Charles Bukowski: The Slavery of the 9 to 5 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/personal-growth/charles-bukowski-the-slavery-of-the-9-to-5-ae6778ce3731 <comment><USER2> I strongly suspect that while Bukowski might have been depressed at his job, he probably had some cheerful as fuck coworkers annoying the crap out of him.

I have a friend who became a barista out of university. For most people that would be a depressing failure to get a "real job", but she got enthused, became hugely knowledgable about coffee, and seems to enjoy it. Her company keeps shipping her out to various coffee related events, so they clearly like her.

Sometimes people fit snugly into a crack in the world that fits their shape, and sometimes no such crack exists.

<comment><USER3> It's not slavery if you'd do it for free.

<comment><USER4> We'll see how you feel about that after doing more or less the same thing for 10 years straight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It hardly seems accurate to say the average software development job is in any way analogous to what Bukowski describes. We're well compensated professionals who, relative to the other professions, tend to have reasonable hours and a lot of latitude in what we work on and when. Yet, we have a supremely weird tendency to identify as some sort of labor slaves.

<comment><USER6> > Yet, we have a supremely weird tendency to identify as some sort of labor > slaves.

Depends where on earth you live.

I can assure you that while some of my Asian friends doing offshore consulting do have a much better life than many of their country fellows, the way they are seen by the western companies hiring them is not much different from the old colonial days.

Also those of us that are lucky to live in countries that have working IT unions, e.g. in Germany, do see the difference.

<comment><USER7> What benefits do you get from your union, and what are the fees/responsibilities that go with it? I've heard this before, never really heard what the details are though.

<comment><USER6> In addition to what soperj has answered.

Any overtime gets paid either in money or free time.

Working beyond 10 hours on a day requires authorization and is extra paid.

If doing crushes over lengthy time periods happens due to bad management, it can be reported to the government activities overseeing labor laws.

Any expat temporarily working in local projects gets the same work rights as anyone else, regardless of what international companies "think" about labor laws. Failure to comply can be reported to respective authorities.

Working over weekends requires special approvals and is properly compensated.

Support for fighting against management, when they "think" they know better than what labor laws state about worker rights.

<comment><USER8> > Any overtime gets paid either in money or free time.

> Working beyond 10 hours on a day requires authorization and is extra paid.

> Working over weekends requires special approvals and is properly > compensated.

I'm amazed that you believe you require a union to ensure proper compensation in a country like Germany?

Is it because you're a contractor rather than an employee or some similar sillyness?

Why isn't being paid for your time the default?

<comment><USER6> Because what the law says and what many employers think that they can get away with, isn't the same thing.

<comment><USER8> I thought unions were a form of collective bargaining to benefit the employee.

Surely they're not required to get an employer to follow the law. Isn't there a better way?

<comment><USER6> > Isn't there a better way?

Sadly not that I am aware of.

Either you go alone with a lawyer, or get some muscle beyond you.

For example, even for simple matters like vacations, many people are actually unaware what are their rights, benefits, obligations and how much control the employer has over them.

Many just take the simple route and believe whatever their boss tells them, instead of checking what the law actually says.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I definitely feel like a slave. I have very little freedom of thought (I'm always thinking about work), very little freedom of speech (the range of topics that I can discuss while at work is very limited). No means of making a difference; all software companies these days are huge corporations that treat you like a number - They don't even bother looking at your past work to understand your potential; they just care about labels. Also, there are no means of escape; I can't even start my own business in this industry unless I win the VC lottery (and I've tried).

Software workers are among lowest class of people in society. Those few engineers who happen to have any business leverage tend to be the most compliant ones and don't use that leverage for the benefit of their own kind; instead they are fully subservient to their corporate masters.

The corporates made sure that only the most docile engineers rose to the top. The problem is that as engineers we spend too much time working on our IQ and not enough on our EQ (which is unlike most other professions where some degree of hustling and social scheming is the norm) - As a result, others take advantage of us.

As I'm writing this, I understand that there will be repercussions some day for making inflammatory comments like this online. As big data get more effective, this comment will probably come up next to my profile picture somewhere with a big red cross next to it.

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to write this because this point of view needs to be expressed more often even if it sounds a bit extreme.

<comment><USER10> I find this somewhat widespread lazy, defeatist attitude among engineers both sad and disturbing. It shows quite a lack of empathy and perspective.

In general, software workers are in an extremely fortunate position:

Their services are in high demand and this will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. Even when taking AI into account software creation will probably be among the very last jobs to be automated.

Software workers can create value out of thin air. Founding a business in the software industry is ridiculously easy. In almost any other industry high up- front investment is required. If you fail in any other industry you likely have to pay off a huge amount of debt. In the software industry the default worst case scenario is you've learned something along the way and just start over.

The idea that one can't found a business if one doesn't score in the VC lottery just seems like the feeling of being entitled to having everything handed to you for free. Not every software company has to be a unique snowflake. Not every software company has to be Facebook or Google. There's plenty of exciting software work to be done by bootstrapped software companies in down-to-earth industries (which are often often terribly underserved by the software development community at large).

This feeling of entitlement in my opinion is the root cause of the problem. As a software developer you can't expect business people to respect you and provide you with business leverage if all you want to do is sit at a desk all day and write code.

Communication is key. You need to present your work in terms non-developers can both understand and relate to, i.e. talk about the business value you provide.

If you don't want to be commoditised first of all don't commoditise yourself! You're not a bunch of TLAs. I find it offensive that people are commonly hired based on a set of acronyms as well as that people often identify with these acronyms. If you're a Java / PHP / JavaScript / whatever developer you're essentially a fungible commodity. If you present yourself as a skillful business problem solver that's an entirely different matter and more business- minded, less tech-savvy people will much more readily pay you the respect you deserve.

<comment><USER11> Is it so hard to imagine that _many_ software engineers are taken advantage of? And that they can't leave due to life circumstances?

I guess your post makes some sense if you add a big fat asterisk: in some parts of the US and Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really, I just want a 9-to-5, instead of a 9-to-8 + "oh hey quick question" notification from Slack at 11.

<comment><USER13> Seriously, 9-5 is the dream. This article is so filled with naive melodrama. Does this person realize how much effort it takes to kill, pluck, and dress a single chicken? to grow a single ear of corn? Things you might eat in a single meal? Someone has to "slave" themselves away to grow that for you. They can't just quit and become a poet, if they did the author would starve. That attitude is the definition of childish because it always assumes that someone is going to be there to provide for you, whether it is the state, some rich patron, or your actual parents.

<comment><USER14> You do realize that efficiencies in agriculture means our country alone has more than the capacity to feed the entire world?

Second consideration, no one opts in to capitalism. You are simply born into a situation with scarce access to natural resources (fenced off by the rich and powerful). Now, it only seems fair to me that a person has to ability to opt out, if we wanted to level the playing field between workers and owners. That is the price of civilization.

<comment><USER15> You _can_ absolutely opt out of capitalism, and many have: you can get some likeminded people together and start a commune, or you can go sleep on a park bench and panhandle, or you can just leave and move to Cuba or North Korea. Nobody will stop you or hinder you in any way.

However, you _cannot_ opt out of socialism. "Not having a job" is illegal in socialist countries. Don't like the job that was assigned to you by some bureaucrat? Want to start a mini-free market with your friends? Too bad, the alternative is the labor camps.

The border guards in capitalist countries are there to prevent illegal immigration _into_ the country. The border guards in socialist countries are there to keep people from _escaping_.

<comment><USER16> > start a commune,

That does not mean you are not part of the capitalist society anymore. You have to get enough capital to get land and you will have to continue paying taxes.

<comment><USER14> I would say the most offensive/dishonest aspect of this loaded statement is basically the implied isolation of "you guys go over there, leave the world to us" \-- as if only the capitalists can claim the inherited knowledge of humanity (fenced off with copyright laws etc). As if only the capitalists, who have taken so many (all) natural resources, have a right to the land we are born on and we must slave to pay for small parcel of land just to exist. How exactly is that "opting out" of capitalism again?

It's more akin to playing socialism than actually living in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm making enough money to live on from apps I released last year. I don't know what to do with my time. Freedom is of course wonderful but I don't _feel_ it, I often long for the office context of a good Swedish workplace. You need to feel you accomplish something every day, and (good) work does that.

<comment><USER18> > You need to feel you accomplish something every day, and (good) work does > that.

Work (good or bad) is a crutch many people rely on to feel as though they're accomplishing something.

I didn't work for 2 years (by choice) and never felt as if I lacked purpose and never felt the need to "accomplish something everyday."

Instead I exercised, read, watched TV, relaxed. I was constantly amazed by the number of people who said they'd hate that sort of routine.

<comment><USER19> > I didn't work for 2 years (by choice)

I'd love to know how you managed that. Somehow built up an enormous savings and then blew it over 2 years? You are very fortunate to have been able to do that!

<comment><USER20> You don't need an enormous savings.Just live on less.

Make 100k for 2 years, spending 25k to live per year. So you have 150k in savings - taxes, lets round down to 100k.

You can now go 4 years without working.

I know people that do similar things... can use it to fund an indy game, or just play videogames for a few years.

<comment><USER21> I guess you don't plan on retiring early in that case.

<comment><USER18> 2 years off in my 20s felt pretty much like retirement. Loved it.

<comment><USER22> Yep, I worked for 4 years at ~$45k/y, spending nothing, and just had a year off, started by travelling for a few months and chilling for the last few, had the best time of my life, even started doing some side projects which I hadn't done since Uni, and really missed. Sadly I've run out of $$$ now and looking for some work.

I know it can be risky taking such a break from a career but I think it was worth it, I gained some great travel experience and better understand what I want out of life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Bukowski the postal worker was offered a basic income and he took it, and in the process became Bukowski the writer.

Currently in France there is a big debate about a universal, unconditional basic income, that one of the candidates to the left primaries defends, against the mockery and outrage of everyone else, right, left and center. (He arrived first at the first round with 35% of the vote, and looks like he will win next week, so all is not lost).

Still, it's surprising that so many people are against this idea. They're not just saying it's impractical, impossible, too expensive, etc. (although they are saying that as well) -- they're opposed to it on principle. But what principle?

For lack of a better explanation and at the risk of being polemical, I think the reason is, people hate other people's freedom.

People want other people to be not free, even at the cost of their own freedom. Thinking that we could actually be able to choose a life without work or bosses or a schedule drives many people mad.

<comment><USER24> I am living in France and here are the arguments I heard against the Universal income so far that has nothing to do with cost or impossibility to set up.

Some say this is a patch to hide misery. The idea is that they think we should not give people charity, keeping them alive but still poor, and instead focus on the real problem: the lack of jobs and the disparity of incomes. I even heard from some that the Universal Income is a Silicon Valley idea to keep getting richer while giving the poor just enough to keep consuming, thus maintaining the capitalistic economy alive.

An other argument I have heard beside cost is that it encourages/rewards laziness and inactivity.

<comment><USER25> > _Some say this is a patch to hide misery. The idea is that they think we > should not give people charity, keeping them alive in misery, but instead > focus on the real problem: the lack of jobs and the disparity of incomes._

The "lack of jobs" would be the real problem is jobs were premised to be available. But jobs are there to accomplish things (and a number of them could be enough for doing those things) not to give people a paycheck.

<comment><USER26> >But jobs are there to accomplish things (and a number of them could be enough for doing those things) not to give people a paycheck.

I agree with this view but you also need to realize that if you follow that logic the only reason society exists is because cooperation worked better than alternatives, specialization and jobs came out of that. Now if that's no longer true the core premise of the society disappears, and all the arguments against that is essentially people feeling uncomfortable with this outcome - that a huge part of people will have no role in society and will be dead weight at the mercy of those in power - it's not hard to see why this view makes them uncomfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I might have read a bunch of books and articles about work, but the biggest lessons I've learned are from Bukowski.

The Post Office and Factotum are two of my favorite books. Here are a few quotes from Factotum that I really liked:

~~

"Look," I said, "these books aren't worth reading let alone arguing about."

"All right," one of the women said, "we know you think you're too good for this job."

"Too good?"

"Yes, your attitude. You think we didn't notice it?"

That's when I first learned that it wasn't enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.

~~

"You knew we were going to let you go?"

"Bosses are never hard to fathom."

"Chinaski, you haven't been pulling your weight for a month and you know it."

"A guy busts his damned ass and you don't appreciate it."

"You haven't been busting your ass, Chinaski."

I stared down at my shoes for some time. I didn't know what to say. Then I looked at him. "I've given you my time. It's all I've got to give—it's all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour."

"Remember you begged for this job. You said your job was your second home."

"…my time so that you can live in your big house on the hill and have all the things that go with it. If anybody has lost anything on this deal, on this arrangement…I've been the loser. Do you understand?"

"All right, Chinaski."

"All right?"

"Yes. Just go."

~~

It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?

<comment>

I always started a job with the feeling that I'd soon quit or be fired, and this gave me a relaxed manner that was mistaken for intelligence or some secret power.

<comment>

Here are the one I liked from Women: [http://www.p1x3l.com/story/171/bukovsky- women](http://www.p1x3l.com/story/171/bukovsky-women)

<comment><USER28> To oversimplify, there's two ways of pricing things: what the market will pay, or taking the cost to produce and adding a markup.

We price hours of work by the first method, but I started wondering what it would look like if we used the second.

For both a CEO and a janitor the cost of one hour of employment is one hour of their life. So from that perspective, we should be paying everyone the same.

I can't think of how to make an economic system work based on that, but it was a curious thought.

<comment><USER29> The answer to al your questions is: in a perfectly competitive market, the two pricing strategies lead to the same price.

However an hour of one person's life does not have the same market value as an hour of another person's life.

<comment><USER27> What do you do with overqualified people =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Working without a calling, especially in an unskilled job, is horrifying. It's main use is to convince yourself that you never want to be in that position again and motivate studying or a career change.

<comment><USER31> I don't know if you consider factory work "unskilled work" or not, but as I mentioned above, my dad was a factory worker for 30 years before he retired at 55, my mom was a high school math teacher, before she retired.

My mom came home, graded papers, took phone calls from parents and teachers (these days teachers do the same and respond to emails after hours), had to attend after school functions, and had to deal with politics, paper work, parents of spoiled children etc. and never got paid extra for it.

My dad went to work at 8, came home at 5 and left the job at work. If he did have to work extra he got paid for it. He has a degree in accounting but said he couldn't imagine sitting behind a desk all day.

I on the other hand, besides a few stints at contracting, have mostly been in the same boat - not getting paid overtime. I'm not complaining, I also get paid well, can work from home when needed/wanted and get paid to do work I would be doing as a hobby any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I find it a bit tasteless to use the term slavery or wage slavery for essentially a job that you don't like but feel compelled to do to survive when there's still real slavery going on in the world. The outcome of disobedience is (assumed) unemployment which in most countries where this term is used doesn't even mean you starve or suffer severely. The outcome for real slaves is a bit more dramatic.

<comment><USER33> > The outcome of disobedience is (assumed) unemployment which in most > countries where this term is used doesn't even mean you starve or suffer > severely.

Yes it does. I live in the Netherlands, one of the most developed countries in the world and one with what is considered excellent social security.

If I would 'disobey' and decide to stop working, I would get nothing at all. Zero Euros. I would be out on the streets in no time flat. If I quit my job, I would be 'at fault' for being unemployed and would not qualify for unemployment. Even if I get fired, I couldn't decide to stay unemployed. Pretty much every type of social security benefit comes with the requirement to apply for jobs (which as a Software engineer means that I'd be back in the 9-to-5 grind within days), failure to apply for jobs means no money.

It has come to the point that even if you are disabled you get no social security if you have 'the capacity to work', which means that if some civil servant can dream up a job you could possibly do (regardless of if that job actually exist or if someone is hiring people for such a position), you get nothing. No arms and no legs ? Your tongue works so you could be a stamp- licker, no social security for you.

Of course, if you _do_ have a job they take a huge chunk out of your monthly salary to pay for 'social security'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Bukowski, a truly insightful individual. Sometimes reading his thoughts and ideas can bring a tear to my eye, simply because of their pithy practicality and clarity (and possibly because I'm reminded of my grandfather, who was similarly gifted in the art of brevity and honest observation).

</comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of F.I.R.E. (financial independence and retire early) from:

www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence

Really interesting stuff on that sub.

</comment><comment><USER36> Putting it with other words:

Society doesn't allow most to be a genius and most of these potential geniuses will fade eventually.

 _' I think we have an ideology about talent that says that talent is a tangible, resilient, hardened, shiny thing. It will always rise to the top. To find and encourage talent, all you have to do as a society, is to make sure the right doors are open. Free campus visits, free tuition, letters to the kids with high score. You raise your hand and say, «over here!» and the talent will come running, but that's not true. It's not resilient and shiny, talent is really, really fragile.'_ \-- Malcolm Gladwell

</comment><comment><USER37> I have this notion that they invented work to keep adolescent boys from getting up to trouble. Then work turned into this thing that became respectable. Then they pasted capitalism on top of it. After a while, women felt left out and wanted in on it. Now we're all working and stressed out and it feels awful and absurd. Yet we gotta do it or left to our own devices might get up to trouble.

</comment><comment><USER38> Am I the only person here who thinks his "slavery" analogy is written in poor taste?

<comment><USER39> Actual slavery was worse because of beatings, and being torn from your family at a whim, and being raped, forced to breed, and a bunch of other things.

Having said all that, the main tenant of slavery is being forced to work. It's not the same, but it's similar. Slaves that were treated relatively well were still slaves. Now, you can quit, but you can't stop working.

<comment><USER40> You're not "forced" to work by other people though, you're forced to work by thermodynamics.

Our cousins the plants can photosynthesise, but we poor sods in Kingdom Animalia have to work for our food one way or another. While my hunter/gatherer and subsistence farmer ancestors had to work all day every day to get enough food to eat, I'm sure they'd be pretty envious of the fact that I could reliably eat for a week on the back of one hour's work in an air- conditioned office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> One of my all time entrepreneurial quotes:

"The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."

— Nassim Taleb

</comment><comment><USER42> After failing at taking my startup off the ground, I just started working for a "normal" company (read: startup that actually raised serious series A, has nice and lofty offices, a good tech team etc). I always have this feeling in my gut that I want to escape from it, even if everything is going great. I wonder if this will leave eventually.

</comment><comment><USER43> Read also: The Lucky Ones[1]

Everytime I read it I can't stop myself to compare it with the popular _The Crazy Ones_ Apple ad.

[1]: [https://bukowski.net/poems/the_lucky_ones.php](https://bukowski.net/poems/the_lucky_ones.php)

</comment><comment><USER44> Depends who you are and what fits I suppose. I worked from a super young age and got to a point in my 20s where the idea of working for someone would drive me crazy. I also hated the concept of someone being able to fire me or make a bad decision above me. I like having no one to blame but me, it allows me to sleep well at night.

Some people love their 9-5 and I find nothing wrong with that at all, Its not a one size fits all solution. What I will say though is you learn a heck of a lot about yourself when you are responsible for "everything". I love the challenge of it.

</comment><comment><USER45> The top comment on Medium is hilarious. It contains "Get off the plantation and build your own." I remember quite well what Taleb said, that to be truly free, you need to be neither a slave nor a slave owner. What good is "building your own plantation"? That literally makes you nowhere better than a slave/the people who originally kept you in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not sure why people expect a lifetime of gratitude for a menial job. You enter a contract the be paid right now and if the terms of the contract grossly differ from what has been agreed either side can (and should) break it.

</comment><comment><USER47> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ4VzhIuKCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ4VzhIuKCQ)

</comment><comment><USER48> But yet it was also Bukowskis tenure as a 9-5 proletariat that gave him fodder for his first novel "Post Office" and his nom de gare "Chinaski" the mail carrier. It's hard for me to imagine Bukowski producing the work he did without having experienced the tension expressed in that medium blog post.

The story I heard is that John Martin agreed to pay Bukowski his Post Office salary for the rest of his life if he would quit and write full time.

</comment><comment><USER49> "Better ten dead men than one live slave." Don Juan, GB Shaw's Man and Superman

</comment><comment><USER50> Even Egyptian slaves weren't at the bottom of the ladder (eg. they had subservient wives). Not advocating "sexism" here but it's worth mentioning subservience. Software engineers often really are at the bottom of the ladder, however. Food for thought.

<comment><USER51> You're kidding me if you think software engineers are at the bottom of the ladder.

They are highly respected, well compensated, and get paid to work on interesting and challenging problems. In certain labour markets, money and perks are thrown at them.

I live very far from SV, and my job is certainly not as enjoyable as software development, and I can tell you with 100% conviction that there are much, much worse options out there.

I'm struggling to understand your viewpoint. You must have led a very [charmed/sheltered] life if you honestly believe that software engineers are lower than Egyptian slaves on the totem pole. I don't mean that as a personal dig at you, but comments like that rub me the wrong way when I would drag myself through broken glass and barbed wire to have the life of a Silicon Valley software dev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's hard to feel free if you have never been non-free.

</comment><comment><USER31> To say that work is like "slavery" shows little understanding of what slavery was. If I don't go to work, I'm not going to have my feet cut off, be chased down by dogs or hung.

I've quit plenty of jobs over the years. My livelihood is not based on my job. My livelihood is based on my having marketable skills so if I do get laid off, I can walk to my car, call a bunch of recruiters and have another job in two weeks tops. It's been that way for 20 years.

Also, a factory job only "enslaves" you for 35 years if you don't live below your means and make life choices that allows you to save and get out of the rat race. My dad knew he couldn't work in a factory until he was 65 or 70. He saved, and lived below his means for 20 years and both of my parents retired at 55, young and healthy enough to enjoy life.

I won't be able to retire that young because of stupid mistakes I made in the past, but that's okay. I can honestly say that I enjoy my job and have enjoyed my jobs for 20 years. Once I don't enjoy my job any more, I find another one. I could easily do this for another 20 years.

<comment><USER33> > My dad knew he couldn't work in a factory until he was 65 or 70. He saved, > and lived below his means for 20 years and both of my parents retired at 55, > young and healthy enough to enjoy life.

That's nice for him, but that doesn't apply to the younger generations.

My retirement age is currently set at 70.7 (it will go up before I reach that age). I have to pay into a pension plan, but if I were to quit before my pension age that would mean a HUGE penalty on my pension payout, and I'm not talking about quitting at 55, I'm talking about quitting at 68.

Furthermore, many older generations had really nice pension plans, a common one was 70% of your last salary. If you stop at 55 and spend 10 years living off savings and then can get a pension at 70% of your last income, that would be amazing. Doesn't work like that anymore. The 70% of last income changed to 70% of your median income and then was replaced by a system where you basically save up for for your pension with no guarantees as to the payout.

When I turn 70 I have to buy a pension from the money i've saved (minus the fees for the pension fund and devalued by inflation, so maybe 70% of what I put in). The money can only be used for buying a pension from an insurance company who will base the monthly payout I can buy based on the life expectancy figures they have at that time (and of course, I have to spend my money with them so I'm sure to get screwed anyway). Right now, I don't expect every to be able to stop working, the pension I'm saving for is just a way of getting more money in the hands of the finance industry.

Your parents were born at the exact right time, pensions never were about enjoying yourself in your later years, they were an insurance just in case you didn't die before you were too old to work. We're returning to that attitude towards pensions.

<comment><USER31> My mom has a pension - she is a teacher. But my dad doesn't. True enough he had profit sharing but in reality that's no different than a 401K plan. He had a vesting schedule similar to a traditional retirement plan

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Bukowski is absolutely right here, and Taleb also hits this topic pretty hard in his drafts.

The worst years I've had working for myself have still been better than the best years I've had as an employee, and that was justice! It's like with all of the problems in the world, I'm going to spend my days being a lackey to make more money for someone who already has plenty so I can ride the status/consumption bandwagon even harder.

My slave mentality deserved slave results. Praise God I accidentally broke free!

<comment><USER54> Could you point me in the direction of where Taleb has written on this topic?

<comment><USER53> Here's the relevant draft from SITG: [http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/employee.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/employee.pdf)

He also has the same idea peppered throughout _Antifragile_.

<comment><USER55> And here [1] (Reddit AMA) "The point is that if you want to be a writer, an artist, or a researcher in something solitary, better have a job that is steady and not taxing intellectually. Think of Spinoza, Einstein, Bayes..." It is not what initiated this thread but it is related in the sense that you can find a job to cover your basic expenses but not being demanding intelectually to pursue other interests.

I read the same from the artist Leon Ferrari [2] [3] he was an engineer and the son of an artist. His father told him to have a career and just then be an artist. This was an anti-fragile advice.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/options/comments/38onec/i_am_nassim...](https://www.reddit.com/r/options/comments/38onec/i_am_nassim_nicholas_taleb_ask_me_anything_on/crwki2o/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3n_Ferrari](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%B3n_Ferrari)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/Ferrari-Leon-Prologo-Andrea- Giunta/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Ferrari-Leon-Prologo-Andrea- Giunta/dp/9873754091/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1485223620&sr=1-1&refinements=p_27%3Awain+andrea%2Cp_n_condition- type%3A1294423011)

<comment><USER29> I've long told my recording clients, "real musicians have a day job" because it described so much of the best talent to come through the studio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It is true, there is no real freedom except for the independently wealthy. (And if you "work for yourself" you trade having 1 boss for having n bosses.) This is the world we live in. There is a saying, "life sucks and then you die"\- it is certainly always possible to be more specific than that, but that's pretty much what it boils down to. Our challenge is to be happy despite it.

What really bugs me is that we can't just admit to each other that having a job is shitty, even if it's a good one. We all have to be "doing what we love" and so forth.

<comment><USER39> I haven't done it in a while, but when working for yourself exclusively, you feel more in control of your destiny. Even if you have n bosses and 1 fires you, you still have n-1 paychecks. If you have 1 boss and he fires you, you have 0 paychecks until you find another boss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I like having a predictable schedule and not having to manage people. All the money in the world isn't worth the stress and misery that comes from running your own company.

</comment><comment><USER58> this thread is dope.

kanye said it.

"we are the new slaves."

we all started out as gardeners. but pretty soon gardening is too much effort. they sit on their ass to long and before they know it they become part of the garden. we are all shrubbery. but we are happy. shrubs don't know that there shrubs. Once in a while the gardener swings by, feeds us, waters us, tells us we are doing a good job, then he goes to jerk off.

</comment><comment><USER59> Kafka wrote many of his works by night, while by day he was an employee of the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali (and a good one at that, judging by the latest studies written about his life). If Bukowski wasn't capable of being a good writer while also holding a busy job that does not mean that it's not doable, it just means that the task was too much for Bukowski.

<comment><USER60> Kafka wasn't that capable of being a good writer in that situation either. He finished a handful of short stories, never finished a novel, and most of his writing lay unfinished and unpublished at his death.

<comment><USER61> You're being unfair to Kafka here by reducing literary accomplishment to mere quantity. Yes, his works were all short, but all of them far surpass the majority of "novels" pumped out daily by the modern publishing industry and all its hacks, idiots who compose at a 6th grade level, for the indisputably puerile audiences they pander to.

The metamorphosis is apparently 20k words or so, and hell, it could be less. But those are 20k words of tight, well crafted prose and artistic execution. Far better than the 50-100k plus words of complete and utter doggerel the majority of us consume on a daily basis.

This is another issue of capitalism--reduction of human experience to mere quantity. You begin to ignore quality and humanity fades. You become content consuming the most infantile garbage so long as the industry keeps it flowing, so long as the magnitude of crap is great and undisrupted. Few are those possessing the willingness or mental fortitude to devote a few hours to care about humanity and its progression, we'd rather spend our hours playing video games or watching movies or tv to "relax" or "unwind"; surprise, surprise, this constant availability of mindless entertainment is another one of capitalism's traps designed to keep you content with a life unlived.

I realize I sort of got off topic from what you stated about Kafka, and none of this is aimed at you specifically boomboomsubban, you just got me on a roooolllll.

I understand your point about Kafka was probably more so that he could've produced more as a writer had his situation been different, not that what he didn't manage to produce wasn't necessarily good, but we don't know that -- we can't argue counterfactuals. It may well have been the case that Kafka simply spent more time on a given piece than most authors, and thus even had he more time to write his output may not have increased too significantly.</comment></comment></comment>


The Men Who Stole the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_2032903,00.html <comment><USER2> _See pictures of the movies' most evil computer villans._

I remember when I used to think time was a serious news magazine. And when the sub-editors could spell correctly.

however, credit is due for the mention of Justin (gnutella) Franklin's current project, cockos reaper. It's music production software and they seem to push out maintenance releases every week, if not more often. Over the last few years I've watched it grow from a 'proof of concept' alpha to a sophisticated and versatile suite, while remaining very fast, well-documented, and extensible. It's also shareware, but without being crippled, just a polite reminder on load. I don't use it for audio production, but I keep an eye on the project and am impressed by the continual release pattern instead of the sprint/collapse model.

Take a look at their release notes, and the dates thereon (page is text): <http://www.cockos.com/reaper/download-old.php>

<comment><USER3> * Frankel, not Franklin - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Frankel>

<comment><USER2> D'oh! Sorry Mr Frankel. This would have to happen when I'm griping about spelling in the same post, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's just nice to see the "mainstream" media recognising that, unlike what the RIAA is saying, the sky didn't fall in as a result of the internet. As a musician myself I wholeheartedly embrace the new distribution methods because they are better for the consumer. The biggest challenge for me is defining what my product is (generally not an easily copied mp3 download) and then making this super effective and properly targeted. This is a good thing, however, as now that the IFPI and the RIAA have been all but taken out of the equation, the freedom we have to make innovative packages is pretty damn awesome.

<comment><USER5> Yes. When I was in New York one day, I happened to attend a meeting by some socialist musicians about how the internet has changed their livelihoods. The theorists and old guys talked about how we need state support and forming a union.

The younger pragmatists where content with giving away their mp3s and selling T-shirts.

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, however the position of the older guys is quite understandable in some ways. The entertainment industry over in the 'States is pretty unionised in the professional part of it, so I guess those guys were just advocating what they know.

Obviously this young musician is a pragmatist, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favorite quote:

 _It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy._

</comment><comment><USER7> All the RIAA would've had to do to come out champions rather than villains in the digital world was listen to a broadcast of NPR's Science Friday in 1993, in which Internet users expressed their hopes and dreams for the Net. One of the requests was a way to listen to and buy music online.

The segment was rebroadcast last Friday: <http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201011263>

</comment><comment><USER8> This stands as an important lesson: no matter how loudly anyone screams that the sky is falling, things rarely turn out as anyone expected. Who would have thought that iTunes would come along? Certainly not the RIAA...

<comment><USER9> No, the sky is still falling for the music industry:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_in_the_music_industry>

"Total revenues for CDs, vinyl, cassettes and digital downloads in the U.S. dropped from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $9 billion in 2008."

I imagine iTunes barely converted anyone who used napster, limewire, etc. back in the day. And now with streaming services like Grooveshark that are far easier than iTunes, the industry has another worry..

<comment><USER10> My money says it's not from piracy but from falling quality of music sold by the major record labels.

I spend more money on music purchased online now than I ever did on CDs but it's going to independent and foreign artists who produce a much better product.

<comment><USER9> The numbers should be including all sales.

For everyone of you, there's multiple people who haven't bought recorded music since 2000.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good to see the mainstream finally getting it. A few choice quotes:

 _"What's striking about the pirate kings is that they've been much less successful in the straight world than they were as pirates. An anarchic worldview coupled with brilliant code doesn't travel as well as you'd think in the bean-counting world of legitimate commerce. Good code empowers users by giving them choices and options, but empowered users aren't necessarily good for business. What you need to hit it really big in legitimate commerce is an authoritarian sensibility that limits users to doing what you want them to."_

...

 _"Johansen rejects any attempt to associate him with piracy. "As far as I'm concerned, it has nothing to do with me," he says. "I support fair use, which means that when you actually legally acquire content, you should have the right to use that content on any of your devices, using any application." For Johansen as for all of the pirate kings, it was always about writing good code, and what good code does is give power to the people who use it. That's the real reason the pirate apocalypse never happened. The pirates never wanted music and movies and all the rest of it to be free — at least, not in the financial sense. They wanted it to be free as in freedom."_

</comment><comment><USER12> Quite a well balanced article I thought. More so than I've come to expect from mainstream media.

<comment><USER13> we need a new word for _mainstream media_ , it's been appropriated by the mainstream media.

<comment><USER14> I think "popular media" or "general interest news" work in this context.

<comment><USER15> 'Corporate media' perhaps?

<comment><USER14> I think their corporate nature is incidental. Wired is a corporate media. Perez Hilton is not. This has more to do with getting technical details correct then being a corporation. So maybe "non-technical media" is the term we want?

<comment><USER5> Popular media, in analogy to popular science, is a pretty good term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16>
      consumers were high on the rush of swapping music hard drive to hard drive for nothing.

Oof.

</comment><comment><USER17> Only in te music industry could somebody do enough coke to simultaneously attempt to sue your company out of existence while investing $100m into it. If there's one thing I agree with PG on it's don't do a music start-up.</comment>


Ask HN: CPAN, npm, PyPi, rubygems, and... the shell? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I've a hobby project which I don't know if it makes any sense.
Most people I talk with tell me I'm wrong, but I still use this project when I want to have some fun and relax coding.
Here is a working draft of where I want to go with this:
http://imagebin.org/index.php?mode=image&id=264198
I want to think how we could use github as a backend, for the public "csan" or whatever is the final name, even if the framework itself should work offline too, or from other "repositories"... "spkg" should take multiple sources... local trees, http trees, rsync, git origins, who know what...
By now it generates documentation from the comments (with markdown and a pre/post parser) with a tool (sdoc) to query and display the "doc-comments" of a code base.
I want to add more "development helpers" to "package->publish" bash code.
The screenshot is from a clean draft, The real s::core now has many more modules :)
My question to HN is:
Should I continue with this project? or really nobody could use it as many people tells me?
There are many reasons I've hear...
"Shell scripts are not modular" "Writting portable shell is very hard" "http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashWeaknesses" etc... <comment><USER2> Just wanted to point out that you misspelled "comprehensive" in the screenshot, in the header :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oooops

Non native, and even worse, self teached. Sorry (and fixed in my local gitolite).</comment></comment>


Adobe Screwed By EcmaScript Standards Agreement - <AUTHOR> http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/08/ru-roh-adobe-screwed-by-ecmascript.html <comment><USER2> The problem is these large standards bodies are always controlled by the players with the most amount of money making their "standards" useless to IMO. A public specification and an open source reference implementation is good enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you messed with Actionscript in the past, but haven't played with Actionscript 3, you'll be impressed. It is no longer a toy language.

<comment><USER4> No it's not a toy language that's for sure. Anyone who has read the ES4 draft will concede that it's not something you just play with. In fact I haven't seen such a bloated monstrosity since the day I read the UML 2.0 spec.

Just read the section about packages and namespaces and you're going to want to kill yourself. And they're making the same mistake as C++, Java and C# before. They don't include generic types (aka templates) from the start. The language includes everything plus the kitchen sink and the dirty dishes too, but they're not including generic types even though everybody now knows that statically typed languages without type parameters don't fly. You can be absolutely sure they're going to add it in the next version and, as always, it won't be pretty.

I really hope Microsoft is successful in slaying this monster once and for all!

<comment><USER5> You _really_ think Microsoft could ever come up with anything well thought out and well designed?

Anyone using siverflash or whatever it is?...

<comment><USER4> I'm not aware that I said anything about Microsoft's design abilities. I'm hoping for Microsoft's clout to kill something I consider horrible language design. And I don't care the least what Microsoft's motivations are. Just read the ES4 draft and then let's have a debate about that design if you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Crockford was one of the many reasons Microsoft wanted Yahoo. ES4 is a really fun language implemented in AS3. I think ES4 was a bit bloated for javascript (getters and setters) but I am saddened a bit that such a fun event model and language will not be avail in the browser. This just delays things longer and longer. I feel a little let down by Mozilla and Adobe.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I feel a little let down by Mozilla and Adobe._

I don't follow. I thought it was Microsoft that torpedoed the standard. What did Mozilla and Adobe do wrong?

<comment><USER7> They took a small, useful and elegant language, in part crippled by horrible, horrible, ugliness (e.g. for inner functions _this_ points to the global object), and in preference to just fixing it, Javafied it.

This is not to say that ES4 should merely be ES3 spec polishing, but that ES4 describes a language not in the spirit of ES3. True, the spec ensures backwards compatibility, but in the sense of some new language that just happens to have ES3 support.

<comment><USER8> I think "javafied" is a bit unfair. ES4 continues the tradition from the original JS to copy Java-syntax where appropriate. "class X extends Y {}" looks indeed very Java-like, however the semantics are quite different, much more akin to classes in Python. But it would be silly to choose a gratuitously different syntax just to satisfy the Java-haters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if Microsoft did some backdoor maneuvering because Flash + ES4 Browser support could give it an unfair advantage over Silverlight.</comment>


Tango EV solar-charging at Googleplex (video; just posted; 1:14) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qutwO8xi_Ro

<comment><AUTHOR> This is Tango #2, owned by Jorg Brown [pronounced "Yorg"]. Jorg is seen in the video. Two more videos of this car are here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=307373></comment>


GifCities - <AUTHOR> https://gifcities.org/ <comment><USER2> The interwebs were full of these [https://gifcities.org/?q=construction](https://gifcities.org/?q=construction)

Not that I'd know anything about that.

<comment><USER3> I guess that's because we hadn't figured out that a webpage is a dynamic thing that is constantly updated, and instead still thought in terms of static objects like books and magazines that are finished some day.

<comment><USER2> People thought business websites were like Sales brochures. Update every quarter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> it feels like sacrilege to have an homage to web 1.0 completely fall apart without js.

were these gifs curated by humans? seems like a big task. neat resource.

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't seen such a bad search algorithm in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER6> Prepare for nostalgia</comment>


Confessions of a Superyacht Stewardess (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/23/sport/superyacht-stewardess-spt-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> Looking at the uniform, I can't help but immediately think of "The Love Boat".

Pop culture is a powerful force.</comment>


Scientists Perturbed by Loss of Stat Tool to Sift Research Fudge from Fact - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-perturbed-by-loss-of-stat-tool-to-sift-research-fudge-from-fact/ <comment><USER3> Here's the editorial by David Trafimow and Michael Marks explaining the new policy for their journal "Basic and Applied Social Psychology": [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01973533.2015.101...](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01973533.2015.1012991)

And here's their concluding paragraph explaining their rationale and objective:

      We conclude with one last thought. Some might view
      the NHSTP[1] ban as indicating that it will be easier to
      publish in BASP, or that less rigorous manuscripts will
      be acceptable. This is not so. On the contrary, we
      believe that the p < .05 bar is too easy to pass and sometimes
      serves as an excuse for lower quality research. We hope
      and anticipate that banning the NHSTP will have the
      effect of increasing the quality of submitted manuscripts
      by liberating authors from the stultified structure of
      NHSTP thinking thereby eliminating an important
      obstacle to creative thinking. The NHSTP has dominated
      psychology for decades; we hope that by instituting
      the first NHSTP ban, we demonstrate that
      psychology does not need the crutch of the NHSTP,
      and that other journals follow suit.

[1] NHSTP = null hypothesis significance testing procedure

<comment><USER4> And what should be used as an alternative? There is no reason to believe banning p value would result in improved research quality. Desperate researchers will just find another technique to game.

<comment><USER5> Instead of blindly applying a tool you don't understand, you'll need to build a statistical model, explain why it's valid, and then construct a meaningful measurement based on it.

Then the referee and reader will be required to understand it and will have the ability to critique it.

<comment><USER6> Which is good, as it will discourage people from submitting there, which means more potential papers for those of us who got on this train a while ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think statistics is one of the most misunderstood field of mathematics relative to how much the general person believes he or she knows about it. I know this article was about researchers and not the general public, but I can definitely sympathize with them; I have a MSc in engineering physics and I still have to think three times about a number before I know that all assumptions I have made while calculating it were correct and not biased, and three times more about what this number means and what conclusions I can actually draw from it.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely. If I were in charge of curriculum development for engineers, I'd swap out a couple of semesters of math that the student will never see again unless they end up working on EM simulators, and replace it with statistics course(s) that will be helpful throughout their careers.

Unfortunately there's a lot of coursework in engineering that amounts to institutionalized hazing. The professor had to do it, so by the hallowed beard of Frobenius, the students have to do it too...

<comment><USER9> At one top British university, the first year Physics practicals are universally reviled, everyone gets within a few marks of each other, the experiments are trivial (roll a ball down a slope!), and at every meeting the academics all agree that they'd prefer that they were dropped. Unfortunately there's some kind of government requirement for practical work, so they stay.

<comment><USER10> >the experiments are trivial (roll a ball down a slope!)

they should replace it with trivial experiments of the 21st century - <USER2> counting for Bell inequalities testing.

Wrt. the original article - good riddance, one less orthodoxy in science. Because it isn't about a tool - p-values in this case - itself, it is about orthodoxy which is the main enemy of science.

<comment><USER11> Oh exactly, sounds like there is ways of getting around the government mandate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find this whole backlash against p-values pretty confusing. That is probably because I come from particle physics, where we also use a lot of statistics, but in subtly different ways.

Hypothesis testing is not too hard [1]. You pick a cutoff, say p < 0.003 ("3 sigma"), and then if your p-value is below that, you call it evidence for your signal - otherwise you just don't have evidence. By doing so, the probability is 0.3% to have data this or more signal like, assuming there is no signal. With other words, if you follow this prescription and are looking for something that isn't there, in 0.3% of cases you will (wrongly) claim evidence (error of the first kind).

Since we are a cautious bunch, we actually put the threshold for discovery at 5 sigma - p<0.0000003 - which sometimes gets us ridiculed by statisticians. This hyper-strict standard shouldn't be necessary, but in part it's a hedge against the case where you get your systematic errors wrong (you believe your prediction for the null hypothesis is more accurate than it is - so if you see a slight fluctuation, it seems to be many (wrong) standard deviations away).

One other thing that we have to take into account - and many people forget this - is the look-elsewhere effect. If you perform one search, looking for e.g. a Higgs Boson with a mass of 126 GeV, you expect N events in your experiment if it is not there, and N+X if it is there. You know how N is distributed, and the interpretation is straightforward. However if you perform a scan, looking at 120, 121, 122, 123... GeV, then you have to adjust your p-value, since you are basically performing a bunch of different experiments, and by chance alone some of them are bound to turn up "significant".

The same thing applies when hundreds or thousands of Master and PhD students and postdocs do their analyses - even if no one makes a mistake, some of them will "find" a 3 sigma or larger effect that isn't there, just due to the sheer number of independent statistical tests performed. I've "found" new particles myself this way, but when you keep calm, put it into context by looking at other analyses, and try to add more data, you'll often find that your result melts away.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>

[1] explaining it is hard, and I will undoubtedly have messed up, especially since I'm tired.

<comment><USER11> > which sometimes gets us ridiculed by statisticians

You get laughed at because you have this huge luxury at dissecting huge amounts of data, running the experiment billions of times.

Do you understand that in most disciplines, you don't have that luxury?

<comment><USER13> To begin with, you'll have to explain to the physicists that there are other disciplines besides physics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There has been plenty of debate about this in other fields as well. Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have a particularly well-written paper titled "The Cult of Statistical Significance" on this very topic. Their main point is that statistical significance is meaningless without a discussion of magnitudes.

[1] [http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf](http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/jsm.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like this may be Prof. Leek's course mentioned at the end of the article: [https://www.coursera.org/course/statinference](https://www.coursera.org/course/statinference)

Also there was previous HN post on p-values, which I found really interesting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330076)

Also this _Nautilus_ article: [http://nautil.us/issue/4/the-unlikely/sciences- significant-s...](http://nautil.us/issue/4/the-unlikely/sciences-significant- stats-problem)

</comment><comment><USER16> >>Several journals are trying a new approach...in which researchers publicly "preregister" all their study analysis plans in advance. This gives them less wiggle room to engage in the sort of unconscious—or even deliberate—p-hacking that happens when researchers change their analyses in midstream to yield results that are more statistically significant than they would be otherwise. In exchange, researchers get priority for publishing the results of these preregistered studies—even if they end up with a p-value that falls short of the normal publishable standard.

It's not exactly the same issue as the one addressed by banning p-values, but this would help a lot.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a bad idea. Sure, p-test is pretty flawed, but this is like going without an antivirus because the one you have has bad detection rates.

The researchers are not the only ones who could game the system. A bigger problem is the editorial staff. Replacing an objective test, however bad, with a nonspecific 'case by case' criteria opens the door for nepotism and political agenda pushing. Psychology is an especially dangerous field for this, with the potential to label entire groups of people with opposing views as mentally ill.

The cynic in me sees this as a power-grab.

What they should have done is specify Bayesianism as the new test, period. None of this case-by-case BS.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting reading:

54% of findings with p < 0.05 not statistically significant: [http://www.dcscience.net/Schuemie- Madigan-2012.pdf](http://www.dcscience.net/Schuemie-Madigan-2012.pdf) easy stats paper as to why: [http://www.stats.org.uk/statistical- inference/Lenhard2006.pd...](http://www.stats.org.uk/statistical- inference/Lenhard2006.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it's easier to explain this in terms of likelihood theory. Likelihood is the probability of observed data GIVEN A SPECIFIC MODEL. This is NOT to be confused with the probability of a specific model being correct GIVEN THE OBSERVED DATA. It is the later probability that people want to really know, but confusing it with the former probability can have catastrophic consequences in fields like medicine, engineering, jurisprudence, finance and insurance.

The problem is related to the Prosecutor's Fallacy ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_fallacy)): "Consider this case: a lottery winner is accused of cheating, based on the improbability of winning. At the trial, the prosecutor calculates the (very small) probability of winning the lottery without cheating and argues that this is the chance of innocence. The logical flaw is that the prosecutor has failed to account for the large number of people who play the lottery."

There is a mathematical statistics professor at the University of Toronto named D.A.S. Fraser ([http://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/dfraser/](http://www.utstat.utoronto.ca/dfraser/)) who is an expert in likelihood theory and has commented on this issue: "...statistics does have the answer! The answer is contained in the p-value function from likelihood theory: p(delta) Here delta is the relevant parameter with delta_0 as the null value and delta_1 as the alternative needing detection. Then p(delta_0) is the observed p-value, p(delta_1) is the detection probability, and the rest is judgement: the route to the Higgs boson."

</comment><comment><USER19> A few obligatory references:

[https://xkcd.com/1478/](https://xkcd.com/1478/), along with the awesome explain-xkcd: [http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1478:_P- Values](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1478:_P-Values)

[https://xkcd.com/892/](https://xkcd.com/892/)

And my favorite:

[https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)

</comment><comment><USER20> The video that made it all come together for me was this "Dance of the P-Values" video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OL1RqHrZQ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OL1RqHrZQ8)

It does a great job of showing how the same experiment can yield vastly different p-values and why it's not useful for the task it's been given.

</comment><comment><USER21> Their issue is basically with the lack of negative result reporting that makes p-values useless; it seems very odd to vilify a valuable tool when it's never going to solve the real problem that people generally re-run experiments until they stumble upon a publishable metic.

</comment><comment><USER22> Despite the present day predominance of the life sciences (including psychology), I wish articles would not describe the p-value crisis as a crisis of "science". Physical scientists rarely use p-values. There are lots of other ways to establish the robustness of a result, most importantly, _not relying on just one tool_.

</comment><comment><USER23> A very well written article.</comment>


ActionAlly – Get Started on Work You Care About - <AUTHOR> http://actionally.com/

<comment><USER2> Love the idea behind this, more to come from ActionAlly I feel, it's got a good basis but a couple more features will kick this into awesome land.</comment>


UH VPN – self-hosted VPN platform - <AUTHOR> https://uh-vpn.com <comment><USER2> Why openvpn and not wireguard?

<comment><AUTHOR> tldr; the main reason behind this was due to routing and authentication flexibility.

Full explanation:

Most users of UH VPN utilise it for remote access to their corporate or home networks. This often requires the use of concepts like split routing where only certain subnets are routed over the VPN. OpenVPN achieves this much more easily using it's "push" directives wheras a solution involving wireguard is much more complex.

In addition to this, UH VPN is in part a VPN authentication system as a service, as such it requires a VPN protocol capable of working with a custom authentication system. OpenVPN does this very nicely using its "auth-user- pass-verify" directive. This allows servers to make calls back to the UH VPN API to check whether a user is indeed authorised to join a network as opposed to just relying on the cryptographic validity of the connection request.

One final and often overlooked note is that when we started development of UH VPN (the website, server software and client apps) wireguard was still very much in its infancy and as such was not recommended for production use. Therefore, we made a concious decision to use the openvpn3 codebase as our base VPN protocol and build our feature set on top of this library. When testing our applicaitons, the performance difference in most people's use cases is near identical to that of a wireguard deployment. We have a strong development team behind UH VPN and when wireguard offers a clear benefit for our clients in terms of performance whilst maintining flexibility with respect to routing and authentication we will add support for it alongside our openvpn solution.

James.

<comment><USER2> Is t the same for resources used on the client side, on mobile in particular?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our mobile apps are lightweight in terms of resource utilisation. This is largely due to two factors:

1) We utilise low level pause and resume network calls provided by the operating system such that the VPN is only active when network data is being sent or received. Therefore, when a device is on standby, the VPN is paused preventing battery drain and resumed whenever the device polls for notifications or is awoken.

2) Most OpenVPN implementations on iOS/Android (e.g. [https://github.com/ss- abramchuk/OpenVPNAdapter](https://github.com/ss-abramchuk/OpenVPNAdapter)) utilise socket bridges, this has the effect of increasing the resource utilisation massively for a given throughput as you have to copy data to and from the network socket when sending or receiving data. Our VPN core writes and reads directly from the underlying tunnel socket which reduces resource utilisation heavily.

Both of these optimisations make our mobile applications very efficient. If you try it out and run into issues, we also have a very active docs hub where people ask questions and request features ([https://github.com/ultrahorizon/UH-VPN- Docs](https://github.com/ultrahorizon/UH-VPN-Docs)).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Order Coffee Beans from the Terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benhowes/extract-extract <comment><AUTHOR> I made this out of frustration of never having the right amount of coffee at the right time.

I don't expect the time investment to break even any time soon (I could place a lot of orders manually in the few hours I spent on this), however I think something better is needed in terms of subscription ordering of consumables.

If I've missed a trick and there's something better than this already, please let me know :)</comment>


Nearly all 2020 presidential candidates aren't using a basic email security - sahin-boydas https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/30/dmarc-presidential-candidates/ <comment><USER3> > just one presidential hopeful — Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren — uses > domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance policy — or > DMARC.

Another reason that Warren is my favorite of the democratic candidate right now. It's telling that the candidate with the most tech savvy is also the one proposing to break up the FAANGs for antitrust abuses.

<comment><USER4> I'm not at all clear what a break up means. How do you break up a monolithic single platform like Facebook? Maybe spin off the messaging stuff but who cares about that? Google is tricky too, you could separate ad-driven search from everything else, but then the everything else bits would just die. How would that benefit users?

Basically picking off bits of the edges of these services is just pointless, but splitting up the core service also seems crazy. It's like splitting up a car company by separating out the bit that makes the engines from the bit that makes the chassis.

I can see it with Amazon splitting AWS from the store, but in that case both would just do fine thank you very much. Again, I'm not seeing any material benefits to anybody. I suppose it's possible profits from the store would be prevented from subsidising AWS, which might benefit competition. This is the only one that makes a lick of sense but it's not really a big problem to fix IMHO.

So what are the actual proposals, or are they just vague pontificating at this stage?

<comment><USER5> > I'm not at all clear what a break up means. How do you break up a monolithic > single platform like Facebook? Maybe spin off the messaging stuff but who > cares about that?

Facebook's platform is already pretty well broken up: you have IG, WhatsApp, the core News Feed, Messenger.

Warren's argument isn't so much that breaking the big tech companies up would benefit consumers in itself, but that breaking them up would enable competing services to emerge (in the same way, she argues, that breaking up Microsoft enabled Facebook and Google to emerge).

It's easy to forget now but in 1998 Windows was pushing Active Desktop pretty hard and MSFT were making a big play to make the Internet something which you consumed via the Windows desktop and via Microsoft owned products.

It's not clear that competition neccesarily _would_ emerge from more constraints on large tech companies, but it's probably true that Facebook making a "WeChat" type play would not be a good thing for the Open Web or competition in any way.

<comment><USER6> > (in the same way, she argues, that breaking up Microsoft enabled Facebook > and Google to emerge).

Is this a reference to the consent decree? Microsoft wasn't actually broken up, not that I recall. Nor did the consent decree permit Google to emerge - <AUTHOR> was emerging anyway, and before the consent decree.

What are they actually talking about here?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd put this in a different category than 2FA, password manager, or basic "watch out or phishing emails" training. All of those things can be enacted by the individual end-user if the organization doesn't enforce it. But it doesn't look like DMARC is something the individual can turn on or off--it's completely on their IT to set it up.

I'm not sure how easy it is to setup, either. Assuming they're paying for Office 365 or G-Suite for outlook/gmail on campaign domains, is that something that Microsoft and/or Google will turn on automatically for you?

<comment><USER8> Email security enforcement is not turned on automatically, but is relatively easy to set up for GSuite or Office365. Typically the easiest implementation is to create a DNS validation record. With that caveat, SPF and DKIM are easier to setup, because it's just creating a validation record. DMARC typically means that you're now getting 10-20 emails a day from major email providers all containing XML files that need to be analyzed. There aren't a ton of good solutions to analyze the contents of the XML files

<comment><USER9> Postmark has a free service that will handle the DMARC XML analysis for you, sending you a human-readable summary report once a week. (You don't have to be sending through Postmark to use it; I've been surprised at how many spammers attempt to spoof my personal domains.)

[http://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/](http://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I see this as a reflection of the candidates ability to find and listen to experts. I don't expect a candidate to understand how to do tech "right" \- I'm in the industry and still get half of it wrong! However, when you're running a multi million dollar campaign you can afford to bring in experts to set this stuff up and audit your practices. In fact, I assume these candidates are already doing this and that if they are still not following some basic best practices it's because they are actively ignoring the experts they brought on to help them. That's what worries me. If they can't find or listen to these people now, what makes me think they'll be able to in office? (Related: "The internet is not a big truck...")

</comment><comment><USER11> This stuff is easy to setup (in G suite you can do in in a hour or two if you know what needs to be done), but like most computer security best practices, the knowledge is out there but not well distributed, and not in the hands of the people who need to know it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I enabled dmarc for my domain about a year ago enabling just reporting. So I get a dmarc report or two emailed to me daily. I have yet to actually check the reports.

Can anyone recommend a free or cheap service or something I can run myself to summarize dmarc reports?

edit: this Quora mentions some free services:

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-make-an- analys...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-make-an-analysis-of- DMARC)

And I found this on Github:

[https://github.com/techsneeze/dmarcts-report- viewer](https://github.com/techsneeze/dmarcts-report-viewer)

Any other recs?

</comment><comment><USER13> > _I see this as a reflection of the candidates ability to find and listen to > experts._

The problem isn't finding experts. There's a lot of smart, well intentioned people in DC. (For example, everyone I met from 18F impressed me greatly, and nonprofit organizations like Mozilla have a presence in DC)

The problem is that both congressional offices and political campaigns are _extremely_ hierarchical.

The culture in a political campaign or senate office is that junior staffers are supposed to be given orders and figure out how to implement them - <USER2> suggest different sets of orders.

<comment><USER14> It's easy to find experts, but not everyone does. Some politicians prefer loyalty to expertise. At least one candidate was able to overcome the hierarchy of her campaign and get basic email security.

<comment><USER15> Was that luck though, or active intent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To be fair i don't think the incumbent needs to be worried about that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Say what you will about Hillary Clinton—at least that woman could run an email server.

<comment><USER18> Do you really think she was the one running it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am sure i will get hundreds of downvotes for this but i still dont accept that the Russians targeted the DNC. Wikileaks says otherwise, the only people who examined the servers are a nakedly anti-Russian security outfit hired by the DNC and to date zero hard evidence has been presented this is true. There are so many holes in this narrative, and given the total lack of credibility the press has after the Russiagate collusion story we shouldnt also allow this piece to slip through as accepted fact.

<comment><USER20> There's some substantial evidence.

[https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2213767-dutch- intelligence-...](https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2213767-dutch-intelligence- first-to-alert-u-s-about-russian-hack-of-democratic-party.html)

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/dnc-lone- hacker-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/dnc-lone-hacker- guccifer-2-0-pegged-as-russian-spy-after-opsec-fail/)

<comment><USER19> I've read both those accounts. The Dutch intelligence bit is unrelated to the DNC; they claim the same outfit they were surveilling is involved. They did not observe the Russians hacking the DNC. Read the story carefully to see the timing.

As for Guccifer, the evidence indicates he operates out of CST (based on tweets and uploaded file timestamps), hardly where a Russian hacker would be situated.

These are both pretty weak as evidence, not what i'd call substantial.

<comment><USER20> And yet Wikileaks denial of them getting the emails from Russia without any proof whatsoever is somehow not weak? How would Wikileaks even verify that they were not dealing with a stooge of Russian intelligence?

<comment><USER19> Easy: they would have direct correspondence with the leaker and could easily validate it's a DNC insider. To be clear, I don't consider this to be strong evidence, I just consider it to be counterevidence that should cause us to be suspicious of the main narrative.

Meanwhile, of the above two articles, one (the Dutch intelligence bit) has nothing to do with the DNC. This leaves only a rather shady character, Guccifer 2.0, whose actions are pretty unprecedented in history: a hacker who announces what they did, seeks interviews, and crows on social media.

Why, exactly, would Russian intelligence set up such a persona? If their intent is to aid Wikileaks, why would they undermine the Wikileaks narrative that it was a leak, not a hack? Guccifer makes no kind of sense unless we believe that his entire purpose is to point the finger back at the Russians, as he quickly succeeded in doing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 10 Most Amazing Electronic Clothes Of the Century - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/04/06/the-10-most-amazing-electronic-clothes-of-the-century/

<comment><USER2> Very cool stuff.

Anyone here doing wearable tech / eTextile stuff? I've just started poking around in it.</comment>


Responsive images without JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://bjorn.wikkeling.com/115/pure-css-responsive-images-yes-javascript.html

<comment><USER2> If you're using Twitter Boostrap 3, there's a new CSS class to make images responsive called 'img-responsive'

</comment><comment><USER3> One IE annoyance that might apply here (if you even care about IE, and have lots of images on one page) is that only 31 style sheets can be applied at once.

[http://blogs.telerik.com/aspnetmvcteam/posts/10-05-03/intern...](http://blogs.telerik.com/aspnetmvcteam/posts/10-05-03/internet- explorer-css-limits.aspx) (includes test page)

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought that, that maximum of 31 stylesheets is only for external stylesheets, the styles in this code are written inline, that should work just fine I think, but I can do some tests to make sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not that big of a deal, but it means when you right-click to open the image in a new tab or save, it gives you the lo-res image (the src of the opacity 0 img tag since background images don't have this browser ability). Not sure it matters too much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, didn't think of that. I am also not sure how important that is.</comment></comment>


The End of Freshmeat.net - <AUTHOR> http://freecode.com/about

<comment><USER2> There is a replacement set up → [http://freshcode.club/](http://freshcode.club/)</comment>


Programming is Terrible - <AUTHOR> http://programmingisterrible.com/ <comment><USER2> This guy gets it wrong in his last post on reliability (but the other posts seem reasonable).

Reliability is hard because we continue to move the goalpost. I can write a pretty reliable program to compute sin/cos tables or to sort a phonebook or to do some basic projectile trajectory. But those aren't even table stakes anymore. Today a first year undergrad student might be expected to write a program that in 1970 the most advanced programmer in the world couldn't do with a large team and millions in funding.

I hate the analogy to other fields of engineering (and this author doesn't fall down that trap, but plenty do). Bridges haven't changed in the past 10 years the way programs have (in terms of functionality or complexity).

And lastly, this is IMO, a corollary for why ageism is so persistent in our field. Experience means very little. Why? Because I can capture 70% of your experience in your code -- in your library -- and build directly on top of it. I don't actually need you. There are few other fields where as much of your experience can be captured in something so reusable (despite our constant protests that code isn't reusable -- it's more reusable than any output from my plumber).

Programming is terrible because we obsolete ourselves by moving technology out of our own grasp. The fact that newer programmers don't understand the foundation they build on is irrelevant, since few need to look behind the current. Unfortunately, I think it is simply the nature of the beast. It's why we love it and do it -- and probably why we'll all eventually stop (or at least move into management).

<comment><USER3> That last point rings quite true with my experiences. I've been writing PHP and some other languages off and on for about 10 years now.

Looking at current jobs listings it's difficult to find things that I am particularly well suited for, even in web programming.

Since I was using PHP well before the current crop of mature frameworks and CMS the majority of my experience is in trial and error development of my own database access patterns , anti XSS , anti SQL injection and all of that other stuff that you used to do yourself in the early 2000s. As a result I have handwritten countless numbers of CMS systems and frameworks and am comfortable taking a bunch of hardware , building a Linux server out of it and mounting it in a rack.

But nowadays the conversation is not so much about that stuff, it's "what do you know about EC2?" , "What do you know about codeigniter?" , "What do you know about Wordpress?". So, my knowledge has been abstracted (generally by people who would do a better job it than I did).

It's quite a hard thing to explain to your family when they say "But you've been doing programming for years! You must know everything about it now!"

<comment><USER4> I had to log in just to reply to this because it very well could be me writing this post. I taught myself PHP in grade 7 (around fifteen years ago, it must have been near the v3 release) and sold websites in high school. I hand built everything on web servers I compiled from source.

Then I made the terrible mistake of taking a long break from professional programming through university (I worked as a tech writer instead, the money was good). When I came back two years ago I found that I had to learn a whole new set of tools. Javascript was now the norm instead of a disabled annoyance. Browsers supported incredible display features using stylesheets which made my table-and-images based designs obsolete. All the sites were built using some sort of CMS.

I spent a year learning front end design, WordPress, Magento, Joomla, and Drupal theme design. Then I went back to my old do-it-yourself ways and wrote my own CMS [0]. Suffice to say that it wasn't necessary. I learned a lot about back end programming and MVC related design patterns while creating it, but the most valuable piece of knowledge I gained was "Don't reinvent and try to sell the wheel when other people are offering it for free." It should have been obvious, but it seems I'm much smarter in hindsight than I was in planning.

I'm still learning today. Now it's the Ruby on Rails world and a whole plethora of new technologies come into play. I'm using Haml, SCSS and CoffeeScript on top of the RoR / PostgreSQL back end. My first web app will be ready for release soon. After that it's on to learning Haskell and RethinkDB.

The irony of all this is back when I stopped programming I thought I had a pretty good grasp on everything I needed to know. I figured I'd step right back into web development and continue on the way it had been when I left it. I wouldn't have let my skills atrophy if I had known how important it was to stay up to date. I think after two years I'm finally catching up, and I don't intend to let them get rusty again.

TL;DR: Don't get cozy because you think you know everything now. Even if you do, the state of the art changes quickly.

[0] <http://saintcms.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe rockstars isn't the best term, _legendary_ is better [1].

John Carmack (Doom), Dave Cutler (Windows NT), Jeff Dean (Google's competitive advantage) [2], Bill Joy (Unix, vi), Peter Norvig, Larry Wall (Perl), Steve Wozniak (Apple II), Jamie Zawinski (Netscape), and many more who I may have missed...

All of these programmers/engineers are legendary. For example, Steve Wozniak - read how he hacked a floppy disk and color into the early Apple computers [3].

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017939>

[2] <http://research.google.com/people/jeff/> Not just Jeff, also Sanjay Ghemway: <http://research.google.com/pubs/SanjayGhemawat.html>

Craig Silverstein: <http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~csilvers/>

[3] <http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> Programmers who can say "I don't know, but I want to." are the type that build things of worth in my books.

Beyond this, this post brings up an interesting question when examining the unpalatable extremes of the programmer personality spectrum:

Do Programming fundamentalists share ignorance and intolerance tendencies like racists or bigots?

\- us vs. them

\- the preference of my language/framework vs your language/framework

\- there's no way anything can be true or possible if I don't understand it or hold it as my current view point

If we notice, fan boys quickly can get defensive, or worse, assault others that don't fit their way, group, or mould. It's sad, but this is done as much covertly as overtly.

The test: Bring up a tool, process, language or framework that's not in vogue right now but may be perfectly capable. Notice how some (mostly inexperienced and insecure themselves) may scoff, belittle, deride, and denigrate others.

I just think it's a shame.

We have in our hands and our minds a way to leave the world better than we found it.

Instead too many of our kin are busy needing to be told we're special rockstar ninjas who are the growth cutting and bleeding edge that are busy crushing and killing things, but continue procrastinating and searching aimlessly here.

</comment><comment><USER7> > The only supporting evidence for the "uberhacker" was a study on batch > processing vs interactive programming, in 1960. On a handful of people, in a > half hour session. The rest of the noise is untamed adolescent egotism.

I present exhibit A: Richard Mathew Stallman before he got RSI.[0] The stories of those early computer pioneers should make computer users everywhere take pause and seriously think about the damage they're doing to their tendons.

[0]: In fact, if you type "uberhacker" into wiki it redirects to him.

<comment><USER8> Must be a random selection from a list. When I tried it I got Linus Torvalds :-) That, Wikipedia, is very cool!

<comment><USER9> Not really; someone changed the redirect moments ago:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uberhacker&act...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uberhacker&action=history)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bitter much?

I've been fortunate to have never worked with bad programmers. Some were not super experienced but still they _cared_. They did their best. A bad programmer would be someone who didn't care about the next guy.

As for "A" players, they exist. They develop code that others can understand yet probably wouldn't haven't have come up with themselves.

Hard work does not make you an "A" player. _Intelligent_ work does.

<comment><USER11> It's possible to care and do your best and still turn out worse code than someone who doesn't care. I've seen it.

<comment><USER12> Yep. Passion, unfortunately, doesn't equal quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Another hope might be academia, but much of the focus is on program verification, rather than reliability. Well typed software will eliminate some failure classes, but it doesn't give you robustness."

For anyone who's curious, academic research into verification extends far beyond "Well typed software". For example:

Klee: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs [PDF, very approachable] <http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/klee-osdi-2008.pdf>

That paper is a nice example of how constraint based model checking can provide code coverage well beyond what a human developer can accomplish.

<comment><USER14> And there's also proving code correct. Like the recent example of seL4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Finally, a reasonable programming blog post.

I'm so tired of the inane myths coming out of the programming community like the recent 'liberal/conservative' thing and the 501 manifesto. It seems like every 2 months I have to stop visiting hacker news and proggit while another one of these seemingly intuitive but unsupported link-bait blog posts comes around followed by a deluge of links saying NUH-UH.

Here's the thing, if there is no research supporting your intuition, it's just bullshit. Bullshit is all fine and good until it gets repeated as fact, after that it hurts our professional integrity and enforces biases and discrimination. Fucking stop it.

<comment><USER16> Lots of research gets started because of intuition. If there is no research supporting your intuition it may simply be that nobody got around to doing any, not that your intuition is 100% certain bullshit.

So when you find your intuition is not supported by research go do some research. Don't automatically assume it is bullshit or otherwise lots of research will never get done.

And then share the outcome of that research (positive _and_ negative) along with your intuition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Programming is honestly a very tricky sector of work to understand how to make progress in the practice of it from here on out.

You have essentially an almost infinite number of ways to get to an endpoint with very few real constraints... this is good and bad.

We have lots of creative freedom within the constraints of code to achieve a certain piece of functionality. For example, authentication - Ive seen it done somewhat differently on every product Ive worked on not to mention the different languages and coding styles used. Most programmers enjoy the mental process of crafting their own implementation and there is usually a real reason for custom development - every product is a little bit different.

The bad... we seem to have to continually be rewriting custom implementations of very similar things which equals cost and usually mediocre reliability. We barely even have adhered to guides for something as common as authentication (at least that anyone pays attention to). This is quite vastly different than other professions. Take for example plumbing - while not every job will be done the same by every plumber, there are a set of standards that all plumbers leverage - specs on pipes, fittings, etc. Or take for example healthcare, most doctors have at most a few different treatments that are agreed upon as effective.

But its not like certain sections of the programming community haven't tried... we have open source libraries, plugins, published recommendations, etc but the problem is that the landscape is a mess not to the fault of any individual... programming languages, technologies, business requirements come and go every day effectively erasing much of the work/libraries/best practices/etc that were just starting to get established.

Its as if we need to only have one universal unchanging language and a set of universal devices we all agree on with an unbiased committee that organizes open source modules - I also live in the real world so realize this is a bad idea that will never come to fruition for a 1000 and 1 reasons but I have to agree with the author and dont have much hope in short term "real" advances in how software development gets done.

<comment><USER18> I see this as a positive, not at all a negative. Programming is rare in that the field lends itself very well to creative destruction / natural competition / evolution, for many of the reasons you describe. The process is chaotic on an individual level but the population as a whole moves forward far more intelligently than any centralized process could hope to mimic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> hm.

Correlation and causation aren't the same thing.

You _can_ correlate good programmers with all kinds of things, but that _does not_ mean that those things make good programmers, necessarily.

...but, you know. There's probably a pretty strong causation in some cases (eg. write code in spare time, play music, speak a second language, believe in TDD, whatever), and if you're trying to be a better programmer, looking at the things that other good programmers do is the right way to get better at it.

Some correlations are obviously stupid though (gender, politics) and I'd be vastly more interested in data mining life-analytics of good programmers for interesting useful correlations (eg. play sport? hand-eye coordination? memory? write c++ for fun? know how to write assembly?) rather than just saying, well, all correlations are probably arbitrary and don't have any relation to causation.

Pity there isn't really any way to get hold of that sort of raw data to play with~

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems like to me the problem is not that academia isn't interested in reliability, its just that they are solving the wrong problems. I am thinking about Byzantine Fault Tolerance specifically, as from what I understand it is a hot topic of research at the moment. That seems to me to be an example of academic research that is next to useless for practitioners.

BTW that quote is from Leslie Lamport, maybe its so obvious he didn't think it needed a credit.

</comment><comment><USER21> This blawg has much potential. Love the post about marginal expected value.

<comment><USER22> On the other hand, many if not most businesses run just fine getting only 20-40% profit. Some business even run on being able to get only 2-5% profit for each investment, but re-invest tens of times per month. Why must software project have 500% profit before it makes sense to kick-off.

<comment><USER21> Software projects need more than a 10% margin for the same reason constructing a skyscraper does. Some types of investments are inherently less predictable than other types.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Really, we don't know how to write and maintain software, let alone reliable > software, without throwing vast amounts of time or money at the problem. > when we come up short we're left with the inevitably bug-ridden fruit of our > labours.

The way to write software efficiently is to have a small team of skilled, experienced and motivated people deliver it incrementally.

The space shuttle team developed a process to deliver software that was not bug-ridden. This was costly.

And there are collections of patterns to improve robustness of systems that are discussed in books about Erlang.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if the author is simply trolling with the first post. He says:

"This myth has many forms, with many attempts to explain the magic power away in terms of some physical characteristics–

1\. Programmers who have a penis are good

2\. Programmers who do not have a penis are bad

If you believe in this in any way, it is highly likely that you are not only a terrible programmer, you are a terrible person too."

Then on his Twitter he proudly displays in all capitals "I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON"

<https://twitter.com/tef/>

<comment><USER25> There's an undercurrent of gallows humor you're missing. Recognizing and being mindful of your shortcomings is wisdom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> So true. You have to learn that programming is politics from day one. Unfortunately, unlike the sciences where there is a framework for determining who is good and who is bad, in programming it is left up to sometimes immature people to make their case. The best way to silence them is with working software.

<comment><USER21> This can be said for nearly every white collar job besides maybe trading or something similarly measurable.

<comment><USER26> With sciences you have citations, peer review, credentials, etc. What do you have when management absolutely loves their immature high school dropout rockstar because they fooled investors enough to bring in big money? I think that programming is a bit of a special case.

<comment><USER27> > With sciences you have citations, peer review, credentials, etc.

You should read this: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shechtman#Work_on_quasicrys...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Shechtman#Work_on_quasicrystals)

<comment><USER26> I'm not saying that the sciences are not political, its just that you have to do decades of work before you can even begin to criticize your rivals. Even then, you are trying to convince smart peers in writing. In programming, the thinking on the street is that the younger, less educated, and less experienced you are, the more awesome you are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> TLDR:

Don't bother making anything - there's no chance it will be successful, no matter what. Life sucks, then you die.

</comment><comment><USER29> hey cool I thought of tef when I saw the title of the post and it was tef!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm so pleased tef is blogging this stuff. It's fun to see it in one place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Programming is a Joy.. Ignorant cowboy-coding is suffering.) Read (learn) before you write. 80/20 rule works here.

</comment><comment><USER31> As a programmer young in my career, it's interesting to get this type of perspective.

</comment><comment><USER32> DNS is centralized? Not as I understand it.

<comment><USER33> They mean 'hierarchical': <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server>

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> No.

<comment><USER34> Programming is just terrible for you because you don't have the awesome Emacs setup I do.</comment></comment>