Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html <comment><USER2> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.

This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time.

The servant was not expected to leave its master, that was not OK.

Or that you are expected to be available at all times, even though the contract only mentions 40h, and that is perfectly OK and even interiorized as acceptable by most people, which will even go to the extent of defending that state of affairs.

What I see in the workforce is a desperate need for people to continuously prove the need for their own role, as automation and informatization eat away more an more jobs.

It's a game of face time, who sends most emails past midnight, and who is willing to sell more of their personal life and squeeze other people out of theirs, often to do "important" tasks that are often completely unnecessary.

I had a couple of jobs where I was working overtime, running for deadlines all the time, sending emails left an right, meetings, you name it. One day I had enough and I left, and to my surprise, I was never replaced :-)

<comment><USER3> > such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of > for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the > employer to terminate the employee at any time.

Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis but this here is the most obvious example. When there is enough choice people change jobs all the time - the demand in my local dev market went through the roof last couple of years for multiple reasons - I see people change 2 jobs within a year, demand all sorts of things - last round of job interviews I did the interviewers spent double the time explaining why their company was a great fit for me instead of actually interviewing me for position - compared to the usual narrative of asking why I fit them.

The situation is pretty much dictated by supply/demand and both sides take advantage. Firing and quitting can have negative implications for both sides, just depends on scenario.

I don't see where shame enters the equation.

<comment><USER4> What's your supply and demand explanation for the following norms?

\- It's considered professional for employees give their employers two weeks notice before leaving. It's considered completely reasonable for employers to terminate employees and not even pay them for the rest of the day.

\- It's considered unprofessional to talk about what you're getting paid.

\- It's considered normal for potential employers to do background checks, call references, and even run credit checks on potential employees. Ask a potential employer for references or any information on their financials, and that's weird. The latter is particularly strange, because the employer is paying the employee, so the employee has a much larger interest in making sure the employer can pay them.

<comment><USER5> Termination without notice or payment is definitely considered bad form, short of the company closing due to bankruptcy.

I have never worked anywhere that did not provide notice or some severance. Even at a startup that cut 50% prior to going down in flames, they paid those half that were released two weeks pay and two weeks insurance coverage. (even though they were asked to leave immediately)

Large corporations tend to offer minimums plus based on years of service at termination.

Even termination with cause (performance, not legal) will generally be after a half year of 'remediation' training, then plenty of notice to find a new job.

<comment><USER6> Are you US-based? Because severence packages are absolutely an exception, rather than the norm. Most of the US has "at-will" employment, which states that employers can terminate employees at will, for any reason, without warning. And companies take advantage of this all the time.

The other thing is that you seem to be speaking as a developer. Everyone knows that our industry treats employees better than average. You really need to look at the broader landscape though.

<comment><USER7> "Most of the US has "at-will" employment, which states that employers can terminate employees at will, for any reason, without warning"

I think this is a misleading (although frequently stated) comment.

Large companies I've worked for have a bureaucratic procedure before they fire anyone, and generally allow people to save face even when they really want you gone.

Technically it's "at will", but I think it's primarily the mom & pop businesses that are going to fire on a whim.

Furthermore, you are implying that there are no constraints on companies in the US, like for instance the WARN act.

<comment><USER8> "primarily the mom & pop businesses that are going to fire on a whim"

Talk to some people in the hospital business who are over 50. I have a friend who worked for a huge hospital, was good at her job, had been doing it for many decades. One day an HR person called her into the office, said she needed to take a test, and said she had to leave _that day_ until she took the test, administered by some 3rd party. A younger worker, doing the same job, also didn't have this credential they invented, but she got to stay. She wasn't making as much money because she hadn't been there as long.

My friend had a couple of weeks to study for this test, which was about the physics of the machine she had been using for 30 years. She failed the 1st time, they wouldn't tell her her score, and wouldn't tell her what she got right or wrong. The test itself was ridiculous: how many of us could explain in detail the physics of how our hard drive works? She was given a small severance and told to sign papers that I'm guessing gave up her rights to sue. And besides, it's well known in my area that suing a hospital is a fool's errand. The local lawyers do so much business with hospitals that they won't even take cases against them.

If you tell someone "your job ends today, but we'll give you a month's pay if you sign these papers", many people have no choice but to sign: they can't afford to have zero income starting today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you had to do everything manually, no running water, no electricity, no farming machinery, no supermarkets. They even had to make their own cloths as textile was extremely expensive, and I've read that weaving was one of the activities that was taking any free moment to medieval women, it was extremely time consuming. The pace of life was slower, that for sure, and perhaps the average working hours were indeed shorter (in winter especially because of shorter daylight), but they worked way harder than most people have to today.

<comment><USER10> I'd argue it's actually easier to cope when what you need is repetitive hard physical labor.

You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved. You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. You know with certainty that you've done your job (you can actually see it) and you know when to stop because your body will tell you to. Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.

On the other hand with mental work, mostly you can't stop thinking about work unless you distract yourself. Many times you don't see the outcome of what you did and it's pretty easy to think you haven't actually "done" anything.

Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand. You might have some unexpected events, but even then, you likely know what to do in those occasions. With mental work it's a lot more unpredictable and full of unknowns.

Having said all that, I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor so my views are likely biased.

<comment><USER11> > You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity.

Found a guy who haven't done any hard physical labor before. You are confusing a 8-hourd hardcore shift/12 hours hard work under the boiling sun in the field with a 1-2 hour workout in a gym.

> Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your > mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something > with it afterwards.

Namely, to lie down and get sleep at once.

<comment><USER12> I don't like sleeping more than eight hours, unless I'm completely sleep deprived. Even then, I'll automatically wake up after about eight hours. This has been the case for as long as I can remember, including times of extremely intense mental work, like a compressed exam week at university. The exceptions was when I did manual labour on a construction site for a few weeks.

I'd get home, eat, shower, and pass out, and sleep for ten or more hours. I wanted to do some reading or watch series but I couldn't keep my eyes open.

Maybe I would've gotten used to it at some point. But the experience was unlike anything else I've gone through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate.

How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their household and there are countries when it is mostly male parent that does the same with same effect. Yet, there is not much difference in their capability to provide, it seems in cases of both types of countries the system settled and regulated itself.

<comment><USER14> The commute may influence this. The average American commute is about 30 minutes each way. That's 1 hour round trip.

Commute as a portion of work time....

4 hrs work: 25%

5 hrs work: 20%

6 hrs work: 16.7%

7 hrs work: 14.3%

8 hrs work: 12.5%

Considering you don't get paid for your commute, there is a natural incentive to work more hours.

<comment><USER15> Remote work may influence this. Commuting to a workplace just to do the things you might as well do from home will be considered old-fashioned, inefficient and/or shameful in a few years, if my crystal ball is not lying.

<comment><USER16> The problem with that this is is co located teams are a massive multiplier - very few jobs are truly singleton roles.

<comment><USER17> There are ways to work around that problem remotely.

When working similar to the Basecamp guys it's even the other way around.

Write problems down and give people time to chew on them. Everyone adds his thoughts and refining the idea will lead to better results than a two hours meeting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is from a 1993 book.

There's no mention of the pretty pleasant 16-21 years that most Americans spend in education, compared to preindustrial labourers starting work before age 11. Or of the concept "retirement", which would have been hard for medieval peasants to imagine.

There's also this pertinent commentary from 1995:

[https://www.clevelandfed.org/~/media/content/newsroom%20and%...](https://www.clevelandfed.org/~/media/content/newsroom%20and%20events/publications/economic%20commentary/1995/ec%2019950115%20the%20myth%20of%20the%20overworked%20american%20pdf.pdf)

"The central message of this Economic Commentary is that the presumption of declining leisure is in fact a fallacy. Previous studies purporting to have uncovered such a fact have not adequately disentangled time spent in home production..."

<comment><USER19> I think it's very hard to

"pretty pleasant" \- I'm glad that your educational experience was that way, but for a lot of people education is a form of work. In fact, I would bet most students would prefer work to education - and indeed many vote with their feet and drop out of education.

Heck, even on HN there are many of us who hated "education" \- it wasn't pleasant at all.

As for retirement, well that's an unfair comparison, life expectancy at middle age was a lot lower in pre-industrial times, mostly as a result of poor public health knowledge and practice. Furthermore, there was de facto retirement as families and communities took care of elders - but who knows how that related to retirement today. The author of this book probably doesn't know and you certainly don't know.

The Cleveland Fed's Economic Commentary is absolutely positively not pertinent. It is comparing the 1950s to the 1980s, not pre-industrial labor to industrial labor. Did you just google "myth of XYZ" and copy and paste the first result without reading it?

And by the way, even on its own merits that Economic Commentary is pretty suspect. It doesn't look like it takes into consideration commute times, time spent shopping, time spent on administrative overheard like paying bills figuring out insurance payments and the whole host of bureaucratic non-sense that a market economy requires customers to engage - all of that is work, it's not leisure and it needs to be accounted for.

<comment><USER5> Preindustrial you didn't spend time shopping, you spent time growing your own food and preserving it. You didn't spend time figuring out insurance, because there was no health care, at all. You didn't have bills because you paid up front, or you did without.

The part about the commute though, I'll grant you that. During the last thirty five years, my commute was two and a half hours each day for eighteen years. They rest has been reasonable, but that eighteen was awful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.

<comment><USER21> We recently read Wilder's _Little House in the Big Woods_ to the kids. The parents' life was non-stop work from sun-up to sundown and beyond, and while there was some downtime in the winter, everyone was basically homebound. It did not seem like a bad life at all, but then I think there is an eternal virtue to hard work that is only tangentially related to sitting at a desk in the modern era.

<comment><USER22> The closer your work is to the actual benefit it provides, the more gratifying it is.

<comment><USER23> Then why do I hate cooking?

<comment><USER24> Nobody has to like everything. I like cooking, I hate doing dishes and cleaning. I know people who hate cooking and enjoy dishes. It is good to have a mix of complementary skills and preferences in a household.

It's a hell of a thing when, as a cook, you can stand up from a good dinner you made and walk away from the mess knowing that your roommate Barry _wants_ to have a quiet hour of not talking to anyone doing the dishes and tidying the kitchen because he has actually been looking forward to it and that's what gives him peace. The same peace I got from chopping vegetables and stirring pots.

I've even met someone who likes doing laundry! They wash and iron their own dress shirts despite being perfectly able to pay an inexpensive dry cleaner and describe it as "Cheaper than seeing a shrink".

<comment><USER25> You make it sound as if washing and ironing is a massive chore.

Let's say you have 5 shirts a week. Step 1: When you do your white wash, throw in the shirts. Hang them up afterwards. Incremental cost: 2 minutes of your time... Step 2: When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is 15 minutes... Probably less that your two trips to the dry cleaner. Plus, nil $ cost, no plastic wrapping to throw away, no use of dry cleaning chemicals.

<comment><USER26> > When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is > 15 minutes.

3 mins? I iron my shirts, five a week, and it takes me 10-15 mins per shirt, depending on the shirt.

<comment><USER27> There's something wrong with your technique or the materials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.

\-- Bertrand Russell

[http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

<comment><USER29> And this is why scarcities of necessities (housing in particular) must be manufactured - to keep people competing with each other to see who can best make investors wealthy that they might be rewarded with the ability to barely able afford a decent home (after signing away their liberty for 30 years of course)

<comment><USER30> Imagine believing scarcity is manufactured.

Scarcity is _NOT equal to_ shortage

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In America, at least, we should consider the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude in attitudes towards working hours. Many of the expectations for economic output by American industry have been set by the productivity of people who had little or no right to question the conditions they worked under, overseen by people who cared little for their well-being beyond that productivity. If that's the basis of the American work ethic, no wonder your boss looks at you like you're crazy when you say you'd like to be able to live comfortably on 30 hours of labor a week.

<comment><USER32> There are plenty bosses like this in Germany, which doesn't have as much of a history of slavery.

I'd wager that when looking at countries with roughly the same level of industrialization, whether humans view fellow humans as something more than mere resources is linked to a certain set of attitudes.

I'd guess that reduced working hours are positively correlated to pluralism and pacifism, and perhaps negatively correlated to religiousness.

The more you think that life ought to be lived a certain way, the more likely you are to see work as a savior from straying from that way.

Looking at countries that have severely mistreated minorities, natives or remote people might also reveal a correlation, the more so the less this is part of the public consciousness.

<comment><USER33> Just an anecdote from quitting yesterday at a German IG-Metall company: Yesterday I quitted my working student job in order to precipitately take the opportunity for an internship at another company.

My boss congratulated me for the offer, said it's a pity that I leave AND _spoke with HR so that I do have a shorter period of notice_ (otherwise I would have had problems). All on the same day. While accompanying me on my way out he said that especially with students, he invests in people. The doors are always open and he would be glad to see me there again. In fact, he recommended a former student worker to join another company before graduation in order to have a better looking CV. Im kinda blown away by this non-selfish (in a company's view) behaviour and strongly consider to rejoin at some point.

<comment><USER34> > Im kinda blown away by this non-selfish (in a company's view) behaviour and > strongly consider to rejoin at some point.

The beauty of capitalism is that it rewards such altruistic behavior - in that you may rejoin them in the future.

<comment><USER35> If the behavior is rewarded, it is not altruistic but self-interested, which is the true nature of things that capitalism rewards. It is not true in the general case that altruism aligns with self-interest, which is precisely the problem with capitalism.

<comment><USER34> > It is not true in the general case that altruism aligns with self-interest

Actually, it is true. Treating your customers, employees and associates results in them wanting to do business with you, which increases profits. Treat them badly, they go away and deal with someone else.

Put simply, you aren't going to go the extra mile for someone you hate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour.

[https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019087...](https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190876166.001.0001/oso-9780190876166)

Many industries would probably suffer negligible losses (and maybe gains) by transitioning to 20 hour work weeks.

<comment><USER37> I don't disagree with you. The average eight hour office worker probably only does do four hours of work a day. But I think the problem is that that nearly everyone has internalized that cadence.

If every office worker had their schedule cut to a 20 hours a week, I strongly suspect that only 10 hours of work would actually get done. It's just too much of the low efficiency is culturally ingrained on every level from the cultural to the organizational. It would probably take a generation for things to change.

<comment><USER31> I beg to differ. Everywhere I've worked, people have despised the waiting built into the processes they have to conform to. Many roles are constructed so that they're actually two roles: one is pure productivity, with clear goals and deadlines. The other is some sort of service role where you're at the beck and call of clients who could waltz in whenever, defined less by your productivity than by your availability (which is always meant to keep you in an workplace for 6+ hours). Switching between roles is aggravating; effectiveness at one kills the other, to some degree. Most would rather just do one at a time, and be paid for either the time sacrificed or the work completed, at a dignified rate.

But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.

<comment><USER38> > But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.

I beg to differ. I think, the mixture of work items as you describe is solely motivated on fear that employees may produce less if not under 8hours control in open plan office. The fear however may not have anything to do with the reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm surprised no one has mentioned "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber. He goes into detail on why and how people have so much work to do yet so little of it translates into practical or social value.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm not waiting for society to change to live a better, more normal life, I've already abandoned the classic work sphere and its crazy carousel, and it has a long time since I have accepted it.

All those findings done in that research confirms a lot of how I'm feeling already.

It's true that I don't "see" as many people as people who work, so I socialize less and I don't meet many people, but:

* I learned that having several friends can be "come and go", it's not an essential part of life (like many people would pretend), and many people told me it can be difficult to keep having those friends. Friendships can be hard work. Introversion is not a flaw.

* I realize that work won't necessarily improve your social life, a lot of the time it can make it worse.

Work is never forced, there are welfare programs and other way to sustain yourself, and once you realize that people who work 40 hours a week consent to it, it allows you to benefit from the mainstream belief that work matters. If you think about it, nobody will send you to prison or punish you for not working. Most people go to work because it's a habit, because they want to see and talk to their colleagues.

<comment><USER41> May I ask what you do? As in, to sustain your life/living situation/etc.

<comment><USER40> I don't live in the US. That's a big parameter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is true, and it's interesting.

However, it's also important to keep in mind that there was also a lot of grinding poverty and near-starvation during the off-seasons.

A peasant family might not have been working during the winter, but its a bit misleading to view that period as "leisure time."

<comment><USER43> The article argues that even when they had a chance to work more they didn't. Maybe they were all being shortsighted, or maybe that happened in a brief climactic golden age.

<comment><USER44> It was a common mindset, historian friends tell me that also shopkeepers in villages would work on a need-money-soon basis.

I think that historically the first job with the work ethic of more is better was the merchant.

<comment><USER45> Which would support the article's hypothesis that the big change in working time came through capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Here is some more recent data (from 2014): [https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours](https://ourworldindata.org/working- hours)

I'm glad I live and work in Norway where the average is between 1300 and 1500 hours a year.

<comment><USER47> 42 hours in Switzerland is IMHO a lie. I've seen and experienced tech and pharma setting expectations so high that people have to work at least 50-60 hours.

<comment><USER46> Don't you have anything like the Working Time Directive? I know Switzerland is not an EU member but then neither is Norway but we adhere to it as part of the obligations that we have regarding access to the Single Market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Access to opportunities for more income also didn't exist either. The article specifically references serfs(!!!), possibly the most difficult economic class to escape, as the example.

Cars, computers, phones, and health insurance also didn't exist back then, and neither did social mobility.

Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that people on average would work more, not less.

Note that I am one of those people who would predict that UBI would not reduce people propensity to work because it just doesn't make sense economically. I think most people's utility curves want the benefits of extra income OVER the benefit of leisure. It's security over enjoyment, which is not out of the ordinary for human value functions.

<comment><USER49> > Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the > opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that people on > average would work more, not less.

this is not how it happened and quality of life is not an objective measure. factory owners needed workers so they lobbied to have common land used for grazing and growing crops to be grabbed by land owners and forced people into cities to fill factories with cheap labour.

<comment><USER50> From Cory Doctorow's Walkaway:

Seth said: "Insert tragedy of the commons here."

Natalie put her hands up. "You know, I've heard the term 'tragedy of the commons' like a thousand times and I've never actually looked it up. What is it? Something to do with poor people being tragic?"

"That's commoners," Hubert, Etc said. Something was awake and loose inside him now. He wanted to kick the pizza off the coffee table and use it for a stage. "Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day's grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn't anyone's, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there's nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead's sheep." "Sounds like bullshit to me."

"Oh, it is," Hubert, Etc said. The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. "It's more than mere bullshit. It's searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn't to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren't overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone's, because once he's running it for profit, he'll take exquisite care to generate profit forever."

"That's the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because, that way they'll make sure they're better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story."

<comment><USER49> yes, also land owners enclosed the areas and reserved it for their own use during early capitalist era

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think this article perfectly captures people's reaction to: "Hey your life is shit than your ancestors and we're all to blame".

I am absolutely loving the random shade we're throwing at people that came before us, as if they were some sort of savages.

</comment><comment><USER52> "Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner."

I would argue it's a flawed thinking then. If you are required to be there for 16 hours, even if you work only every second hour, I consider it 16 hours of work - you cannot do anything in between anyway. It's a bit like your if job is to sell cars and your boss only counts your time when there is a customer there and you are talking to him.

<comment><USER53> "There" was near home. Those activities were done with family and friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Well work is done more or less to pay for the interest, that is created on top of the money, that is also created out of thin air. That is why politicians keep talking about more jobs, because people need to pay the interests on government loans. More work, more taxes.

How production has been automated for 100 years we should be working 1 day a week. No such luck. We work for 5 days and some pedo looks after our kids in the mean time.

So soon we work for 6 days a week and still get the mandatory "unforeseen" market crash every 10 years, so that what ever we can save up can be transferred to the banks&corps.

Just waiting for the big crash to come and us moving into cashless society. I bet it comes around 2021 and get rid of Dollars&Euros. You behave or you don't eat. Everybody is chipped and talking against the government is considered "domestic terrorism" like the FBI already announced.

This new electronic currency is backed by gold that they have taken from WTC, Libya, Egypt and Iraq. There is still time, so add Syria and Iran to that list.

If you still live in the "matrix" this all sounds a like wild conspiracy theory to you, but you will eventually see it. Maybe it is too late then.

</comment><comment><USER55> I wonder how much more egalitarian forms of government are a factor.

If you have a fixed amount of land to farm, there's only so much work you can do. If you give the king or the bishop your excess crops, there's only so much motivation to work.

<comment><USER56> Whereas with good abstractions and maintainability, software can grow the pie/field significantly. It's not completely irrespective of hours and is totally contextual to how innovative/novel the challenge is. But there's still the potential for a multiplier that doesn't exist in farming, short of biological breakthroughs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I feel there is an implicit assumption in the article, which is that work time is defined as time that you give away from your life to serve someone else. What if work time was more like a paid hobby or time spent with like-minded adults on intellectually stimulating topics?

Surely I don't like _all_ aspects of my work and surely there are rainy days, but on average I like my work. I like the people I meet at work, the challenges that work exposes me to. My boss often asks me for favours ("can you take this customer call during holidays"), but also makes sure that the emotional account is balanced ("you want more salary or an extra holiday?"). Also, the so-called 40-hours week includes coffee breaks and 1 hour per week of sports (I'm living in Sweden).

I see nothing wrong with people working long hours _assuming they do it because they want to, not because they have to_. I would much rather like to compare the number of hours people _had to work_ in pre-industrial times (which is likely 100% of their work time) compared to today.

</comment><comment><USER58> > called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and > dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and > midafternoon refreshment breaks.

They didn't exactly have a choice with the food. It's needed if you genuinely spend a hard day working. People used to make drinks for laborers containing things like molasses here in the US.

I admit we've lost the afternoon nap, but I'm not sure why. It does happen elsewhere. The China office at previous job worked long hours and all napped at their desks in the afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER59> If you look at hours per worked per family, things have gotten even way worse since woman were drafted en mass into the salaried workforce post ww2, going from a 40hr week to well over 70hrs.

<comment><USER60> That's really only true is you take the parochial view that what women do at home isn't "work", when it clearly is work.

In the 1940s a woman would typically spend 62 hours a week in housework.

Nowadays women typically spend 15 hours in housework and 45 hours in paid work. So the same ballpark, really, and not a dramatic expansion.

<comment><USER61> It may be "work" but it's not the same work. Your boss is your family and its well-being when you do housework. It's not the same as someone who doesn't care about you.

<comment><USER41> I hate housework WAY more than "work work". At least work has the possibility of being something new/interesting rather than the grinding tedium of washing the same plates, floors, furniture and clothes day after day after day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> "One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two days-works." I've been saying this for years with programming and tickets! 4 hours a day is a full days work. If you can get a 4 hour ticket done each day you are right on pace. If you can get two 4 hour tickets done in one day, that's double pace!

<comment><USER63> That leaves 4 hours for configuring your development environment. Nice work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This article is somewhat surprising. It does not seem to account for variation in the intensity of work at different times, for example planting and harvest. At those times it's hard to imagine that people worked anything less than dawn to dusk to ensure they had food for the next year.

<comment><USER43> The table at the bottom is in units of hours.

<comment><USER65> > Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short > working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer- > miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only > 180 days a year.

I think the point the above poster is making is that "working hours" logged in these sources are very vague. Does the "175 days" in the English manor mean that these people had free time for the rest of the year? Or did the go and work second or third jobs to get by? Remember, only have the manor's records.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Pre-industrial workers _worked_ , they didn't sit on their butts at a keyboard in air conditioning.

<comment><USER67> Agreed. And fully half of them were farmers, who worked like nobody's business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I think a comparison with someone living as a citizen of the Roman empire is much more apt. Check out:

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

Of course they had slaves, but then so did we..

</comment><comment><USER5> It all depends on what you did for a living.

Case in point, agriculture. Averaged over a year, maybe it wasn't too bad, but during planting and harvesting, the day didn't end.

And animals need feeding and care through the day, so that was an anchor if you were raising animals.

</comment><comment><USER69> They had other gods to serve besides Mammon, and that was part of public life. Today, the only god left to be taken seriously, is Mammon. Serving him earns you respect. Every other deity, pity at best.

<comment><USER67> There's huge conferences for enthusiasts for Cosplay, Science Fiction, Comic Books and on and on. They take one another seriously.

So maybe in the main that's true, but there are many subcultures that don't pity one another?

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Preindustrial workers also had organic food and clean air. And no commute

<comment><USER71> And terrific life expectancy in which to enjoy it ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> People have realized that the revolutions to overthrow the old order were advocated by merchants and finance. The dystopian hell we live in now is the result of avarice being turned into a virtue.

</comment><comment><USER73> I have talked to relatives who, in living memory, established and ran farms on the plains. Sod huts, the whole deal. They worked way more than 40 hours a week. A 40 hour week would likely have led to loss of everything or maybe even death. Even after mechanization, a 40 hour week was not in the picture.

Factory workers used to work 6 12 hour days. Then 5 12 hour days. Then 5 10 hour days. Now, more like 5 8 hour days.

We live better than kings and plutocrats did 100 years ago, with luxuries undreamed of in history, and with amazing freedoms.

</comment><comment><USER74> It seems like they're just excluding domestic labor from their calculus. The fact that people had breaks from farming tasks doesn't mean they were filling that time with medieval Netflix.

</comment><comment><USER75> I believe at the height of Imperial Rome, workers almost had one day off for every day worked. The Romans did use a lot of space labor, so that may also have something to do with it.

<comment><USER76> What's "space labor"?

<comment><USER77> Imperial Rome enslaved the martians, and as a result creates an entire lower caste of space laborers. Over time they could not adapt to earth and their species went extinct. This resulted in the dark ages.

<comment><USER78> I want to believe

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> The author clearly misses the mark. Not all hours are created equal.

Or is it physical labor under the sun, constant exposure to the elements or a furnace more "leisurely" ...than sitting on a desk with air conditioning?

This kind of comparison is exactly what gets you into financial crisis. Reading the data is only 1 side of the equation. Understanding its implications is, sadly, a major failing of most academics outside of risk management

</comment><comment><USER80> In many countries donkeys are not allowed to work more than 6 hours a day by law. In Palastine this still exists. Or in England : ) . -- [https://www.blackberrydonkeys.com/donkey-riding-rules- regula...](https://www.blackberrydonkeys.com/donkey-riding-rules-regulations)

Compared with donkeys, we are not doing well- I am researching mules.

</comment><comment><USER81> it is a shell game. I spent the best years of my life, my 20s and early 30s, building a career that was formidable and lauded by peers and colleagues, in a contracting industry. a nervous breakdown from work/life dysfunction led me to graduate studies in contemplative Tibetan Buddhist psychology. I have not worked a day in five years. there are mediating circumstances of privilege, position and inherited /accumulated wealth that have permitted me to choose not to partake in the power-oriented dynamics and economics of the modern "free market" wherein one has no choice but to subjugate free will unto the institutionalized corporation (at center of Western life) and its requisition of children consumers--who lack free will or organized behavioral/stimulus response to reject consumerization behavior mod. Therein the slaves remain working for unseen pharaohs and praying for unnecessary Saviors.

<comment><USER82> Someone else is working for you instead (unless you saved this money).

Whoever pays your bills is your boss. If the pay is contingent on attending graduate school then it's actually a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think a big part of the blame is the promulgation of Calvinism and it's "work ethic" by early industrialists. It was also used as justification for removing access to common land under the guise of building the character of a "lazy" population by forcing them into cities and factories to fulfil labour shortages

</comment><comment><USER83> I was lucky enough to get 4 months severance once - thanks you stronger New York labor laws, and I took 3 of those months off. I have to say, going to back to a 10 to 6:30 gig was torture. I am still not recovered from it. Once you see the Matrix, the day to day slog to your retirement becomes meaningless. Don't enter the Matrix.

</comment><comment><USER84> I can measure my output quite effectively and could, if allowed by my boss, adjust my hours to ensure some constant level of output - ie work less when Inwas being more productive.

However my boss cannot measure that output - it's generally too complex, too uncertain too ... software-y

Until we fix that, which is possible, we are stuck with "work 8 hours"

<comment><USER85> _Your_ boss cannot measure that, I would argue, because he's incompetent (assessing progress of subordinate is a primary management function)

As a boss myself, if my developers finish early, they are free to go. I can read their code and pull requests, I know who is pulling their weight.

When I worked at Google, all of my bosses (including project managers) could read code at a superficial level, and accurately assess progress, so it's certainly not unique to my org.

There's better options out there

<comment><USER84> I may have been too simplistic

1\. The work is never finished. As such no matter how productive you are or not there is more to do. So when do you say "Ok go home early?"

2\. _My_ view of productive may differ from my boss - and that gets further afield as the hierarchy goes up - so let's say you were working on Google+ (insert corporate white elephant) - no matter how productive you were in the small, it was ultimately a waste.

3\. Output can be measured by reading code, yes absolutely- but it can also be measured by outcome of code (ie the report now runs five tones faster)

these last two is measurement by _value_ \- and that gets hairy.

So it's not quite "pointy haired boss" is bad

So does google allow folks to go home early? it is that like the "as much holiday as you like" uncertainty ploy?

<comment><USER85> No, my developers have a list of tasks to do for the day, and if they finish it, I let them go home. It's that simple.

If you keep pushing work onto developers forever then you're rewarding hard work by giving them more work causing incentive mismatches.

This only works if management has the ability to evaluate the work by reading the code. I can spot when something has a bug in it just by reading the code, I can spot when an interface boundary has been designed badly, and I can spot when there's problems. I can _evaluate_ my developers results, and I can _evaluate_ the developers themselves.

So you hire good developers who have the right attitude and don't game the system for their own benefit, fire the under performers, then everyone goes home at 1PM on friday because their work is done and they are proud of what they built.

Lots of developers might find it hard to believe that everyone wouldn't just do something quickly and go home early, but thats because most developers are near burnout and they just need a break. If you give them 2-3 very light months of work, they recover and then start enjoying their work again ... then nobody games the system and puts their best foot forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> If anyone has read "Walden Two" by B.F. Skinner, it promotes an interesting premise of work that is assigned based on how tasteful or distasteful it is. For example, gardening only counts for 0.25 credits per hour, while cleaning counts for more.

Also, all workers are assigned a small portion of manual labor to stay in shape.

</comment><comment><USER82> Here are numbers in question:

13th century - Adult male peasant, U.K.: 1620 hours

14th century - Casual laborer, U.K.: 1440 hours

Middle ages - English worker: 2309 hour

1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours

1840 - Average worker, U.K.: 3105-3588 hours

1850 - Average worker, U.S.: 3150-3650 hours

1987 - Average worker, U.S.: 1949 hours

1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours

</comment><comment><USER87> I don't quite understand why anyone considers it a good idea to drive to their destination, by looking in the back mirror and arguing about what they see in there.

Maybe we should have a look at who's behind the wheel and where they're driving us.

</comment><comment><USER88> In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell is a timeless classic on the subject: [http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

</comment><comment><USER89> I think this whole x hours per week system is completely flawed. If I can deliver the same amount of value in 20 hours, why would I have to work for 20 more hours and all profits go to my boss and nothing to me?

</comment><comment> lota-putty _Slavery isn 't abolished, you've just stopped recognising it._ was an ad for a local SUV over a decade ago.

\- Spending is good for Capitalism

\-- Spending on products with short-life is even better

\--- Everyday dependency on short-life products is a gold-mine.

Break nation in to major groups based on colour, religion, language, jobs, social status. Break each group into families, families into nuclear & nuclear into individuals. Coz, "I'm Unique" is the best catalyst for consumerism. "I did it my way", reminds us so.

Growing population is the best reinforcement out there for consumerism.

BUT, Democratic-Republics & Capitalism are best out there for people in general.

We accept long working hours coz, we're chasing a dream; sadly a dream aptly set by others. But, most likely we're in debt; monetary advances we received to chase our/their dreams.

 _make a list of things you own that you haven 't used over a month; you might want to share them with others if you don't like long working hours_

<comment><USER90> I totally agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> > One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. > This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour > week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. > The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour > standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary > life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked > to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before > the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.

Hours spent working is hardly the same thing as quantifying human toll. Most people in agrarian society subsisted on a near-starvation diet, to the point where most women would not get their period until their late teens and early 20s. If you go to a civil war museum you might be surprised at how small the uniforms are - lower diets pushed average heights down by several inches. Antibiotics were non-existent so infections were lethal at drastically higher rates than they are today. Mortality between the ages of 0-20 averaged ~50%, and life expectancy at 20 was usually in the 40s or 50s. Due to this high mortality rate, the births per woman required to form the replacement rate was 6-8 (this is counted of the women that survive to adulthood, raw BPW is about half that). This meant that women effectively had to spend most of their adult lives bearing and caring for children, a big reason why agrarian societies are overwhelmingly patriarchal. Rates of literacy and education did vary, and were as high as 40% in some agrarian societies, but were still far lower than the >90% rate we see in most countries today. And I'm not even going to dig into the can of worms that is the amount of slavery that occurred in agrarian society that was displaced by industrialization.

Capitalism may have a higher demand in terms of hours worked in explicit employment, but I doubt many today would genuinely trade life in a capitalist country for life in a pre-industrial society.

<comment><USER91> All of what you said is why poverty is usally seen as a relative value — it is relative to the perceived average of the wealth of the society you live in.

A society that continuosly sustains high degrees of poverty under that definition, usually needs a narrative for why the poor people deserve to be poor and why the rich people deserve to be rich. Centuries ago (depending on the place) this might have been still been religion: you have been born into a poor life and those in the lead have been born as leaders and there is nothing you can/ought to do about it.

Today individualism takes that function: you are responsible for beeing poor, even if you have been born into it. But you can become a billionaire if you want — it is just very hard. This means also those who _are_ billionaires must have worked very very hard and so deserve their wealth.

Rich people _usually_ inherit their wealth tho, which makes a fool of the whole narrative and suggests who profits from it.

Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in.

<comment><USER65> > Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite > optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can > have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society > and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they > do okay for the society thwy are in.

This doesn't seem right to me. Would you rather live as a middle class person, say 50th percentile in terms of wealth, in medieval Europe (which, despite being middle class still means 50% child mortality, little or no education, no effective medicine, etc.) Or a lower class person today - say 20th percentile by wealth. The latter is making $18,000 a year which will be tough to get by. But I'd still take that over any sort of pre-industrial life without hesitation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> On the other hand, I read that archaeologists have studied the bones of American colonists and found evidence of very hard labor. They didn't live very long, either.

</comment><comment><USER92> They also spent less time reading Hacker News while doing it.

</comment><comment><USER93> "Wage slave" is a term that should return to the popular vernacular. It very accurately describes the relationship most Americans have with employment.

</comment><comment><USER72> Bourgeois that is merchants and finance took over the state after the revolutions, the dystopia hell we live in is a product of rule by money.

</comment><comment><USER94> It's hard to compare, but those who try usually say we have about 30x the income now.

So the extra effort is worth it!

<comment><USER91> Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your environment's wealth because that is how poverty affects your life.

You can be 100 times as rich as some poor soul in a third world country and still be so poor in your own society that you are constantly struggling, fighting for survival, skipping meals and inheriting that struggle to your kids who are born into them without much chances of getting out.

This could be because the poor soul can maybe life decently within their society off a hundreth of the cost you have (sometimes you even just need to be a good hunter and be able to build some shelter).

The average societal wealth definition of poor used in sociology is not without critics of course, but you can ask yourself if 30 times the income buys 30 times as much rent today and helps you to sustain 30 times as many families (all costs and benefits considered). The income gap between rich and poor is higher today than it ever was under any industrial rule — I wish I'd be able to share your optimism, but considering the average top manager's salery (including bonuses for failing upwards and fucking shit up) my optimism about the altruistic nature of today's wealth distribution seems to vanish just a little too quickly..

<comment><USER94> > _Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your > environment's wealth because that is how poverty affects your life._

No, that is how it affects your _status_.

In every society, half the people are at or below average status, because math. That can never change.

But 95+% of the people in the richest country have better material standard than the average people in the poorest.

And even those in today's poorest countries have better material standard than preindustrial people.

But we still have the same percentage of losers...

<comment><USER91> I didn't come up with that definition of poverty, it is the definition used by UNICEF, UNDP (The United Nations Children's Fund) and the OECD.

And there certainly is discussion about that definition, but other poverty definitions also fail to capture certain aspects of poverty (e.g. the World Bank's poverty line).

It isn't status, when bith of your parents work full time and you still don't get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty.

<comment><USER94> First of all, I don't know why we're discussing the word "poverty". I talked about "30x the income", never mentioned "poverty".

But let's talk about the word.

By the UNICEF/UNDP/etc definition of "poverty", poverty can never be eradicated. There will always be people below average, as any math teacher can explain to you.

In a "Richistan" society comprised only of dollar millionaires and billionaires, the least wealthy millionaires will be living in "poverty".

> _It isn't status, when both of your parents work full time and you still > don't get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty._

...but now you've jumped to _absolute_ poverty measures! Those "Richistan poor" could easily dine in fine restaurants every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I don't think this is about "your employer owning you". I also don't think this is about capitalism (which is just private property, economic freedom, and a government to enforce those two things). Instead, I think the pressure to work so much comes from society, which wields incredible control over all of us.

More specifically, I believe that the 40-hour work-week is a consequence of the ascension of wealth creation as the primary goal of our societies. Past civilizations, rich and poor, did not see the creation of wealth as their raison d'etre. Modern civilizations do and, as a result, we're sacrificing everything else (autonomy, privacy, free time, family, etc) at the altar of wealth-creation.

It's not all bad: wealth makes people's lives better. But there are downsides (like overwork, the feeling that you have no control over your life, the feeling that your life lacks meaning, lack of meaningful social relationships, and so on).

I'm borrowing this argument from Hannah Arendt. I find her incredibly convincing: she sees this whole process as having kicked off with the Reformation, which resulted in the expropriation of ecclesiastical property in Europe that had been serving as the commons. Since then, we've never had much of a commons and wealth creation has slowly become the primary goal.

</comment><comment><USER96> An owners only real goal (sometimes enshrined in law!) is to increase private profits for himself.

At a certain point you run out of ways to do with for a single product or service so you're left with reduction of labor to lower margins. So in a way we can consider this article to be a very clear documentation of what people mean when they say capitalism is "efficient."

</comment><comment><USER97> I have a hobby: when I meet Americans I'm starting to tell them how lazy we Europeans tackle working. I mean the work / life balance for us means nothing since we do life first then work.

And I'm telling them another thing: for me it seems in America everybody is working. The president, the millionaire, the middle and lower classes. Nobody does the `healthy meaninglessness`.

Of course all these are friendly provocations. What surprises me is the cognitive dissonance they cause.

<comment><USER98> On the topic of "healthy meaninglessness" and somewhat related to the discussions around Universal Basic Income, I think Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" is a mandatory read.

[http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html](http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Wait until you learn about hunter/gatherers.

</comment><comment><USER49> also [https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/18871-the- highl...](https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/18871-the-highland- clearances-a-capitalist-tragedy)

</comment><comment><USER100> Than we.

<comment><USER101> Common usage indicates that "than us" is just fine. Remember English grammar doesn't come from a grammar book - grammar books are merely imperfect attempts to describe common English usage.

<comment><USER102> More than that, "Than We" sounds archaic to me, 19th C at best, i.e. wrong. Who talks like that?

<comment><USER103> Carl Sagan did, I recall a quote of his talking about the composition of the brain and he says something along the lines of "to consider that we live in a universe which permits the construction of biological machines as intricate and as subtle as we"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> If I was to visualize a Venn Diagram of people who write articles such as this on mit.edu and the people reading them, and my other circle being people who get the short end of the stick of capitalism, I see very little overlap.

It's true there are skilled workers that love what they do, and their jobs allow them to exert influence -- so they are motivated to work long hours (versus, say, a worker assembling widgets on a factory line).

Something about that dichotomy of the people who have the luxury of choosing how much to work, writing about how we work longer, is something I find interesting. The management class of workers are the ones who have the most influence on the working hours of an organization's individual contributors.

</comment><comment><USER105> And people has to work from young age if I am not wrong...and because they don't have electricity they also work shorter hours.

</comment><comment><USER106> And every year 4% of them died from measles, and every now and then half would die from a pandemic. In between pandemics their growth and mental development would usually be stunted, to some degree, by malnutrition.

</comment><comment><USER106> People who live in Detroit have shorter work weeks than people in New York City. It's called 'unemployment'.</comment>


Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://bestofjs.org/timeline <comment><USER3> I feel even a list of the 5 most impactful js projects should include Firebug.

Firebug played a huge role in removing the shroud around javascript and making it approachable to a lot of people, helping them introspect others code, and improving their own code quality. After it, javascript became a beast you could tame rather than a source of endless frustration.

<comment><USER4> It didn't only remove the shroud that made it difficult to work with for beginners, it made an _incredible_ difference in terms of being able to use JavaScript for serious application development. When Firebug showed up, the JavaScript development tools were basically where under 1,000-dollar, pre- Turbo C development tools were on the PC, except slower, too. That didn't stop anyone from writing complex JavaScript programs, of course, but it was extremely useful in getting people to take it seriously, and in making people in established organizations trust it for complex UI work.

I don't have words to say how dreadful JS development was before that. Debugging was extraordinarily limited by default, and we all had bits and pieces of debugging functionality pieced together from a variety of projects, most of which were glorified "debug by printf" hooks which sometimes interfered with the real application logic, and you ended up having to debug your debug code instead of whatever was actually broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those that are disappointed at the omissions in the timeline:

> Disclaimer

> We could have mentioned a lot of other projects: > [lines omitted] > ...but > we had to make choices to keep this timeline compact.

> The 2 main constraints were:

> We wanted 20 projects because we are in 2020 > We wanted at least one > project for every year between 2010 and 2020.

Reasoning kind of dumb, since this could have been a much more impactful post, but glad they laid out their reasoning. They missed some major precursors to the web we know to day -- Node Webkit existed before Electron IIRC, there's stuff like MooTools, Ember has been around basically forever (and SproutCore before that), Backbone isn't mentioned, KnockoutJS started the MVVM craze IIRC. In more recent time, they left out Parcel which is by far the easiest bundler I've ever used, JSPM & SystemJS were left out as well.

I wonder if there's a better timeline out there for the history of JS tooling.

Given the disclaimer at the end, they predicted people would be unsatisfied with the omissions... They were right

<comment><USER6> I think Backbone is a really big omission, specially because it credits Angular for the popularity of the SPA and in doing so practically erases Jeremy Ashkenas and his awesome contributions from Javascript history. I would argue you can trace modern JS to Backbone, Underscore and CoffeeScript.

<comment><USER7> I had the exact same reaction. Sticking Angular in there with no mention of Backbone is revisionist history. Backbone was _everywhere_. ES6 doesn't coalesce without Coffeescript either. Firebug is another glaring omission. What about npm? Chromium? MDN? ECMA2015? querySelector/modern DOM APIs?

As someone who has been writing javascript for over a decade, I find this list to be really disingenuous. Putting projects like Rome, Snowpack, and Deno alongside jQuery is almost laughable. They certainly have large potential upside, but they have yet to have any significant tangible impact on the Javascript community. I'm all for them and will continue to support their development, but why not mention the projects that had genuine _historic_ impact. Does angular really belong here twice? I'm not sure it belongs even once.

I suppose it shouldn't bug me this much.. it's just a list. But given everything the developers of these projects have given me, I'd like to see them get the credit they deserve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ugh. Was the author of this article in the field since 2006? From the look of this list, I'd wager not. Almost resembles a cherry pick of Google results. Listing VSCode without listing it's precursor and source of inspiration (Atom) nor the platform which enabled VSCode to be a thing (Electron) is mind- bottling¹. We're going to list Snowpack (new last year) but omit Rollup (hey, Webpack made it and it drives three other projects listed there), which is what drives Snowpack?

Should've been called "Some old school stuff I heard about and shiny projects with lots of Github stars." Sloppy click-bait work, this.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSfebOXSBOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSfebOXSBOE)

<comment><USER9> Electron is listed as #9 as the entry for 2013.

<comment><USER8> Bananas. I'm not seeing that on my end (Chrome). Opened Firefox and there it is. Might be time to nuke this Chrome install.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A low key ad for Rome imo. I thought the title was a metaphor for the JavaScript empire into its current state not the name of a new library. Nonetheless seems worth checking out

<comment><USER11> > Rome is designed to replace Babel, ESLint, Webpack, Prettier, Jest, and > others.

Sure, why not.

Cool, lets see if it works out

<comment><USER12> Rome has zero deps, which is big win over the alternatives imo.

<comment><USER13> Still though, it casts a very wide net. I'm super fond of simplifying things and having fewer dependencies (one reason why I prefer TypeScript over Babel), but I'm not sure why I would want my test runner to ever care about formatting code, or why I would want my Markdown formatter to ever worry about bundling JavaScript files.

Still, very excited to check it out!

<comment><USER14> I think tying an opinionated linter/code style tool to the rest of the tools is going to limit adoption. While people point to gofmt/prettier as examples of opinionated tools winning, Eslint (fully configurable) is still more popular by downloads than prettier (slightly configurable) and both are way more so than standard (not at all configurable).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It should be noted though that Rome is not a project by Facebook. It's by Sebastian McKenzie (@sebmck), who started working on it as a side project while working in Facebook. But he's working in Discord now. And the project is totally owned by him.

<comment><USER16> Yeah I was going to say he probably won't be happy seeing it presented this way considering his current public opinion on Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Where's Backbone, Ember, Coffeescript (the OG transpiled lang), HTML5, CSS3, WASM, ect, etc.

The road to today is paved with many influential projects.

<comment><USER18> And browserify, gulp, grunt, babel..

<comment><USER19> Babel for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20>
      > Babel #13
      > First called `5to6`, the compiler Babel helped make the
      > ES6 version of JavaScript popular and was a key part of
      > React success.

It was called "6to5" for reasons that should be obvious.

But it's also just an irrelevant factoid on a timeline that at first seems to be a history of influential JS projects over the past 15 years, but in reality just takes some projects that are well-known today and kind of arbitrarily arranges them.

</comment><comment><USER21> The article omits some major influential JS projects over the years that folks have already pointed out (Backbone, Coffeescript, Underscore -- and I'd add Require.js, as a commonplace early AMD loader before ES modules were a thing).

And then it also lists 2 projects that, frankly, I've never heard of (and I try to keep pace) and speaks of them in suspiciously-glowing terms, speculating about them being significant in the future.

Fine, you can't always know today what will have had the biggest impact in 5 years, but the result is that this reads like a really bad "puff piece" ad for those two projects.

It's like when you see blog posts from some SaaS company about "best practices for <industry>", and the first few tips are either obvious or wrong, and the last few tips are "buy our product!"

</comment><comment><USER22> Not a web dev. Don't know much about Javascript itself.

MathJax might be the most significant JS project ever. It enabled something that couldn't really be done before it came along, displaying complicated equations in a readable manner.

Ace deserves at least an honorable mention. I was able to add a full-blown text editor to a CGI app with little effort. I'm pretty sure it's been around longer than VS Code and it's been used in more major projects.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is Michael the author, thank you all for your feedback! This timeline was like a game, trying to find a balance between projects that made the history and bets for the future. The disclaimer explains some of the rules but of course the result is not perfect. I should have added that all projects mentioned are GitHub projects tracked by Best of JS app (the app I created in 2015) I totally agree about the importance of Firebug that I discovered in 2005 or 2006. Being able to debug JavaScript was such a liberation! JavaScript was no more just a toy language.

I also agree about some projects should have been mentioned, at least in the disclaimer, mainly Backbone and its friend Underscore because at the beginning of 2010s, it was a kind of standard to build clean apps in the browser, using a MVC pattern.

In addition of the Rising Stars projects [https://risingstars.js.org/](https://risingstars.js.org/) that provides an overview by year, this timeline was the first attempt to provide a big picture about the landscape of the 10 last years, I will try to create something more thorough soon.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice summary. Deno v1 was only released this year though: May 13, 2020

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a cool list, but I was kinda hoping to see a shout out to prototype.js and script.aculo.us in the epilogue.

</comment><comment><USER25> Still looking for stuff to replace Wordpress and jQuery in this area. This trend is cool but requires a technical hurdle way bigger than before with lots of tradeof (backward compatibility/easy introduction to programming/performances on frontend).

</comment><comment><USER26> Sadly there are some glaring omissions.

How about Enyo the predecessor of React? If there was no Enyo there would be no React since a team member on Facebook was originally inspired by it ... [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enyo_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enyo_\(software\))

How about PhoneGap? A Javascript library that allowed you to write native mobile apps for the first time.

</comment><comment><USER27> These posts and subsequent comments always prove me to that the wide world of JavaScript has so much more to offer than I could ever imagine. I've only used a very small subset of tools, I really wish there was an easier place to visualize all the available tools and what they accomplish. I don't know what I don't know so it is hard to even begin.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nice article. I really liked MeteorJS and thought it had lot of potential. Sad to see it didn't make to 20 projects in 2020.

</comment><comment><USER29> This list shows how out-of-date I am with frontend webdev. I last did frontend stuff with Spring MVC and JSPs!! Yeah it's been over a decade. I was also using table-driven UI element placement still and hadn't fully switched over to CSS. I'll get there someday...

</comment><comment><USER30> Nobody remembers MooTools

<comment><USER31> For those into trivia, MooTools curiously popped up again a couple of years ago when the 'flatten' method was being discussed and it was suggested that it be called 'smoosh' to avoid breaking MooTools apps(!) [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- flatMap/pull/56](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-flatMap/pull/56)

</comment></comment><comment> node-bayarea Really like this bestofjs.org site! Kudos to the creator(s)!

</comment><comment><USER32> not sure why you started from 2006 maybe because of query. but I would go a bit back.

Gmail - 2004 Google maps - <USER2>

These were the things that really woke us up that js is a game changer.

</comment><comment><USER33> i did not know that vue was 7 years old already.

</comment><comment><USER34> my additions: npm and esprima

Both had significant impacts on the JS developer-experience.

</comment><comment><USER35> shouldn't take this list too serious. Rome is here?, it's pretty new hasn't proven it's success. also, Three.js, Atom, are not here?

</comment><comment><USER36> Site doesn't load on iOS even after a minute.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is Rome supposed to do what Svelte does?

<comment><USER38> No, it wants to be your one stop shop:

> Rome is a linter, compiler, bundler, and more for JavaScript, TypeScript, > JSON, HTML, Markdown, and CSS.

> Rome is designed to replace Babel, ESLint, Webpack, Prettier, Jest, and > others.</comment></comment>


Privacy-focused messenger Signal is ready to go mainstream and take on WhatsApp - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/02/17/privcy-focused-signal-mainstream-take-on-whatsapp/ <comment><USER3> Blogspam of this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22326731)

Extensively discussed already; this piece is literally just a summary of that one.

</comment><comment><USER4> Let me know when it's ready to use without a phone number.

As it is, I lose my identity if I switch phone numbers (say, I move to another country). Even worse, someone else might get my old identity when my old phone number is recycled.

<comment><USER5> This.

Is there an actual technical limitation preventing Signal from offering a one- field signup, whereby one would simply enter a self generated public key?

<comment><USER6> There's no technical limitation, but read this ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357948](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22357948)) comment to understand why Signal did what they did. Your SIM card stores your contact list across devices. With usernames, your phone's contact list doesn't work anymore. You need a persistence, i.e. cloud backups, to store the contact list first. This is in the works ([https://signal.org/blog/secure-value- recovery/](https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/)). Expect to see user names once that's done.

The nice thing is the persistence can also remember identity keys, fingerprint and their verification statuses, and even group membership status -- so it'll mean much more convenient use once it's ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Started a HackerNews group chat on Signal to test it out. Ping me your signal phone # to firstname.lastname@example.com and I'll invite you to the group.

<comment><USER8> Serious question: Is this the only way to invite users to a Signal group?

Couple of concerns here; you might use google to host your email for all I know and I'm not inclined to help google update my shadow profile. Also, giving my phone number to random dudes seems ridiculous given what we're ultimately trying to achieve here.

BTW I'm not being snarky towards you, it just reads that way :P

<comment><USER6> It's not what Signal is built for. If you want to join public chat rooms, you can use Telegram equally securely. E2EE never hurts in the case of public groups, but since you're not able to verify none of the group members are malicious, and logging and leaking your (and everyone else's) comments to every bad actor, it doesn't matter.

Your only protection is anonymity, but that's something not even Telegram offers by default: This has lead to speculations about attacks where the Chinese cyber army has performed massive reverse look-ups of Hong Kong citizens' phone numbers, by storing what TelCo has in it's database / what IMSI catchers / hacked towers see, and adding them as contacts. This by default reveals Telegram user's username to the attacker. You can disable this by opting in, but very few do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Enabling group administration was also a hard feat, as Signal has to give > administrators the ability to add and remove members without its servers > knowing who's part of the conversation.

I was chatting with Trevor Perrin about abstract crypto relating to this when he was presumably working on this, and never got the chance to ask him - <USER2> if the group crypto hides this information, the Signal server still has to physically deliver the messages to the correct people in the group, whose phone numbers are all known by the server, so isn't this exercise a bit pointless? Or are there long-term plans to drop the critical reliance on phone numbers?

<comment><USER6> "Or are there long-term plans to drop the critical reliance on phone numbers?"

Yes

[https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing- usern...](https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing- usernames/9157)

<comment><USER9> That's a good start. I forgot to add though, to actually make group membership private _for real-world practical purposes_ , you have to achieve all of the following:

1\. group crypto can't give away the identities 2\. your identity system can't give away the actual people 3\. your distribution system can't give away the locations of those people

It's a hard problem, nobody in the world has done it yet. Signal seem now to have some concrete thing for (1), by your link they are supposedly working on (2), but (3) is also needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Signal started lately (maybe it's AB tested and it happens at differet times to different oeople) doing the annoying "add your name" thing, where you get askedfor your name pretty much every time, and you can only caugh it up, or say "remind me later", not"no thanks".

How is this scummy dark pattern good for privacy is beyond me. If it werent for my obe privacy nut friend, I would have stoppped using it.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love and hate signal. The tech seems good, but the UX has some real frustrations. Group chats are the most glaringly frustrating part in my mind.

<comment><USER12> I'm probably missing the point, I use groups in Signal but I never faced any issue. I'm probably not a power user. Can you provide more details please? I'm curious about it. Thanks :)

<comment> y-c-o-m-b Not sure what exactly OP is referring to, but this bug has plagued Signal for quite some time in that it doesn't handle Signal to non-Signal group messages gracefully:

[https://github.com/signalapp/Signal- Android/issues/8571](https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/8571)

The bug is my only real complaint with Signal's group messaging system.

EDIT: I should note that the bug was opened in January of 2019 (although existed for much longer than that) and as of December 2019 it was still in ongoing problem for some users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm looking forward to Signal introducing basic features like iOS message backup (which exists in the Android version).

<comment><USER14> As soon as Apple gives access to that data (they won't)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Eh, I want to like signal. I really do. But it does not play nice with Blokada ( though that is an easy fix ). My tech illiterate parent was unable to use it ( when compared to whatsapp ). I am kinda done with whatsapp so I finally broke down and added international plan.

I am annoyed, but I can't really blame my parent.

</comment><comment><USER16> Signal has MAJOR UX problems when you have several devices (which is fairly normal for mainstream users). Try using the same account multiple computers, smartphone, tablet / chromebook at the same time. It's painful.

Compared to Telegram (which is also privacy-focused and NOT owned by Facebook like WhatsApp is) that simply works, I'm not sure what Signal brings to the mainstream table.

The people behind the predecessor to Signal were somewhat successful in a disinformation / FUD campaign against Telegram's cryptography early on, but 0 POC exploits have ever been released. Telegram even upgraded their cryptography to alleviate some of the concerns - [https://core.telegram.org/mtproto](https://core.telegram.org/mtproto) . They are now recognized as IND-CCA secure [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext_indistinguishabilit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext_indistinguishability#IND- CCA).

To be mainstream, you have to have mainstream usability. Signal does not (at least not right now).

<comment><USER3> Telegram's cryptography isn't comparable to Signal's. Telegram provides end- to-end encryption only for private messages between two people, and, last I checked, that encryption was disabled by default. There is no group end-to-end encryption; rather, Telegram claims that TLS hop-by-hop encryption --- in which Telegram's own servers get to see message plaintext --- is sufficient.

Signal provides true end-to-end encryption, for groups, by default, always-on, in a privacy-preserving design that ensures that Signal's servers don't have to collect a log of who's talking to who. Signal won the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto --- in fact, they won the _first_ Levchin prize ever awarded, meaning that when Dan Boneh and Tom Ristenpart and Kenny Paterson and the other referees sat down to figure out who should get the inaugural Levchin Prize, Signal was the first thing that came to mind.

That cryptographers recoil from Telegram's bizarre IGE-based cryptography is besides the point. Nobody needed to "FUD" Telegram to show that it's inferior.

<comment><USER14> Telegram does invest heavily on their UI. It's been hard for me to convince people to move to it, regardless.

I imagine I'd have an even harder time moving people to Signal. While their encryption is better, I've seen complaints of messages not being sent and the sender not being aware until days/weeks later after personal follow up on the receiver. Even if this didn't deter me from using it, I have little to no contacts using it. And for the ones that do have it I have no way of knowing if they uninstalled and I'm sending a message to a black void.

If Signal had the reliability, UI polish, consistent updates, and feature-rich experience of Telegram I'd be putting more effort to convert users toward it rather than the latter. I'm a fan of both apps and companies running them nonetheless and am using Signal as my primary SMS app as it's a step to detach from Google.

<comment><USER17> To me it comes down to one simple question... do you want other parties reading the messages you send to your family and friends? If not, use Signal and encourage them to as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Funes- I'm personally against using _any_ instant messaging app, even more so if it's on a smartphone rather than on a desktop computer. I don't care how private they are. Why? Well, I think it's an inefficient communication tool, and thus a huge waste of time. Modern instant messaging applications work by interrupting people and being interrupted by them constantly throughout the day, since there's no way to turn it off—in contrast, MSN Messenger didn't allow for offline messaging until 2005; most of the time you found yourself in front of the computer with the program opened if somebody sent you a message, ready to engage in conversation instead of dealing with anything else.

Of course, you can turn the notifications off and check messages at a specific time every day, but good luck with that! If nested conversations without a subject attached to them, no character limit, and no formal way of telling when they either start or end aren't already put off enough and stretched out unnecessarily, imagine setting a time restriction to your responses. Imagine setting up a meeting or a date: as cumbersome and as long as it takes as it is, you'd spend a week trying to meet with somebody. Believe me, I've been there. I've tried it all: installing WhatsApp on a virtual machine with Android_x86 and only using it at night didn't solve a thing; still, a phone call was _always_ faster and much more efficient in dealing with anything you can conceive. However, most people didn't want to pick up the phone; texting, on the other hand? I'd receive texts from people wanting to start full conversations there, to which they would respond every two or three hours. How can _anyone_ do anything efficiently or be productive enough at work, or even enjoy hobbies, while doing that?

I know I'm alone on this one, but it's really frustrating seeing how something that isolates us and separates us from our own lives, immediate environments, and thoughts will probably never stop growing.

End of the rant.

<comment><USER18> > How can anyone do anything efficiently or be productive enough at work, or > even enjoy hobbies, while doing that?

by replying every 2 or 3 hours, when you're waiting in the elevator, or have some other idle time to fill

>you can turn the notifications off and check messages at a specific time every day, but good luck with that

some people simply ignore their notifications until they're ready to deal with them. they don't toggle some setting on their device, they simply choose to ignore the whole device. it varies from person-to-person and you might just not be personally suited to this kind of technology.

personally, i read every email i get as soon as i get it, but i realize this is not the norm.

<comment> Funes- >by replying every 2 or 3 hours, when you're waiting in the elevator, or have some other idle time to fill

Most people don't seem to do that. Most people I know, in fact, check their phones while driving, during lectures, during meals with friends and family, walking the dog (poor things), in the gym, walking down the street... I mean, you see it every day. Those aren't ideal times at which you should be checking your phone. Moreover, idle time can be hugely beneficial to rest our minds, relax, or to quietly reflect on important things about our lives.

>some people simply ignore their notifications until they're ready to deal with them. they don't toggle some setting on their device, they simply choose to ignore the whole device. it varies from person-to-person and you might just not be personally suited to this kind of technology.

If having your smartphone around occupies some of your cognitive capacity [0], imagine trying to "ignore notifications". You are keeping your mind busy with endless conversations kept on the air. I don't think _anyone_ is suited to this kind of devices, because the software they run on has been designed to keep you glued to it [1]. I just don't tolerate it as much as other people, I think.

[0] [https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of- your...](https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your- smartphone-reduces-brain-power/).

[1] Tristan Harris has talked at length about it, among other people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The 50 million infusion happened in 2018. Why has it taken so long to scale up? Anyway, I don't think it can take on WhatsApp. If you look at the history of when signal succeeds and gains many users, it's only when WhatsApp is down. Which is not for very long, as it's so important that it goes back up pretty quickly.</comment>


Machinarium Rejected From XBLA For Not Being Microsoft Exclusive - <AUTHOR> http://www.xblafans.com/indie-adventure-game-machinarium-refused-for-xbla-41.html

<comment><USER2> This is inaccurate. Microsoft just doesn't want to _publish_ the game, which is completely different. They just need to find a publisher.

<comment><USER3> Why would there be a need for a publisher? Where is the problem for Microsoft to just host the game on their servers, let people buy it off XBLA, keep a certain percentage of the money and forward the rest to the developers?

<comment><USER4> Publishing console games isn't as simple as hosting a file on a server. There is significant testing and certification cost, assignment of liability, and much more. Are those costs worth it to Microsoft? Will they have to advertise the game themselves? Who handles the support calls (yes, there are support calls for games)?

It just seems like Microsoft said "Our personal pipes are full, but maybe one of our licensed partners has some bandwidth for this game." Extrapolating on the headline, it sounds like Microsoft's pipes are full of Xbox exclusive titles. Preferring exclusives seems like a reasonable general guideline when there are simply too many games worth investing in. This is especially true for simultaneous development of cross-platform games. Microsoft certainly wouldn't want to spend time and money waiting on or helping a studio finish up the Playstation 3 port of their game (PS3 development always takes longer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Saying it was 'rejected from XBLA' is pretty misleading. Microsoft is just refusing to be their publisher.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, if this is true (sounds sort of extreme, but I don't really know much about this area) -- that's really scary. It bodes very poorly for the WinPhone7 platform, too.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd like to see a quote from Microsoft... aren't there other non-exclusive XBLA games like Braid and Peggle?

<comment> matthew-wegner Braid was Microsoft exclusive for over six months. Peggle is a pretty good counter-example, although it did add local multiplayer and good Live integration.

Microsoft is _extremely_ aggressive with exclusivity agreements with XBLA these days.

<comment><USER8> I'm particularly annoyed by that being a ps3 owner. You'd think they would spend their resources making xbox better, not screwing over people with PS3s.

In any case this just makes me avoid Microsoft products more.

<comment><USER9> Someone was predicting a more Balkanized and much less open Internet awhile back. In fact, IIRC, they were predicting this through increased reliance on proprietary walled gardens. We see it coming true right here. Being in one corporate camp or another trumps beauty and excellence.

<comment><USER8> Who said I'm in a corporate camp? So am I supposed to go out and by both a 360 and a PS3 to remain neutral? That's ridiculous.

I bought a PS3 because I needed a blu-ray player for my 12 foot projection screen, and I also happen to play some games.

Now I find out microsoft is trying to f __me up the ass by paying to withhold shit from me. I'm just saying why don't Microsoft go take that money and integrate a blu-ray player instead. Maybe then I would consider a 360.

I'd only avoid microsoft products which employ similar tactics. Tactics which are anti-competitive.

<comment><USER9> I'm talking about the developer perspective. "Being in a camp," means developing for platform X or Y because platform X won't license you because you're on Y. This is a bad situation and I'm against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just goes to show that a closed platform is a crappy platform.

<comment><USER2> So is an open platform with no market share.</comment></comment>