I've noticed a pattern. People who sneer at HN—of whom there are more than a few, it's quite a thing now—always think it's other people who are the assholes.
To reply to zombio: it's probably that NYT and WaPo are such major publications that a site that wants to link to the best content can't very well exclude them. I agree it's annoying. What I do is visit the URLs in an incognito browser window.
When incognito doesn't work, you can usually get the piece by Googling the title. Google almost always returns a link that bypasses the paywall.
Posters post these links because the content is unavailable any other way. HN would be poorer without any stories from the NYT and WaPo, inconvenient as this all is.
Please stop talking about counter cultures like it's some new idea you came up with. You don't even realize why it's so easy to make fun of y'all, goddamn.
TIL: Children can be Nihlists too? Does it really take a gifted child to see the futility in the majority of life or to understand our insignificance? This is something that should be fairly obvious to anyone without privilege, not only children.
Fuck it, I'm going to start writing my programs on punchcards and mailing it to Github HQ to test the results of it. Then I'll handwrite letters to my coworkers to finally switch away from the evils of email. For blogging, I'll literally stand outside of coffee shops on a soap box and talk about how boring I am. My only file storage will be a cabinet in my house. I'll hand draw my own maps. I'll do organic searching through newspaper listings. For social networking, I'll go outside and announce to the world how I'm feeling, only accepting their emotions if they like it. For photography, I'm going to buy a polaroid camera and keep the pictures in my cabinet. Fuck Android, I'm bringing back rotary phones. My feed reader will be the random clippings at starbucks.
If someone is proud enough of not being able to finish their work in a reasonable amount of time, then sure, they should let the world know about it. I know I won't hire them, either.
Huh? How do you figure that people proud of their work aren't finishing it fast enough. It turns out that when you finish your work, you can work on something else. You don't have to end your work week right then and there.
No, you stop glorifying "smart" work and shorter hours.
Could it possibly be that people work at different paces, have different work ethic, and have different aspirations, but that they can't be compared at face value purely on the hours worked? Just because you work less hours, doesn't necessarily imply you're doing the work "smarter," it probably just means that you are only doing the required the work. It is possible that I work much "smarter" than you do and still work 50-60 hours work weeks because I am doing twice the required work. This isn't that bizarre if you are really trying to cover a large amount of the material that exists in CS beyond making cool, hip web-apps and mobile sites. In that case, you might NEED to put in extra work since you are possibly taking on two jobs: one as an employee and one as a student.
That being said, I recall a lot of people making this argument to me as I progressed through school and every activity I've done. They claimed the exact same thing about being the "real geniuses" (please don't fool yourself here) because they learned how to work "smarter"; which usually came down to putting in ONLY the minimally required hours, constantly calculating their grade to make sure it was high enough for them to fail the tests and still pass with a C, and overall cutting corners. You want to know what I saw happen to those people? Failure. These are the same people who were high school dropouts or got kicked out of college for not doing the work. Here's the thing, in a world where the job market is extremely competitive, your stubbornness to work "unreasonable" hours is purely a weakness and hardly a strength. You can have all of knowledge in the world and truly be a "real genius," but if your boss can't confirm your work ethic, you still don't have a job. Oh, and good luck starting/running a business with your 35 hours work weeks.
Finally, you should probably apologize to those of us who are hard workers out there for being purely insulting. As if CEOs and CTOs and great hackers all over the world worked somehow less "smart" than you did because they worked hard hours and slept underneath their desks. Sometimes to excel and to surpass yourself, you have to sacrifice and change the pace of things. Do you really think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc, got where they were by saying "well, I've done 35 hours of 'smart' work now, I need to stop an meditate?" Well, maybe, but they definitely didn't start like that. And god forbid you have to take care of a family and multiple children. Do you think your spouse is going to be happy with "Oh, I already did my 35 hours of 'smartly' raising the kids and providing for the family, I'm done now."
There are reasons that people "glorify" the hard work and long hours they put into things; they are proud of their work. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out. If your twitter friends are "humble brag"-ers, get new friends. But don't pretend everyone who loves to share their hard work is trying to shame you or brag about it.
Uh Steve Jobs and Bill Gates weren't high school dropouts nor did they get kicked out of college, they consciously moved past it. And when they did, you bet they worked more than 35 hours a week to make it.
Your argument extends beyond work. What do you think folks with a work/life balance do with the "life" part? Veg out? Play videogames all day long?
I've gone through periods of intense workaholisms, and I've gone through periods of laid-back socializing. I found that my work performance - as measured by promotions, salary, being put on important projects, and getting good jobs - actually improved when I let go and didn't focus so hard on work. Why? Because I came across as more confident and easier to work with. Because all the time spent hanging out with friends, going to parties (which I'm not sure I really enjoyed - I'm an introvert by nature), getting coffee with random strangers, etc. translated into improved social skills, which translated into better work performance. Because I had time to be curious and let my mind run wild, which is the birthplace of creativity.
There are certain intangibles that you miss when you're heads-down toward a goal, and you don't realize you've missed them until you've been working hard for 10 years and then seen people seemingly inexplicably pass you by with far less effort or technical skills. I know a lot of older scientists & technologists that are really bitter about this, forever complaining about how idiots rule the world, but I chose to accept that this is the reality and figure out why idiots rule the world, and what I was missing that prevented me from ruling the world too.
'Do you really think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, etc, got where they were by saying "well, I've done 35 hours of 'smart' work now, I need to stop an meditate?"'
Steve Jobs said pretty much exactly that: "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." -- On Bill Gates as quoted in "Creating Jobs" in The New York Times (12 January 1997)
First of all, you're talking about "workaholism." I'm not. I'm saying that there's nothing wrong with working extremely hard and that it doesn't imply inefficiency of less 'smart' work. Realize that there are things that are actually inherently hard and that you might, just maybe, need to work more than 35 hours a week to get them finished!
Also, the Steve Jobs quote is cute, but doesn't really address what I'm saying. Steve Jobs is purely saying that Bill Gates should have probably enjoyed his life more, but that doesn't mean he couldn't also work hard. There are actually 168 hours in a week. You can work for 60 hours and still drop acid, it turns out. You don't have to call it quits at 35 hours because you're supposedly working 'smarter' and Steve Jobs definitely didn't.
It is really simple(in this context of hard workers). If you are willing to work for free it is your choice but mostly that is not economically smart choice and most likely not healthy choice. Unfortunately seems that you equal hard work with amount of value provided (results) , but you actually should look what is efficiency of your work hour comparing to the others.
Work != life in most cases , you can't stop life but you can stop working so your family analogy doesn't hold up
I don't know what you're talking about. Although raising a family might be your personal life, it is seriously HARD WORK. Just because you love your family, doesn't mean you don't work hard to provide for them. My parents, for example, are foster parents and so we have about 6-7 children around the house on average. Because of this they are always on the run; cleaning the house, keeping the children busy, paying bills, running errands, cooking food, supplementing what the children learn at school, and making sure to give the children a chance to go outside and play with others while supervising other's children. This is hard work. On top of this, they want to improve their household and themselves. They also run a foster parents association to help others in the area. Because of all of this, they don't usually go to sleep until 1-2am each day, to balance all of this. This is what I truly call HARD WORK.
Now, they could do what the author says and call it quits after 35 hours (what a fucking low # btw) of taking care of the children and running their organization. They should be proud of the amount of work they do to keep their family together and improve themselves. And you shouldn't be whining if they happen to make a twitter post about it. It's not your business.
you just choose to not understand my point, working in mine is also hard work , working in mine for free is hard work and plain stupid
I don't consider family interactions work , it can be hard but it is not my definition of work. You can stretch definition to suit your justification of your lifestyle but I am happy with my 133 hours/week left for me after I call quits :-)
Interesting idea, but I wonder if "niceness" is really that important when sharing ideas that may or may not be controversial. Being professional and constructive might be a good goal, but these don't necessarily entail "niceness." That is, you can still be professional and constructive while being a giant asshole.
Also, I'm not really sure making people accountable by making them use Real Names or whatever account tied to their real name will make them be nicer. It might seem like that because on social networks, you can selectively add people to talk to that you enjoy being nice to. When it is an open forum, the discussion might still turn sour because people have contradicting viewpoints and that's okay, especially in a technical discussion. Finally, tying people to their real names by default sounds like it lends itself to all kinds of Internet Detective-y stuff which will probably lead to more Ad Hominem attacks than discussion.
Source: I post on Something Awful where we can still have useful discussion and call each other out on our bullshit. Niceness isn't as important as the free discussion of ideas.
To me, Reddit has done a great job of letting me think of it as the kind of place that suits my style of discussion. I hear stories about the atrocity exhibition in this-or-that group of subreddits but never encounter it personally.
"A picture is worth a thousand words." Also, you just assume this person is setting up a professional photography shoot while ignoring everyone. Is it possible they took a photo of the situation AND helped the people around them? How profound!
Please get off of your high horse and have decency or respect for human lives. Also, there are always stories of prominent hackers dying on HN and we give our condolences as well as discuss the innovations of that hacker. But because it's live and people seem ok, it's not relevant?
Also, if you can't learn something or satisfy your intellectual curiosity from an extremely violent plane crash that left (what is seems to be) all of the passengers virtually unscathed, you're really not trying. There are tons of physics and engineering principles in place in the flight of a plane and, imo, looking at the way the tail was lost, it should have turned out way worse than it did. Anyways, there's a flag button on the article, so feel free to press that button and move on. Thank you.
