paranoiacblack

They like, read our emails, man.

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.

> of whom there are more than a few, it's quite a thing now

lol

To summarize this for you OP: no, fuck you, do it yourself.

#HN

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.

Stay classy, HN.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ITT, don't tweet about things you are proud of. It makes us regular people feel bad. ;(

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.

No, stop trivializing cryptography software.

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.

"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.

On the contrary, you're extrapolating too much from the OP. It was never presented as a universal impression, and I really doubt anyone took it that way. However, the anecdote is useful because it shows that there are people who absolutely hate testimonials. Which is a useful lesson for anyone who might be blindly using testimonials as opposed to actually analyzing their users. The OP never challenged the statistics or suggested that testimonials are always bad.

To say that users sharing their anecdotal negative experiences about what you claim is an indisputably positive experience for the user is an interesting argument to make though. It's almost like you're telling the OP that it's good for them whether they realize or not.

> For some marginal utility?

Yes, this is the point of extensions. Extensions are help you and others do things with the browser that the vendor shouldn't really spend time on. Approaching them with the idea that they're useless doesn't really help your argument.

For example, I once wrote a browser extension that extracts class calendar info from the school website and automatically syncs it to the calendar application of your choosing. It turned my class scheduling process from an error-prone 2 hour process to a 3-click 10 minute step. You can label that as a useless, marginal utility, but that's being facetious at best.

You're getting pretty uppity about testimonials here. Regardless of them being effective persuasive techniques, they're still just persuasive techniques and I imagine a lot of people dislike persuasion getting in the way of content. I happen to agree with the OP that testimonials tend to make me believe that the product lacks enough substance to be useful by itself. In any matter, it's a personal preference and no amount research changes that.

Not really? If I know someone that you don't and introduce them to you, at that moment they are a stranger to you, but definitely not random.

Or because they had good alternatives to Google Reader that would be updated and voted on by a good user-base? No, nevermind, can't be that.

Honestly, I would be surprised if this wasn't definitely considered by Google before closing Reader. The thing is, when the tool is so closely tied in to Google's internal infrastructure, it would take a large effort to open-source it. IMO, it probably wasn't worth the trouble.

You're misreading what you quoted. I'm telling you that the company that sells you milk doesn't want you to drink anyone else's milk because that's how businesses work. They might sell some cheese too, but they also don't want you eating anyone's else's cheese. Also, perhaps that is one of the founding ideas of capitalism, but our modern day version is far away from that. Capitalism screws people over by the day in America.

Is it possible there is a world where Google does share our values but also knows when to kill off products they don't care about?

The GP complains about the entitlement directed towards the shutdown of Reader. The OP complains about the word entitlement being used at all and I agree with him, except that the GP is right that no one is entitled to Reader. I then go on to say that people should stop complaining about it.

Ok, so it's just if Google does it then, because they are the only ones with "great power?" Although "with great power comes great responsibility" is a cool catch line, it's extremely nebulous, especially as presented. What you are saying is that if any company provides a widely used product, say like Instapaper, they are ethical mandated to continue providing it, etc. Why would I create something for fun then, if I'm morally obligated to dedicate to it in the off chance it becomes popular? When can products close down?

Also, your solution is hardly more ethical than theirs, even if it puts the "well-being" of users first. It's just more binding than what already exists. In my opinion, it was perfectly ethical that Google gave its users a good head's up to the situation and that they even provide a way to find other services that might replace Reader. It's not like it randomly stopped existing one day or like they promised it would always be there. No moral code was broken and no ethics or rights were trampled on. It just sucks and you have every right to be upset. To be a proponent of "you either support it forever in some way or you're (ethically? morally?) evil" isn't really helping though.

> fighting

Let's not get too carried away here. It's about doing the same thing we've been doing for the history of the web. Hackers will continue to hack on stuff and find holes, etc, etc. Content curators will get use to APIs and integrate these services into their own. As it has always been. There's no fight to be had, only some latent bitterness over Google Reader and RSS and privacy.

> if you come out with a free service and end up displacing everyone else in the market, then you have an ethical responsibility to at least try to continue the service in some shape or form

This is exactly the kind of entitlement the OP mentions. Also, how would you know your product you wanted to release was going to displace everyone in the market? Does this apply only to large companies or is it small shops as well? What if they lose interest or what if they lost users when they add this magically and universally loved paid solution? There is no such ethical responsibility and they shouldn't be because it is ridiculous. Google shutting down Reader might make them tools, but the precedence you're trying to establish with ideology like this is far worse than that.

You're right. But you're not entitled to Google Reader. So stop complaining about it and upvoting posts that complain about it.

What you're saying is that a company wants you to use their product and no one else's. Sure, that's how companies work. They aren't compelled to allow anyone from the outside to contribute. This is not closing us in. Unless I'm missing something, people are still able to choose the applications they install and use on their mobile phones, and I don't see that as a lock-in in the slightest. I understand the internal changes that have happened over the years at Google, but to say that Google no longer supports or does not plan to support openness or interoperability is either the word of a prophet or Google Reader-inspired sensationalism.