regular job and work from home 1 or 2 days a week and manage your week in such a way that you perform all your tasks in 4 days.

</comment><comment><USER47> IT managers really need to heed this advice. Not everyone is working for Tesla. There may be a few times a year one needs to sprint through. And that's even fun. But consistent 50+ hours workweeks are bad for company, bad for employee and bad for the economy.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm surprised there's a listing based in San Francisco. I'm not surprised many of them are remote.

</comment><comment><USER49> If I had the option to reduce my working hours by 25%, I would actually prefer to accrue the extra time as vacation, so that I can take several weeks off at once.</comment>


Thoughts on CSEXP – A compact data serialization format - <AUTHOR> https://write.emacsen.net/thoughts-on-canonical-s-expressions <comment><USER2> I like most Conspack, it supports many more datatypes while still staying simple: [https://github.com/conspack/cl- conspack](https://github.com/conspack/cl-conspack)</comment>


An App for maintaining a "Wanna Watch" movie list - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the process of building this social web app that lets you maintain "Wanna Watch" movie list and discover new movies via friends.<p>Kindly help me by sparing a minute to take this survey : http://polldaddy.com/s/DB8919ED6D08FEA4 <comment><USER2> Love the questions. I really think this could a more useful app if it fulfilled both sides of the equation: let me enter movies I want to see, and remind me of when those movies are in theaters near me/released on DVD or Blu- ray.

I don't see the social aspect as really playing much of a role, at least outside the 1% of hardcore die-hard users.

</comment><comment><USER3> The last question was interesting.:)I am assuming the monetization strategy is to provide links to amazon/itunes as referrals.

Kidding aside, a simple app would be great. Having lots of unnecessary feature would turn me off though.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the responses guys. The survey has helped me understand various aspects of the app. Somethings that i never thought about in the first place, have become priorities now..

</comment><comment><USER4> It really needs an iPhone app, so when I'm at the movies and see a really cool trailer I can add it to the list. The app needs to be ultra smooth though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Actually, I am developing similar application. I think we should have a discussion about it and join the forces if feasible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey.. thats great news.. Are you on twitter ? I'm @shrihari. We'll discuss abt this..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> COngrats.... Wishing u a grant success !

</comment><comment><USER7> Netflix

Amazon.com lists

iTunes Ping

Facebook has at least one movie app

Reinventing the wheel.

<comment><USER8> Don't listen to this guy. Create your web app.</comment></comment>


Service for Some, Slavery for Others - <AUTHOR> http://gerrymcgovern.com/service-for-some-slavery-for-others/ <comment><USER2> Good customer support agents are highly valued by many tech companies where support is a key value-add to their solution. Three of the companies I have worked for paid very well for top-tier CX employees.

Just like some developers are treated by their companies as an expense, other companies highly value developers and pay them well. This is the same with customer support, and good support agents who are feeling mistreated find higher-end jobs.

Good waiters at restaurants work at high-end establishments and make good salaries. In a free society, people flow towards better jobs that are a better match for their skillset.

You don't need to feel that you live in a digital hellscape populated by slaves, as the author proposes. The person driving your Uber likely chose that to make money, rather than all the other ways they could have made money, because they prefer it.

There is a popular theme lately being promoted by educated, well-off people that society is being destroyed by mobile apps, Facebook, on-demand food- delivery service, etc. It's really not. Go enjoy your day and stop getting yourself worked up.

<comment><USER3> > The person driving your Uber likely chose that to make money, rather than > all the other ways they could have made money, because they prefer it.

or didn't perceive the other ways, or didn't have resources for other ways, or wasn't approved for the subset of other ways that they both perceived and had resources for

<comment><USER2> You assume that uber drivers are ignorant. I assume that people know how to live their own lives. They had the resources to acquire a car and a driver's license. There are many, many worse jobs out there than driving a car.

<comment><USER4> Most ridesharing drivers are ignorant of the expenses they're incurring, and therefore the effective wage they're receiving. Just because you know how to survive doesn't mean you know how to calculate the return on your time and vehicle investment (clearly, as American personal finance education is woefully inadequate).

I find arguments such as that put forth as deeply disingenuous, that most people are rational, exceptionally educated economic actors (if you can convince someone to give you an auto loan and a drivers license, which are extremely low bars, than you can clearly determine if gig economy work is in your best interests), when overwhelming evidence proves otherwise. To me, it comes off as justifying exploitation (ie "the gig economy"), which clearly has no place in first world countries or this century. But, with the number of tech workers who are employed at highly compensated at exploitative entities, I am not surprised in the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are of the view that everyone does what they do because they're somehow economically forced into it then you're going to see the world as a very dark place indeed.

Whether you're correct in that view or not is almost irrelevant because the effect will be the same. It's going to infect your every interaction.

Honestly, I find this more of a common sentiment amongst historically well off folk. I grew up poor and this sort of "everything is awful because we're slaves" mindset didn't exist.

Not everyone has the skill or capital to apply for any job or start any business tomorrow. That much is obvious. That's a very different concept from slavery.

</comment><comment><USER6> I hate "analysis" like this, which is divorced from data or trends over time to make fair comparisions. Here are some actual questions worth answering, and likely could be, based upon data:

\- What income levels are Uber drivers (and others being paid by these companies) within their region? How do these wages compare to other non- skilled, non-physical labor?

\- When asked, what do these workers say about their working conditions? Why do they choose to work for these companies vs some other low-skill job?

\- What about mobility? What is the average duration of a person's "career" as an Uber driver? What is the distribution of outcomes? What events typically cause entry and exit from a contract relationship with Uber?

I am genuinely curious if the prevalence always-available of low-barrier-to- entry/exit, low physical labor "gigs" like Uber has resulted in increased income mobility, standard of living, etc, for those working for these companies. It seems that the kinds of questions by this author are only relevant insofar as companies like Uber have displaced other opportunities or driven down the standard of living of their contractors. One factor that seems particularly troubling is the fact these contractors are not employees, and so have no bargaining power, benefits, etc, which may become normalized due to the introduction of these jobs as other companies try to compete for these workers.

It's unclear to me if Uber et all simply add more jobs for the unskilled labor pool to consider or in fact are having a negative effect on bargaining power, average wages, and income mobility compared to the previous regime of unskilled, non-physical labor opportunity pool (retail, fast food, etc.)

It sure would be nice if there was a clear answer to this question based upon data.

<comment><USER7> _When asked, what do these workers say about their working conditions?_

My sample is quite small, but from quick chats with Uber drivers they seemed to like it.

You won't become a millionaire driving Uber, but it's better than being a deli clerk in a grocery store next door.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how their feelings might change when the maintenance costs come home to roost, when their frequent driving involves them in an accident their insurance company refuses to cover (because they have personal use insurance), and now they have neither car nor job, etc.

Basically, it seems to me that there is a lot of deferred cost and risk and that people are, in general, very bad at assessing. Perhaps the job is not worth it if you factor in these long term factors, but most people have not yet had to factor them in. (As our OP said, data would be nice here. When do these costs come home for drivers? What do they say then?)

One thing I will say. Professionalization and licensure certainly brings its own hazards, but one thing it almost always does is drive up wages for the licensee. The taxi market in NYC is wacked out, but taxi drivers can usually enjoy a decent standard of living in major metros with licensed taxi systems.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, Uber provides insurance for its drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is much bigger than the existence of these gig economy services. The deeper issue is that demand for unskilled labor has become weak enough that, for many people, this is their best option relative to their skill set. Working conditions _are_ terrible, but I don't think it would be a good thing for the world if Uber and the rest of the gig economy services magically disappeared one day: it would simply put the drivers into a financial tailspin with no real chance of escape. Moreover, Uber and Lyft are in a race to the bottom in terms of prices, and neither can unilaterally raise driver wages without pushing riders to the other app. The global economic rat race to drive down prices is unrelenting.

I suspect that universal basic income will become extremely popular in the public view, bordering on necessity, to offset the rise in inequality in the United States.

</comment><comment><USER10> We are all a slave to the needs of our own body. When I'm hungry for instance (or anticipate being hungry), I act to serve that slave master.

If you offer to pay me to drive you from point A to B and I freely accept, you do not become my slave master just because you exploit my need to serve my true master. I would be worse off if you failed to exploit that need.

The final slave master is mother nature, and she's a heartless bitch. It's frequently easier to blame our fellow slaves. The true slave masters are the ones that offer pain instead of cash for your labor.

If you want to blame an actual person for your pain and identify them as your slave master, the one with the most choice in the matter was probably your mother. Blame her. And also give her a call and tell her you love her, because it's almost Mother's Day, and there are good parts to being alive too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Uber is making life of Uber drivers better, by giving them the option to be an Uber driver and providing customers and rules of engagement. It creates new means of earning a living, instead of taking it away. What is even the question? It is not the best job in the world, but surely beats no job at all.

<comment><USER12> "no job at all" means welfare, which may give you the time and training opportunity to get a better job

<comment><USER11> There are many people who are not allowed or don't have the opportunity to get welfare (immigrants, people who lose the competition for welfare — it is not a straightforward process, etc.) Not to mention that welfare is not limitless and usually quite low compared to working income, even from driving Uber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen > For instance, Uber seeks to ride to a mega IPO on the backs of its slave > drivers.

Note that a "slave driver" is a kind of overseer that makes the slaves work harder. "Drivers who are slaves" might work better here.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hmm I feel like Billionaires are an easy target. And while the narrative is easy to sell, I doubt it's the real answer. My belief is that wrong kind of complexity created the current state. Take Healthcare, Manufactured scarcity of doctors, lawsuits, layers of insurance, pharmacy benefits managers, mergers of hospitals all lead to the present dysfunctional state. Did few billionaires profit off of it sure, but the blame lies on overly complex system of intermediary agents all bleeding the system. The answer might as well be Medicare for All.

</comment><comment><USER14> This kind of perspective is pretty much the standard perspective of the European left. Saying these things is almost like saying nothing, because it's what you expect.

</comment><comment><USER15> If the proverbial 'man from mars' took a look at developed Western society what might he see? A middle aged man gets up at 7am and climbs into a car, conveniently parked right beside the shabby dwelling he sleeps in. He then spends the next 18 hours ferrying other people from location to location stopping only to use the toilet. He eats when he can - maybe a rushed sandwich during a 5 minute quiet period until he is again summoned to the next person. At the end of the day he returns to his starting point and, exhausted, collapses into his bed. The next day he repeats this.

The man from mars concludes that this person must be a slave.

<comment><USER16> Could you not apply the same logic to any occupation?

I get out of bed, head to an office and build software on the orders of those who pay me, I get summoned to meetings at their behest, I work long hours, only stopping to go to the toilet, I too get home and collapse into bed to repeat the next day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author takes the etymology of the word service notices that it is based on the word slavery and decides to conflate all service jobs with slavery.</comment>


Six Months of Pinboard - <AUTHOR> http://pinboard.in/blog/57/

<comment><USER2> I have been using pinboard for 6+ months, excellent service, does exactly what you want a bookmarking service to do. And, Maceiej and PVG are very responsive.

<comment><USER3> Glad to hear you're finding the service useful. Beside eliminating spam and keeping growth manageable, the 'every user is a paying user' model is a very effective motivator for providing prompt response to customer feedback, bug reports, feature requests, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      >> Today, Pinboard has grown to about 1200 active users,
      >> we store copies of all bookmarks in an account for $25 per year
      >> the site has reached the point where I can work on it full-time

That's pretty impressive, low living costs?

Lets say 1% sign up to premium, that's 12 premium accounts, @ $25/yr for a total of $300/year or $25/month :/

Cool to see this sort of post though, and great to hear peoples progress etc.

<comment><USER5> Additional income comes from signup - current fee is $5.69 to join. They increase the cost by $0.001 each time a user signs up. (not where they started the price, but assuming $0.01 that could be another $16190.90)

I like the idea of charging a nominal fee to signup (or perhaps just to have a "pro" account)

<comment><USER4> Ah sorry, I missed that :) Interesting.

How do you get $16k :/

Avg price = ($5.69 + ($5.69 - $0.001 * 1200)) / 2

= $5.09

$5.09 * 1200 = $6,108

<comment><USER3> 1200 is not the total number of users.

<comment><USER4> ah. The important word being '1200 _active_ users'?

I'll stop trying to over analyze now :)

Congrats on growth so far anyway

<comment><USER3> Thanks! And you're right, it's active users and I think they were defined as 'used in last 30 days' in the draft Maciej showed me but it seems to have somehow dropped out of the final post.

As to over-analyzing, it's the meat and potatoes of HN. I'd be happy to clarify or answer any questions (best posted at top level as HN likes to assume deep-nesting is a sign of a dreadful flame-war and imposes its timed lockouts).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does Pinboard have a Firefox extension (or plans for one)? I'd love to have an alternative to Delicious, but the smoothness of their Firefox integration is so good it not only keeps me using Delicious, it also keeps me using Firefox.

Some reasons I like it so much:

* Ctrl-D to bookmark, just like vanilla Firefox

* Ctrl-D on an already-bookmarked page to edit tags / description for that page

* Ctrl-B for an always-up-to-date bookmark pane, with FAYT by title or tag

* "Open in tabs" for any tag (I use this daily for the webcomic update-checking ritual, and occasionally for actually useful things)

* Awesome Bar integration by title or tag (bit flaky but great when it works)

* Dropdowns for user-defined "favourite tags" in a menu bar (this plus a "todo" tag is almost as good, for me, as a natively supported "toread" feature)

<comment><USER3> It's something that's planned but I doubt it's going to be quite as heavyweight as the del one. Replacing the standard local bookmark shortcuts also seems a little intrusive to me. Open tag in tabs and and 'favourite tags' menu sound quite useful though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The post URLs form is responsive generally compared to delicious' form which at times is totally unresponsive.

</comment><comment><USER8> Feature point #1, "spare user interface" should be "sparse user interface"?

<comment><USER3> It's a user interface, not a matrix.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The only part of this I didn't really grok is that the blog says pvg was a co- founder of del.icio.us. I always thought the co-founders were @joshu and Pete Frietas.

<comment><USER9> Apparently not... <http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2005/05/yeah_sure_consi.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Random, non-thought provoking, press release in the shape of a blog.

The only semi-interesting (imo) tid-bit relayed is charging for services prevent spam, but that isn't new or uncommon.

<comment><USER11> These sort of data-supported, direct insights into personal experiences in entrepreneuship are valid and excellent content.

I upvoted the article and downvoted you for your bad mood ;)

<comment><USER10> Yes I was in a bad mood when I wrote the above, but I feel my point still stands. There was very little meat of anything to gain. Yes you see 6 months they obtained 1200 users, and it's sufficient to support the operations, and they didn't take any VC money. There was nothing in the article about what they overcame to get to their position. Maybe they didn't and got very lucky, but luck is just one aspect of getting a company successfully running. I'd be more interested in a recap 1.5 years from now where they have had more growing pains, more trials, and more interesting successes.

Alternately just say you want me to check out a centralized bookmarking site.</comment></comment></comment>


PopSlate, an E ink case for your iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.popslate.com/ <comment><USER3> Interesting. Tho' since I already know about yotaphone [ [http://yotaphone.com/in-en/](http://yotaphone.com/in-en/) ] this seems like a compromise. The 'second display' as a case does not seem to have the interactivity that the built-in display of yotaphone has. Also, you'd have to turn the bluetooth on to change display ...and yet another 'device' to charge, so well not for me.

I am waiting for yotaphone2 to be released

</comment><comment><USER4> I want a proper E-Inc smartphone, damn it! With no OLED screen. The number of times I used my cellphone to watch videos: 0, as far as I remember. Number of times I wished my phone had longer battery life and didn't auto-dim after 30 seconds: well, every single time I use it for more than 30 seconds.

Yeah, yeah, I know that you need fast screen for shooting videos. Whatever. I would settle for a phone with no camera and EInk screen without thinking twice.

<comment><USER3> I know what you mean. I feel the same way about not just the display but about phone having physical keys or qwerty keyboards ...I mean, the old casio and palms had it right for useful phones to get shit done as the _primary_ function and taking funny cat pics/videos or playing games as secondary. Ah well, I guess I am just old.

BTW, as far as E-ink displays are concerned, do you know about the yotaphone ? [http://yotaphone.com/in-en/](http://yotaphone.com/in-en/) ? The yotaphone2 is scheduled to be released sooish; I plan on getting one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Popslate is pretty cool, I saw it at MWC 2013 in February of 2013. I guess it never took off because it was too expensive.

Guess what - it's gotten more expensive ($129 now).

Bummer.

<comment><USER6> I came here to wonder about the price, and there's the answer. It's a pity that eInk is a great technology that remains horribly expensive. Not sure why; manufacturing yield? Rare inputs? Small volumes?

<comment><USER7> There's no proof that the product is at a particular price point just because one of the needed components is expensive.

It might just be priced at what they perceive that the market is willing to pay, this is kind of a luxury product with very little competition, after all.

<comment><USER8> Also it could be that they are going for the profit maximising price curve.

$129 is worth it; if you would use the functionality a lot. And they must be selling enough units at that price to make it worthwhile for them.

Without knowing their cost structure it's hard to say; if their production capacity is limited there may be no way to make enough to meet demand at a lower price.

The wiki page is interesting read [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I used to wear a Pebble watch every day and found it useful but not overly so. That needed charging every 5-7 days, and this claims to last a week on a single charge. I don't wear the pebble watch any more because as lazy as it sounds, I kept forgetting to charge it when it ran out of battery, and there were days where I was walking around with a dead watch, which was at that point essentially an expensive wristband.

With my phone, I know I need to charge it every day and it is a habit to plug it in just before I go to sleep every day. With the pebble, and I think this too, sometimes the battery would last 5 days, sometimes 8, and that irregular charging cycles means it's hard to form habits around charging.

It became annoying to remember to charge the Pebble and take it off and put it on again. The benefits from having it became less appealing. I fear the same might happen with this if I were to own it, and it would become a bulky iPhone case. At $129 it might be worth a punt but I'm skeptical.

<comment><USER10> This display is actually electronic paper, so the display doesn't use power once it's set. Power is just used by the bluetooth and rest of the bits to monitor for changes in the display. If they could let you switch it on only when you want to change it, it could likely last a lot longer. The Pebble has a fake "e-paper" screen that's actually not electronic paper, it's a black and white LCD which constantly draws paper.

<comment><USER11> e-paper, or electronic paper, is a generic term for any kind of display that doesn't work by emitting light, which the pebble, the popSLATE, and ereaders like the nook or kindle do. What you are describing is e-Ink, which is a specific implementation of a non-light-emitting screen generally used in ereaders.

That being said, it does seem that popSLATE is using a screen like what is used in an ereader, and not like what is used in the pebble.

<comment><USER10> The thing is, pre Pebble, everyone understood that both terms meant something that didn't use power once an image was displayed. The Pebble is the first product I was aware of that abused the term. Everyone I spoke to thought it was the same clear display used in an ereader when it's actually just similar tech to my retired Palm III.

<comment><USER11> I don't really think it abuses the term, since it doesn't require a backlight to display things, it is technically correct to call it e-paper. I also remember the people at Pebble discussing the differences between e-Ink and e-paper when it first came out. It's not like they hid how the Pebble's display worked.

Besides, an e-Ink screen would be a horrible experience given how the display gets used in the Pebble watch.

<comment><USER10> It always seemed purposely misleading to me. Heck they don't even use the term LCD in the technical specifications... which is odd because that's what it actually is. And it did work as I had multiple friends, including several technically minded ones, who were misled by Pebble's terminology and thought it was an ereader-quality display.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was standing behind someone in a queue for boarding a flight whose phone died from lack of charge as they were about to hand it over to be scanned - <USER2> having your boarding pass on an e-ink display might actually be a pretty good idea...

<comment><USER13> Is it really worth $129 so that you don't have to print out a paper copy of your boarding pass when your battery is low?

<comment> vertex-four A lot of people no longer have printers, or at least working ones. They'd have to find an Internet cafe and brave the risk of keyloggers, print things off at work, or get a document printing company to do it.

<comment><USER14> Or print it at a kiosk upon check-in?

<comment><USER15> I can check-in from my phone.

Edit: downvotes don't make that any less true. The situation the OP was observing could very well have been that the person had checked-in via phone and when boarding was starting, the phone's battery died.

<comment><USER12> Yes, she had an airline app that allowed you to check in using your phone. Not much use if your phone runs out of charge just when you are about to get it scanned to board the flight!

<comment><USER15> The question was why didn't she get the paper when she checked in to her flight at the kiosk at the airport?

Because she doesn't necessarily was even near the airport when she checked in. Nowadays you can check-in online or via your phone up to 24 hours before your flight starts.

And you never see any paper. Yeah, that sucks when your phone runs out of battery. In our trains, the conductor has now USB chargers in case such things happen.

Technology fails, we fail. It happens. We manage to adapt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of people are commenting on the price but the thing that struck me was the thickness. Based on the images it looks to at least double the thickness of the phone!

</comment><comment><USER17> Like the InkCase, [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/378232716/inkcase- plus-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/378232716/inkcase-plus-e-ink- screen-for-android-phone) but for iPhone. Nice.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing this! PopSlate looks cool but I was a little sad that this would be difficult to pull off for Android due to fragmentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >SAVE POWER

> Use the ultra low-power, ePaper screen to extend your battery life

That's one way to put it but:

        s/extend/save

is more honest.

<comment><USER20> Minor nitpick, but shouldn't it be s/save/extend/

<comment><USER21> no

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> (silly) Price aside, why is it only for iPhones? Surely the bigger market is Android devices... or both... I see a similar trend with docking station/speakers. I've yet to find a model that has a dock for micro usb. All of them are iPhone centric with an optional cable to the headphone jack of other phones.

<comment><USER23> Bigger market with Android devices? Very few Android phones will get even close to what any of the iPhone models sold. And docks for iphones are a lot more interesting, because there is an established standard for controlling iOS devices externally, which works with music and many many iOS apps. Not to mention, that for both 30-pin and Lightning connectors the device playing the music is the iphone, not the dock. With Micro USB the only way to do anything would be to access the filesystem and play all the music files found. But that's incredibly difficult, because of different standards, root Android directory being polluted with files for apps, and there is no way to control apps on the phone. Android phones are horrible for standards - mine doesn't even work with a regular remote(next/back + mic) on my headphones.

<comment><USER24> This is not true, most modern Android devices support USB audio class as "very strictly recommended" in _Android Compatibility Definition Document_ and everything supports USB HID devices. Just implement USB sound card and USB keyboard to play music and control it.

<comment><USER23> In that case - fair enough. But we are yet to see a single dock which would support this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know if the screen is only configured via their app?

</comment><comment><USER26> Reason to buy for me: read an ebook in the sunlight.

<comment><USER27> If these perform well, it might be the perfect reason to move to a phablet sized device. I don't really need the extra real estate for my phone, but I'd need it for reading.</comment></comment>


Demand for Ruby on Rails is Still Huge - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yoelblum_45935/demand-for-ruby-on-rails-is-still-huge-ea4434926c57 <comment><USER2> If I was building a startup today I would choose Rails for the MVP without a doubt. So much time wasted with the modern JS ecosystem or even other mature frameworks like Django. I have almost 15 years of experience building web apps professionally with the majority of that being spent with Django.

There is no tech stack in the world that will get you shipped and proving your business faster than RoR.

<comment><USER3> Whoah!

I think the surprising thing about this comment is that you actually developed using Django for all those years, and you still prefer RoR.

The vast majority of people on the web that comment invariably say they are pretty much the same and it depends on whether you know ruby or python better.

So people who already use python for finance or data science pick django.

I saw a study (old now, from the early days) that claimed they were about the same but that the admin page on django cut dev time by some %.

This is the first I've heard a long time django user say that rails was faster to develop and not about the same. Can you elaborate on why?

<comment><USER4> I've used Django a little bit, I can definitely believe the admin page cuts dev time if Rails doesn't have an equivalent. But I know Python well, and Ruby not-at-all, and I'm not sure I'd choose Django over Rails, because Ruby gems seem better for RoR than Python has in terms of Django-compatible packages. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much of an ecosystem there.

<comment><USER5> You should look in [https://djangopackages.org/](https://djangopackages.org/)

<comment><USER4> That's really helpful, thanks! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I posted this same comment to /r/ruby when this article was posted there:

Having serious large scale full stack Rails and non-Rails (Py or Node) under my belt now, it has become ever so clear how productive Rails is and how much of that is the fact that Ruby actually has a f __*ing standard library (directed at JS). So I 'm not surprised by these numbers.

Then with gems like devise, filterrific, simple_form, cocoon, carrierwave, sidekiq, and activerecord-import I can whip together apps so quickly it just boggles my clients' minds. The ecosystem is deep, rich, documentation is good if not great and the language has several paths to getting some serious speed improvements behind it (Graal/Truffle/Substrate and JIT).

Implementing the simplest things in the node ecosystem sometimes feels like wading through molasses. I love ES6/7 but damn for 95% of projects today regardless of (anticipated) scale I'd choose Rails to start with and then split off just the things which need to be fast or fancy like Delayed Processing / MQs, ETL, any data science, etc.

<comment><USER7> For curious onlookers: true, one can "can whip together apps so quickly", as long as:

* Your code is empirically around ~1 KLOC

* You won't have to maintain it in the future

So yeah: if you're going to make a one-off-deploy-once-never-touch-again message board/blog app with Google Maps integration, choose Rails. Otherwise: don't bother.

Making Ruby/Rails maintainable at scale is a sisyphean task: it's possible, but at an enormous cost. This is why there are several attempts to bolt a type system onto Ruby, the most recent one being developed by Stripe [0].

I've no hard numbers, but the narrative "without Ruby my startup wouldn't last long enough to worry about engineering it the right way" sounds very very suspicious to me when talking about even remotely complex problem domains. Your speed will drop to zero in about 3 weeks from the start when you have to refactor some fundamental piece of code/data structure anyway, and then better hope you at least wrote some tests. And having to write tests essentially halves your dev speed anyway, so I really am not sure where this "prototyping speed" meme comes from.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17217815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17217815)

<comment><USER8> I worked on a many years old and k*10⁵ LOC Ruby application, and it's fine.

Talking about 1 KLOC and future unmaintanability is nonsense.

In order to scale, Ruby applications need very high coverage. This has nothing to do with Ruby and/or Rails though; it's a requirement of all the dynamically typed languages.

There are certainly missing functionalities that at some point will cause a roadblock (currently, threading is immature), however again, no framework can support all the possible functionalities.

<comment><USER7> > In order to scale, Ruby applications need very high coverage.

Exactly, this is the "at enormous cost" bit I hinted at.

<comment><USER9> >Coverage is a measure used to describe the degree to which the source code of a program is executed when a particular test suite runs. A program with high test coverage, measured as a percentage, has had more of its source code executed during testing, which suggests it has a lower chance of containing undetected software bugs compared to a program with low test coverage.

In case folks are wondering about what we mean by coverage...

<comment><USER9> Double Pasta, now that's embarrassing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only thing that would get me off Rails is an opinionated framework with static type checking.

I need

* Migrations

* Models with validations

* Views (prefereably statically typed)

* Controllers with built in routing and type safe routing methods.

* Static type checking.

* Great package management.

* Deploy to Heroku

I'm looking at [https://luckyframework.org/](https://luckyframework.org/) and it's looking very good. Using crystal as a type safe ruby.

<comment><USER11> The problem with Ruby isn't static typing per se, it is the terrible handling of `nil`. Ruby either has to make nil more evaluatable, or assure unexpected nils never come with options. For instance calling `each` on `nil` should have the effect of calling it on an empty enumerable like Clojure does would make it more evaluatable and stop the dreaded "No method found each on nilclass".

I've been programming in Ruby for 10 years and I have to say after writing Clojure for a bit I really enjoy the fact that nil behaves as an empty value, and is enumerable. It is not the purest CS interpretation of nil but it makes it way easier. If someone is really concerned to check to see if something is nil there is still .nil?

When have you had errors like Oh this is String [][]{} vs Int[][]{}? That kind of static typing gets in your way more than it saves you. Pretty much all my errors that would be saved with type checking involve nil and that could be handled as I stated above.

<comment> wes-k Not perfect, but ruby 2.3 introduces the safe navigation operator (&.), so you can do foo&.each or foo&.bar

<comment><USER12> I'm at best an intermediate-level rubyist, but I was quite surprised when more experienced people didn't recognize that operator after I started using it. It seems like one of the most significant upgrades.

I got really into it and started using it with operators, eg

        num_objects&.> 0

<comment><USER13> I didn't even think of using it with operators. Awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> $ curl [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17205865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17205865) > hn.txt

$ grep -i 'php' hn.txt | wc -l 8

$ grep -i 'python' hn.txt | wc -l 50

$ grep -i 'react' hn.txt | wc -l 71

$ grep -i 'java ' hn.txt | wc -l 6

$ grep -i 'java,' hn.txt | wc -l 8

grep -i 'javascript' hn.txt | grep -v 'javascript:void' | wc -l 35

^^ thanks busterarm

$ grep -i 'objective' hn.txt | wc -l 2

$ grep -i 'object-c' hn.txt | wc -l 0

$ grep -i 'object' hn.txt | wc -l 4

$ grep -i 'haskell' hn.txt | wc -l 7

$ grep -i 'rails' hn.txt | wc -l

24 <<<<<<<

$ grep -i 'mongo' hn.txt | wc -l 10

$ grep -i 'mean' hn.txt | wc -l 21

$ grep -i 'lamp' hn.txt | wc -l

$ grep -i 'docker' hn.txt | wc -l 19

$ grep -i 'aws' hn.txt | wc -l 3

$ grep -i 'devops' hn.txt | wc -l 28

$ grep -i 'android' hn.txt | wc -l 18

$ grep -i 'ios' hn.txt | wc -l 21

$

<comment><USER15>
      $ links -dump https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17205865 | grep -Eio '(php|python|react|javascript|java|objective-c|objective|object-c|object|haskell|rails|mongo|lamp|docker|aws|devops|android|ios|django|ruby|rails|react|swift|node|docker)\b' | tr A-Z a-z| sort| uniq -c | sort -rn
      87 react
      63 python
      42 javascript
      39 aws
      33 devops
      29 rails
      28 ruby
      28 node
      23 android
      22 java
      19 ios
      19 docker
      15 django
      12 haskell
       8 php
       7 swift
       5 mongo
       2 object
       1 objective-c
       1 objective

Used links to get just the text and not the HTML markup. Used grep -O to emit just the part of the regex which matches so we can feed it all into a pipe that emits a single histogram. By ordering the pattern we can match "javascript" before "java" and not need to add the space or "," after "java" to exclude javascript (you could also use "\b" with grep -E).Case-insensitve and case-folded. Added a few other keywords.

Since grep only emits the first match on a given line, this won't count properly if multiple keywords appear on one line.

Why did you search for "mean"?

Edit: here's another approach that splits the output into words first so that we can count multiple keywords on one line, along with a couple tweaks to the pattern to eliminate some false positives:

      $ links -dump https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17205865 | tr -s '[[:punct:][:space:]]' '\n' | tr A-Z a-z | grep -E '\b(php|python|react|java|object|haskell|rails|mongo|lamp|docker|aws|devops|android|ios\b|django|ruby|rails|react|swift|node|docker)' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
      87 react
      63 python
      42 javascript
      38 aws
      33 devops
      29 rails
      28 ruby
      27 node
      23 android
      21 java
      19 docker
      18 ios
      15 django
      12 haskell
       8 php
       7 swift
       6 nodejs
       5 reactjs
       5 mongodb
       5 mongo
       2 objective
       2 object
       1 reactnative
       1 reactive

Another issue: this only grabs the first page of comments.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, we have to have comment pagination turned on these days to spare our poor single-core server with steam coming out its ears. Hopefully the performance improvements we've been working on this year can roll out in the next few months.

If you or anyone wants to run this query on the full comment set, email us (firstname.lastname@example.com) and we'll turn pagination off while you do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In addition to be a full-time CTO, I run a referral network that helps connect high-quality engineers with great job opportunities whilst skipping bullshit interview processes.

I can attest that the demand of Rails engineers is still large - why wouldn't it be? It isn't like the 15+ years of Rails code in the world just converted itself to another language.

But I will tell you one trend that I find very interesting and did not think I'd ever see: The lead-in for a full stack or even a backend position is the _React /Redux_ part, not the backend technology.

Very often a position will be React + whatever you can do on the backend. For years, it was quite the opposite. You wanted to hire a Rails engineer who would dabble on the frontend where need be.

A lot companies I work will pay handsomely for a React developer, and they're quite sure they can teach the React developer whatever backend they use (usually Rails, Django, Flask, Sinatra -- in that order).

<comment><USER12> The last team I worked with seemed to be going that way. I'm an old-school database engineer, and RoR had a familiar feel as I was learning it, since it got a lot of the database interface right, but my manager was a blame-the- tools type. To me our app just needed a few tweaks for performance and some refactoring of a few poorly-designed classes which were obvious in the data model, but to him it needed React, .net microservices, and a whole lot of yes- men to implement these things.

This kind of culture has always been around since way before Rails; unfortunately I've never learned how to turn it around. The team no longer has a database engineer :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure why this continually comes as such a surprise on HN. It's a mature framework with tons of community involvement and 3rd party gems to help ship features out the door.

The vast amount of projects and internal tools out there don't need to be "webscale" or process millions of requests a minute.

<comment><USER19> I have a hard time seeing Shopify and Github as anything other than "web scale."

<comment><USER20> Depends on what your comparing them to.

They are dwarfed by most media companies etc. Github's website sees far less than 1% of Facebook's traffic for example. On the other hand they have almost 30 million users so they are not exactly tiny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I suspect companies using Rails are quietly making money and do not feel the need to migrate to the latest and greatest. Money making code does not get changed in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have a few Rails gigs listed on my linkedin from years ago, and I constantly get recruiter messages looking to fill RoR positions despite not having used it for years. I've been told by the recruiters that I chat with that senior Rails positions are increasingly harder to fill with each passing year.

Whether that means the Job Providers in my sample simply aren't paying enough, Rails devs are sick of maintaining legacy Rails apps, or a combination of both, it seems like everyone I know who spent years working nearly exclusively with Ruby has now moved on to Go, Elixir, or Node.

<comment><USER23> I've had the same experience, having done exactly one, one-month RoR project and a lot of embedded Ruby.

At the end of the day though, the couple of jobs I did investigate were really pretty shitty. One company asked me to do a coding challenge... I said, "Sure, about how long will it take me?" "I dont know." "What's the subject matter?" "I don't know." "How will you grade the test?" "I dont know." "When do you need it?" "Thursday." "So the only thing you know about this test is it has to be done right now?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've done twoa startups (2005-2006 & 2008-2014) with Rails (Rails <1.0-1.X && Rails 2.x-3.x) and we are now rewriting most of the software at my current company with Rails (5+) + React (for most things). We even went so far as to create our own framework with react, loosely based on how Rails does stuff called Gluestick (github gluestick). It lets us do native, web and mobile web with like 95% code reuse if you are good with web views.

When we were confronting the task of rewriting a large, undocumented, untested, msft db, and java (macro services) Rails was the easy part. Choosing a full fledged react app, with Rails as the api server was a harder decision, but based on who we had and what our immediate plans were it made sense. There is a decent argument now that just doing it all in Rails would of been faster, but the mobile part is going to be huge for us.

Finding senior rails devs is harder than it used to be though, hands-down. We converted a lot of django devs to rails and it's been a big win, according to them. "whalesalad" listed a lot of reasons why and I agree with all of those. We, at least in the past, at startups found Rails people to be more capable of full stack development and we needed that. But, that was probably just our experience in the 2009-2010 in the valley.

<comment><USER25> > Finding senior rails devs is harder than it used to be though, hands-down.

Money talks. I'm sure you can find someone in no time if you advertise $500k in compensation. Most employers balk at that rate, so most of the talent take the freelance/consulting route.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> TFA might be right about Rails but completely wrong about Spring. Spring is absolutely a web framework--templates and all. With Spring Boot and modern Java, the productivity is probably in same ballpark too.

<comment><USER27> What is TFA? It's always meant "Two Factor Auth" for me, but this is the second thread I've seen today that's using it like it's an acronym for a person.

<comment><USER28> "The fucking article", from the retort RTFA ("Read ..."), itself derived from RTFM ("... manual").

[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/RTFA](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/RTFA)

<comment><USER29> And, as with the manual, it can also be fine rather than fucking. I tend to read it as the former when there isn't an R in front, and as the latter when there is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been out of the game for awhile now, and sure, I find it eminently believable that Rails is much more productive than Node-based things, but has nothing better than Rails established itself by now? I always found it to be great for, as you say, whipping together small apps for clients quickly, but not well targeted at big long-lived software.

<comment><USER31> I have been using Ruby on Rails for a large distributed systems (using Sidekiq) deployed across over 100+ servers.

Gems like 'bluepill' and 'god' have been instrumental in deploying and ensuring mission-critical processes like elasticsearch, and redis are always up. This system has been in production for over 4 years, and we're still cranking :)

<comment><USER30> Fair enough, that sounds similar to the system I maintained for a similar length of time. I came away thinking it was not great - error prone, expensive to run, and hard to keep running reliably - from which I developed the interest in better options that led me to ask the question in this thread. I guess as usual, YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Another thing you could look at -- perhaps relevant to HN -- is the number of seed and early stage startups that use the various frameworks:

[https://news.crunchbase.com/news/popular-web-frameworks- seed...](https://news.crunchbase.com/news/popular-web-frameworks-seed-early- stage-startups/)

Set aside Angular could be the front end for Rails at the moment.

Consider this data: it would be interesting to know which of these get _funded_.

The funding may be an indication of agility i.e. which technology is the most successful and launching and iterating.

And then which technology makes it to scale will tell you which ones scale.

</comment><comment><USER33> One of the biggest telltales about the decline of anything is articles related to it claiming it is not in decline despite general public perception.

Sure, Ruby is amazing and sure Ruby on Rails is a great framework. But Ruby stalled right there -- RoR has been churning out regular updates and is still making strides in right direction, but look at Python and what happened with its community: the community didn't just stop at Django or Flask -- it went ahead in multiple domains and created useful libraries. The end result is, Python is used for far many types of projects (be it enterprise or robotics) where as Ruby is synonymous with only the Rails framework.

This is why Python has eaten up any potential share that could have gone over to Ruby and if that is not all, the Academics in Universities around the World are starting to take Python seriously and are teaching it (NOT RUBY!!) and if there was any space left for those grumpy Java Developers at the Enterprise level, well emergence of Spring and Spring Boot has swayed them back into Java's fold.

<comment><USER34> So where are all the Django jobs? I am trying to compare apples to apples here. Data science jobs and academia don't mean much for web developers.

<comment><USER35> Indeed.co.uk for London consistently shows 25% more Django jobs than Rails.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The problem is, the sort of devs who would jump right into Ruby On Rails a decade ago are now doing stuff with React, Node, Go, and (if they're lucky duckies) Elixir.

<comment><USER37> Elixir is an absolute pleasure. The benefits of Ruby's developer experience with a maintainable, scalable backbone.

<comment><USER35> Elixir adoption is going nowhere. If you search Indeed.co.uk by job title there are currently 7 Elixir jobs in London compared with 104 Ruby and 364 Python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Rails is still the most taught web framework in prominent coding boot camps."

This is not true. Rails is the most common back-end framework at coding bootcamps. But if you're trying to understand is happening to Rails, the biggest update is "Rails' model of serving HTML is dead/dying, and React took over a lot of Rails' old job". Bootcamps mostly teach JS now, for that same reason.

</comment><comment><USER39> I read/skimmed all comments, lot of people complaining about RoR and the big ball of mud that it creates. Trying to be positive, and some days is really hard, anyone has any recommendation to get out of it? I wish I could start small, but got spaghetti code in my hands, when I think I have the tail or head, there's more under.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is conflating frameworks and languages.

Sure rails may be more popular than other frameworks, but that's because Ruby has one major framework, whereas PHP has had 5 or so now.

If you read down the page, you see that PHP is actually more popular than Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER41> Well, if I had to choose Rails vs Laravel, I would go for rails. Rails is faster than laravel; besides why would anyone use a rails clone in php? Check rails vs laravel frameworks, this is fresh stuff: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r16&hw=...](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r16&hw=ph&test=json)

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh Yeeeaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh.

I'm a rails dev. This is nice.

</comment><comment><USER43> I have mixed feelings about RoR, having seen both sides: the incredible speed of development as a startup bootstraps its MVP, and later as a mature company where the codebase becomes an immense behemoth of tech debt that's almost impossible to refactor. Don't believe the people who handwave and say you can avoid the latter by just "designing it right at the beginning". That's a lie, even the best engineers will build an unmaintainable monolith in RoR given enough time and if the business requirements are complex.

At this point I have a strong aversion to starting any product using a dynamically-typed language (regardless of framework). The initial speed and ease of development is repaid 10x later on in sheer engineering pain (if you're lucky enough to be successful, that is).

<comment><USER44> This is a complaint I hear a lot, and it's very valid. My question is: which frameworks protect against this "behemoth of tech debt" inevitability that comes with using rails?

I've worked with large rails, django, and node apps, and none of them have felt particularly enjoyable to work with from a feature development standpoint once a certain scale is achieved. This doesn't feel like a rails-specific problem to me, but that's just based on my experience.

<comment><USER2> None. This is not a Rails problem or a Django problem. If you're coming to that conclusion you haven't been building software long enough.

You can architect clean software in any language. What happens is this: you learn a new framework (or sometimes learn a new framework AND the corresponding language it is build in). You don't know what is idiomatic. You haven't made mistakes yet. You're making progress on your idea and getting shit done though, so it doesn't matter. Long story short: you don't know any better. Hindsight is 20/20!

Next time around you try something new and blame your old woes on the framework. This time around you've learned a thing or two about how to properly organize your code. You've been bitten by a third party tool that stopped being maintained. You've grown and learned and become more wise. But... you still blame your past issues on the old framework.

At some point you've been doing this for decades and you start to learn about abstract patterns that are not coupled to frameworks: service-oriented design, domain-driven design, CQRS (command driven systems), event buses and event systems, clean architecture, separation of concerns, SOLID principles, etc... ONCE you are at that point, you will begin to realize that NONE of the frameworks are going to solve these issues and NONE of them are more or less prone to causing tech debt.

Long story short: keep building software and focus on principles not frameworks. Read up on SOLID. It just takes time to get better and to start building things that don't encourage debt.

Another thing to note: tech debt is not bad. People throw that term around all the time and use it as a proxy for "messy code". Nothing in life is free. Everything is a balance. Perfectly architected software vs move fast and prove the business and make a profit? Pick one. You're going to acquire some amount of tech debt along the way. It's like real debt... sometimes you gotta accrue monetary debt to make progress elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Its all horsesh§t. just use php and mysql

</comment><comment><USER46> There is also no tech stack in the world that will get you to rewrite your entire application faster than RoR.

<comment><USER47> Yes there is: any JS stack.

<comment><USER48> I dont have much experience, but with react native, you only need to build 1 app for iphone and android, then potentially use react for web.

Is there any competition here? I could be unfamiliar with other solutions, but I thought the purpose of using JS was to eliminate re-writing code in multiple front end languages.

<comment><USER49> The code for the server is different from the code for the frontend, even if they're in the same language. You're trying to do vastly different things. Front end is about user interface. Server is about controlling access to and storing data. IMO, you should use the best tool for each. Rails has been encapsulating the best practices around server side web apps for 15 years. The ecosystem is unbelievably mature and productive, regardless of whether you want to do a traditional server rendered app, or a JSON API for a JS, iOS, or Android client.

<comment><USER50> >Rails has been encapsulating the best practices around server side web apps for 15 years.

Not to be pedantic, but I worked on Rails projects in 2006 and 2007, and had probably heard of it just a bit before that. This was during the initial Web 2 boom. I would not have thought that Rails was created much earlier than that, since I usually keep some track of at least major tech developments (although could be wrong, of course - I could have missed reading about it when it was created, or only first read about it after it became a bit popular). So anyway, I googled, and the Wikipedia article for Rails says:

>Initial release: 13 December 2005; 12 years ago[1]

Haven't used it lately, but I do keep reading that it is very mature and productive, as you say.

<comment><USER49> Ah, sorry. I was thinking 2003 instead of 2005.

But anyway. A long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The demand is still huge if we use this flawed methodology to measure it ...

<comment><USER52> What's the flaw in the methodology?

It actually makes sense to me. There are a lot of shops with legacy Rails apps, and they'll use Rails for new code too, because it's worked well and they don't need to do the shiny and new.

<comment><USER53> Like us. We started a newish project on Rails and couldn't be happier. 90% of the app's job is to do CRUD. Wouldn't want to use any other framework for that job.

<comment><USER52> Exactly. It's really hard to beat Rails for CRUD apps, and CRUD is _so_ many situations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Video Apparently Showing Flight 572 Missile Strike Geolocated to Iranian Suburb - <AUTHOR> https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020/01/09/video-apparently-showing-flight-ps572-missile-strike-geolocated-to-iranian-suburb/ <comment><USER2> I don't recognize that site's domain, but the NYTimes seems to have done some confirmation legwork: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/video/iran-plane- missile....](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/video/iran-plane-missile.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> bellingcat (belling the cat, get it?) does open-source intelligence. Here's their thread regarding the coming NYT piece today: [https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1215354416951365632](https://twitter.com/bellingcat/status/1215354416951365632)

Here's another good article from NYT today focusing on more than just the video: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/world/middleeast/iran- pla...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/world/middleeast/iran-plane-crash- ukraine.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Juan from the Blanco Lirio channel just consolidated the rumors that two (2) Tor (Gen 1) (NATO: SA-15 "Gauntlet") short-range missiles were probably fired from a battery near the takeoff path based on NATO forces' SIGINT identifying a lock-on from fire-control radar onto the aircraft and radar tracks of the missiles. It's interesting how Western sources could identify such signals either from space or hundreds of miles to the south from the Caspian. I guess there is also a possibility of visual/IR sensors seeing the exhaust plume of the solid rocket motor moving quickly at a distance.</comment>