A recent HN thread I cannot seem to find discussed the idea that currently in the US work is the default state, and leisure exists to refuel for work. At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure. This context affects everything in life - IE a microwave frozen meal is excellent in the work viewpoint (time value ratio), but if you enjoy cooking it’s horrible in the leisure viewpoint.
At which time exactly was leisure "the default state"? The only way to have this is by having a slave-like class while the idle elite could enjoy "leisure", or live in very low density, caloric rich environment, which doesn't last long or ends up with wars (and being enslaved by the neighboring tribe, if you are from subsaharian Africa).
I think there is a growing online mix up of "leisure" time in the past. 99% of people were farmers, farming season is 3-4mo a year. That doesn't mean they had 9mo to do whatever they wanted. The time off was technically not their job but they were doing work on other survival tasks. If you consider re-roofing your shelter leisure time then yeah past people had more leisure time.
My girlfriend and I were talking about this the other day. We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended.
It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
> We both have full time jobs and can only cook “real meal” in the weekend now that WFH ended.
Do you have extra long hours and/or an extreme long (1 hour) commute?
It’s common in my social circles for parents to work 8-5 or 9-6 and still cook weekday meals that are healthy. With some meal and grocery planning it’s not that hard, unless you of course have on of those 90+ minute commutes and a job that keeps you in office until 8PM.
Unless your definition of “real meal” is something more than I’m thinking of, like something that requires hours of prep.
> It sucks, I enjoy cooking and want to eat at least somewhat health conscious…
There are a lot of healthy meal planning (ahead of time prep) or quick and easy recipes out there. It’s pretty easy to prepare a healthy meal with steamed vegetables and a warmed protein in 10 minutes. We can even make an entire healthy meal in 30 minutes start to finish after doing it for years.
More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch (or I’m just incredibly slow).
Cooking a full meal would at least take me an hour end-to-end. As a sibling comment mentioned, it’s more that when I finally get home (6:30 -7pm), I rarely have the energy to put in that kind of time.
So I end up making a quick pasta or other such dish that is ready in 30 minutes.
> More traditional “French” cuisine is not typically ready in 10-30 minutes when starting from scratch
I was responding to the part of your comment about not being able to eat healthy.
Cooking traditional French cuisine on weeknights is not the only way to have a healthy meal. Eating homemade French cuisine every weeknight would be a luxury for working class standards just about anywhere.
Super normal. Let’s say at the simplest, you take 30 mins to get ready to leave from waking up, 30 mins from front door to sitting at your desk, 30 mins to get to bed and sleep that’s 2 hours of your 24 just kinda handling the bare functional minumum. Sleep for 8 and now you are left with 12 hours. Work plus breaks at work is probably 8-10 at the best.
So OK, 3-5 hours left over for everything else, assuming perfect execution on the other parts. Do you have family or pets that need something? Do you have dishes and laundry and trash days and bills to pay? Do you want to watch TV, play a game, do any kind of hobby or leaning? Are you sick? Do you have friendships? Are you tired from work being physically or mentally demanding? Do you need to exercise?
All of those things need to be handled in the same few “outside work” hours each day.
> that’s 2 hours of your 24 just kinda handling the bare functional minumum. Sleep for 8 and now you are left with 12 hours.
24 - 2 - 8 leaves you with 14 hours, not 12 hours.
Sounds pedantic, but 2 hours is a lot in the context of your argument that we only have a few hours per day to do anything.
This conversation gets repeated ad nauseum on social media, yet in the real world it’s common for people to operate fine on normal weekly work schedules. Back when I was still reading Reddit there was an endless stream of posts like this complaining that there was no time left to do anything after work. Every time when the OP was asked where their time was going, it revealed one of two things: Either they were taking way too long to go through the basic motions of life (e.g 2 hour morning routines and 2 hour dinner prep every day with a 1 hour bedtime ritual) or they realized they actually had a lot of time but it was just disappearing somewhere and they couldn’t figure it out. That latter one could almost always be traced to spending too much time on phones or in front of TV.
Yeah that’s a correct point, bad mental arithmetic there.
There are a few other unrealistic things too, but they fall in the other direction. Like I think it’s almost impossible to spend only 30 mins to leave my front door, get in the car, park at work and get into the building, get all the way to my desk and actually be in work mode. When I used to commute it was more like an hour, in busy traffic.
I have lived a lot of my life not having enough time to cook dinner mainly because I have often had a part time job in addition to a full time job, and was studying for a career change. So for a few years I was just kinda spinning plates. So that’s another way people end up caught out for time.
> in the real world it’s common for people to operate fine on normal weekly work schedules
I think it’s common but also maybe not even the majority of people are this way? There’s no good reason that “40 hours of work plus an arbitrary commute time” is a functional pattern for most people.
I think we have a mix of people who find this totally fine and have some energy left over at the end of the day, with people who are fully drained by their jobs. It’s hard for each cohort to relate to the other.
For some people, almost all leisure time is lost in an impossible quest to relax/recharge “enough” for the next day/week of work. Sometimes that explains the phone use or TV patterns. It’s an attempt to rest (plus their attention-taking and holding techniques work better on us when we are tired). It’s hard to plan on cooking if you know you’ll be in that state.
I tend to believe If you can find the right work and the right hours for you it’s a huge improvement in your life, and if you are on the wrong pattern with those it’s very bad and leads to a spiral. A lot of us have to accept the wrong pattern to make enough money to live and retire and support family.
I should have clarified it, but you hit the nail on the head. I arrive home with little energy after a day in the office.
By the time I’m home it’s at least 6:30pm, usually a bit later. If I would work until 6:30 but from home instead of the office, I’d probably still be up for cooking.
Although you also need to get gym time in, family time, chores and other stuff…
I have the same, my commute is a 10min walk, I have no dependants and make a good salary and I find it impossible to cook, I'm just depleted after work. If I add exercise and some social interaction then my time is spent recovering energy... It's probably a sign of burn out or of a bad job
You can adjust what “real meal” means for you so that cooking at home is possible. The hardest part is finding time together if schedules don’t line up.
For two weeks write down what you do with your time, and then evaluate it afterwards and decide if it was the best use.
> At other times in history, leisure was the default state and work existed to enable leisure
It wasn’t that long ago that a lot of hard work was necessary to even survive through the winter each year.
What times in history had leisure as the default state? When was life so much easier than it is right now? Where were all the food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment materials coming from during this time and why was it so much more efficient than today?
Every time this topic of historical leisure time comes up and people start bringing up problems with the theory, the goalposts start moving as fast as the conversation. Are we now only talking about people who didn’t live in areas with winters? Because those areas have different sets of problems including entirely different sets of insects, diseases, and predators that aren’t controlled by annual winters, among other things.
You should probably revisit the guidelines, as your flagging policy doesn’t align with HN guidelines:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
When we say "interesting" we mean intellectual interest, not all kinds of interest or curiosity. For example, there is social curiosity (the sort that powers celebrity gossip). There is political curiosity (wanting to know how one's side is doing against the other side). There is sexual curiosity (no comment needed). These things all have their place, but not here. On the other hand, there can also be overlap with intellectual curiosity, in which case it's fine, though the bar is higher in some cases than others.
The qualifier "most" is very important there. Certainly opinions can differ as to what should fall under "most" and what shouldn't. But citing that line to justify flagging a politics-related story isn't a good argument.
Yep - I totally got that from your original comment.
I did think to myself "I hope they're using the Richard Feynmann/MIT Model Railroad Club sense of the work "hacking" there, not the "dude in a hoodie in front of a green on black terminal" sense. HN, for me, for over a decade, has been a source of intellectual curiosity provoking links, not just software/computing related stuff.
My attendances at DEF-CON have been mostly grey-hat [0]. I don't really care about downvotes just here to spread knowledge on topics I find interesting.
Thanks for the sanity/perspective.
[0] I'm in the XX documentary, and have been on stage (as have many friends), but never as an official speaker. In a former digital life, I ran a lockpicking youtubey with millions of views.
Pretty sure HN has discussed porn, the porn industry, sex work, sex workers, etc tons.
For example you can find in my history on posts about how porn access is being restricted that the "They have more fraud" claim is likely false and claimed in bad faith, and in fact Pornhub has been so removed from the payments industry that they now seem to have grafted themselves onto the internet gambling industry to make money, which is just awful. They have not turned to crypto payments because they just don't work, which is interesting to discuss.
But you would never see any of those discussions if you banned from the front page anything that mentioned porn.
Do you see how that works? Interesting discussion is about who is discussing, not about what is being discussed.
IMO the topic guidelines are entirely the wrong way to ensure meaningful discussion. All they have done, as clearly evidenced by the time HN tried to outright ban politics, is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to participate in and contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here", despite the guidelines themselves saying "If it's here, it belongs here"
HN also bans a lot of meta discussion which is crap, as talking about the sneaky and intransparent parts of HN, like the Orange Nametag cohort, would be interesting to the constant influx of new accounts.
I for one would also find deep dives into moderation or site meta information to be very interesting. I deal with abuse prevention in my day job, so seeing how others experience that abuse and deal with it would be not just interesting to me, but downright educational.
Meanwhile, HN is full of "I slapped an LLM into someone else's open source code" as if that is interesting at all. The entire point of vibe coding and agents etc is that anyone else could do that just as easily. So it seems "being interesting to hackers" just isn't the actual desired content.
>All [the guidelines] have done ... is provide ample fodder for people to shut down discussions they were never going to ... contribute to anyway, and force people to have less interesting discussions about "Does this belong here"
Absolutely. See /u/grey's comment above, which /u/DanG responded with saying ~"no personal attacks"~ (I don't think grey got personal, and I don't think DanG's response was appropriate/warranted).
But as DanG and you have pointed out (in response to my other comments in this thread), porn does have a place on /hn/ — I truly believe the porn industry is the major driver of consumer tech.
Respectfully submitted, and thanks for all the great discussions among ALL users, oranges/admins/®ulars.
I think people might be missing the hack here, because the front story is such an ongoing political (and moral) football.
The hack is in the leak, and the sudden availability, of the video segment, across international borders, against the Weiss will (and apparently against the Ellison and Trump will), rebounding back to us in the US via the good graces of https://archive.org and via some true journalistic (or political) chutzpah.
That's what drew me to this page, to learn more about how presumed underhanded corrupt billionaire-sanctioned censorship was defeated by an innocent premature distribution.
I have an extremely cheap and extremely low power automatic cat feed - it’s been on 2 D batteries for 18 months. I just reset it after it had drifted 19 minutes, so about 1 minute a month, or 15 seconds a week!
That’s a really cool link! One guy predicted it very well:
> Second, I think Apple is using this as a "sneaky" device to sneak large capacity hard drives into our pockets. Basically, once we're used to carrying around something like this, they can build on it. Add the PalmOS or OSX/CE (OK, bad joke, but you get the idea) and you have a PDA with more massive storage than any other. Add a firewire connection to some optics and you have a video camera with 10 hours of battery life, smaller and easier to conceal than Sony's smallest.
The thing I like about the video camera idea is that with tapeless storage, editing is much, much faster, and with the disk unit in your pocket, the camera can be really tiny and lightweight and still have a lot of features. Basically, once they up the drive capacity to 20GB (maybe 3-6 months?), that's enough for 90 minutes of broadcast quality digital video, enough for almost any common event!
Think about it. This is just an iSeed iPod. Many other things can and probably will grow out of it.
The top 5 or 10 of these you’re basically getting close to equivalent square footage or better once you replace your vehicle spending with housing spend.
Well, the video isn't available. And it's a big ask to make way out there claims and then expect people to watch whatever that video was to fully understand whether the claims are true or not. This is basically asymmetric warfare in trolling.
"Here's my wild claim, to verify it go spend your time watching a video!"
Interesting, I have never seen CityNerd take a video down. I’ll summarize it below my next couple of paragraphs.
Criticizing a source for being in video format and therefore taking time to digest is an invalid criticism. If I linked you a scientific study you’d still have to take time to read it to properly evaluate it. Just because a source in video form doesn’t make it not a source, and it’s not asymmetric trolling warfare. I’m literally just providing a source that aligns with my perspective and opinion, and trying to have a good faith discussion.
I will also point out that every YouTube video provides a full automated transcript on the desktop version of YouTube.
The gist of the video was that some selected American cities presented in a “worst to best” list have an interesting effect going on where people who live in suburban car-dependent areas can potentially live in their metro area’s most walkable neighborhoods with rich urban fabric without sacrificing a lot of square feet or potentially even gaining more space in their home by removing the cost of owning a car and putting that into their rent instead. Ray Delahanty, a (former?) professional city planner, ran through some data on this based on median rent in various neighborhoods and an assumed TCO of personal vehicle ownership of around $750 a month. Metro areas like New York City fared poorly but others presented an interesting trade-off potential.
Obviously, it was something of a simplified discussion that doesn’t take into account every life factor that determines whether car ownership is a requirement, but he is a guy who lived without a car in Las Vegas of all places, so I think the general point was to present a thought experiment on what kind of lifestyle you can get if you change your perspective to consider the idea of ditching your car entirely and no longer pay the very high average costs that Americans incur to own, operate, store, and maintain their vehicles.
Seriously, delusional take. I live in Manhattan and I’m considering a move to Westchester (large suburban county just north of NYC). Average cost per sq foot to buy in Manhattan is about $1500, and it’s about $400 in Westchester. That’s before you touch the other differences in cost of living (taxes, childcare, groceries, etc).
Really cool! Huge fan of maps - it looks like there is some amount of processing, so you have that automated or are you manually editing details? Also any advice on someone just getting into engraving?
This seems like an extremely broad brush. There are cancers that were literally untreatable and guaranteed death within years, that with treatment now can see patients living 5+ years. Lung cancer specifically, but others as well.
Let's assume fate has decreed that patient X will die of lung cancer at 70. Detect it at 68, dies in 2 years. Detect it at 64, dies in 6 years. Your early detection "increased" survival by 200%.
And I think there's a lot to his point. Fundamentally, cancer can be divided into three groups:
1) Slow growth. Leave it alone and it probably never harms the patient. Many prostate cancers fall into this category.
2) Fast growth. These are the ones where the oncologists hitting it hard can make a real difference.
3) Fast growth/fast spread. The oncologists don't have a chance. Some tumors can be slowed.
Unfortunately, our ability to figure these out (other than in hindsight) is limited. Both of my parents died of stuff that spread rapidly, in both cases treatment was a negative. (Although there was some palliative stuff for my father.)
reply