Half of American workers would rather work from home forever: poll - <AUTHOR> https://www.zippia.com/advice/coronavirus-remote-work-survey/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if this is related to the long commutes Americans have gotten used to. I'm not in the US, and while I would say I definitely appreciate the flexibility of being able to work from home (or from "not the office") every now and then, and I do like the present drop in meetings, I cannot fathom how people stay sane without a variety of other people around.

My productivity has definitely dropped, and it feels like my brain never really fully turns "on". It feels a lot like those times in university I decided to study for exams from home instead of going to campus. I can't explain it, but 9 out of 10 times it just feels bad, like the way your brain feels if you've spent the day watching TV or something (when, in fact, I haven't). This doesn't even begin to consider the social punctuations of work that are essential to my psychological well-being.

Does anyone feel the same? I'm a little bit worried that I just have a personality type that isn't well-suited for the remote work culture that is likely to become more prevalent after this crisis is over. I'm in my early thirties, but I've felt this way for as long as I can remember, independently of whether I was in a relationship, whether I was working or studying, etc.

<comment><USER3> Extrovert / introvert.

You're clearly more towards the extrovert part of the spectrum. Please try to have empathy for people on the introverted part of the spectrum who cannot fathom being forced into an office with tons of people distracting them all day every day. Heretofore they (save for a lucky few like me) have been forced to not just fathom it, but live it.

The "half" of Americans mentioned in the article probably has heavy overlap with those introverts.

Honestly, your post reads pretty heavily to me of "status quo privilege bias". You fit the current status quo very well, and are expressing worry that a change to that status quo would hurt you, with out extending empathy to those the current status quo hurts badly.

The world is not going to flip to fully remote work. It's likely going to inch towards remote work being more prevalent or available. What you are expressing is a case of "When you're accustomed to privilege (your way of working being privileged in this case), then equality (remote work being equally available) feels like oppression."

Not saying that makes you evil or any thing, just pointing out that this is a pretty standard human bias that gets expressed and winds up working to defend harmful status quos all the time. Worth being self aware of.

<comment><USER2> > Extrovert / introvert. You're clearly more towards the extrovert part of the > spectrum.

That's the thing: I don't consider myself very extroverted! Probably on the extrovert side of the scale, but very moderately so!

> Please try to have empathy for people on the introverted part of the > spectrum who cannot fathom being forced into an office with tons of people > distracting them all day every day. Heretofore they (save for a lucky few > like me) have been forced to not just fathom it, but live it.

Oh I do, I really do. I guess I'm just a bit (selfishly) scared of what awaits people like me in the future.

If we allow ourselves a lot of optimism, workplaces will see the need to accommodate both kinds of people to a great extent :-)

> Honestly, your post reads pretty heavily to me of "status quo privilege > bias". You fit the current status quo very well, and are expressing worry > that a change to that status quo would hurt you, with out extending empathy > to those the current status quo hurts badly.

You may be right, but to defend myself on this point I think it is in part fueled by the overwhelmingly positive press WFH seems to be getting in this crisis. Nobody is writing articles exhalting the virtues of regular offices (rightly so), and I guess I have all this praising of WFH a bit stuck in my throat at this point - it leaves me thinking "is it me there's something wrong with?"

> The world is not going to flip to fully remote work. It's likely going to > inch towards remote work being more prevalent or available.

I guess I'm just afraid it'll be a reinforcing cycle driven by potential real- estate savings on the part of both employers and employees, and infrastructure savings on the part of society.

<comment><USER3> Well, here are two things to think about that may salve your fears:

1) There are just as many extroverts as introverts. You are very much not alone in your desires.

2) Management is overwhelmingly extroverts, because of the people managing required in the management profession. The C-Suite is almost entirely extroverts.

<comment><USER4> > because of the people managing required in the management profession

While I agree with the rest of your statements, I disagree with this.

Management is overwhelmingly extraverts because extraversion lends itself very strongly to the kind of elbow-rubbing that our culture sees as more important than performance for determining suitability for raises, promotions, and such.

I know some introverted people who are absolutely brilliant people managers. They understand leadership and what people need so much better than any extraverted manager I've ever personally met.

For all too many people, management isn't even about "people managing". It's about being on a power trip. And this applies triple to the C suite.

<comment><USER3> Fair critique.

For the record, I'm an introverted manager (and seemingly a decent one judging by my record and the feedback I receive). I do find the people managing aspects to be pretty exhausting (though also fulfilling and totally worthwhile).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've worked from home since 2001, except for a brief 2 year stint at Google. I think I'm far more productive at home because I have:

\- An office, with a door I can close

This was going to be a big list, but I actually think that just about sums it up. The cube environment at Google was utterly intolerable, and made it hard to concentrate. It didn't help that the guys in another group next to us had a game where they flew rc drones around for fun, or the folks on the other side of my group that were always discussing food, or the loud door to a lab behind my desk that was constantly slamming, etc, or just the constant stream of people walking by my cube.

At home I have a door that I can close. I can _think_. So I get a lot more done.

I'm not saying all office environments were terrible. Before 2001, I worked doing research at a University and I had a fantastic office with a door. I think I was just as productive there as I was at home. Because, again, distractions were minimal.

<comment><USER6> I also worked at Google after almost 20 years of working at home. I didn't mind the cube environment because I worked from about 6am to 3pm, giving me a few hours of quiet heads down time every day. My last job before retiring at Capital One was the same, I started work early in the morning for heads down work time, was available for brainstorming, etc., then knocked off work mid afternoon. I really recommend time shifting for people having problems concentrating in a cube environment.

<comment><USER7> You didn't find that there was pressure to work later? I tend to prefer to come in late because you can control your bound on that, but leaving early makes you look bad (despite the irrationality of that), and its just easy to fall into the habit of "oh just another hour, I will still be home for dinner..."

Then there are meetings scheduled for 3-6pm....

<comment><USER5> There was some, but we tended to put a bound on meetings to 10-3. I had a good excuse in that I had hard deadline of 3:45 to pick my son up from school most days. The days that I stayed late, it was mostly for social events. Either TGIF on thursdays, or group celebrations which were generally at 4.

<comment><USER6> I was in Mountain View and my manager was in NYC, so we started working at the same time, given the 3 hour time difference.

Also, the manager of everyone in the ocean of people around me was my peer, we had the same manager, and he came in almost as early as I did.

So, no problem, or at least no problem that I worried about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No wonder given that the daily commute is both mentally and physically taxing for most.

I've been working remotely since 2015 and have already decided to settle in a perhaps less attractive, but definitely cheaper neighbourhood so that I could have some office space in the house.

In the long run it's probably going to cost as much as the sum total of fuel and vehicles used over the years, but the main benefit is not having to go over this stressful routine of negotiating my place in a stream of cars.

<comment><USER9> Make sure you account for the value of time saved. Time is precious and there's never enough, if I can find a way to add 40 more minutes to my day I'm going to value that immensely.

<comment><USER10> Don't use it for additional time spent working uncompensated! Your commute wasn't paid for (typically), so don't give that time away to someone else for free now that you're saving it.

<comment><USER11> Personally, having a long bay area commute, i now use that time instead to sleep in AND go for longer walks with my dog, that we'd usually reserve for the weekends

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm anticipating that most HNers prompted to comment here will be those thinking this unlikely or wrong or whatever. Every time something positive about remote working is on HN, only those opposing it seem to comment...

So, anyway, here's my vote in favour of remote working!

I've worked from home for the last 10 years straight, and two years in the decade before that. Working from home has always been best for me.

Historically, colleagues have always been amazed I get anything done, and wondered about how teams can possibly function etc etc. Lots of people have been skeptical.

And now so many of my colleagues are working from home, and all the awful destruction hasn't happened, and in fact many people are saying they've never been more productive...

Yay to remote working, long may it continue!

<comment><USER13> > I'm anticipating that most HNers prompted to comment here will be those > thinking this unlikely or wrong or whatever.

On the contrary, this seems like the most honest take on the topic of remote work preferences.

The headline says that 50% of Americans prefer working from home. That suggests that 50% prefer working from the office or aren't sure yet.

In other words: Some people like to work from home. Some people don't. That's the point that many of us have been trying to make all along.

When quarantining started, a lot of the WFH advocates came out of the woodwork and declared an early victory for WFH. There was an influx of hot takes that office spaces would be closed forever once people saw the benefits of WFH. They all ignored half of the population who really does not benefit from working from home.

<comment><USER14> > The headline says that 50% of Americans prefer working from home. That > suggests that 50% prefer working from the office.

If you even glance at the article that's just not true. The remaining vote is split between 'Prefers the Office' and 'Unsure'.

If you were to split the 'Unsure' based on the current ratio of 'Prefers Home':'Prefers the office' between the 2, you're looking at closer to 42% 'prefer the office'.

<comment><USER13> > If you were to split the 'Unsure' based on the current ratio of 'Prefers > Home':'Prefers the office' between the 2, you're looking at closer to 42% > 'prefer the office'.

I updated my post.

Given my prior experience managing remote teams, WFH tends to come with a honeymoon phase where people enjoy their new freedom but don't yet miss the social interaction of the office. Over time, some people tend to get cabin fever and feel isolated, especially if they don't have strong social networks outside of work. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "Prefers Home' group switch to 'Not decided' or even 'No' over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think alot of people will want to go back because they've now associated working remotely with being in an isolated jail cell. Also I'm sure couples and people with kids are ready to jump out their windows.

I wont be going back to the office for a number of reasons, however, and I think everyone should boycott the office as well. Weather you want to work in the office or not should ultimately be the employees choice.

1\. Commuting pollutes.

2\. Commuting is lost time. Almost a month of lost time every year.

3\. Office spaces are expensive. Without them, companies would have lots of extra cash. Ideally that extra cash goes to wages or hiring.

4\. VR workplaces can be and will be a sufficient substitute. You can get about the same quality of social interaction + more in VR as you can in meat space. Its a different experience and until you try it you aren't really entitled to an opinion.

5\. You can go to the gym whenever you want (assuming businesses open up again).

I'm sure there are other benefits that I'm missing.

<comment><USER16> You make a compelling case for more people to opt to working from home given the choice. I wonder in all of this whether or not we might be losing something. I'd say that co-location (and possibly commuting) are a part of a larger ecosystem. For instance there are a number of businesses that cater for the office based folks. This could be providing breakfast, lunches, coffees, cigarettes (vapes), etc. In some cities you have coffee shops/restaurants that are mainly open during office hours. Without the offices many of them wouldn't be there. These may be businesses of various sizes employing several people. Then there's the staff required to maintain the office space from receptionists, porters, security, cleaners, technicians, etc. Then there are the pubs/bars that people go to after work (one of things I miss when home based). I could go on. You could argue that many of these people could simply be employed elsewhere. I think we should consider the potential ramifications of the shift before we jump full steam ahead.

<comment><USER15> These are definitely valid concerns but usually the way changes happen is slowly and then suddenly all at once like we are witnessing with COVID-19 or as we saw with the transition from horses to automobiles, and from blockbuster to netflix. Technology is an incredible force and slowing it down is hard. Ultimately it will come down to which companies, bussinesses and people display the most adaptability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was working from home before the virus. The difference for me now is that my other colleagues work from home too. The quality of our meetings has improved, and I feel that I'm on a more even playing field now (in term of evaluation for instance). It's great. I'm also collaborating more closely with some colleagues with whom I had little interaction before.

That being said, working from home is not for everyone. Not everybody has a good working environment. Some people get distracted, feel lonely, or are unable to maintain good work/life balance.

It really has pros and cons. What I hope at least is that it will be less taboo in the future and more employers will be open to that option.

<comment><USER18> > That being said, working from home is not for everyone.

Actually, even work (in any particular set of circumstances) is not for everyone. And still, people do manage.

For example, open offices are not for everyone. Yet they do happen.

Imagine, if at your future employer, you could simply decide whether you want to WfH or not. And they would plan the office accordingly. They would rent less space. Why not give people the freedom?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm going to strike a very different reaction to most here: I miss my office!

The office is where I work. Home is where I don't work. I have a 30-40 minute subway ride between the two for changing gears. Home-no-work. Office-yes-work. Sudoku and Kindle in between. It's a pattern I hadn't realized I'd so strongly driven into my mind.

The first two weeks of this pandemic? I accomplished nothing. I sat down and tried to work at my desk (I even have a dock and a KVM switch so I could use my dual-monitors, keyboard, and mouse) and I did almost nothing for two weeks. I just could not change gears. It was agony.

I finally was able to get working again by moving from my desk to a chair beside it, with just my laptop. I have no pattern for this place- it's a chair usually covered in stuff I need to put somewhere so I have no really deep patterns for what I do when I sit here (is my own self-psycho-analysis). I'm still not as productive as before, but at least I'm getting some things done.

Even then, I miss running into people in the kitchen that I haven't talked to in a while. I miss grabbing lunch with friends from other departments. I miss that first 15 minutes of the day where we're all waiting for the caffeine to kick in, asking what the weekend plans are. The social aspects keep me sane.

And right now I'm trying to train new guys. One guy, we started him during the lockdown by just mailing him a laptop with instructions for how to get on the VPN. Training people remotely is _hard_. Even mostly-remote companies often start new people in the office for a week or two, then send them back home. There's video calls and screen sharing- it's not the same. I find it very difficult.

I have many criticisms of modern offices, but I still want mine back.

</comment><comment><USER20> This article (like most discussion of these work styles) conflates remote work and work-from-home. I feel it would _greatly_ help clarify discussion to keep in mind that these aren't the same thing: the latter (WFH) is _mostly_ a subset of the former (work from a location of your choice), and of the two, "remote" is _much more enabling._

WFH is okay. It beats an office. But it blurs the lines between work and not- work life further than they already are unless you're highly skilled in setting boundaries, and if you have kids or other dependents it's a fresh challenge to stay focused every day.

Working remotely, in non-pandemic times, opens up real possibilities. The young and the restless can try the nomadic worker thing; that looks like it's be fun for a while. Coworking (in the small community sense, not WeWork) gets you the separation of work and home on your own terms and can be a fabulous balance for the extroverts (and also introverts) among us. And WFH gets rolled in there as well.

At present moment, as the world suddenly is all doing this at once, while confined at home—of course these concepts will be conflated. But let's be deliberate to ensure we aren't setting ourselves up for a world where managers get suspicious of you for leaving the house during work hours. That sounds worse than the situation we started with.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think that I have relevant experience to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of working from home. In 1998 my wife and I moved from California to the mountains in Central Arizona. Until 2016, I almost exclusively worked remotely and sometimes I took long periods off work to write books and enjoy nature hikes. For about a decade I only accepted about 20% of offers to provide service.

Working remotely got old. In 2016 I worked on a project at Google so we lived in Mountain View for a while. I really enjoyed the change of working in an office (and the food was good). After we returned home, I accepted a gig to work for an AI company in Singapore and after that worked onsite managing a deep learning team at Capital One (an excellent company to work for, BTW).

We are back home now, and I am retired except for writing and working on a commercial software product (in Common Lisp) in the semantic web/linked data space. Frankly, as much as I love my day to day life, to be honest I really miss working in a team with face to face brainstorming, etc.

<comment><USER21> This can be heavy and I need to talk about it but feel it runs people off, but I had a recent suicide attempt resulting from years of chronic pain and increasing isolation. I am not getting enough help or support. The relevance is how you mentioned you miss face to face and as I sit here alone trying to recover I see how terrible an effect the increasing isolation has had on me. But I live rural with no support network and no options. Looking back it's why I was far better mentally in a city. People need people...even the introverts. I don't fit in politically locally, cannot find support online. Even healthy and wealthy people get down when all alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Who are these people? I've been working from home and I've noticed a steep dip in my productivity.

<comment><USER23> A dip in productivity is a problem for your boss, not for you. Anecdotally, I'm much more productive at home because I can take breaks whenever I want instead of getting burned out after working for 3-4 hours at an office, but knowing that I still have to stay there for 4 more hours.

<comment><USER24> How about, after working 3-4 hours at the office, you go outside for a walk before you start on the next 4 hours? I know people who do that, and I think it's a great idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> As someone else mentioned, the real culprit here is probably long commutes. Personally, I've worked remotely for 5+ years and don't like staying at home all day. The perfect setup for me is a small office that I can walk to in 5-10 minutes, preferably with a gym and coffeeshop en route. I get out of the house, interact with people, and have a designated _work_ space, without having to sit in a car or a crowded subway train for an hour+ each day.

</comment><comment><USER26> Honestly remote working to save commute time is awesome. But there are a lot of problems with it too for e.g. mentally unstable people or situations where people can't setup a proper work environment at home (as it's to small for it).

So while I like remote work a lot I think it's best "in general" to only have it just part of the week.

Honestly best is still to not work remote but have a way to work of 10-15min __walking __or similar (e.g. cycling, reliable public transmute). Enough time to clearly separate work from home and think a bit.

Naturally this is very unlikely to happen.

But worst is if cities are seperated in "residential" and "office" areas as this will make transmute times spike. Having a nice intermixing it much much better. Sure it doesn't guarantee short travel times (or else you would need to potentially move every time you change the job). But it allows them.

</comment><comment><USER15> I absolutely won't be going back to the office, even if it costs me my job.

<comment> Joe-Z I decided to look for a new job after our management only very reluctantly let us all work from home (it was very obvious they just don't trust their employees to still do their job when not on site). My productivity has gone up due to no more walk-ups distracting me with questions whenever they like and I don't have to waste an hour in the subway every day. My next job will for sure be remote, or at least for a company with strong remote support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've been joking with my coworkers that I'm never coming back to the office when this is over...

I'm sorta serious but not sure I'd be allowed to. We were already allowed 2 days per week of remote working but 5 seems like a stretch.

FWIW I have a dedicated office at home and no kids. Commute is not a factor - I live ~7 miles from the office, it takes 10-15 minutes to get there or get home. There's also an alternative ~7 mile route that is almost entirely bike path I can ride to work on.

<comment><USER28> Time to start questioning why that rule is in place?

If you're that close to the office then you can easily argue that you can drive in for important meetings and such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm very curious about the sampling methodology here. This is anecdotal, but I am a millennial and precisely zero of my friends prefer working from home. So there must be bias in one of those two samples.

<comment><USER30> I asked the author:

 _The survey was conducted using mechanical turk for American workers with full-time jobs. We didn 't control for age, as you can see in the age breakdown of "are you more productive working from home," so had some age groups more represented than others. The margin of error is 4%._

So that raises some red flags, because turkers are WAY more likely to be favorable towards WFH conditions. They already do that!

<comment><USER29> Yeah. Massive, massive sampling bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I heard on WFH opinions there are two groups of people, one that think this will usher in a new age of productive freedom working from home never having to commute again, and the group with kids.

<comment><USER31> I should add our juniors are getting screwed. Usually we spend a lot of time training and coaching, now at home they're mostly ignored. I think our intern class is going to get cancelled too.

<comment><USER32> My company cancelled its intern program this year. I actually did hire one but I was very proactive in making it happen and barely got it done before shelter-in-place kicked in. It's really challenging for both sides compared to last year due to lack of in person but it's working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I worked at home for 9 years and then I had kids. (They are great kids but they make working at home hard.) That was enough for me to not want to work at home anymore. I then got a new job, and then covid-19 hit and I am working at home again. Argh!

<comment><USER34> We can structure our choice of house around kids, e.g. an attached office with separate entrance. An office complex with facilities and maintenance costs on the order of $600/mo per desk, which is about what a city commute costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Don't people miss social interaction? I don't understand how these articles are written. As a single man living on my own, this lockdown has made it pretty lonely.

<comment><USER36> Time for a lifestyle change I suppose.

<comment><USER37> I have friends and hobbies outside of work, but I still miss my "work friends". If you're going to be somewhere for ~8 hours a day, I find it's nice to have some company.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, and while one's "work friends" may not be the perfect kind of friends (otherwise they tend to migrate to being "regular friends", no?), they have on important property to me: they're _around during work_ and they punctuate work with social/human interactions. Sometimes those interactions are annoying and disrupting, but my god I'm realizing how incredibly important they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> THE BIGGEST thing i HATE about office work is the shoulder surfing. i go insane with rage when some idiot is standing behind me while i'm trying to figure something out, i feel under the gun and i start to make mistakes. i have huge anxiety issues and that doesn't make it an easier. not to mention the fact that if i wanted your damn input, i would ask for it.

since working from home, my anger and anxiety level are at a lifetime low. i don't have bleeding ulcers and i actually get a 4 mile walk in in the morning since i'm not rushed to fight traffic. my life is so serene now.

I hope this lasts forever.

</comment><comment><USER39> People used to all work from home. If you read a bit of economic history, it seems that working in an office or a factory is a rather recent invention, only a few hundred years old.

Prior to that there was something called the "putting-out" system, where you'd sew some clothes or whatever and put it outside for someone to collect. And they'd leave you some raw materials.

I'm also of the WFH persuasion, but I'm unsure whether it's great for people who are starting their career.

For experienced people, they already know what the business is about, they are more likely to have kids and need a longer commute from the suburbs.

For people on their first job there's a lot of informal learning that happens in the workplace. You run into more people randomly at a traditional office, and you learn more about what exactly your role is.

What would probably make sense is for businesses to get more relaxed about whether you actually come into the office. If there's no meetings or requirements to get immediate feedback on a given day, why make people sit on a train for an hour?

<comment><USER40> > Prior to that there was something called the "putting-out" system, where > you'd sew some clothes or whatever and put it outside for someone to > collect.

Something similar to this exists in rural Germany, at least in Brandenburg, mostly for fresh or preserved produce where you leave a donation in return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Not sure if generalizing something like this based on a survey from "over 500 Americans" is correct, but anyway. I believe that most millennials will definitely feel more comfortable working from home permanently (I'm one of those) however there are a lot of other factors to take into account, as mentioned in other comments it can depend if you're more introvert rather than extrovert, do you have the appropriate workspace, tools?, commute time. It can be incredibly tough if not stressing to be working on a rather small place without a desk, a proper computer/laptop, kids/toddlers hanging around you, random noise coming from outside, etc. I think the point is clear. IMHO it really depends on the resources and environment that each individual is able to have.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have found that working from home is great, right now. During normal times, though, I could not really handle doing it for more than a couple days a week.

I suspect the reason is that my wife and kids are at home right now. So I can close the door and they will leave me alone, but I still have a sense of them being around. So I am comfortable. But during normal times, the kids would be at school all day and my wife would be at her office. So then the house would be empty except for me, and then I get a little stir crazy after a couple days.

We will find out eventually, when offices reopen. I am secretly hoping that I will be able to continue working from home while maintaining my sanity.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've been working from home for the past month, and honestly I'm tired of it. Perhaps I'm just more outgoing than I thought, but this whole forced WFH episode is really proving to me the importance of face to face communication.

</comment><comment><USER44> For many/most people working from home is something new that is "forced" on them. I have been working from home (or on the road/'wherever I may roam' _)(wander_ )(wander _) 80-90% of my time and I really enjoy it.

For people who just started WFH they may combine WFH with virus, kids screaming, lockdown, isolation, etc.

Circumstances are not BAU right now, for 99.9% of us. Once this blows over, and the infrastructure remains in place, and business start making their typical revenue, it will be interesting to run the same survey and compare it with 12 months ago.

_sorry for the Metallica reference, I couldn't help myself.

<comment><USER45> Yes I'm in the same situation and I was thinking the same thing reading the negative comments. It's important to not conflate the work from home aspect with the lockdown aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've been working from home a minimum of one day a week for 10 years, frequently 2 days a week - and for rare bursts of a month, the whole deal.

The reality is that environment more than makes up for all of it. At home, I completely control my work environment. Sure, there are elements to communication you have to change - amongst other things, but working from home is fantastic if you WORK from home.

I find those days at home are significantly more effective - and the clients, partners, and employees I've worked with have always agreed. There's also a lot to be said for face-to-face time though.

</comment><comment><USER47> Whenever I read these WFH HN threads and see all the comments about people who "just can't do it" I'm always curious if it's truly that they can't enjoy working from home, or that they are doing it wrong. Have worked from home for the better part of 10 years off and on and some things that make all the difference:

Have a dedicated office. Yeah you aren't going to be as productive on your kitchen table or your couch on a laptop as you would be in a quiet dedicated room with a desk, multiple monitors and clear delineation between work and play time.

Get the kids/dog/whatever distraction dealt with. You don't have kids at your office, why would you think your productivity wouldn't take a hit if you have them around at home while you are trying to work? Not now obviously because Covid, but under normal circumstances, send them to day care or whatever arrangement you gotta make to have quite during your business hours.

Figure out your coms! If your team/company isn't built around remote work, obviously there are going to be issues. You have to have a strategy for communication that's designed for remote. Both to keep you from feeling like an island or second class citizen and also because remote communication requires a totally different regiment than the random water cooler check in.

If you are doing all of these things and remote work still isn't your cup of tea I'd love to hear about it. If you aren't doing most or all of these things, It's probably not remote work that is the problem, it's how you are treating it.

</comment><comment><USER48> I worked from home 3 of 5 days a week.

I loved it.

Now with my wife and kids home ... working form home is horrible.

COVID-19 has ruined work from home for me ;)

I want some alternate bandwagon "work from home sucks" articles.

</comment><comment><USER49> I have a feeling this will change over the coming months.

<comment><USER50> Exactly the same thing would happen if you asked people if they'd rather be on vacation forever. Yes, but after a few months, they'd be begging to get back to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I once took three months off work when I had a pretty sweet severance deal. Let me tell you, going back to the office from 10AM to 6:30PM was HELL. It ruined worked for me. I realized that there was, you know - life.

It's the sort of epiphany you get after you retire ("oh crap, I worked too much and now my healthy years are gone"), except this time a lot of people will realize it when they are still young.

</comment><comment><USER52> In the last 15 years, I've worked as a developer:

\- on site for a non-tech company

\- on site for 2-3 small tech companies (10-100 employees) between 20 and 60 minutes away (depending on traffic)

\- fully remote for a tech company 5 hours drive away (with on-site visits 2-3 times per year)

\- a blend of on-site and remote at my own discretion for a tech company 20-45 minutes away

\- fully remote as a contractor with occasional (monthly-ish) on-site visits

What I have learned through the years is that my needs change with the growth of my family and the dynamics of my work. I have by far enjoyed working the remote/on-site blend because it allows me the freedom to make a mature decision about my own work needs each day.

What we especially as thought workers ought to be advocating for as an industry is the freedom to CHOOSE where we work each day, not a fully-remote mandate or an on-site mandate. To me, this is a compromise among many concerns, such as infrastructure costs, accountability, collaboration, a quiet work environment, and generally the ability to break up the monotony of doing the same thing every day.

</comment><comment><USER53> My last two roles had management expect you to be in the office because they had spent a lot of money on the rent/furnishing even though 50% of the companies roles could be done remote. Now Ill admit it is easier to walk over to someone's desk to ask a question then the endless are you free email/phone call tags before all this COVID-19

</comment><comment><USER54> I suspect this is going to have a pretty profound impact on the commercial real estate world. Aside from workers wanting to WFH, anecdotally I know of a few now cash-strapped start-ups that are very seriously considering breaking their leases and having much more of the work force WFH.

If you live in a city right now, just peer out at all of those sky scrapers. A huge amount of that is currently empty office space that costs a fortune. For many companies the idea that this space was truly optional was absurd, but right now companies everywhere are seeing that they _have_ to be able to do 100% remote to survive.

Within a month an office space has gone from essential to being more and more of a luxury, way more expensive per employee than a automatic espresso machine.

I suspect a small but non-trivial number of companies will break their leases in the coming months. But far more companies will emerge from this crisis no longer believing that every employee needs a desk in an office.

<comment><USER55> > Within a month an office space has gone from essential to being more and > more of a luxury

More like a liability. Any company with office space is currently paying rent with no utilization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> It was in the `70s that I first heard the concept "Telecommuting". I knew right off I would have to learn a skill set that allowed me to do that and started exploring the options.

It took me until the late-1990s to get there, but that's when I started working from home full time. Right now I have my office in the basement of our house. It's quiet, and spacious, and cluttered with the stuff I tinker with.

For me, the "shelter in place" thing we're going through hasn't really changed much at all in my routine. I prefer being alone in a quiet space when coding and have spent most of my days doing that for the past 20 years.

Since I could choose anywhere to do it, I chose the Ozark Mountains. I packed up and left Malibu and haven't regretted it for even a moment. I've hardly spent any time at all sitting in traffic since I got here. Before then it was common to spend a couple hours sitting in traffic getting to and from work. And often the same on days off going somewhere to have fun.

But it's not for everyone. My wife is way too social to spend much time alone. Right now she's on the phone or facebook almost all day chatting with friends and family, or watching TV.

I have all kinds of stuff to do aside from coding. We've got a big yard and a few acres of forested land with a menagerie of "critters", a barn, and a big veggie garden. All of them wanting my attention. I spend most all my time at home working on something. Shoot, I have to remember to drive my car now and then to keep the battery charged.

Most of my friends in LA could never live here. My wife struggles with it. She was raised Lake Forest, Il and loves whooping it up "Downtown". For me, all of Los Angeles felt pretty much like a "Downtown". Malibu Canyon St. Park in the Spring is actually a lot like the Ozarks, and I did love it there. But I hated sitting in traffic. I felt like I was wasting my life doing that.

</comment><comment><USER57> Many people are blaming the commute, but I've been working from home for almost 6 years, and I actually miss the commute. Especially the bus, but the train was nice too when I had to switch. It was a nice buffer of being able to read or think quietly to myself. The start and end of my day were absolute. Whatever I didn't get done would have to wait, and I wouldn't start until I got there. Along with the social interactions, and having more choices for lunch in my immediate area, the commute is in my top 3 things I miss about working in an office.

What I don't miss is waking up early and getting ready, picking out clothes, combing my hair, and all that nonsense every single morning. I even had 8 of the same exact outfit when I worked in an office, and it was still such a drain.

<comment><USER58> I think the difference is that for you, many of those same things can be accomplished by choice. You can still have an absolute start and end to your workday, you just have to be proactive about it. You can still take the same amount of time to read or think to yourself. Perhaps the requirement of a commute makes doing those things easier, but its entirely possible to do the same thing by simply being more mindful about it.

For those who hate their commute, being forced into the office every day doesn't offer the same latitude for adjustments to their personal lives. And many of those things you enjoyed are only possible via public transportation. Given the woeful state of public transportation in much of the US, many commuting are doing so in cars, which don't afford the same opportunities for peaceful self-reflection and unwinding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> As someone who has done remote working more or less exclusively for 6 years, the current state of affairs for most homes does not reflect the reality of what "Work From Home" looks like in normal, non-emergency times.

You can't competently work from home full time and also manage children. Even for people without children, they are dealing with co-workers who are juggling a new normal, have not set up dedicated work spaces, are fumbling to learn how to use zoom/meet/hangout etc...

I say all this to point out that, even in non-ideal conditions with little to no preparation or planning, most people would still rather work from home.

Work from home should be the STANDARD, not the exception, for white collar work.

</comment><comment><USER60> > Half of all Americans want to continue working from home following the > coronavirus

That is a VERY rough (actually false) sentance, considering they have only surveyed ~500 Americans out of 205'950'000+ population at working age.

> We surveyed over 500 Americans...

<comment><USER61> You should look up polling theory. You don't need to talk to every member of a population, only a representative sample.

<comment><USER60> My point was that sample size is too small. According to Standard Occupational Classification [[https://www.bls.gov/soc/](https://www.bls.gov/soc/)] there are 459 broad occupations.

Multiply that by age group and you still haven't tossed a coin even a single time for every combination of occupation/age group.

<comment><USER58> And OP's point is that you don't necessarily need to have representation for all of those occupation/age group combinations. It's highly unlikely there isn't high amount of overlap in perception among those occupations. There's going to be supersets of those occupations that are fairly homogenous. So you really don't need a huge sample of respondents and coverage of all of those possibilities. You just need the makeup of the sample to be reasonably representative, and that's the problem with this poll. Seems like it was conducted in a way that the respondents are not representative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I don't necessarily want to WFH permanently, but i do treasure the large reduction in my commute that happened in 2010 for me. I would be hard pressed to go back to the days where i was losing almost 3 hours a day in a car.

</comment><comment><USER63> I've been remote for two years and don't want to go back to the daily commute. I've been happy to sacrifice one room in my home to be an office in exchange for not running the traffic gauntlet each day. The one thing I still prefer in person is whiteboarding. We have good collaboration tools but none of them yet match the efficiency of people in a room together working on a common whiteboard. There are digital whiteboards that might fill this niche but currently they're too expensive to distribute to entire teams. Maybe over time this will change.

</comment><comment><USER64> Let's note that distributed companies almost always clearly make the distinction between "remote work" and "work from home".

Some of them are openly "against" work from home.

<comment><USER24> As a freelancer, especially in between on-site projects, I made a habit of getting a workplace outside the home, explicitly to avoid all the distractions of the home. For a while, I rented a desk at an office, but I've also worked in the lobby of a work-friendly hotel, I've tried working in the library (but their wifi sucks) and various other places. Anything but home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Personally, I can definitely do away with my commute (while it's short, it's still a twice a day anxiety event)

I think there is something to be said about the autonomy we're given while at home. No pretend needed when your interactions with coworkers are purely work- event driven and not social for the sake of "team building" or "Culture".

Give me a paycheck to do work, beyond that transaction I shouldn't owe any more of my mind and body to a job.

</comment><comment><USER66> The 25-34 age range had the most "Yes" I want to work from home. I wonder if experience made the later years want to not work from home, or what caused that.

<comment><USER67> Children probably. Don't get me wrong, I love being home and spending time with the family more, it's really the best part of this experience for me.

But there's no way I'd be able to be as productive as expected under normal circumstances. I'm lucky if I get 4 hours in.

<comment><USER12> Presumably if you continue to work from home after the crisis, then your children return to school...?

<comment><USER67> Not in my case, no. They're not school aged, and are at home during the day. Elementary schools where I am run roughly 9-3 as well, except on Thursdays when they run 9-2.

Maybe I could make it work, but I would still prefer to have an office to go to most days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I find constant "WFH" isolating and a bit depressing. I prefer to work out of a coffee shop, but obviously that is not possible these days.

</comment><comment><USER69> I've been working from home (in full time positions for a couple of tech companies) for the past ~12-13 years now. During that time I've done both purely-technical work and managerial work (managing other remoties).

I'm excited about the work-from-home revolution that's going on here, and I think it will benefit society and some level of work-from-home will stick for the long term, for many people. However, it's not for everyone. Some people just don't like the remote work lifestyle at all. It's also not for every kind of job or office.

I think we'll see a lot of hybrid arrangements in the post-covid world. Some offices might institute work-from-home only for tuesdays and thursdays. Or just have everyone come into the office on Mondays and cram all the important in-person meetings into that day. Or in some situations it will be an at-will flexibility (come in for specific meetings when it makes sense, or come use the office like you would a co-working space when your home life is a little crazier because the kids are out of school for the summer and/or there's a contractor remodeling the kitchen, etc).

I think most seemingly-virtualizable businesses that had offices before will still have offices for the foreseeable few years, but by implementing various hybrid policies they could see their average headcount onsite per day shrink significantly over time. For many the office will become optional and/or a part-time thing. One way they could react to this is to downsize their commercial real estate the next time contracts are up. Another way they could handle it would be to remodel the space they've got, trading out cube-farm areas for more private offices and private conference rooms that can be reserved ahead, which will draw some employees back for more hours on-site, until they find a balancing point.

The deeper transition for managers is getting away from the control-freak model of tracking "hours worked", and starting to focus instead on the "things done". The reason you hired your employee is not to punch a clock and stare at a wall for a fixed number of hours; you hired them to accomplish goals, and you're actually going to have to focus directly on measuring true work rather than time in a post-office-hours world. Once you break free of the chains of time-tracking, all kinds of efficiencies that benefit both the employer and the employee are unlocked through remote and flexible work arrangements.

</comment><comment><USER70> The survey doesn't say how many people they asked, but looking at their chart sliced by age it's a very small sample: looks like ~30 in the 55-64 age group? They also don't say anything about how they found their participants. I'm pretty skeptical that asking these questions to a large representative sample would give similar results.

<comment><USER71> I'm skeptical of the 19% who can't work from home. BLS says that food prep, transportation, production, healthcare practitioners are the 3rd, 4th, 5th, & 7th most common jobs. This totals 43 million, most of whom probably can't work from home. [https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm)

Edit: Another commenter claims the author sampled workers through Mechanical Turk. WTH.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> This survey is ...bad.

\- _Seventy-nine percent_ of workers can work from home at least some of the time? Maybe the ones your survey reached, but I'm pretty sure I've read the real fraction is under 30%. \- "Do you think your employer will make working remote permanent?" is a bad question because it's easy to interpret it multiple ways.

</comment><comment><USER73> Understandably so. I'm working remote for 7 years now, and before also for over 10 years. I'm at least 10x more productive. No interruptions is the biggest cause. And only asynchron communication, in written form.

Also I do much longer hours, because it's much more fun, and I can take a siesta nap when I need it. I'm an extrovert btw.

</comment><comment><USER74> Anytime a poll or election comes back 50/50 you seriously have to critique and justify whether any actual signal was uncovered. A yes/no question being answered 50/50 on the face of it tells you nothing. It's good she breaks stuff down here, but that's all ex-post rationalization - keep that in mind.

</comment><comment><USER75> I've been working from home for 9 1/2 years, and I really like it.

It suits me-- I'm more of a quiet, research-type worker.

But some of my friends are more 'cubicle hoppers' / social butterflies. I really don't think those folks would do well with it in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER76> WFH for almost 2 years 50-60%. Due to corona now 100% for almost 2 months. Used my car 3 or 4 times the last 2 months instead i often walked or used my bicycle, before i used the car at least 5-6 times a week. So WFH can definitely help to save the planet from global warming

</comment><comment><USER77> I think it is easy to say this in the first few months of working at home, but after an extended period of time it can be unbearable to spend so much time in the same place. Cabin fever is very real, and human beings are social animals who want to be around people.

<comment><USER78> Yeah, but after the pandemic is over, if you're still working from home you can go out to restaurants and bars in your free time and hang out with friends, unlike today where your office and your social space and your restaurant and your bar are all your living room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I have been working remotely for 6 years and I mostly love it. My wife has been working from home for about a month now and she is not a fan. Lots of people just like working in person with others.

</comment><comment><USER80> I do like working from home, but I will admit that my hygiene has suffered. I don't shower daily and that bothers me. Obviously not enough to actually do anything about it.

</comment><comment><USER13> TL;DR: A job search website (Zippia) surveyed 500 people about their work from home preferences during the Coronavirus-related quarantining period.

No mention of the study methodology. Given that this was performed by an online job search website, it's not clear that they invested effort into collecting unbiased samples. Visitors looking for new jobs on a somewhat obscure online job search site aren't exactly an unbiased sample.

Regardless, I think the important takeaway is that work from home preferences vary. Not everyone enjoys working in an office. Not everyone enjoys working from home. And not everyone has made up their mind on the topic yet.

They also asked whether or not people thought they were more productive working from home. 44% said yes. When asked if people thought their companies would move to permanent WFH after this, 17% said yes.

</comment><comment><USER81> Wow, using the same colours but swapping the meanings is seriously misleading! In the circle graphs, red is No, but in the bar graph red is Yes.

</comment><comment><USER82> The office, is the holiday home for parents with young kids.

They might represent the other half...

</comment><comment><USER83> It is nice to have a choice

</comment><comment><USER84> I stopped reading when I hit "baby boomers"

</comment><comment><USER85> I'd rather not work forever regardless of the location.

</comment><comment><USER86> The other half would rather not work at all.

</comment><comment><USER87> Working from home is the norm. Most of civilization has been farm based.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sadly many tech workers can barely afford more than shared accommodation or tiny apartments. Wondering that is the half that would rather waste away in crammed offices, long commute hours and lack of privacy from flatmates.

<comment><USER88> Because they're living in expensive places. If you don't need to live where you work you can find cheaper places to live.

<comment><USER36> They are - but what is the benefit of being poor in an expensive place?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Well it probably means we don't actually do much useful work in America.

Cube farms in America are like adult day care that doubles as a basic income mechanism.

Although of course MY work is very important and useful to civilization...</comment>


Reflecting on Haskell in 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/haskell_2017.html <comment><USER2> The Haskell community is incredibly blessed to have Stephen Diehl around. This is an excellent write up on so many of the things that have happened in the Haskell community this year, not to speak of his other written guides and in- depth explanations which are amazing.

<comment><USER3> I came here after reading the article to say something like this. I try to follow the Haskell community, reading articles etc, but I had missed a lot of this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started learning Haskell this year.

One of the small bumps I had was getting my environment setup. Based on my experiences with Ruby and Node, I knew I'd want to have a tool for managing the language's version and dependencies per-project, so I ended up going with stack [0]. Arriving at that decision required a bit more reading than with other languages. Additionally, while setting up stack, I thought their docs were too long. They'd benefit from being broken up into more pages, instead of pushing so much all at once. With that said, the information presented in the docs is actually quite clear and well written.

Looking at the Downloads section [1] on the Haskell website, it looks like they've improved the docs since I last visited, but it's still a bit confusing. What's the point of Haskell Platform? It looks like it includes stack, which _already_ covers all my requirements. Maybe it'd be useful to include a "why" section for each choice, to provide some examples of scenarios in which you might go with one choice over the other. Telling me what I'm getting doesn't give me any meaningful information if I don't know why I'd want that in the first place. I think there's too much information up-front, even though people landing there probably aren't equipped to make use of it. Why would someone pick the Haskell Platform option or the minimal install option?

While reading Learn You a Haskell, I used Haskell for Mac [2] for poking around. It's pretty great, although I didn't end up purchasing it, as I'm not doing anything that would benefit from using it.

Something I liked about Elixir is that you can just read their getting started docs and pick up Phoenix framework to get a web app up and running. That gives you a nice base on which to gradually build upon as you learn. Does anyone have a similar suggestion for Haskell?

[0] [https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/README/](https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/README/)

[1] [https://www.haskell.org/downloads](https://www.haskell.org/downloads)

[2] [http://haskellformac.com/](http://haskellformac.com/)

<comment><USER5> I'm in the same boat as you. I learning Haskell earlier this year, and while I really really want to like it (if nothing else, I'm a sucker for type systems) and even start using it for projects I can't when, IMO, there are languages out there that feel so much more productive to me. A few key concerns I have with the language and community:

1\. I feel like there is a really strong push towards writing concise code, which make it really hard to approach for me. I've seen a lot of code which substitues words as function names for 2 or 3 character symbols. I'm okay with learning `>>=` and the like, but when every library want to invent its own symbol-functions, I feel like the barrier to entry for me becomes much higher. This occours in just about every high profile library I've seen, from parsers to web frameworks; everyone wants to invent their own DSL.

2\. For as much as Haskell seems to pride it self on function composition I don't think `.` is the best way to do so; Clojure's threading macros are much more readable to me. Comparing the thread-last macro ``` (->> (range 10) (filter odd?) (map #(* % %)) (reduce) ``` to Haskell's composition operator `(sum . (map (\x -> x * x)) . (filter odd)) [1..10]`. (Please correct me if there is a clearer way to write this.) The former is much more readable from and LTR English language PoV. In Haskell I need to start from the right and work my way left; and this become even more harder for me to decipher when function operator precedence starts coming into play. It's small quality of life things life this which makes all the difference IMO.

3\. The millions of syntax extensions in ghci, some of which are incompatible with each other. This means ProjectA and ProjectB can be written in completely different, possible incompatible, 'dialects' of Haskell. Now I have to learn the base Haskell languge and whatever language extensions that project has dedcided to use just so I can start reading and understanding the code.

4\. AFAIK, there is now easy way to get function documentation in the repl. Sometimes types aren't enough for me and I would like to have some human written documentation guide me when I'm trying to use a library.

<comment><USER6> Your example can be written more clearly (IMO) in Haskell like this:

      sum $ map (^2) $ filter odd [1..10]

Or, defined as a function:

      > let foo = sum . map (^2) . filter odd
      > foo [1..10]
      165

You can write it without using the composition operator at all, if you prefer:

      > let bar xs = sum (map (^2) (filter odd xs))
      > bar [1..10]
      165

In general, you _can_ write out your programs as crazy sequences of operators (whose precedence may not be obvious to the reader):

      > take 5 . unfoldr (Just . next) <$> getStdGen >>= putStrLn . show
      [1336079013,234736121,108049288,410228860,1573295749]

But you don't _have_ to:

      > let infiniteRandoms = unfoldr (Just . next) :: StdGen -> [Int]
      > gen <- getStdGen
      > let fiveRandoms = take 5 (infiniteRandoms gen)
      > putStrLn (show fiveRandoms)
      [1336079013,234736121,108049288,410228860,1573295749]

People seem to think Haskell is all about writing your whole program in a single hideous line of code with incomprehensible sequences of arcane operators glued together by a glut of anonymous functions, but that's just bad code.

As for left-to-right vs right-to-left, I have never had a problem with the way Haskell does it. I think if you're coming from a language that does it differently, it makes sense that Haskell would trip you up in that regard. Haskell's composition operator matches the way it's usually written in mathematics, but there's nothing special about it and you could change it to go the other way if you really wanted to (but please don't):

      > let g . f = \x -> f (g x)
      > let foo = filter odd . map (^2) . sum
      > foo [1..10]
      165

`(>>>)` from `Control.Arrow` is a more reasonable way to get that sweet left- to-right action but using it might still throw people off:

      > let foo = filter odd >>> map (^2) >>> sum
      > foo [1..10]
      165

<comment><USER7> To add to that from someone who went into programming after math grad school, composition is actually much more natural in the way to think about functions. When putting together functions, and where they map to, it is more natural to think about functions the way Haskell thinks about them, but more natural when writing them to go the other way at first. This is because when one is working at the lower level of just writing code it becomes easier to move from one data state to another, but at the high level, you lose some flexibility in seeing the high level structure and it becomes more difficult to figure out how to move things around if it turns out you have to modify the code.

In math, the preferred way of writing functions is via composition, as then it enables tools of visualization such as commutative diagrams. One thing to note is that in general mathematicians have a history of picking the right choice in notations for thinking about abstractions at an intuitive level in the world of mathematics (when there is a choice and it matters), and IMO they were correct about how they chose to represent function composition, although it is not immediately obvious unless you start talking about function domains and ranges - the composition notation matches the flow of reading how functions map values from one set to another.

That Clojure version reads like a complete mess to me personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Haskell community identifies "no documentation" as a key flaw of their own community? I was going to ask why there hasn't been more uptake of Haskell for all of the apparently cool ideas that are there, but nevermind, I don't think I need to ask now.

<comment><USER9> Note that it's a contentious issue. Lots of people think there's plenty of documentation. I'm one of them. The people who think documentation is lacking seem to be people who need worked examples of things to understand them. I'm of the opinion that worked examples are often worse than no documentation.

<comment><USER10> There's research that shows people learn abstractions better when they also have examples. See e.g. [1] for references.

However, I find your tone particularly unpleasant. The sneer in "seem to be people who need worked examples of things to understand them" is repulsive. If this is a representative example of your community, it's one no-one should be proud to be a member of.

[1] [http://www.maa.org/external_archive/columns/launchings/launc...](http://www.maa.org/external_archive/columns/launchings/launchings_12_08.html)

<comment><USER11> > However, I find your tone particularly unpleasant. The sneer in "seem to be > people who need worked examples of things to understand them" is repulsive. > If this is a representative example of your community, it's one no-one > should be proud to be a member of.

Its always good to apply the principle of good faith. You have no idea who you're talking to, are likely going in biased away from someones arguments, and this will be the first time you've ever conversed. On top of that you're hobbled by text. You also don't know if the writer is a native english speaker or not and might consider the phrase "seem to be people who need worked examples of things to understand them" entirely neutral in tone.

Communication is a 2 way street, the tone you perceive may not have been intended. And painting an entire group by one sentence, in one post, that you perhaps disagree with, is a bit of an overreaction in almost any circumstance. The tone you perceive is not one I've personally experienced, quite the opossite.

As a beginner in Haskell that is still learning, and learns best by examples, the gp's opinion on documentation drives me nuts. But by and large, most examples aren't all that necessary in haskell with the type system. But when you're learning, I have to say, I hate "the types will document everything" mindset. They tend not to when you're a stranger in a strange land.

I wouldn't say documentation itself is a problem in haskell, there is tons. I would say the problem is in quality documentation that at least recognizes audiences of disparate skill level would be at issue. Examples help, but if the examples use something like the state monad that you're not familiar with, it probably won't do you a lick of good to understand how to use it.

<comment><USER6> I taught myself Haskell to an intermediate level a few years ago, and I think you're touching on the truth here.

Haskell is _hard_ to learn, or at least it was for me. There is a whole laundry list of concepts I had never even heard of that I had to understand before I could do anything real with the language. Some were apparently dead simple yet frustratingly abstract (e.g. Monoids). Some were intuitive but still took time to grok (e.g. list manipulation stuff). Some twisted my brain into knots and only yielded to persistent study and practice (e.g. monads with threaded state).

As I was working through all these "basics", I was constantly frustrated trying to write simple programs. I don't recall whether I blamed it on a lack of beginner-friendly documentation or not, but slowly it all started to resolve into a coherent picture and once I could consistently read and understand real-world types I found that the available documentation was almost always enough for me to quickly understand an interface and how to proceed in using it.

I think both sides of this debate are partly right. Haskell's learning curve seems to keep going up as far as you want to climb, and some of the stuff at the intermediate level IMO could really use more examples and documentation, or at least that was my opinion when I was looking at it a year or so ago. One good example might be Template Haskell, which pissed me off to no end every time I tried to use it even in very simple applications. It involves a lot of new syntax and concepts and IIRC had literally _no_ documentation besides what Haddock gives you for free.

On the other hand, I think a lot of people criticize Haskell's documentation without knowing the language well enough to make use of said docs or even understand how they might be useful. IMO it's unrealistic to expect every module and library to provide documentation specifically for beginners who don't understand challenging yet ubiquitous concepts (like state monads, to use your example), and I don't think other languages necessarily do a better job at this, but Haskell is just so darn tricky to get your head around that the "total beginner" phase lasts way longer than it might in e.g. Python.

For beginners who do want to learn about the core concepts of the language, I found that there was plenty of material to help me on my journey: _Real World Haskell_ , _LYAH_ , the IRC channel, and the internet full of blog posts, to name just a few. I don't mean for this comment to cause offense, or to belittle anyone. I'm certainly not an expert Haskell programmer, and there is much that I still don't understand about it. I just wanted to share some insights I've had learning it and using it in some practical applications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not having examples in documentation is a non-starter for me. It seems like there is a superiority complex there, that the Haskell community thrives on. That's ok I guess, I've never heard a practical use for it and I'm sure it will remain in it's insular state for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER13> I strongly prefer having examples, too, but I doubt it's due to any kind of "superiority complex" that docs are lacking. Writing good docs takes work, and some library authors are more willing to put in that work than others. Well- designed types _can_ give you a great deal of what you'd get from docs in other languages, but they aren't a panacea.

Now, I find it very hard to believe that you've _never_ heard of a practical use for Haskell. Do you just not care about the things that companies are using it for? (Compilers, web apps, backend services, finance, educational apps…)

<comment><USER14> Can you name a single, widely used (outside the Haskell camp) opensource application written in Haskell?

I can only think of "darcs" which for all intents and purposes was a failure. IIRC, one of the darcs retrospectives I've read, pointed out that GHC runtime behavior and its hard-to-foresee and hard-to-measure complexity properties, was a problem.

Moreover, another high-profile failure that springs to mind, is Joel Reymont (wagerlabs.com) trying to write a high-performance poker server in Haskell and eventually abandoning it in disgust due to non-predictable behavior of the GHC runtime. He delivered it (with assorted paeans) in Erlang instead, which proved quite lucrative for him.

I used Haskell for 2 years during my undergraduate degree, for program analysis. It was a good choice for such a theoretical domain. Some time later, I had another look at applying it to more practical problems. Besides the slight turn-off due to cultish behavior - which is also obvious in this thread, many posts excuse the lack of documentation or posit it as not a problem (!?), if not outright exalt it! - I got from the community itself, the language felt completely sterile and - most importantly - not fun. The syntax is also atrocious.

I concluded that if static typing was needed, I would pick ML every single time over Haskell. I also have no affinity with Haskell's type system (in the sense that it leads to better programs) or its interactive nature (laughable compared to Lisp/Smalltalk). I also remember something Sussman said, "Haskell is the most advanced of the obsolete languages" [1], and can't help but chuckle.

[1] [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know- How-...](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-To- Compute)

<comment><USER15> > Can you name a single, widely used (outside the Haskell camp) opensource > application written in Haskell?

How about pandoc, PostgREST, git-annex, the Elm compiler?

You can find more examples here: [https://github.com/Gabriel439/post- rfc/blob/master/sotu.md](https://github.com/Gabriel439/post- rfc/blob/master/sotu.md)

<comment><USER15> What's the reason for the downvotes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Out of curiosity what progress has been made in regards to improving the ergonomics of records in Haskell? Stephen references that an answer is in the works, but it looks like it has stalled out.

<comment><USER17> Most people use Lenses for heavily record-oriented programming. They work quite well. They are less convenient than built-in structural syntax like in Javascript, but once you get past the initial inconvenience they are vastly more powerful.

<comment><USER16> I'll need to check out lenses. I've run in to a few annoying this working with records so far so I was hoping some progress was in the works.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure how useful an introduction it is, but I really enjoyed this talk:

[https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/4251-lenses- composition...](https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/4251-lenses- compositional-data-access-and-manipulation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A nice summary. I'd also like to mention Don's talk again, which I feel should be added to the talk list, regarding the production Haskell we have at SCB: [https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9098-haskell-in-the- lar...](https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9098-haskell-in-the-large-the- day-to-day-practice-of-using-haskell-to-write-large-systems)

</comment><comment><USER18> One thing missed in the various discussions of documentation here is that the Haskell ecosystem is actually highly variable in both the amount of and need for various types of documentation.

There's a pile of packages like diagrams ([http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/](http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/)) or yesod ([http://www.yesodweb.com/](http://www.yesodweb.com/)) which have tutorials, examples, books. People who have been working mainly with these should be completely expected not to feel much of a problem with the state of documentation.

There are also packages which have mostly/only API information. Sometimes, this tells you everything you need to use a package effectively. Sometimes it doesn't. And this is impacted substantially by people's level of skill -- at Haskell and at inferring usage from names and type information in particular.

There's room for people to have _very_ different experiences

</comment><comment><USER20> < A lot of industrial Haskell sadly still uses string interpolation for SQL synthesis, or fall back on libraries that use TemplateHaskell to unsafely lock a specific build to a snapshot of a database at compile-time.

This sounds kinda off-putting, but I'm not totally sure what it means. Are the SQL libraries for haskell comparable to e.g knex, or psycopg, or sqlalchemy? The bit about string interpolation makes me think that prepared statements aren't used?

</comment><comment><USER21> I know I won't be thanked for pointing out non-technical infelecities in the writing, and I'm not a grammar nazi or anything but... "There was a lot of excellent Haskell writing this year. One can't possible enumerate all of them..." A lot of excellent writing is a singular noun, then it refers to "them", plural. Exactly the same mistake made in the next paragraph.

I don't want to be picky but if you're writing something public, learn how to use your language right.

<comment><USER22> > I don't want to be picky but if you're writing something public

Neither do I, but there should be a comma before the "but" there.

<comment><USER23> No: these are dependent clauses, a comma would be incorrect.

<comment><USER24> What you just wrote is a comma splice, by the way. You should read up on semicolons.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Designing an Enterprise Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) System - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/designing-an-enterprise-role-based-access-control-rbac-system-96e645c659b7 <comment><USER2> Other than the insane suggestion permissions should be assigned to individual _users_ (a fundamental violation of the term " _Role-Based_ Access Control") .. a decent overview.

[https://medium.com/@volcimaster/for-the-love-of-all-that- is-...](https://medium.com/@volcimaster/for-the-love-of-all-that-is-good-and- holy-in-this-world-you-should-never-be-assigning-roles-to-5a7f0f34c4f8)</comment>


American Hunter Killed Cecil, Beloved Lion - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/world/africa/american-hunter-is-accused-of-killing-cecil-a-beloved-lion-in-zimbabwe.html

<comment><USER2> the dentist also has a sexual harassment against him [http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_28548920/bloomington-...](http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_28548920/bloomington- dentist-accused-killing-zimbabwe-lion-illegally)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is sickening. I wouldn't object is this man is executed, preferably through a mob lynching.

</comment><comment><USER4> Meanwhile, abortion is killing hundreds of children today, and no one cares. Alternatively: ISIS is killing people for not proclaiming Mohammed as their prophet. Or: an African-American person is being killed for his skin color. Getting this upset over a lion is ludicrous.

Seriuosly, the guy bought a hunting license and killed a lion with it - if you want to blame someone, blame the government that sold the license.

<comment><USER5> The real problem is that 9 of each 10 living lions in Africa had disappeared in just one generation and this is a problem because environmental services provided by lions are the direct responsible for saving the lives of a lot of african people each year.</comment></comment>


Imagine There's No Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.tellapart.com/imagine-theres-no-server-/

<comment><USER2> Really bad headline.

TL;DR: they use Apache Mesos and Aurora to schedule Docker containers on their servers, which means they only have to ship containers around instead of installing all dependencies everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very happy to have been a part of this project! Come hang out with us on the #aurora chat room if you're interested in trying this out.</comment>


Get a "free" SSL certificate for your site - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.iyogeshjoshi.com/get-a-free-ssl-tls-certificate-for-your-website-and-setting-up-with-nodejs-server-b5189ac8e007#.62s6axm7d <comment><USER2> Why "free"? It is free, no need for quotes.</comment>


Siezed Replicas of Batmobile, Echo-1 and Time Travelling DeLorean Up for Auction - <AUTHOR> https://www.usmarshals.gov/news/chron/2020/071520b.htm <comment><USER2> Ecto-1 :-)</comment>


Ask HN: What to do if the firewall removes all new HTTP response header fields? - <AUTHOR> A few months ago our company got a new firewall (WatchGuard). It removes every HTTP response header field not in RFC 2616 (HTTP 1.1, June 1999). Maybe even more.
This includes CORS headers which makes it impossible to see the real fonts on a website that uses hosted web fonts like Google fonts.
JIRA was behaving strangely because of missing headers.
And now the evaluation of Drupal 8 went bad because AJAX requests need the header X-Drupal-Ajax-Token: 1.
The admins aren't idiots and they aren't ignoring the users. We see web fonts again and JIRA works like before.
But we are now a bit traumatized. I realized that the web isn't functioning the way I imagined it. Browser vendors and the W3C have made many new features after 1999 that benefit security and speed. But they use new header fields. Content management systems and web development frameworks rely on some X- header fields for features and security.
And I can't rely on these header fields to be available in the browser because the user could be in a network behind such a restrictive firewall. And maybe in a network with administrators who don't care.
What does this mean for future web development work? There's no "we need all headers we send to be available" in the requirements of our tools. Because everybody thinks that all header fields always get delivered. And when you find a CMS that is OK today, it could be breaking everything after a minor update.
Do I need to write everything by hand again? Back to 1999? No new features (including WebSockets, HTTP/2, …)? <comment><USER2> You need to get a new firewall. A firewall that breaks the web is a broken firewall.

<comment><AUTHOR> And what do I do with all the other firewalls in other companies? I was told that a lot of bigger companies in Germany use the WatchGuard firewall. And probably on default settings.

I can't use Drupal 8 for web projects because of this. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing in this case because I hadn't the chance to evaluate it, yet.

And all the other options need to get checked for the same problems. Any CMS without "special" HTTP response fields could get some in the next update.

I'm feeling a bit lost right now. (Programming since 1984.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Everybody and their grandmother seems to be building/using their own x-header field. It's just a matter of time before an x-header or combination of x-headers becomes a real threat vector. I think there should be some level of additional 'standard' headers (yea, cue XKCD "and now we have 16 standards".

Our inspection firewall logs and dumps unknown x-'s like yours does. We meet once a month to go through them and either deny or clear them. Like your admins, if someone says "Astroscript" isn't working someone will dig into it.

X-headers are not the way to do data passing. There are other ways to make that happen other than creating new headers.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very common. In general inventing your own headers as a sideband channel is a bad idea. It's not just firewalls - many proxies do this too. Just put your metadata in the body or URL instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> FYI here is the Drupal issue queue entry for this. [https://www.drupal.org/node/2580191](https://www.drupal.org/node/2580191) .

<comment><AUTHOR> Still open and currently Drupal 8.2 is targeted. The version I tried to evaluate was 8.0.6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's got to be a way to configure this firewall to prevent the removal of the headers. It sounds like someone in your IT dept. just configured it in an aggressive manner (perhaps the default). I have no specific experience with Watchguard, but this is almost certainly the case. How big of a company are we talking about?

</comment><comment><USER7> > impossible to see the real fonts on a website that uses hosted web fonts > like Google fonts.

Feature, not a bug.

<comment><USER8> I block webfonts voluntarily, but there are some sites I have to allow them for because they use icon fonts and the page is unintelligible without them. So saying the unilateral blocking of webfonts is a "feature, not a bug" seems a bit short-sighted.

<comment><USER9> It's a huge strain on a development and QA team to ensure that every contingency (disabled JS, blocked content, etc) has a fallback. Once you go down that rabbit hole you end up supporting a lot of outdated browsers as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is actually why a lot of people are using HTTPS.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.howtoforge.com/filtering-https-traffic-with- squi...](https://www.howtoforge.com/filtering-https-traffic-with-squid)</comment></comment>


What US Software Companies Should Understand - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@did_78238/what-us-software-companies-should-understand-about-the-rest-of-the-world-783e8dbca758#.fcmi8fdb1 <comment><USER2> This blog post makes a number of good points, though it also kind of veers into simplistic VC-bashing. It ends up sounding a little bitter and angry, which undermines the smart insights elsewhere.

The US government is absolutely doing bad things with the NSA. And not wanting to store data in the US is reasonable. But you'd be a fool to think that other governments, especially Russia and China, weren't doing - or trying to do - the exact same things the NSA does.

All the VC money sloshing around in SF these days may well distort valuations. But it isn't 1999. The vast majority of companies that achieve huge valuations do have significant revenues, or otherwise control valuable assets that can easily be converted to cash (e.g. massive user engagement). So a three-year- old startup with $300M in revenue is valued at 20x instead of 10x. So what? It's still massive growth and a tremendous amount of money for a small team to have captured in a short time.

I think a lot of the points about customer behavior and survivability are great. And the point about scepticism towards the US gov is spot on. But then it veers into a kind of cliched VC-bashibg that loses me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://backchannel.com/why-silicon-valley-will-continue- to-...](https://backchannel.com/why-silicon-valley-will-continue-to- rule-c0cbb441e22f#.qtnyzge7t)</comment>


Techmeme: A Cautionary Tale - <AUTHOR> http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/11/techmeme-a-caut.html

<comment><USER2> What we need is better recommendations systems based on your past activity, instead of a monolith feed that is served to everyone.

It will be more relevant, less prone to tampering and manipulation.

<comment><AUTHOR> there are apps that do that already, but I am not sure if that is even the final solution... to give you an example, one day I wake up with a new idea in my head, and all of a sudden I am interested in certain news that I never found interesting before! and there might be some very relevant stuff there for me, which will be filtered out since I wasn't interested in it before...

also it happens a lot that I find something interesting, but couldn't ever find it based on my past history or interests (like some stuff I find here at hacker news)...

also there might be some important news for the day which I want to know about but is not necessarily what I always read about... for instance Amazon introduced Kindle today, I might have not been interested in ebooks before, but I would like to know about it, as it is the talk of the day!

so I guess the final solution might be a combination of all these, my previous history, what other people talk about (techmeme), what other people with more common interests as mine find interesting (hackers news), what the "wisdom of crowd" chooses for me (reddit, digg) ... and what some of the people I find interesting are talking about (my RSS reader)

but I guess if anyone can find the best solution here, they are in for a good ride and big $s

<comment><USER2> I know most solutions that try to do it are pretty horrible.

I didn't say it was trivial but there is a very lucrative market here for someone who successfully balances all these pressures, history over time, current session, N closest peers etc and builds a good recommendation system on it.

Until then our only real solution is to create and participate in niche communities like this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Everything on the Interent will be gamed. And user generated content won't stay "user" generated forever. The pros will crash any party that's worth crashing and make it their own. "

techmeme, reddit, digg and others are all great as long as we can prevent users from cheating the system ... they kind of remind me of Yahoo and other search engines in the early days which had very simple ways of ordering the search results (and many took advantage and got better rankings for their sites), and then came about the more complicated Google ranking with much improved results (yes there exist SEO but half of SEO is to improve your site as well, and you don't really get on top of the list really easily)

I think as time goes by _someone_ will find a way to make it harder for people to cheat the system and give news that is more relevant

<comment><USER2> There will always be a drive to game the system, that is the greatest advantage of small communities like this one a lot less incentive to game it.

But the problem is not exactly the same, Google still almost always gives the same results to everybody (they are doing some experiments in personalized search but they haven't rolled out these features).

<comment><AUTHOR> yes you are right but none of the sites I mentioned are trying to give you customized, personal news... I was mostly referring to them rather than the customized version

And to be honest I am not sure if it is a good idea to go _really_ customized based on my preferences, since I really think there might be stuff that I _should_ know about, but I just have no idea what they are and someone or something needs to point them out to me. But to be customized at a more general level, would in fact give you what the current sites are (but are doing a somewhat poor job at it as we mentioned). For instance, you come here for startup and hacker news, and you go to techmeme for tech, and you could find yourself on reddit for politics and so on. So to some extend they are customized, since they are more focused, but not so focused.

Its all about filtering the noise, but thats very subjective, as any news on Paris Hilton might be noise to me but must read for someone else!</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Surface Preorder - <AUTHOR> http://surface.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/Content/pbpage.Surface

<comment><AUTHOR> What looks funny to me is that right next to the preorder button there is a print link - I assume that that is just in case you decide not to preorder but to print the page. LOL</comment>


On John Simon - <AUTHOR> https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/obituary-critic-john-simon-1925-2019.html <comment><USER2> This is a better descriptive obituary than the one linked:

[https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/john-simon-critic-with- a-c...](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/john-simon-critic-with-a-cutting- pen-dies-at-94/ar-BBXkD4j)

<comment><USER3> Very interesting submission, thank you. Also interesting that he managed to travel from Europe to the US in 1941, as an European I sometimes forget that the US only got into the war in late 1941 and that you could still travel freely between Nazi Germany (and Nazi-occupied Europe) and the United States through 1940 and almost the entire year of 1941 (that is if you weren't a Jew, a Pole, a gay person, a Roma/Sinti person or any other such "undesirable", of course)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny story: My dad was in a play that John Simon loved, but no one else did. It closed within a week.</comment>


Everything You Wanted to Know About Email CTA Buttons - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/email-industry-news/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-email-cta-buttons-98807ab98806#.xxmh4g1fl <comment><USER2> The one thing I want to know is which ones people click on.</comment>


Researchers win $100,000 for Chrome hack that leaves Windows vulnerable - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57573064-83/researchers-win-$100000-for-chrome-hack-that-leaves-windows-vulnerable/

<comment><USER2> The comments are a little depressing. Everyone is saying "Oh god uninstall Chrome" when they should be saying "Thank Google, they paid for this thing up front instead of people getting hacked."

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I did get a kick out of this one : "uninstall yourself out of the internet", which thus far has been the only guaranteed method of avoiding any sort of exploit.

Normally this is the sort of privilege escalation we'd see from IE, but I do wish operating systems, Windows in particular, had better sandboxing for applications. Browser sandboxing alone obviously isn't gonna cut it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Title is a bit sensationalist and makes no mention of the two Win8/IE10 exploits found at the same event. Nor FF for that matter.

<comment><USER5> How is the title sensationalist? It describes exactly what happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious why they showed this at Pwn2Own and not Google's own Pwnium, especially if they are going to share the exploit with Goog. Is there more money to be made this way?

<comment><USER7> I believe there's some conflict between Google and Pwn2Own.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own#Controversy_with_Google>

<comment><USER4> I believe that the rules were changed this year to require full disclosure. Prize money was upped to commensurate.

Pwnium was ChromeOS only, while the sandbox escape portion of this attack was Windows-only (possibly 32bit Windows only as well?)</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Highlights: April and May 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-highlights-april-may-2018/ <comment><USER2> I was recently reminded just how unusual this place (HN) is - I think there was a common thread between HN and Reddit, and so I followed the link from HN and read a fairly tame comment that drew quite shocking personal vitriol, and there was no community correction, no obvious moderator action. I closed the tab.

The weather "out there" is pretty horrible. It's much nicer here by the warm fire.

And we should thank pg, dang and the many other moderators and commenters for keeping that fire going. communities at scale is hard.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love it. IMHO comments are the best part of HN. I always read the top few comments before clicking the linked URL.

<comment><USER4> I always feel somewhat bad when I do this, but it really is much easier to read the first few comments. For really long articles, I often only read the beginning, catch something I want to comment on, and hope I didn't need the rest for my comment to be valuable.

It's not great, and honestly feels a little like in high school when you didn't actually do the full reading assignment for english class, but it can be hard to keep yourself to high standards.

<comment><USER5> The articles are almost never as short and to the point as they could have been. The article authors are at fault.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great and I would love you to keep doing this, however couldn't HN software be made better so I could follow people and provide many different ways to surface fascinating commentary? Even being able to see what people had favourited over the last month would give another great list of incredible commentary from all the clever people here.

<comment><USER7> Some of this I expect could be built with the HN API, though I don't think favourites are part of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this a regular thing? I've never seen a highlight post by YC before.

<comment><USER9> Almost regular: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker-news- highlights&sort=by...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=hacker-news- highlights&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

<comment><USER8> Thanks, Daniel!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I switched to White Mountain (from Fage) based on that thread. So delicious. Especially with homemade granola and a dollop of honey. Thank you HN.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is cool, I hope you guys keep posting these

</comment><comment><USER12> Hacker Daily appears to have gone weekly, but that's another good roundup source: [https://hackerdaily.simplecast.fm/](https://hackerdaily.simplecast.fm/) ; [https://hackerdaily.co/](https://hackerdaily.co/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I try to collect interesting comments on /r/HNDepthHub. I would appreciate any help

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a neat way to highlight interesting things going on here, but as others are pointing out, it surfaces the challenges of a temporal ranking system creates...this was a very manually curated post that could probably be easily automated.

A few of us have been chatting at [https://hackerforums.co](https://hackerforums.co) because of this after a thread here made me realize many others pined for the bulletin board systems of old. It's much quieter than day 1/2 but it's still healthy.

I have a draft thread in the works that highlights how it's all running and how it's done growth-wise since launch, hoping to get it posted next week.

<comment><USER15> Hi, man! I saw your forum had experienced spam-bots attack. I have a suggestion...

Do you know any messenger app based on replicating database in which users' messages are acknowledged by their transfer history through a social graph? So, a new user must ask several registered ones to broadcast the creation of a new node in that social graph, and then he will be able to post his messages by relaying them to the rest of the system through those users who registered him. Spam-bots could be then filtered out by black-lists...

Simple idea, I'm sure someone had to make it already. Do you know any? Thanks for the effort!

<comment><USER15> I implied just sharded database of messages, no need to replicate it. With customizable filters along data transfer path, of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Love the focus on positivity and encouragement here. Such a great counterbalance against the cynism that's so easy to popup.

<comment><USER17> As a counterpoint, I love the conflict on HN. I usually go to reddit for my warm-fuzzies, but when it comes to making sense of the world HN is my favorite spot on the internet.

That said, I'm slightly conflating intellectual rigor with standoffishness. I'm not sure that they have to go together (but it seems they often do), but I'd rather have both than neither.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm digging these Highlights. Very handy.

</comment><comment><USER19> I prefer the n-gate highlights. [http://n-gate.com/](http://n-gate.com/)

<comment><USER20> "please complete the captcha to continue" and the spinner spins forever.

No errors in the console.

<comment><USER21> It's doing that based on the referer being hacker news

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm always surprised at how in 2018, screenshots are often the fastest and most aesthetic way to share a few paragraphs of text. Considering the amount of text shared like this, I would have thought that there would be more search-friendly alternatives

<comment><USER23> I know it's easy to snipe, as we often do here on HN, but a series of screenshots with no alt text is an accessibility disaster.

<comment><USER24> To be fair, in this case the original comment is linked to, so one just needs to click the link to have a text version of the screenshot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why they gotta be using Safari

<comment><USER26> Safari is a fine choice of browser, especially if you still want to browse and read some documents instead of interacting with a web app.</comment></comment>


Airborne particles might grow fast in cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01334-4 <comment><AUTHOR> >Rapid growth of new atmospheric particles by nitric acid and ammonia condensation

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2270-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2270-4)</comment>