A Coder in Courierland (2005) | Hacker News Reader

A Coder in Courierland (2005)

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48 pointskeiferski15 comments

> And what exactly does a bike courier spend all this time carting from Alpha to Beta?. Undramatically, it is mostly just legal documents and cheques. I fear that once average people get more comfortable with internet encryption, courier companies will go out of business.

Any data on how this has panned out? I'd imagine that it has declined a lot, but sometimes you still do just need to deliver a physical document.

One thing that occasionally stands out to me in Agatha Christie novels is that London had twice-daily mail delivery in the early-to-mid 1900s. You'd post a letter in the morning and it would arrive in the evening. It wouldn't replace the "we need this across town in an hour", but it's always been interesting to me that delivery service downsized when telephones became commonplace. It would make sense for courier services to do the same with email, the web, and SSL.

While you'd expect the documents to be digital these, there's a lot more delivery of food and consumer products bought online than there was in 2005.

When I lived in Hatfield briefly in the 1980s, we had thrice-daily post delivery, 9am, noon and 9pm. I imagine it was an artifact of de Havilland's influence.

When I was growing up in Rhode Island in the 90s we had twice-daily newspaper delivery.

The same newspaper? Big cities used to have morning and evening newspapers, and the evening papers seem to have largely died off.

Yes, IIRC, the evening edition had essentially "updates" to the morning edition. I was very young though, I don't recall getting both editions past the mid-90s.

I was expecting a tale of using Courier for a programming font.

Yeah, me too. I hoped for a killer-reason to switch to Courier with a smug sense of superiority.

Great read!

> Gibson and Stephenson had taught me that the messenger, the mailman, was a vital romantic figure.

It seemed weird to me that both Snow Crash and Virtual Light had main characters who were couriers. When I read Virtual Light I thought "oh, so this is what Snow Crash was parodying," but nope, it came out a year later. I didn't grow up in a city so that job was something I only encountered in fiction (aside from pizza and Chinese delivery).

The comments for the parent article included an excellent longread on bike messenger culture in Boston: https://web.archive.org/web/20050314012405/http://www.bikesu...

Also, that early 2000s internet was indeed a fine place to be in. Simple pages with well-crafted long-form, using Verdana -- what more do you need.

> once you've learned your chops you should be up in the $10 - $12CAD

I forgot about the (2005). That is below the (very low) current minimum wage of $16.55 CAD in Ontario. And that minimum wage is not sufficient to survive in Toronto. Wouldn't be surprised if couriers were paid minimum wage today, or maybe a dollar or two over. Seems to be the trend for 'manual labor'.

A Coder in Courierland - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268768 - Aug 2008 (29 comments)

Haven't thought of Kuro5hin for years. Man, the memories. What a great site.

I remember reading this great entry when it came up almost 20 years ago! Still a good read, despite some of the details having since went out of date.

> I think I may be the only courier who even knows what PHB means.

Player's Handbook? ;)

(Yes, I know they mean the Scott Adams creation)

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