Martin from GitHub here. I think we’d consider this very much ‘by design’ in removing the streak counter so I’m glad it had the desired affect. Coding 100 days straight with no breaks isn’t good for anyone.
[1]: https://superuser.com/a/1402013/1109910
[2]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
A colleague once showed me a tool to produce back dated commits in bogus git repos so you can draw pictures on your commit graph. You should know that people are gaming the gamification.
Why? I've done that and it has been amazing for me. I don't want other people telling me what's good or not. Absolute statements like this is just social malaise and not based in objectivity in the slightest.
The current social bandwagon can be summarized as: “Work is bad. Hard work is toxic. Perseverance is not healthy”.
HN is just reflecting r/antiwork ethics.
Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped thinking for themselves.
Well one might start to excessively think like a computer!
For example, most humans can account for the imprecise nature of language and understand that "for anyone" doesn't necessarily mean every individual human on earth, but rather a sizeable portion of people. And "isn't good" is speaking relative to the poster's ideas rather than them claiming to have determined an absolute measure of the term "good".
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But a computer struggles with such fuzzy constraints and falls back to the most literal interpretation of any statement.
At which point the GPT-3 model the computer is running might regurgitate some overreaction by jumping from someone essentially saying: "everything in moderation" to interpreting it as an attack on hard work and good work ethics.
(A better ending sentence from martin might've been "We don't want to incentivize 100-day streaks." But that has its own, orthogonal downsides--oh, GitHub's in the business of setting incentives? Uh oh... So all in all, I think I understand his choice of phrasing.)
I thought this is “Hacker News”. The tone here has slid significantly in last 5 years. Folks like Martin apologizing indirectly.
I think you vastly misunderstand the entire point of antiwork. Its not saying go sit on a couch all day. Its to recognize you have a life outside of work and its okay if work isn't your driving factor in life.
You can learn to persevere and push yourself many many ways. Work is not the only way. Not excelling at your job does not mean you are lethargic and resentful.
Success is measured many different ways, by many different people. You seem to measure it by how hard you work, that's great. Doesn't mean everyone has too.
> Not a single comment on HN in last few years encourage hard work and mentally exhausting yourself.
I am astounded that not pushing yourself to mental exhaustion is what you consider anti-work. If I'm not willing to abuse my own body for the good of a company I'm destined to be lethargic and smoke weed all day? What the hell kind of scale is that?
Pushing yourself to mental exhaustion, is stupid and pointless. It's been thoroughly studied, by the time you've hit mental exhaustion you are not doing anywhere near your best work. Hell I've seen it myself. I noticed my code quality and code output fell drastically the more exhausted I became. I can not stress enough how much better you are not doing that.
Looking through your own post history I see clear signs of trying to work while exhuasted.
> it takes me forever to make anything with code. Like hours to do something simple.
This was literally me until I learned to not push myself so hard. I had the exact same problem and it turns out for me at least trying to learn programming while exhausted did me no favors. I worked all day came home and tried to learn and struggled the exact same way you are. It wasn't until I was able to learn more during the day while not exhausted that it really started to click with me.
You more then anyone need to really reconsider what I posted earlier. Please for you own health.
I find too many people mistaking velocity for progress to be an almost insolvable organization problem. if you want to end up with mega lines of code that are all part of a useless of incomprehensible solution that is certainly a job, but might fail as a life's contribution.
I am no longer an eager youth, but when i was, the thing that hooked me to push on past limits, was my excitement and joy about solving real problems, at scale, with software, with a simple yet powerful idea. It was not any history of frequent commits or risong to rhe 95th %ile or the barren useless of a streak. It was having an idea born out of real needs and made simple enough to need almost no comlexity to implement. Having that novel simplicity go into production and be used was motivation for a lifetime of work.
I certainly have periods of stillness and more restful learning than prodigious output, but they are, for me at least, completely necessary. they may be fairly lethargic as well.
> The current social bandwagon can be summarized as: “Work is bad. Hard work is toxic. Perseverance is not healthy”. HN is just reflecting r/antiwork ethics. Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped thinking for themselves.
This is generally not even-keeled behavior.
"Everything in moderation" dates back to 6 BC. This was clearly an reinterpretation of that basic idea. No reason to hop into a tirade into the death of hard work or something.
I work 5 days per week. I may not commit every day. Typically I will, except when I'm ill, or my close family is seriously ill, or there's a funeral, wedding, holiday, etc. So, life gets in the way, I guess.
If you're compelled to work all the time, every day, for months on end, good for you I guess. But I wouldn't skip my life to satisfy any KPI.
I will, however, persevere. I work hard. I do not give up easily. I learn something new all the time. I try to get better every day. I do my best to contribute to my family, my company, my society, and humanity at large.
However, life, I've realized, is long. My priorities have shifted over time. In the past, the value I've created in my work has not always ended up where I'd like.
If you have all this figured out 100%, then yes, go for it! Don't stop! The rest of us are still figuring it out.
Oh, also, I don't work with GitHub at all. Imagine that.
Like, you should do what works for you, but you should do it for better reasons than getting a streak counter on github.
I see the opposite. People are thinking for themselves and are looking at empirical evidence like TFA to boot.
Edit: your other comment about needing targets makes me suspect you'd benefit from using a personal task manager that can clearly and tangibly visualize progress if you aren't using one already.
I learnt early to task things out, in my head/notes.
Graphical representation seems like a crutch to me.
Specifically regarding 100 days of coding - with truly zero breaks yes this is ridiculous. Defined as design instead, it's not - I work best in periods of long productivity, but I also require time to focus on different activities, else I suffer in ways that affect my performance. If you can't write code, that's fine, maybe look at the problem a different way or build that tool which helps you succeed in your 100 day goal.
That's the opposite of poor work ethic, IMO, and that's exactly what is required (mental breaks) in order to succeed, at least in my experience.
It's fairly factual, just because you have a way you might like to work or think is best doesn't mean it's the only one. People are very different, perhaps there is some psychological profile which behaves differently than another, regardless just as there are extroverts and introverts, people don't all work best in one way.
I suspect most people can benefit from breaks, and the studies seem to back this up. Perhaps you are the special one - not the other way around.
> Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped thinking for themselves.
Yes, absolute statements are a problem - including your comment. There's context around antiwork, there's context around grind culture - everything can be taken to an unhealthy extreme.
also time off is just good for you...
No more zero days, so to speak.
Starting is often the hardest part. An easy task makes it harder for you to talk yourself out of it. It also keeps the ball rolling.
I think the OP meant "code" in its purest sense - writing something for themselves, not necessarily pushing the contributions to GitHub as a part of gamification.
You don't have to do it if you're disciplined. I struggle with it and I find tiny daily habits useful.
Just add a random meaningless feature? Bump a version number just because?
Habits have context. I do gardening and I have a habit of checking my garden beds for weeds and diseases every day. I don't do it in winter when it's freezing and nothing is growing. I'll pick it up again in spring.
You don't have to game the system you've created. The habits are for you, not the other way around.
> also time off is just good for you...
Source?