The story of Henry Ford's $5 a day wages: not what you think (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-story-of-henry-fords-5-a-day-wages-its-not-what-you-think/#674d6332766d <comment><USER2> The story makes a good deal of sense if, in general, wages are set only partly by supply and demand, and partly by the employers-as-a-class's feelings of how much money people doing that sort of job ought to earn.

In this case production line workers were a relatively new thing, and Ford was helping to create a consensus about where they would fit in.

Part of the reason why simple supply and demand doesn't dictate a single level of wages is that there's a good deal of flexibility in what doing a job entails.

In this case it seems Ford was helping to decide that the workers would be skilled labourers: there'd be a training cost (what the article calls "a costly break-in period") and high enough wages to reduce turnover so as to amortise that cost.

The business about "character requirements" and visiting the employees' homes also looks like a conscious attempt to control where the workers fit in the class system.

The alternative would presumably have been to try to organise the production line to require less training, and accept the efficiency loss in exchange for the lower wage bill.

<comment><USER3> > The story makes a good deal of sense if, in general, wages are set only > partly by supply and demand, and partly by the employers-as-a-class's > feelings of how much money people doing that sort of job ought to earn.

In my experience, this is exactly how business owners feel. The skyrocketing salaries of tech workers in recent years is a prime example. It isn't just supply and demand. Its also norm-breaking behavior by a handful of exceptionally profitable employers.

<comment><USER4> > In my experience, this is exactly how business owners feel.

Anyone who consumes a good or service is aware of its market price, and is very well capable of comparing it to any value offered. There is no need to pull a classist conspiracy card because, in the very least, those responsible for doing the hiring have interviewed multiple candidates and heard what wages they were asking, and were more than able to compare offers.

<comment><USER2> It isn't so simple, because there are many ways of dividing up the work that's going to be done into job roles (and the division tends to be industry-wide, rather than done separately within each company).

The people doing the hiring may have enough information to produce an efficient market for a given job role, but I don't think the mechanism for the selection of job roles looks much like a supply-and-demand market.

Consider system administration. As a simplified example, you could have one equilibrium in which you have one low-skill employee for each 50 computers, or a different equilibrium where you have one high-skill employee for each 500 computers.

If the industry as a whole settled on the first, a particular company would find it hard to switch to the second: it would be hard to even gather information about how well it would work, because the operating systems available would be designed for the lower levels of automation that the first model implies.

In cases where two equilibria are viable, I think where we end up can depend on whether the employers feel that a given sort of job "ought" to be a high- paid professional one or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't disagree with the article, but the false equivalency at the beginning is pretty annoying.

>It should be obvious that this story doesn't work: Boeing would most certainly be in trouble if they had to pay their workers sufficient to afford a new jetliner.

You could go the other extreme and ask the same question about paperclips, but paperclips are a poor substitute for automobiles. The equivalent of a jetliner in Ford's day would probably be closer to the Titanic than a Model T.

<comment><USER6> But it is in Boeing's interest to pay workers enough to increase demand for jetliners -- that is, enough that they can afford airline tickets with some frequency.

<comment><USER7> Not necessarily! If Boeing decides to pay an employee an extra $50/month, and that employee saves all of that money and spends it on airline tickets, after the money that goes to the airline, the airline workers, the oil companies, and the airports, a small fraction of it returns to Boeing. Whereas if they didn't pay them that extra $50/month, they would retain 100% of it.

<comment><USER8> If you pay an extra $50 a month, it forces all the other companies to pay an extra $50 a month, and you get a fraction of everyone's extra $50. If you get 5% of the average $50 a month extra, but only employ 1% of the workers, you make money

<comment><USER7> If you only employ 1% of the workers and you pay an extra $50/mo, the rest of the market isn't necessarily going to keep up with you. You're probably just gonna end up hiring the top 1%. (Which also had a lot to do with Ford's success, to be fair!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does my company give a raise every year: If they don't, I'll leave.

Why does my company employ me in the first place: If they didn't, they would make less money.

<comment><USER10> > Why does my company give a raise every year: If they don't, I'll leave.

AND someone decided it probably costs less than hiring a replacement for you.

<comment><USER11> I don't think people responsible for making those decisions are always adept at calculating what those costs are, and they aren't always empowered to make the fiscally sound choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> part of an account I heard of this somewhere else was that the turnover of employees was specifically _between_ car manufacturers. Because they all paid more or less the same, if a worker got annoyed he would leave with no notice and go to a competitor.

Ford also refused to re-hire anyone who had previously quit, so the $5 was a great example of "Golden handcuffs". People would think twice before leaving, knowing they would be making 50% for the foreseeable future if they did.

<comment><USER13> Is a blanket ban on re-hires legal? It does not sound legitimate/legal.

Surely a hiring decision should be based on employee skills/performance, and not punish general life choices?

<comment><USER12> I'm not an expert! But my impression is labour law was pretty different then and very employer focused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Today, I don't think the general public buys that story cover. Probably back in Ford's time.

Ford had to raise wages because it was actually cheaper than to not to. If we want to look at a good analog today, I would point to software engineers.

</comment><comment><USER15> The most fascinating part of this article to me is the choice to represent dollar amounts like $9,250,000 as "$9 1/4 million".

I don't think I've seen a non-decimal format used for currency outside of history books talking about pre-decimal currencies.

</comment><comment><USER16> >It should be obvious that this story doesn't work: Boeing would most certainly be in trouble if they had to pay their workers sufficient to afford a new jetliner.

This is a terrible strawman. One could easily argue that Boeing should pay their employees enough so they could afford plane tickets to fly in Boeing jets. Comparing a commodity product to a commercial product like this article does is narrow and silly.

<comment><USER17> Well, it is Forbes.

<comment><USER18> To be clear, this is not Forbes. This is forbes.com/sites/ which is an unedited blogging network. So long as a blog brings in clicks and doesn't cause problems for Forbes then they don't much care what is posted.

<comment><USER19> If it's at forbes.com, and has Forbes logo at the top, it's Forbes. If they don't like the brand damage this is creating, tough luck: they can't have their cake and eat it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another facet not mentioned is unemployment. The world of pretty casual factory work (52k hires/year with 14k employees) was one in which (say) a 20% decline in work meant the average guy waited an extra 2.8 weeks before starting the next job, which he did a few times each year. It's pretty easy to save/borrow enough for a few weeks.

But in Ford's new world of more-or-less employment for life, a 20% decline meant 20% got fired, and those guys now waited on the bench until the economy recovered. This is, I think, part of why the great depression was so unpleasant, compared to 19th century recessions. (For clarity, I don't think this was anybody's intention, just a consequence of higher-skill jobs being less flexible. Nor that it was the entire story.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Beware of getting history lessons from fellows at the Adam Smith Institute. As is almost always the case with history, the truth is a bit more nuanced and needs more than one conservative's blog for a full treatment.

The policy did come directly from Henry Ford [1], and in 1926, Ford himself wrote:

> _" The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, > and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices > low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. > One's own employees ought to be one's own best customers."_ [ibid]

Although employee turnover may have been a factor, the source material for Tim Worstall's quoted excerpt in 2012 continued,

> _" The $5-a-day rate was about half pay and half bonus. The bonus came with > character requirements and was enforced by the Socialization Organization. > This was a committee that would visit the employees' homes to ensure that > they were doing things the "American way." They were supposed to avoid > social ills such as gambling and drinking. They were to learn English, and > many (primarily the recent immigrants) had to attend classes to become > "Americanized." Women were not eligible for the bonus unless they were > single and supporting the family. Also, men were not eligible if their wives > worked outside the home. Other groups also offered classes to help > immigrants and southern blacks adapt to the Detroit area, but none were so > prominent as the Ford plan."_ [2]

And this is where so much more of the nuance really comes in to play, because Ford was a complex character. Among his complexities was a really paternalistic view of his workers and of society; he believed in an idealized, perfect society, and sought to create it and to force others to live in it. [3]

The $5-a-day plan solved a handful of problems then. It gave Ford a lot of free advertising in the press, it added a significant amount of pressure to his competitors, it ultimately made his automobile a little bit cheaper, and it supported his paternalism for his workers.

You could do worse for a modern analogue for Henry Ford than Elon Musk. He's a really divisive figure in a lot of discussions, alternately driven by impassioned visions of a hypothetical society and by larger-than-normal faults. He makes decisions that are part business and part ideology, and so did Ford.

[1]: [https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles- min...](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/01/ford-doubles-minimum- wage/)

[2]: [http://web.archive.org/web/20121224153214/https://www.michig...](http://web.archive.org/web/20121224153214/https://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-54463_18670_18793-53441--,00.html)

[3]: Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

<comment><USER22> I enjoyed your comment, but it is an unfair criticism of the article. The subject of the article is not Henry Ford, the subject is his $5 a day wages. It's a business article (vaguely economic) not a historical account.

Will probably buy that book though. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The article centers on this:

> The point is not so as to be paying a "decent wage" or anything of that > sort: it is to be paying a higher wage than other employers.

There are a couple of key take things to take away from that.

* The employer is less pressured to find candidates. Candidates will find the employer if it means double wages.

* The employer has more choices. They aren't locked into settling for somebody vaguely competent from a limited pool of applicants.

* Employees are locked in knowing they cannot go somewhere else for equivalent money.

Despite those points there are limitations to this approach. For example, I have known many low income people who would not join the military even though it could mean double or more in wages. Likewise I have also known many people who refuse to get into software knowing they could double their wages. I would also be willing to accept lower wages elsewhere if the work were engaging and meaningful (however a person defines meaningful).

The only way that super high wages make sense numerically is if it results in retaining employees for a longer enough period to reduce expenses of employee replacement over a satisfactory time period and results in a premium on choice of employee from the population at large.

Wages alone won't provide a combination of those though. There has to be something in addition that makes the employer stand out in world class fashion. That could be unique opportunities, superior training, an accreditation program, research recognition, or something else. If this is missing the organization is going to swell with a certain percentage of bad candidates that will decay the organization over time from the inside out.

Government agencies emphasize the later more than the former because they have budget limitations on what they are allowed to pay employees and because the later has proven more historically reliable at retainment.

<comment><USER24> > * The only way that super high wages make sense numerically is if it results > in retaining employees for a longer enough period to reduce expenses of > employee replacement over a satisfactory time period and results in a > premium on choice of employee from the population at large.*

This ignores the large increase in productivity from each individual employee. Better-paid employees are less stressed, healthier, less busy at home (because they can afford domestic help), and spend less time commuting.

All of those things provide ROI for higher wages irrespective of turnover.

<comment><USER23> > Better-paid employees are less stressed, healthier, less busy at home > (because they can afford domestic help)

Again, that isn't always true. It is true when comparing $40k to $100k but less true when comparing $200k to $400k. When looking at that argument in terms of scale it is an argument of diminishing value that does not guarantee the increased individual productivity the argument would promise. The reason why that argument can suggest but not promise increased individual productivity is that increased wages alone does not directly correlate to better leadership or a more valuable team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> You boss being generous does not have to mean him being lax.

Laxity and lack of seriousness are bad for the company. All bad bosses I had were like that.

<comment><USER26> The moral of the story is you're supposed to be generous to your employees by reflex without having to wait for excess labor difficulties or costs to become quantifiable.

Pinpointed savings will always be limited and never correlate very well with the unlimited advantage of a more motivated staff after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not a communist in that I feel we should reward effort, experience and commitment but that said I also think grunt work and bean counting are equally important to get a product out there. There is nothing logical about squeezing the grunt work as much as possible for the benefit of the bean counter. Its just theft.

I one time oversimplified the situation like this: We could examine each sector for innovation. If there is not enough or a sufficient lack of it government can run the operation. The idea needs a bit of fine tuning to house the remnants of innovation in competitive commercial hands.

</comment><comment><USER28> Essentially employee non-compliance with a capitalist induced higher wages. What a wonder.

</comment><comment><USER29> Stopped reading when he compared a commodity auto market to Boeing.

<comment><USER30> You can stop when you see Worstall's name. Absolute lying imbecile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> _The International Jew: The World 's Problem_

Ford's articles published in The Dearborn Independent - Ford's personal newspaper, and later published as a book.

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

And let's not forget the bromance between Ford and Hitler.

"only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews'] fury, still maintains full independence…[from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions" - Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

[https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/henry-ford-grand- cross-1938...](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/henry-ford-grand-cross-1938/)

Also one of the many antisemitic conspiracy theories Ford espoused:

 _Jews have always controlled the business... The motion picture influence of the United States and Canada...is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind._ \- Henry Ford

<comment><USER32> Why was this down-voted?

If we don't pause to examine the dramatic moral failings of earlier tech titans, how will we identify our era's blind spots?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Seriously, please read about how creepy Ford was, this article does not do it justice. [1]

There are other tech titans with strong ideological views about how you should live. [2]

Fun fact: Ford hired "private detectives" who used machine guns to murder striking workers. [3]

Know your history. There is nothing new under the sun.

[1] [https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...](https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2124&context=dissertations)

[2] [https://youtu.be/xM9GMGDsKUU?t=859](https://youtu.be/xM9GMGDsKUU?t=859)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March)

<comment><USER4> > Seriously, please read about how creepy Ford was, this article does not do > it justice.

What surprised me the most is that Ford's decision to increase wages was actually to use Ford's dominance to pull an anti-competitive play on his rivals to try to dry them of talent and manpower, which back in the days actually was deeply tied to the throughput and quality of the product that comes out of their production lines.

Thus by paying a little extra to their workers, you in practice are killing off your competition by strangling their ability to produce competing products.

It surprised me that the author showed ignorance in a way that forced him to use some imagination to come up with absurd argumrnts when he did not needed to.

<comment><USER33> How in the world is that "anti-competitive"?

It sounds like you are saying that these workers were worth a lot of money, as they determined the quality of the cars.

So... that means that they were actually worth those higher wages.

Anti-competitive would instead be if a company did something that was unprofitable in the short term.

This wasn't unprofitable in the short term! It makes perfect business sense to pay lots of money to highly skilled workers that are legitimately worth that money!

<comment><USER34> My guess is that it requires deeper pockets but it is an utterly fucked thing to call actually competing for employeers anticompetitive. Granted the accusation "anticompetive" is often a tall poppy complaint that really means "I don't want to have to compete with that!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 1913 US dollar backed by gold @ $25/oz. Therefore was 1/5 oz of gold.

Thats a 2020 equivalent to $300 per day and there was no income tax.

This is whats been stolen from you.

<comment><USER36> A better way to find the 2020 equivalent of $5.00 would be to look at the change in Consumer Price Index (CPI) over the past century.

The CPI changed from 9.9 in 1913 to 255.7 in 2019. So $5.00 dollars in 1913 is equal to about $130.00 in 2020.

<comment><USER35> >CPI

* hedonic adjustments

* variable basket of goods

* structurally created to understate inflation to save gov money on entitlement payments

<comment><USER37> The difficulties with CPI are well known to economists and anyone interested in historical finance.

But its flaws are insignificant compared to using the price of gold as a measuring stick - given how volatile its price is.

By your method of calculating equivalent amounts, the $5 a day was worth $300 in 2020 but only $200 in 2016 - or $380 in 2012 or $50 in 2002.

<comment><USER26> IRC these wide variations are all due to relatively greater fluctuations in the value of the dollar compared to relatively lesser fluctuations in the functional value of gold.

With uneven but too-frequent devaluation events, the US dollar, or indices based on it, certainly does not have enough continuity to make accurate trending across the previous century feasible.

These events are usually reserved for situations when other assets are in extreme flux, exacerbating the difficulty accommodating the discontinuity.

This has been by design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Repeated use of a straw man argument. I knew that retention was a reason for higher pay. But social inclusion was too, that is the surplus of money and ability to join in consumer culture. (I doubt Henry used terms like that!)

"It was nothing at all to do with creating a workforce that could afford to buy the products" is simply a lie. That was part of the reason.

<comment><USER39> It was promoted as the reason, but all the evidence directly contradicts that.</comment></comment>


A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lessons-learned/917b8b63ae3e <comment><USER3> As one of the older folks on HN, I can tell you that death in the age of facebook is strange in that even when they are gone there's still a "there- ness" to them thanks to left over accounts. Its almost like at any moment, a tweet will pop up or an update to a wall... Perhaps that's the 21st century version of seeing ghosts.

<comment><USER4> When my girlfriend died I could not bring myself to remove her from my friends list. She is still there. Her beautiful smile looks at me nearly every day. Some days I am glad to see that little profile picture of hers and others it is painful. Her family could have the account closed I guess but I think they feel the same as me and closing it is like deleting a little part of what we have left of her :(

<comment><USER5> I feel you. A girl I dated passed away and her family deleted all of her social media accounts. I was already still coping with losing her in the real world and then she instantly vanished from the online world too. There were pictures of her and me that I no longer have access to, and our conversations now show up with a blank face (Facebook chat was the last way we communicated). The only remnant I could find of her online was an Etsy account. She had a wishlist on there with a few items on it and so I bought something she had picked and it is hanging on my wall right now.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps this is a good thing? (Forgive me if it's not and I'm being insensitive)

Before human beings developed external memories (photographs and now digital records of everything we do), trauma and negative memories were supposed to slowly fade away, and they did. Only mildly emotional residues remained. Our psychological itch to keep experiencing sights and sounds associated with a thing or person lost could not be scratched no matter how tempted we were.

Now we can. Not only that, we consider it some sort of obligation to carry the burden. We scratch the wound just as it starts to heal and it's like experiencing the loss over and over again.

or may be that's just my experience. I used to be in a permanent state of melancholy because I always reminisced about past losses, even when the present was good. I don't do that anymore. I've a rule, in fact: never replay a negative experience more than once unless you have new data to re-evaluate it in a different light.

<comment><USER5> I share your sense of not replaying the negatives, I let those go long before she passed. What about the good memories? Those are the ones I want to re- live. I want to replay the highs, the wild times, the experiences we had with and of each other. She has the other half of all the memories we created together. If I forget something, she is not there to remind me, and if I no longer have anything else to remind me, that memory can potentially be lost forever. Her social media disappearing just made this effect worse...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      Around The Corner

      Around the corner I have a friend,
      In this great city that has no end,
      Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,
      And before I know it, a year is gone.

      And I never see my old friends face,
      For life is a swift and terrible race,
      He knows I like him just as well,
      As in the days when I rang his bell.

      And he rang mine but we were younger then,
      And now we are busy, tired men.
      Tired of playing a foolish game,
      Tired of trying to make a name.

      "Tomorrow" I say! "I will call on Jim
      Just to show that I'm thinking of him",
      But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
      And distance between us grows and grows.

      Around the corner, yet miles away,
      "Here's a telegram sir," "Jim died today."
      And that's what we get and deserve in the end.
      Around the corner, a vanished friend.

      -- Charles Hanson Towne

I've had this happen to me. And it really hurts. Partly from the reality of death, and partly because it's so easy to play the what if game. What if I'd called any of the many times I thought about doing so? How would things have been different?

As far as I know, there are no do-overs. So make a point of keeping in touch with the people you care about.

</comment><comment><USER8> A very close friend died. I knew she died, she died while she was on the phone to me. I had my cell phone (to her) in one hand and my landline (to the police) in the other. They were saying "ask her about landmarks! Ask her for her address!" and she was saying "oh ho ho! You won't get it out of me that easily".

The online stuff is a bit hard for me to deal with. She had a friendster page, but not Facebook. There's a memorial, and some other snippets floating around. There's a glimpse of her in a Moloko video, and another (shorter) glimpse in the video of the Smith's last concert.

I get no comfort at all from that memorial page, and it left me pretty much anti the idea of them.

There's quite a lot of misinformation about her life, and her death, but she's dead and people close to her were grieving so I just ignored it and kept quiet. But it makes reading that stuff very hard.

([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjiMx9SpnI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjiMx9SpnI))

([http://www.a-free-guestbook.com/gb/6tsinfo/1](http://www.a-free- guestbook.com/gb/6tsinfo/1))

([http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/event-news/va-va-voom-all- day...](http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/event-news/va-va-voom-all-dayer- happening-this-saturday-r1570))

([http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/soul-news/sad-news-lynn- davis...](http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/soul-news/sad-news-lynn-davis-r478))

<comment><USER9> > A very close friend died. I knew she died, she died while she was on the > phone to me. I had my cell phone (to her) in one hand and my landline (to > the police) in the other. They were saying "ask her about landmarks! Ask her > for her address!" and she was saying "oh ho ho! You won't get it out of me > that easily".

As someone who has been in the same situation (though in my case my friend survived), I am very sorry for your loss. I still have nightmares sometimes about that experience - hearing the authorities bark orders into the phone on one end, hearing her scream at me, calling me a "traitor" when she realized I'd divulged her plans that she told me in confidence[0]. I even remember the exact song that I had been playing in the background (to give background noise, so she wouldn't realize I was on the other line) - I haven't been able to listen to it since.

Back to the topic, though: I'm in the opposite situation. This former friend and I haven't spoken in many years (for unrelated reasons), and it would cause a lot of problems in our social networks if we reconnected. Still, every now and then (perhaps once a year or so), I am reminded of her and have the inclination to check in on her. We're not Facebook friends, but thanks to Twitter, her public blog, etc., it's easy for me to see that she's alive and well[1].

I'm not sure how I would react if I checked one day and found that she had passed on, whether by taking her own life[2], or from "natural" reasons. It would certainly be very difficult emotionally to handle seeing remnants of her life all across the Internet, almost all of which have been generated after the last time we spoke in person.

[0] I pride myself on my integrity in general, but I don't regret my actions here. (She apologized later, for what it's worth).

[1] for some definition of "well".

[2] given the aforementioned history, there is a non-zero chance of this

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I come from a fishing town in Alaska and a year or so ago all of the people from my hometown started to show up on Facebook. I had been away for a very long time, lived all over the world, and only just started to get back in touch with my roots.

Fishing is dangerous work. Over the last year I slowly learned how many people had died. I learned about more when I finally went back up to visit. The fisherman's memorial was a tough thing to walk by. It was even tougher to hear that people I had loved had died one, two, five years earlier and I had no idea.

Life is short. Maintain those friendships.

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course, this has happened for as long as people have been able to travel. Before the Internet, you'd move to a different city, and maybe you'd keep in touch with some people but for the most part, you'd never know what happened to most people you knew. Because as soon as _they_ moved or changed their phone number, getting back in touch was limited or involved a certain amount of research.

The difference now is that people who are in the acquaintance-Internet friend spectrum can still be reached easily with an email, a tweet, an instant message… if you wanted to. So they always feel kind of "there" even if you don't actually communicate with them. Until, like the author, you try to reach out and they don't reply back.

It's kind of an interesting thing of online "friends": you can be in touch with somebody in a chat room or a forum for years and feel like you know them well (at least in the context, you've known them), but they can just disappear one day and you won't know if it's because they died or just moved on to other things.

I was thinking about that about a guy I've been playing Words with Friends for probably three years. I only play with him because I know we're about the same level and it's hard to find players like that. (we were matched randomly) But I don't know anything about him except for his first name, most likely his birth year (based on his username) and possibly the fact that he lives on the East Coast based on the time he plays his turns. If he were to stop playing, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from him being dead. It's a strange thing.

</comment><comment><USER12> That was a really good article, and really sad.

This happened to me recently, as well. I hadn't spoke with my best friend from Junior high in years (since I was 18), and I looked him up this past winter... died in Iraq (in 2006!), in an attack on his convoy. The reports were mixed. He either died by gun fire while defending the convoy after the initial attack, which was a road-side bomb, or he died as a result of the road-side bomb. It was the weirdest feeling, because I was sure I could have him on the phone in less than 1 day, and we'd be reminiscing about all the fun times we had back in the day, etc., and have some sort of "let's do that sometime soon" plans before the call was over. I was wrong. What's more, he had a wife and kid, which I never met. If I'd been a better friend, his wife would have had another person to comfort her with anecdotes of his younger days... I was a terrible friend. He was killed while fighting for our country (whether our imperialism is justified or not, our soldiers are important to our country's sovereignty), and I was busy vacationing in the Florida Keys.

<comment><USER9> > I was a terrible friend. He was killed while fighting for our country > (whether our imperialism is justified or not, our soldiers are important to > our country's sovereignty), and I was busy vacationing in the Florida Keys.

This happens to the best of us. In itself, it does not make you a terrible friend.

> What's more, he had a wife and kid, which I never met. If I'd been a better > friend, his wife would have had another person to comfort her with anecdotes > of his younger days.

You never know - she may be happy to hear from you regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My mother passed just after I graduated from high school in the late 90s and although it was pre-FB (et al) and she wouldn't have been into social networks, I do wish there was something that recorded who she was...her moving about, her voice, something. A bunch of her friends ransacked her house for her things, which I was told they (my mother and them) had previously agreed upon in the case of her death, and so when I got there, there was almost nothing left of her things. I can't remember her voice anymore so, in that sense, having a FB profile of hers wouldn't do it for me but a Youtube video would. That would be nice.

<comment><USER14> I'm in a similar boat. My mom passed away in 2001, and I have very few digital reminders of her (mainly just a few emails, but she never really got into the whole internet thing). She wasn't one to be photographed often, and even if she had been, I didn't get my first digital camera until a year or so after her death. I'm trying right now to recall her voice, and I'm having a lot of trouble doing so clearly.

As much as a posthumous online presence could be unsettling, I really wish I had more tangible things to remind me of her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This happened with the first friend I ever made taking my CS degree. We were in a lot of classes together and corresponded on a semi-regular basis on Facebook over school breaks and things. I had talked to him a couple months prior to this school year starting, but once I got back and noticed he wasn't in any of the classes we were supposed to have together, a mutual friend of ours informed me that he had committed suicide over the summer. It was so jarring that just a few months had passed and he was gone. I looked back on our Facebook messages. I had no idea he was in any sort of distress. The last thing he had sent me was some funny cat gif and I hadn't responded. I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made a difference somehow.

<comment><USER9> > I had no idea he was in any sort of distress.

> I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made > a difference somehow.

In case you're still harboring any sense of guilt over this, please don't. You are not responsible for your friend's death.

This is a common reaction when a friend or acquaintance commits suicide; it's normal, but don't let it get the better of you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sadly, this is a byproduct of a passivity in relationships that seems to be more pervasive in the Facebook era. You don't need to reach out to your friends anymore, instead, we just consume each other's broadcasts.

<comment><USER17> This was my first thought. If someone dies and you don't know until two years later, they weren't actually your friend. Or maybe, Facebook just has their buttons labeled incorrectly.

<comment><USER18> Surely there are people between "Friends whose lives you are involved with on a day-to-day basis" and "Acquaintances that mean nothing to you".

Friendship doesn't need to be a black-and-white concept; there are close friends and there are distant friends.

<comment><USER17> I agree. Now change the tile of this article to, "A distant friend died two years ago and I didn't know about it." And no one clicks.

<comment><USER19> There's emotional distance and there's physical distance. I have been very close to people who are now very far from me. The fact that we don't get to speak often these days says nothing about the quality of the bond. Still very sad...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is why setting up a deathswitch with a trusted friend to manage your online accounts upon death is critical. Wills are nice and all but I don't trust my close family to be proficient enough to correctly close out my online accounts.

<comment><USER21> That's really not what I took away from this. Why do you... you know, _care_ what happens to your online accounts? Web accounts are no more special than your library or toll road accounts. The only reason bank accounts matter at all is because the contest need to be disbursed.

<comment><USER22> Do you want your on-line account compromised with Viagra spam after your death? Do you want your grieving family to receive BIGGER PENIS NOW advertisements from you once you've passed?

<comment><USER21> How exactly would my passing cause this?

<comment><USER23> Your passing wouldn't _cause_ it; and it could happen to anybody. However having it happen after you die is going to have an emotional impact on those who are still alive. How would it feel to open up facebook and see that you have a message from your deceased spouse? Not very good I imagine.

I think it is entirely reasonable that some people would want to prevent this from happening.

<comment><USER21> We can never completely escape the echos of the past.

<comment><USER24> And your platitudes don't actually address the points raised.

<comment><USER21> It's clear we disagree, and neither party will be convincing the other, so I thought I'd just leave something to think about and move on. Alas, here we are again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Kinda had this happen. My ex-partner and close friend - "my rock" as I called her - Amanda "Moo" Hearn died a few years ago, just a few weeks after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I'd not called her for a couple of months. Kept meaning to. Then I suddenly had this urge to know how she was, and called, but the number had been disconnected, I think, so I called her sister who said "Oh, I'm so sorry Toby, Moo died yesterday." So yes, that Charles Hanson Towne poem (elsewhere on this thread) rings true for me. I email friends and call them occasionally and flippantly say "Hey, you're alive!" (I moved to the US six years ago and haven't been in touch quite like I used to be) and they don't realize I actually mean it. I hold a lot of guilt inside, dreading learning of another friend's death in a similar manner. Good to read this thread.

</comment><comment><USER26> I lost a friend about a year and a half ago. He just stopped responding to email, and I found out he had died about two months after.

Pancreatic cancer is a bitch -- he was gone in about three months, and he was (a) busy as fuck wrapping stuff up and (b) very sick for much of that period. He had all he could handle.

I did get to go to a memorial for him a few months later. I still miss him; one of the best programmers I know, and he got me into motorcyling 25 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER27> I tend to hate stuff like this. He closes with suggesting life is fleeting and you should keep up to date with still living friends. There is no indication he is actually doing that. People routinely have wonderful things to say about the dead, often when they said (and did) terrible things to them while alive.

Maybe he isn't a hypocrite but I have seen this too often from people who are.

</comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of what I saw a couple weeks ago on Facebook. I saw a friend's birthday popping up on FB. Then messages to that friend sending wishes of happy birthday and good health, peace, and everything else people wish you on your bday, started popping up on my timeline. The problem was: she died two months ago. I didn't know exactly how to feel about that... The funny thing is that this happened in a small town (13k people), where everybody knows each other.

That's when I decided to remove my birth date from FB. That is about the only time most of your "friends" will remember that you (may still) exist.

<comment><USER29> I'm fine with acquaintances that don't really correspond with me when my birthday rolls around. However I explicitly don't wish anyone a happy birthday over facebook. If it's someone that's important to me, I will make it a point to either text them, call them, or otherwise arrange to meet up with them in person. Otherwise, I leave it unsaid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> And on the other side of weird, I got a request from a person to introduce them to someone in my LinkedIn contacts list that I knew had passed. I passed along the information so they could be informed but realized that no doubt this person was getting emails from recruiters and such. Got the image of someone laying dead in their casket with their phone humming incoming calls/texts.

I have stated in my will that my executor will put an indication about my demise on any social media accounts that folks might visit. And I included a signed letter authorizing said social media outlets to allow them to do so in my absence. Strange thing to have to include but it is the new world.

</comment><comment><USER31> Too true and common. A friend of mine in sales taught me to make sure you reach out to everyone who matters to you in some fashion on a regular schedule. To put it on your calendar. I never gave it much thought outside business, but it's something I'm going to start doing.

</comment><comment><USER32> I deleted and recreated my Google account recently. Some deceased friends of mine have "added me". An unsettling feeling.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've had this happen to in the past. I may be cynical but I think most people just don't care enough about cultivating friendships with you, especially post-college. We just become too preoccupied with our jobs, family, obligations, etc. Even when we do have time to connect, we rather just sit in the couch and watch Breaking Bad instead.. too much effort. So yes, OP's thoughts are nice, but in the end, most of us just fall back to old habits.

</comment><comment><USER34> When I was in my early 20's I had an intense email friendship with a girl I met in alt.music.nirvana. Her name was Michaels, and if you search hard enough, you can still find her Usenet posts on Google Groups. We lived on opposite sides of the world, but we kept in touch for over 2 or so years. Then she moved out of home, had no internet access and we list touch. One of the worst days of my life was the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. Not because it was the day he passed on, but because of what I found. I tried to look her up. I felt she must have found the internet again. It had been some years since my last search. Sadly I discovered that I was never going to get a chance to speak with her ever again, because she had died in 2001, 3 years earlier. I managed to speak to her family, and her father told me that he had often wondered what had become of me. It's still hard to deal with. I have a reminder for her Birthday and the day she passed. It's a weird one really.

</comment><comment><USER35> Sucks. I had a friend/mentor pass and not find out for two years as well. I went to his blog, and was wondering why he never finished his house remodeling project... Found his wifes blog and found out about his year long fight with cancer. Life is precious.

<comment><USER36> Indeed. When my 10 year high school reunion came, we were surprised by several "Who knew?" instances of people passing away. It was always people 2 removed. With social media the amount of people 1 removed is closer, and it's easier to contact folks, but it's still a surprise to hear about young folks in that "see every year or so category" go. It's a shame when it's cancer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've long thought that somebody should write an app called "recycle me" for folks, like me, that post a lot on social media. It could just run your posts again in a loop, much like TV does reruns. If you had ten years or more of posts, it might even accomplish something like a poor man's immortality: you'd always be interacting with people, even people that weren't alive when you died. One can even imagine this being two-way: taking this to the next level by analyzing your online conversations and extrapolating what sorts of votes and comments you might make on new posts.

<comment><USER38> After playing with CleverBot for a while a few years ago, some colleagues and I created a clone that we chatted with, training it for months.

Chatting with it now is a lot like chatting with one of us. Granted, it doesn't always make sense, but the style of responses comes through.

<comment><USER37> For people who post online heavily, I don't think this is as far away as some might believe.

Sure, it's not going to convince folks you're still alive, but it might provide entertainment to the great-great-great grandkids, let them know what you were like.

<comment><USER39> This idea (taken to its extreme) is the premise for a Black Mirror episode: [http://vimeo.com/61215171](http://vimeo.com/61215171)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Really scared of this one ... [http://xkcd.com/686/](http://xkcd.com/686/)

</comment><comment><USER41> I had the same thing happen with a friend of mine who had moved. Her and I kept in touch periodically, and we'd always catch up and complain about the dumb shit going on in our lives.

I hadn't heard from her in awhile, and her not responding back via text messages was always weird. I then checked out her facebook and saw all of the wall posts and lost my shit.

What I wouldn't give to just have five more minutes to complain about the dumb shit one final time.

Now and again, I see stuff related to her show up on facebook and I just kind of stop and think for a bit.

</comment><comment><USER42> I had a friend die and I didn't find out for about 400 days. I was very upset, though I only knew this man via the internet...but we had been close friends for nearly a decade before having a falling out.

He had cystic fibrosis and went from perfectly healthy to dead in about four days.

His father and friends have taken up his various online presences--facebook, website, twitter. It's a neat little community that formed around him, even in his absence.

</comment><comment><USER43> Years ago, when Facebook was new and Orkut was taking its first steps, I decided to, once more, look up a good friend of my early computing career.

He was one of my first BBS-friends, helped me set-up my first PC compatible, lent me an external hard-drive and taught me a lot about programming. By the time I finally found him, I realized he died six months before.

We take our friends for granted. They are not.

</comment><comment><USER44> Having lost -- I think? -- a friend whom I had before the advent of "friend me on FB," I can tell you there are more ambiguous, stranger ways to lose a friend, and they involve _not_ finding out.

I don't actually _know_ he's dead. I only know that none of our mutual friends have heard from him, and that he was fighting with almost-certainly-terminal cancer to begin with.

The supremely interconnected world of social media has certainly created problems. But there are other circumstances that people don't understand as well, situated some time between "all we have is the postal service" and "all we had was email" that don't even give you the closure of an obviously-defunct Facebook account or the direct reassurance of other friends/relatives.

Many people here might not realize that before this sort of issue there was an entirely different one, and it ends with... well, it doesn't end. Which is really the problem.

</comment><comment><USER45> This has happened to me a few times, now. Friends from high school and college passing away far too soon. At the time, I knew them well and we were very close. Of course, growing up and moving away and life progression takes you away from those you knew early in life to those late in life.

My friends were all Facebook users, and I knew them before FB existed. We were connected through those services, but we didn't really communicate. They were wonderful people, all of them, and every time I learned of the news of their passing, it was through Facebook.

My parents still read the newspaper, looking for the news about "who died". (They are also interested in the weather, but that's about it.) Nowadays, it seems social media is our generation's obit distribution system.

In the end, I'm thankful for their images on Facebook. Even though we were no longer "daily" friends, I still miss them.

</comment><comment><USER46> Damned impressive and I can imagine how chocking it can be. In old times we had necrology announcements in newspaper. Family would publish an announcement and people would read the necrology. The locality property of the information would make it some how work.

But today with the so powerful communication means we have, there is no excuse that people can't be informed of such major events.

It looks like there is a missing Internet service there. I don't think this should be charged, so I don't expect the opportunity for a big business there and a so called startup.

But there there is definitely a need there and Internet solidarity or ISPs service should probably be the way to go to offer such type of service.

Probably country administrations could be involved as well because we want to be sure there won't be fake death announcements.

</comment><comment><USER47> I have a friend who died a year ago and I still keep her in my Gchat. I don't want to remove her.

<comment><USER48> I have a friend that died 11 years ago and still have him in my address book and have a birthday reminder for him too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Katie Hafner wrote a book about online death about a decade ago: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Seminal-Online- Community/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Seminal-Online- Community/dp/0786708468)

It was triggered by the sudden death of one of the Well's prominent/prolific members, Blair Newman, which resulted in a lot of conversation about what happens to one's digital presence after death. In Blair's case, he had removed his content from the system and closed his account (as there were those who were bullying him) before his death. It was decided to restore the content (from backups) into a Memorial sub-conference for him not long after his death.

</comment><comment><USER50> I think it is quite insensitive, the way that post has been written. Scattered with so many private messages and needless investigative fluff. I do think it brought to discussion an important topic, but I'm not sure I appreciate the way it did.

</comment><comment><USER51> I have had a similar experience with a friend who died very young (probably suicide although I've never had confirmation). Anyway now every year a bunch of people still post something for his birthday some comments are followed by RIP others are not. I suspect some of these people still don't actually know he's dead and post a message directly through their newsfeed without looking at his profile. It's pretty awkward but it's not my place to go and tell them (I don't know most of them) "FYI, he's dead"

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder, what if I wrote a script to keep generating trivial updates to my various feeds in case I die, maybe by sentence mixing and so on. How long would it take for people to notice.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is why Facebook/Social networks cannot replace real life interactions. Maybe they weren't as close of a friend as you thought? If you don't hear from someone for two years and never make a phone call to reach out/or spend them with them, it sounds like they were more of an acquaintance than a real friend. I quit facebook back in April, and I can say that my friendships with true friends have been getting stronger ever since.

passive relationships are not genuine.

<comment><USER54> This is such a shortsighted and cruel thing to say.

<comment><USER55> How so? I think eyeareque is correct.

In the days before the Internet, there were generally three ways to stay in touch with distant friends: writing letters, making telephone calls, or visiting in person. All three required varying degrees of time and effort on ones part, but this was offset by the simple pleasure of conversing with a friend. People didn't bother engaging in this sort of activity with acquaintances or "rather pleasant kinda-friends", because the personal _connection_ didn't exist. There was no "payoff" significant enough to offset the effort.

The likes of Facebook remove most of this time and effort requirement. You can "friend" people you haven't spoken to in years or even decades with a minimum of difficulty. While I'm sure there are plenty of cases where the lack of communication could be due to external causes (divorce, reassignment, death, job loss, etc) there are undoubtedly many more cases where people simply "drifted apart" because they found they didn't have strong common interests.

Many Facebook (and similar social media) relationships really _aren 't_ "genuine" (as eyeareque stated) for this reason. Neither party really is interested in putting additional effort into the relationship beyond a simple "like" button click every now and then, if even that.

The OP's story is sad, and while I agree with their summary that we should treasure our friends and family while we have them, let's not pretend that the Golden Age of Social Media has somehow provided us with a revolutionary relationship tool.

Facebook is a dynamic, 21st Century version of the old "phone number and address book": full of people to whom you might send a Christmas card, but little else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> My aunt died last year and for a while I was getting requests from Zynga on fb that she was inviting me to play games with her.

A lot like this thread, it hit me right in the feels :(

</comment><comment><USER57> When my sister died it was a source of comfort to read her FB wall and see the nice things people wrote about her. I would think someone would have written on the OP's friend's wall that would give a clue that he had died.

The other thing that's been nice is that we were able to find my sister's FB password, and were able to post her obituary. We continue to post pictures of her two young daughters she left behind.

</comment><comment><USER58> Says the guy who spends his effort and brilliance creating a site for entrepreneurs to meet.

When I say things like, "Silicon Valley is a gigantic, worthless circle jerk," articles like this bring it starkly to light. I'm sure this guy feels many things about the death of his colleague, but I doubt he understands the irony of how it conflicts with the waste of his own life on efforts like his startup.

</comment><comment><USER59> One of my coworker died of heart-attach two weeks ago. He had accepted meeting requests few hours before dying and had conversation with fellow co-workers. We couldn't believe that he is no longer alive.

His name is still displayed on my frequently chatted contact list. The thought of pining him or e-mailing him has crossed my mind so many times..

</comment><comment><USER60> I haven't had this happen, but something similar. One of my friend's dad passed away while I was away for college. This was before Facebook and since we went to different schools I didn't end up finding out for 6 months or a year.

</comment><comment><USER61> Great article same thing happened to me. I had an old friend that kept popping up in my mind and we briefly touched base to get together for a beer. I dropped the ball, and a couple of years went by, now he's gone for good.

</comment><comment><USER62> Wow. This almost makes me want to reactivate my facebook. Powerful post, bravo!

<comment><USER63> Strange, it makes me feel glad I actually phone my friends.

<comment><USER64> Yeah, Facebook "friendships" are not the same (though it's handy for keeping up to date with people :) ).

I at least have learned to post a "curated" version of my life online (after I was shown it wasn't good to share everything, even though I do tend to be quite open by default), and I assume many do the same, so you're not learning what's really happening with peoples' lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I always thought to write instructions about how to delete everything I have on the Internet and ask a relative to share that written instructions to a friend. Now I'm unsure if I want this to happen...

</comment><comment><USER66> Some time we involve in busy life and forget to meet our lover one, No day's Messaging,email,chat,FB decide our relationship. Why not we understand they are just source of contact not interaction.

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't use social networks and my family is separate from my friends are separate from my colleagues.

When I die, I expect it to take a few days or more before anyone notices. Then neighbors and immediate family will be aware, followed eventually by work and then my colleagues. My friends (who are all out of state) will probably never know.

I worried about it for like five minutes, once, but then realized that by the time it mattered, I would be dead, so why would I care at that point.

</comment><comment><USER68> I've had people worry if I was dead when I stopped writing to certain social media accounts.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It means a lot to see everyone's comments and thoughts. Thank you. - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER69> simplest friend test: remove your bday on facebook and count how many wishes you get on your next bday ; )

You don't have that many "friends" as you think you do.

<comment><USER70> I have a bunch of, what I would describe as, friends, but I know none of their birthdays.

Does that mean I don't have a single friend?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Be proactive about your health.

lef.org is a great resource even if they are selling stuff to you...

</comment><comment><USER72> OP = attention whore

</comment><comment><USER73> Good post, Alex.

</comment><comment><USER74> Man that last paragraph sent shudders down my back

</comment><comment><USER75> Surely I'm not the only one who read the screenshotted exchanges and thought:

He just told the OP he's waiting for "answers" from the doctor. He can't make travel plans. He says it's long, gruesome, UGH.

Guys. In case you have the social instinct of a cockroach, this is what they call A SIGN. Not a subtle one, either. That is when you LEAP to care for your friend.

Here's what you do. You ask: Wait a minute, forget about whatever it is I wanted to talk about -- what's wrong? Are you okay? Do you want to talk? Why don't I come visit you instead of expecting you to travel?

Alas, the author just glossed forward with "Well if you decide you can make it, let me know!"

The sick (now dead) friend expressed well wishes for health to the OP, only to receive what kind of well wishes in return? _None_. Not even "good luck with your doctor's visit that I don't want to ask about cuz I'm not comfortable expressing feelings."

How self-centered do you have to be to not even wish a friend with obvious health problems "good luck" or "feel better"?

> "Now you're probably thinking I'm a real shitty friend."

Yes, but not because you didn't know he died. But because you didn't care enough to notice or ask while he was alive.

<comment><USER76> It seems wrong to say both that he has the "social instinct of a cockroach" and that he's selfish (implying his oversight was a choice). I'm inclined to believe it's the former, given that he is making a post like this. Social instinct is not easy for many programmers, myself included. Your comment almost amounts to assigning blame via the butterfly effect.

 __edit: rewording my first sentence per comment below

<comment><USER77> > You can't simultaneously say that he has the "social instinct of a > cockroach" and that he's selfish.

I'm pretty sure you don't need social skills to be self-centered.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: JFDIN - Just Fucking Do It Now - <AUTHOR> http://jfdin.com/ <comment><USER2> Stuff like this screams the "brogrammer" stereotype to me. Strip the profanity and there's not much of a joke left.

<comment><USER3> Strip the profanity, and it's the pomodoro method.

<comment><USER4> ... but without the profanity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a nice timer, but this recent casualization of the word 'fuck' is irritating, and I don't care to support it. It was in a ton of the blog headlines posted on this very site last year, and all it does is detract from the power of the word, while doing nothing to add an edge to your project. Sorry.

Nice timer, though. Find a real way to motivate the user without abuse and it'd be even cooler.

<comment><USER6> Oh no. People are swearing!

Woman, cover your ankles, you're inflaming my sexual ardour!

<comment><USER7> Assuming that the other parties are offended by the cursing is the common response to these criticisms. I don't think anyone is saying that they're actually bothered by it, but rather that pointless cursing like this is formulaic, worn-out, and generally lame.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. If the cursing is the only funny part of the joke, it gets old pretty quickly. In fact, it seems at this point it's the opposite of offensive. I'm mostly just bored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like it! I think the progress indicator in the title needs some rounding love, however:

        document.title = (100 * time / totaltime).toFixed(1) + "%";

<comment><USER10> Agreed.

You might want to round() first, though:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1726630/javascript- format...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1726630/javascript-formatting- number-with-exactly-two-decimals)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all of HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's non-intuitive that you have to press enter to activate the timer. I couldn't work out why making the text box lose focus didn't start it. I ended up having to read the source to figure it out!

Also, it'd be good if there would be a way to start a new task after clicking "I give up"!

Funny idea for a pomodoro timer!

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL. We intentionally wanted to make the user feel like he/she is hopeless if he/she were to press "I give up" - ending it with a middle finger.

Game over.

<comment><USER11> I like you!

<comment><USER12> Seconded!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A few thoughts:

1\. Great idea! I use Pomodoro a lot, and find it really helpful.

2\. Honestly, I'm offending at the word Fuck and Shit, and I would never use a product that was swearing at me.

<comment><USER14> You must struggle to surf generally, in that case, without being offended. There are plenty of profanity blockers like [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simple- profanity-f...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simple-profanity- filter/ackkocjhcalcpgpfjcoinogdejibgbho?hl=en).

Surely, it makes more sense to install one, objecting to every occurrence of swearing is going to take up a lot of your time.

<comment><USER15> There's a world of difference between "I fucking hate Javascript" and "Fuck you."

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure what you're getting at here. One can be incredibly rude and 'offensive' without swearing.

<comment><USER15> Not sure how you wound up there. I'm pointing out that swearing to emphasize words is different from swearing at the user. I don't think the problem here is that the software has "Fuck You" and not "Screw You" floating over the middle finger pointing at the user, but that's exactly what David is implying with his disingenuous remark about installing a profanity blocker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> How does this suck? Is it enough for you to use it on a daily basis? If no, what would you like this to have? Welcome any form of feedback!

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a way for me to get a link to a pre-configured JFDIN command? This would allow me to make a work item for entrenched coworkers and send it to them. ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> If enough people use this, we have plans to include additional logic to it (database, etc.) to make it more collaborative - definitely stay tuned if you like it and give us more feedback on what you would like to see!

<comment><USER9> You could achieve this entirely statelessly (i.e. without a database) by encoding the task name in the URL. This is the sort of feature that could fuel growth by encouraging sharing :)

<comment><USER17> That's more what I was going for -- a nice, short URL I can send to someone.

<comment><USER18> What happens after you send it to your coworkers? Would you want to track whether your coworker gives up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fantastic. I just stuck on some metal and got some shit done for 25 minutes, although I was a little disappointed when nothing happened at 00:00. :(

<comment><USER19> It should have some kind of :D emoticon and a question along the lines of "So what's next?"

<comment><USER16> Heh, perhaps prepending "Fuck yeah!" to the :D emoticon, to stick with the theme. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> OH WOW ANOTHER FUCKING PROJECT THAT USES PROFANITY IN IT'S NAME TO TRY TO MAKE IT SOUND COOL WHERE THE FUCK DO I SIGN UP

<comment><USER21> I agree with you. But please, it's "its"... and don't scream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Helping you get your shit together. Cause Clearly, You Can't_

The snarky tagline actually works.

<comment><USER23> "Cause" is not a valid contraction for "Because." Looks fairly out of place in text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Don't know if you're seen <http://writeordie.com/>, it's mostly for papers. Just remembered it because if you don't write fast enough it starts eating your text.

</comment><comment><USER25> It seems that some people want less profanity and some want more. It might be useful to let all the text on the page be user-editable. That way they can choose the exact phrase that would have the desired emotional impact on them (and anyway, why tight-couple the tech and the copy?)

For instance, my first language is Hindi, and English four-letter words just sort of slide over me without making much of a dent. I had to 'inspect element' on the h1.tagline containing 'Just F* Do It Now' and change that to something in Hindi before it really made sense. Good job, by the way.

<comment><USER26> My first thought was "good joke". But I think you're actually serious!

I think the key difference between this web app and just a timer is precisely the message. Some people find it funny that it uses some profanity. I were the author, I'd focus on those, and just accept the fact that they'll lose some users that would've liked a different choice of words.

<comment><USER25> I was being serious, but that's up to the author of course, if they do indeed want to focus on the (for lack of a better term) South Park enthusiasts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Feature Request: Allow the use of a hashmark (or a different method) to pre- fill the user input, and auto-start the timer. Then you could send it to people who you want to get stuff done.

<comment><USER28> Definitely implement this. And add email notifications when the URL is clicked AND when the timer runs out.

<comment><USER18> This sounds like a great idea!

How do you think we should allow users to input their e-mail addresses w/o cluttering too much of the page?

(p/s: I'm one of the developers working on this)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I typed in "Go to work", waited 5 seconds, and then pressed "Give up." I still haven't gone to work. How is this supposed to help?

</comment><comment><USER30> I need to see lists of tasks on which I fucked up and the ones I completed. Basically, I need to track my progress. And yes, customized timer obviously.

p.s. : More profanity will be appreciated, maybe customize option for that too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting... maybe we can even chart out for you the average number of f __* ups vs success and do some data mining on this and suggest change (with more profanity).

<comment><USER31> It needs to source profanity from urbandictionary.com in an intelligent way relative to the race, gender, age, and sexual preference of my users... all of which will not be optional on my JFDIN app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can just think of things that I can do in 25 Minutes.. #shame

<comment><USER10> "can" or "can't" ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33>
       ((time/totaltime)*100).toFixed(2)

would be nice.

</comment><comment><USER34> Finally, a timer.

On the Internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well thanks for dropping by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Now all we are missing is a lengthy discussion here on HN about how to get things done properly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now.. all we are saying, is JFDIN.

Properly can come later.

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is great on so many levels :-) simple, focused and very nice design, I love it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! If people use this, we have a v2 which has some geeky 8-bit stuff.

<comment> unix-dude No lie, geeky 8-bit stuff would probably win me over instantly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sneak preview:

(Drafted) consequences: Someone will die -> you will see a 8-bit character running towards you with a gun My girlfriend is going to leave me -> 8-bit girl running away from 8-bit boy I will start hurting myself -> 8-bit you carrying a knife...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I love it! Please release an API for this! :D

<comment><USER18> What kind of return data would interest you?

<comment><USER31> Make Fucking Badass Just Fucking Do It Now API (FBJFDINAPI for short);

If I supply a string of text for a task, I need its ID.

Given an ID, I need the time remaining on the timer.

When the time reaches 0 on a given ID, I need a message to display to my users.

<comment><USER18> Definitely putting this into v2!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Everybody is fighting. Peace ✌

</comment><comment><USER38> So many tender souls that are awfully offended by someone using a bad word on the internet. The horror.

<comment><USER34> Probably less "offended" and more "unimpressed."</comment></comment>


Secret Service probing potential Target data breach - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/18/secret-service-target-data-breach/4119337/

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. Old news. Discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930258](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930258)</comment>


NY farmer says ICE officers stormed his farm without a warrant, cuffed him - <AUTHOR> http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2018/04/upstate_ny_farmer_says_ice_officers_stormed_his_farm_without_a_warrant_cuffed_hi.html <comment><USER2> Followup: Aguilar had a felony conviction plus had been _deported 3 times_ previously:

[http://www.newyorkupstate.com/news/2018/04/ice_responds_to_q...](http://www.newyorkupstate.com/news/2018/04/ice_responds_to_questions_about_rome_farm_raid_worker_had_a_criminal_conviction.html)</comment>


Nokia admits it rejected Android; eyes "billions" in revenue from WP7 deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/nokia-admits-it-rejected-android

<comment><USER2> _> >"A decision to swing to Android would have tilted the mobile ecosystem in the direction of a duopoly, but we wanted to create a challenger," he said._

It looks like he didn't explain why they wanted to create a "challenger".

imo having three dominant players is better than having two dominant players. However, it would have been great to get Elop's thoughts on what benefits Nokia would get from creating a "challenger" and why a "duopoly" was not good for Nokia.

<comment><USER3> I think the Nokia decision was the right one for Nokia, but the given reasons are BS.

Basically Nokia could have ended the smartphone war by joining with Android. But ironically, that makes them more valuable to Microsoft. This is just the same as Microsoft paying people to build apps for WP7, paying Verizon to use Bing, or paying devs not to release games on PS3 but on a massive, multi- billion dollar scale. It's a bit tragic when the greatest value your company can offer is to be paid to not join the dominant ecosystem in exchange for a cut of a desperate monopolist's war chest, but that's why you need to bring outsiders with no emotional attachment to your products in to do it.

So basically he wanted to "create a challenger" because Microsoft would pay them handsomely to do so. And if it doesn't work out, it's not like Android is going anywhere, so they've got a Plan B. (Though to be honest I think they're currently splitting the company into two pieces, the bit that will wring any remaining revenue from Symbian then close, and the bit that Microsoft will buy once they've sacked anyone Microsoft doesn't need. Microsoft will then try the PlaysForSure -> Zune thing again.)

<comment><USER4> Desperate monopolist? They have 5% market share on mobile.

<comment><USER5> They are a monopolist because most of the world depends on Windows and Office.

They are desperate because they know that in the long run, Windows and Office will be irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Nokia was unable to give a firm timeframe on when its first WP7 phone would appear but it is hopeful for a launch before year end."

I find this very telling. As far as I can tell, Google made the first public announcement of the Open Handset Alliance in November 2007 and HTC released the first handset in October 2008.

Nokia and Microsoft who should both have more experience and resources specific to the mobile industry than HTC and Google did in 2007 are "hopeful" to even meet this timescale, let alone beat it.

In a year, Nokia will have even further to catch up. I'll admit I may be underestimating the difficulty of getting a new device to market, but it seems to indicate an aversion to risk-taking which may set Nokia even further back than they need to be.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. By the end of the year (early next year), we're going to have Android devices with 2, 3 and maybe 4-cores, as well as a version of Android that no one could guess at right now (2.4, 2.5, 3.0, 3.1, 4.0 maybe?). Apple is going to be the same way. I can't imagine Apple not announcing new iPhone(s) and a new iPad this year in order to compete, so anyone who isn't rocking new hardware by the end of the year is going to get left behind. I'm looking specifically at Nokia and RIM, whose current phones are so outdated that it'd be embarrassing NOT to release something spectacular this year.

<comment><USER8> RIM has already "leaked" most of their planned high-end phones for this year, and none of them look spectacular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not entirely clear what Elop means by "value transfer". My initial reading was that Microsoft would just be writing a big fat cheque to Nokia in exchange for Nokia using WP7. It sounds like it's actually something slightly more subtle but I wonder what it will boil down to.

<comment><USER10> It means "we can cut staff and save billions"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I spent some time today looking at youtube videos of Nokia's Symbian OS, and also looking through the shopping catalog.

It just makes me reminisce the fact that Nokia makes good reliable phones. In contrast Hua Wei phones I saw don't have the same build quality.

The Nokia wall papers are tastefully selected, but the standard Nokia fonts are looking a bit tired. I mean even Motif was good looking in its days, but human nature demands that these be refreshed regularly.

Nokia would have done just as well selling Android or refreshing it's Symbian OS. Anyone care to explain what is wrong with Symbian?

I own an Android now, but I would have bought a Nokia android if it was available.

By the way, there is a long write up on what's wrong with Symbian and Nokia back in July 2010 by a Symbian-Guru.com editor as he decided to move to Android instead. [http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2010/07/symbian-guru- com...](http://www.symbian-guru.com/welcome/2010/07/symbian-guru-com-is- over.html)

<comment><USER12> I totally would have bought a Nokia android. WTF is a 'Samsung' anyway? Opportunity missed, and now I would happily buy a samsung again.

<comment><USER13> Not sure about that. My significant other constantly complains about my phone, and I have to admit my Samsung Android phone is not rock solid. Yes, I'm running a 3rd party version of the OS, but the Samsung version was slow, buggy and two versions of Android behind. She switched from Android (ok, it was Samsung's first Android phone, and was pretty awful) to Nokia/Symbian and was very happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They did it out of the goodness of their hearts, because it is better for the world if there isn't a duopoly? Yeah right...

</comment><comment><USER15> > to sell any personal shares he still owned in Microsoft as soon as he was > allowed.

This is hilarious. The Nokia CEO inked a contract with his ex-employer MS that benefits MS hugely while still owning shares of MS. Um... what?!

If it smells like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck... oh, well.

</comment><comment><USER16> "he also talked up the significant "value transfer" in financial terms that would come Nokia's way as a result of reduced operating expenses and new revenue streams such as access to Microsoft's search and advertising capabilities."

Wouldn't these two "value transfers" have occurred with Google? Nokia's operating expenses might have been reduced even further if they'd gone with Android (free) instead of WP7 (which they are paying to use). Wouldn't Nokia have gained access to Google's search and advertising capabilities if they'd gone with Android?

I don't know if Google or Microsoft is better for Nokia, but this article doesn't make it sound like Elop had any convincing reasons for his decision. It sounds like Nokia agreed to give Microsoft money (WP7 fees), but they haven't actually agreed on anything concrete that Microsoft will give Nokia yet?

<comment><USER17> > Nokia's operating expenses might have been reduced even further if they'd > gone with Android (free) instead of WP7 (which they are paying to use).

MS fee is what? $10 per phone, probably less for Nokia? But, do anyone actually think that Android is free? Sure, it can be free if you're some cheap Chinese factory that just slaps the latest commit from Android repository on their handset, but key Google applications aren't open sourced, and to get them you need to make a deal with Google ("Google experience" apps, support, etc), which I doubt is free.

On top of that, if Nokia wants to differentiate itself from said Chinese manufacturer, they need to build some custom UI on top of stock Android (which probably everyone will hate, but that's the way of doing things in Android world). And to support that UI on couple of future Android releases in timely fashion for each handset, to avoid angry mob with obsolete phones mere months after the purchase (SonyEricsson, I'm looking at you). Developers time aren't free, and Nokia is notoriously bad at making software, just look at their Symbian record.

<comment><USER5> Also, if some cheap Chinese manufacturer slaps the latest Android commit on their handset, _Google makes money_ , because that phone is going to run Google searches and show Google ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Honestly, it was a brilliant move by both Microsoft and Nokia. Microsoft dropped to 3% of the global market share for smartphones and Nokia's 2/3 market share dominance was nearly cut in half [http://blog.cedowin.com/2011/01/mobile-future-taking- market-...](http://blog.cedowin.com/2011/01/mobile-future-taking-market-share- from.html). Additionally, Android overtook the #1 sales spot in Q4 globally, (depending on who you get your numbers from).

Nokia could have gone with Android, but why? There are already Android phones. Why be another number? The key to success is not to do what everyone else is doing but to do something different and find your niche. Microsoft touts itself as the "business" solution. This partnership of high quality hardware and business-minded software will set Nokia/Microsoft apart.

<comment><USER8> Would you say the same thing to a PC manufacturer after Windows 95 came out? Like it or not, Android is already the "Windows" of the phone industry. Going with another OS, that ust happens to have the Windows name on it, but with a much smaller market and momentum, is a catastrophic mistake.

What if this is going to be true a few years from now and Nokia fails with WP7 because the Android ecosystem assimilates everything. Will they still be able to go to Android? They'll be destroyed by then, and it will be way too late too switch. At least by going Android now, they would have a fighting chance, and would just need to become a competitive company again, which they haven't been for a while, even in hardware. Yes, the N8 looked pretty good, and the camera was nice, but that's about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One issue with Android which seems to have escaped mentioned is Oracle's lawsuit over Dalvik and concerns about how vigorously Google will ultimately defend the suit given the role Dalvik plays in their revenue model. Two years ago, adopting Android would not have come with the baggage that it does today.

</comment><comment><USER20> three viable ecosystems is better for consumers than two. it also forces more competition to be dev friendly since apps are a large part of each player's strategy.

<comment><USER21> I'm not entirely sure that 3 ecosystems will work out to the benefit of users. With just two platforms, there's a decent chance that top-selling apps will eventually be ported to both. But with 3 platforms, you'll see a lot more market fragmentation and picking of winners. Witness the Wii/XBox 360/PlayStation 3 mess.

And because Windows 7 Mobile allegedly runs a dodgy version IE 7, we can't make portable applications using HTML 5, either.

So we're really looking at something like 1985, when developers had to pick between DOS, the Apple IIe, the Mac, and the remnants of the 8-bit microcomputer market. In this market, the correct strategy was to support a single platform and hope that it won. Ironically, Microsoft ported Excel to a huge number of operating systems, and they were eaten alive by Lotus. They've never made the mistake of fragmenting their efforts again.

<comment><USER22> Agreed. I love choice, but fragmentation is definitely an issue.

On a sidenote: This "there are two, now with WP7 there are three contesters" is (by accident? intentionally?) completely ignoring HP/Web OS. So maybe we're talking "4 ecosystems" now, supporting your point even further.

<comment><USER23> Is even the Android ecosystem even viable? Or is it just "a platform we should also port to for completeness?"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your Own Hot Spot, and Cheap - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Your-Own-Hot-Spot-and-nytimes-362333608.html <comment><USER2> There's a lot of fud in here. I get unlimited data on my Nexus with free terthering for $40 a month on T-Mobile; the mifi doesn't offer anything new. Great to see more no-contract options of course, but the tone of the article is really unwarranted.

<comment><USER3> What plan is that, by the way?

I'm on the lowest Even More Plus with 500 minutes, unlimited text, unlimited data, and it runs me $60.

<comment><USER2> I'm on the unlimited data-only plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We tried to buy one today. Sold out on the Virgin website.

Aside from that, I'm thrilled to see Virgin nuke the wireless data market. Pogue is right on -- other providers are charging outrageous prices for this service.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have the virgin MiFi and in NYC it is SLOW.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the first plan that had me thinking that I'd actually buy one. I've definitely found myself in spots where I'd have liked internet access but I don't need (tethered) internet access so badly that I would commit to a 2 year contract. It seems this is the best of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've got one of the Verizon Mifi's but grandfathered into their unlimited data plan (had several previous generations of Verizon USB devices) for $65/month.

I'm very happy with it. For example, I can take the train from Pittsburgh to NYC with full connectivity all the way, which is pretty amazing. Works well on the East coast and on the West. (Avoids paying ridiculous hotel wifi charges; the more expensive the hotel, the higher the charge.)

And I use it when I'm in my remote office (near-beach house) in CT as my main line. Can't really do VOIP, but otherwise it's fine (1+ Mb/s).

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there any reason why this + the new iPod touch + Skype/google voice wouldn't be equivalent to an iPhone that is $60 cheaper per month?

<comment><USER9> If you like to receive incoming calls, yes. You can get 1-2 days standby on an iPhone. Good luck getting anywhere close with that combination.

<comment><USER8> Hm ok, didn't think of battery life...but as I have a droid right now, I'm in the habit of plugging my phone in whenever possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have one of this in LA (Westwood/Santa Monica/Venice area). How are the speeds and connection stability?

</comment><comment><USER11> I just bought one and am appalled by how bad it truly is. Connections are obscenely slow, and that's when you can actually get them. Skype is useless, maps are impossible, and it runs _very_ hot. The only thing truly unlimited here is the disappointment.

</comment><comment><USER12> Had one and returned it. Slow and dropped connection often even on major highways.

</comment><comment><USER13> I got a MiFi from 3 here in the UK to use with my iPad a couple of weeks back - it's awesome (can use it with kids laptops, iPods and my iPad).

</comment><comment><USER14> Not sure I'm sold. 3G on my iPad, iPhone in Charlotte is pretty awfully slow. I would be scrambling for my wallet if it was 4G/3G.

<comment><USER15> It appears to be sprint, which is a different network?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What does 3G speed equate to for download / upload speeds?

</comment><comment><USER17> This is much better than trying to put a 3G modem in everything you carry. Save the money, buy a portable hotspot and buy wifi devices.

now if only contractless, reasonable priced data plans were more common... and the mifis were unlocked....

<comment><USER15> They probably are unlocked, but don't have the radios for all networks...</comment></comment>


Bike Desks eliminate Phys Ed and helps students focus - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/3036607/this-school-has-bikes-instead-of-desks-and-it-turns-out-thats-a-better-way-to-learn

<comment><USER2> Eliminate Phys Ed? Nowhere in the article says so.</comment>


How we made our React-Rails app 5x faster - <AUTHOR> https://blog.progressly.com/how-we-made-our-app-5x-faster-and-set-up-our-dev-team-for-continuous-delivery-193f9b37ff9a#.yurc3d289 <comment><USER2> "Using the Webpack-Rails gem allowed us to finally compile frontend assets when deployed instead of checking the minified files into source control for Heroku deployments."

Huge red flag for a project. Checking in minified files at any point of app development is a nightmare for developers. The fact that they were doing this at all is no good. And if you're reading this and your team is doing it, that's no good either!

The #1 thing you can do to speed up a SPA is server side rendering, which it doesn't look like this company is doing [https://progressly.com/engineering#/engineering](https://progressly.com/engineering#/engineering). The entire page is blank for almost a second on each load. Was it 5s before? I sure hope not! But the tactics mentioned in this article are insignificant to actual server rendering.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why would you couple Rails + React in the first place?

We have a similar project and decided to just put everything React-related into "client" directory in Rails, then, once webpack builds production-ready files, it puts them into public/assets (during container build time). And that's it, I can run React without Rails, vice versa, test them independently,... etc.

<comment><USER4> Yes, I would create two different projects, one Ruby only and one JavaScript only.

I wonder if there is a well established pattern for server side rendering of some pages in this kind of applications. Obviously one can use Rails views for some important pages but how not to duplicate HTML in Rails and React?

<comment><USER3> Hm, why would you need to render some pages in Rails? Why not just go React all the way and use Rails for API only.

If you absolutely do need them, I would just separate them by routes.

<comment><USER4> If the SPA is large, server side rendering is faster. Users get the first page in milliseconds, whatever page it is, then the SPA loads and takes over. I would do that for a few entry points to the site, for example the ones that get into the sitemap in the Google results page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How much of the 5x was from proper CDN usage? Given that we can all expect a CDN to dramatically benefit delivery time, I would be interested in seeing these kinds of posts with obvious wisdom omitted.

</comment><comment><USER6> How do they define 5x faster? http request to browser renders the page usable?

<comment> amk-- I wrote the thing, but have noprocrast on that account...

The primary metric is DOMContentLoaded, then the time to finish all requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Last week we deployed an update to our React-Rails app that improved load > time by 500%

By "improve" they surely mean reduce. How can a measurement be reduced by 500%? If load time has decreased to one fifth, it would have been clearer to write "load time was reduced by 80%"?

<comment><USER8> "500%" is equivalent to "5x"

So "improved by 500%" means "improved by a factor of 5".

In the case of time, improving means reducing.

So time got reduced by a factor of 5.

<comment><USER9> Which is also wrong. "Improving speed by 100%" means being twice as fast. 100% + 500% = 600%. Better avoid it even if it sounds sooo much more than "double" or "five times".

<comment><USER10> Improve by itself doesn't imply a direction. It has to be inferred via context. Improving page load time by 500% is perfectly reasonable to say, the reader infers that improve means decrease in this case.

Just as you can improve a golf score, or a marathon pace, or your BMI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They were checking in the minified files into git? Really?

</comment><comment><USER12> FTFY: How we made our React-Rails app COMPILE 5x faster

This kind of article is just a click bait. No data to support his claim.

</comment><comment><USER13> This snippet from the gist provided in the article says it all about any "optimizations" they might have done:

      path: production
                ? path.resolve(appRoot, 'public', 'webpack')
                : path.resolve(appRoot, 'public', 'webpack')

</comment><comment><USER14> No mention of E-Tags.

</comment><comment><USER15> 1\. Make sure you're using the latest stable version of React core

2\. Get a CDN for static assets

3\. Use Webpack, again, for making development easier

Saved you a click.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much! Caching makes a big difference, especially for first-time visitors. For logged-in users, one particular big gain was getting rid of a join from users to events to show the notifications count, and replacing that with a counter cache (denormalization).

<comment><USER16> By the way there is counter_culture[1] which is great for more complex counter caches:

Inventory:

        product quantity
        1       2
        1       5
        2       -1
        2       3
        2       10

And having a counter cache for the sum per product (e.g.: product.inventory_quantity).

[1]: [https://github.com/magnusvk/counter_culture](https://github.com/magnusvk/counter_culture)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks useful, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it just me or is every story titled "10 tips on making X faster" or "how we migrated from X to Y and reduced number of servers from 10k to just 2" or "how we speed up Z by 400000%" is really just a story of "how we made our project better by stopping, checking what we really need to do, researching how to do it and then investing time to actually do it right"? There is hardly ever any new ground breaking wisdom, new revolutionary algorithm or amazing new tool, it's all about knowing what you're doing, which usually takes a few tries.

<comment><USER18> How to make your software 5x faster

Step 1: Have it be 5x slower than necessary

Step 2: Fix it

<comment><USER19> >How to make your software 5x faster

>Step 1: Have it be 5x slower than necessary

>Step 2: Fix it

Corollary:

Step3: Pat yourself on the back

Step4: Show everyone how clever you are</comment></comment></comment>


Is getting rich worth it? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Is-getting-rich-worth-it-9?share=1 <comment><USER3> It's true if you get a windfall, you don't have the skills and experience to go with it. You're like a trust-fund baby, even if you worked for it.

I notice that people who get rich often end up continuing with what they were doing. Warren Buffett, YC partners. Of course, it's an important credential to be successful, in order to be an advisor, else no one would listen to you.

But it seems to me that these people are happy with what they are _doing_ (which is why they got rich from it). So... why not just do what you are happy doing in the first place?

There's a catch though: it needs to be something valuable and meaningful - <USER2> least, to you. Watching day-time tv and cat videos don't really count (unless you're like a critic, or curator, or creator of [http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/](http://icanhas.cheezburger.com/)).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd say it's an individual problem. Also, it's a question about _how_ rich you want to get.

I'd define being rich as having enough money to live of interest alone or at least have enough money that I could live my whole life before spending all of it. Both very different sums, one is probably over a million, the other about 300-500k depending on how long you live and how much you spend every year.

Other people say you're already rich if you earn more than most people in the country.

As far as I know, I'm in the top 7% of my country when I work full-time 11 months a year. I like my work, but I prefer only to work 3-4 months a year.

Will I get rich like this? I hope, haha, but I fear not. At least I have much time to spend the first half of my life with more freedom.</comment>


Mt.Gox CEO says bitcoin exchange at 'turning point'  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/101444038

<comment><USER2> It's too bad that they're going under and taking everyone's money with them, but the sooner they go away the better. Nobody will trust them again regardless of what they do. The more they're in the press the worse bitcoin looks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the aquisition rumors are correct... It's too early to tell though.</comment>


Startups Aim to Make Coding Fun - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39926/?p1=A2

<comment><USER2> I thought we all did this because it's fun. I don't see why people want to dumb it down.</comment>


British Library Helps Lock Down More Knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2785&blogid=14 <comment><USER2> I guess that's a novel open source monetisation model. Make it open source, but dependent on boatloads of proprietary products.

<comment><USER3> It's not that novel. As open source has become mainstream you'll find nearly every proprietary platform maker talking about how great "open source" is as a way to build on top of their proprietary system.</comment></comment>