Gina Trapani! That's a name I haven't heard in a long time and at first couldn't place correctly -- for some reason, my mind went to Groklaw, but Lifehacker was the correct answer. Maybe I'm idolizing my own youth and its associated available free time just a tiny bit and I can't actually believe it's been 20 years, but those felt like good times, Web 2.0 with its focus on communication instead of publishing, with Slashdot up top for tech news, Lifehacker, Engadget and many other sites not yet owned by big corporations feeling fresh and bearing individual flair, making you feel being a part of something. A rare feeling in modern times.
There are still tons of websites (more now than ever) not owned by gigantic corporations. It's not their fault that you and the masses mostly stopped going to them in favor of facebook and twitter and instagram and, of course, apps.
(You're on one right now, naturally.)
I get the same feeling when people say "RSS is dead". I read dozens of websites via RSS and my RSS reader still works fine. Very few blogs I want to read don't support RSS.
This happens with programming languages also. Lots of people cry "Perl is dead" because its market share is decreasing. But its absolute user count is increasing!
It's not a competition for a limited size of pie; the pie is still growing at a frightening pace, along with all its pieces.
Actually, it’s making a comeback now somewhat, thanks to the inherent capability to filter and select only wanted content and weed out the noise in this world.
I loved the old LH when she ran it (and a short time after, before it became fully enshittified). Still have a Steelcase Leap chair, which was the usual runner-up to the Herman Miller Aeron in their office chair votes.
Fun fact: Nordic countries use week numbers for all sorts of planning, e.g. vacation period, school events, company planning, statistics reporting, ...
I use GNOME with week numbers shown in[0]! Find it super useful.
I am also a big fan of setting yearly goals. Been doing this for a couple of years now. This has sort of converged into a tradition of having ~12 goals per year.
Each item is something quantifiable and achievable. For example, a goal of mine is 'losing x amount of weight', as opposed to 'becoming fit' - this I won't expand into other domains however, if the context is making a game, it would be 'publishing a game', and not 'publishing a game that sells a million copies', as the latter depends on factors outside of your control, luck, etc.
The way I set up my own goals, they are achievable if I were to focus on these for a quarter alone. They are not big, huge deals. But I don't focus on these for a quarter of course, I have to go to work, and I have a family and loved ones that I enjoy spending time with. Yet it is also an anchor I look at occasionally, and if the list is having too little progress, I get the message that I should work on these for a while. I find it to be a nice balance.
0: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.calendar show-weekdate true
I'm Norwegian, but never got used to this, and to this day (I turn 50 this year) my mum will try to communicate time with me using week numbers, and I have to tell her to use dates.
Another fun fact: there are three commonly used ways to define week numbers (see `man strftime`, %U, %V, %W; %V is the one used in at least the Nordics). In some years they coincide so you might not notice that you picked the wrong one until next January.
Yet another fun fact: with %V week numbers, the date 2024-12-30 (December 30, 2024) was 2025-W01-1 (the Monday of week 1, 2025). Thus strftime needs two different ways to specify the year: %G denotes the year that goes with %V week numbers, %Y denotes the year that people usually think of when they ask "what year is it". Unfortunately %G comes before %Y on the strftime man page, so people who scan the page quickly can easily pick %G when they really want %Y. I've seen a few bugs caused by this.
I have also seen the corresponding bug in SQL, using IYYY instead of YYYY. This boggles the mind, but apparently when some people read "ISO 8601 week-numbering year", they only see "ISO 8601 ... year", think "yes, that's the date standard we use" and don't care about the "week-numbering" word in the middle.
I've done a bunch of thinking around how to organize things in dates, etc, and often wondered if I should be using week numbers. Never thought to look up if it's a common practice in any countries.
Not so fun fact: Corporate Germany also uses week numbers and some paper pushers and some project managers have adapted, most nerds (incl. me) will never come to terms with it and have to look it up once a month. Also what do you mean by "all calendars" - the last paper one I owned I bought at an art fair in 2018ish ;)
Oliver Burkeman wrote a book about this, named "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals". The main point (at least as I remember it) is that there are way more books to read, links to click, and things to do than you can fit in your lifetime, so it's a delusion that you could ever get to the end of your to-do list.
So much of our life is consumed by work. Seeing your lifespan laid bare like this, there's a perverse instinct to optimize what remains. Have to be more productive, more efficient. But it's a bit like seeing you're bleeding out and deciding to optimize your blood donation schedule, isn't it?
The older I get the more I realize that the most effective and productive things I can do are not at all what seem to be productive or effective on the surface.
One of the most mentally and physically crippling things I’ve ever done was work too hard, for too long. I worked and earned more money than I thought I ever could but… All I truly got out of it was a lesson. To never do it again. I would have earned enough but also enjoyed my life had I just calmed down a bit.
I’m sure you know as well as I do, if not better. It seemed worth noting though.
In this Lex Fiedman video, they talk about how life is short, and a visualization as a spreadsheet is shown that makes one very concerned:
Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg
[ironically, the podcast is very long - over 3 hours - speaking of not wasting time, but after initial annoyance I'm glad I watched it all.]
The positive insight that can come out of that is use every week and don't waste it, and and if you can, move your long-term dreams closer to the here and now.
I made a version of that spreadsheet for "the rest of my life" to hand it into my office as a reminder. (Even if I will live until 90, it fits my laptop screen without scrolling...)
Should everyone make it? On one hand it’s awareness, on another- at cause endless anxiety that you now visualised how little it is and still can’t do anything..
This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
Maybe some people who have wasted half their life being completely unproductive say “I wish I focused on relationships more” on their deathbed. But many others might say “I wasted my whole life, I wish I got it together.” The thing is, those people don’t write books or give seminars on how to live a good life. They die alone and are quickly forgotten.
That’s the conventional wisdom but I think it’s worth challenging it. Or at least, if by “productivity” you mean “work” (I think there’s an important distinction there).
There is nothing wrong with your work being the focus of your life. Many people derive great pleasure and satisfaction from, and make a positive impact on the world with, their work. Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness. (I’m aware that much work is drudgery, I refer mainly to the kind of work one can derive joy from, which I suspect many of us on HN have in our lives.)
The question “is it okay to work all the time” is explored rather well here:
Most people on their deathbed who would counsel you would counsel you to focus on relationships. The ones who had the insight "people can fuck right off, that's the key to it all" aren't interested in telling us about it.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve shifted to: learning how to find enjoyment and purpose from whatever situation you find yourself in should be an important priority.
Finding work that is inherently enjoyable and purposeful to you is still great if you can find it. But that’s not always possible, and I’ve been increasingly interested in the ideas in books like “Flow”, which details the ways people in all manner of circumstances find purpose/enjoyment from the work in front of them.
That's completely unrealistic though. If you have a job that allows you to support yourself and doesn't make you want to veer into oncoming traffic daily that's about as good as it gets for the vast majority of people.
There's so many reasons why purpose should be found outside of work.
Like others replying to this comment, I disagree because there is much work that needs to be done which cannot truly provide purpose to most people.
However ... I do believe that any job should provide dignity and "purpose" in the narrower sense of something the person doing it believes needs to be done. Any job done full time (however a culture defines that) should also make a reasonable lower middle class life possible.
Though, I'd argue it should be 18 years free by their math. They lump a subset of leisure activities into another category as if those are beyond your easy control.
Commuting, working, grooming, etc - sure, you could optimize those, but it's harder to deviate from the norm. But TV/video games? Doesn't seem like the same discussion.
Exactly. I have thought about it for a while, I think I have to get rid of work or family to be substantially happier. Apparently getting rid of family is morally wrong, so the only option is to get rid of work, somehow, anyhow.
I fully understand why people buy lottery tickets. Hope beats probability on every single instance. I, a Master of Statistics graduates, buy them too.
This is why I have interest in the FIRE movement. Our lives are short and fleeting. If there is even a small chance I can become financially independent before traditional retirement age, I am going to optimize for that.
We spend so much time optimizing for productivity that we sometimes miss the bigger picture: the quality of life itself, not just the quantity of tasks we can check off
My biggest failure has been not getting an extreme income ( 300k TC a year +) before 30.
I had planned to retire by 40 and be done with this work nonsense. Now I'm in my mid 30s and that doesn't seem possible.
However I will say if you have a highly variable income ( one year you make 100$ an hour, the next year you have no work), you should max out your 401k during the good times. Having 30k in retirement funds that you'll get smacked for drawing on is better than nothing.
Too late now. I'm comfortable, but I think the era of 300k TC is done.
Yup. My advice to young people is -- if you can't figure out what to do in life, make more $$. With enough $$ you will have a world of time to ponder what to do.
I also regret that I gave up a FAANG level opportunity because my faily doesn't want me to go to another city. I would hit well over 200K TC by now -- a very comfortable salary in Canada.
Very cool, thank you so much for sharing! One thing that hit me as a European is that you consider president inaugurations interesting enough to put in there! I mean, its a great point of reference, but still interesting to me. I couldn't tell you from when to when Merkel was chancellor, and I couldn't care less.
For me, I employ presidential terms as memorable 4 year labels, much the same as Olympiads (Beijing 2008, Sydney 2000, Barcelona 1992). It’s got zero to do with (geo) political influence. The Olympiads work as point in time “beats”, while presidential terms are “long tones”. Weird memory functions.
The news in the media (and outside) is so full of this that I might even be better at naming US presidents and their terms in reverse than German chancellors. The two term limit helps, to be fair. We're only on the fourth since I was born, vs 8 (counting non-consecutives) in the US. (Like, of course I can name ours, but not the exact years)
Politicians in the states have more influence and can still do something and effect change.
In Europe we're way past that, they are just bureaucrats spinning wheels, extracting value and doing minor changes (some good, some bad), gradually boiling us alive until they extracted any value from society and we collapse.
In Europe legislative bodies are responsible for moving things along. The executive takes care of filling in the gaps, taking care of current affairs and international diplomacy. This is by design.
I like gradual change. I see things here in France changing (for the better mostly) here and there but yes no dramatic shifts. The US model seems irresponsible by comparison.
What are you talking about, what value did Merkel extract for example?
I think Europe has done more good for the world than bad in the last few decades. On the other hand we're still feeling the effects of US involvement in the middle east.
As for politicians in the states having influence... congress is supposed to make the laws that the president executes. The joke is that the US is now operating in complete opposition of that. The president rules by decree, congress members have no real influence and would get decimated in a re-election campaign if they act out of favor of the president. I'd say politicans in the US have less influence do effect change, not more. In fact non-politicians like Musk/Thiel have more influence than politicians, that's more the case than it has been in many decades.
OP is a homosexual ( pls suggest the correct word here) so i think its of special importance to her. i would bet most ppl won't put "cheeto inaugurated" on their life in weeks.
Yes and no. All Presidents have been more or less hostile to gay people at least when they were inaugurated until weirdly enough Biden.
Clinton signed the “Don’t Ask or Don’t Tell” legislation and Obama was originally in favor of the the protection of marriage act. They both have changed as the winds have changed.
Also she called out that prop 8 banning gay marriage was signed in California.
This is a terrifying reminder of the shortness of our lives. I remember reading a blog by Tim Urban, where he showed that you could put all the weeks in your life on a single piece of A4 paper, and it didn’t feel nice.
What strikes me is the empty spaces where we don't recognize what we did, or didn't do anything memorable.
I made an app to try to address this about a decade ago which I called Bucket52, the idea being that every week you put one memorable thing in it. Trying to do this just for a year was surprisingly difficult.
For me I just want to remember what's gone on in my life better, even if it's sometimes mundane. I've tried short-form daily journaling, but I've only made it around 3 months before I start skipping days and stop doing it altogether.
When it comes to doing something new/memorable, I'd be fine with aspiring for just one thing per month (with the assumption that sometimes/often I'd end up with more than that).
I think the way to make things like this work is to start with a low-ambition target, and then scale up until just before the point where it starts to feel difficult to keep it going. I'm not sure I could keep up a cadence of doing one memorable thing per week. Once a month seems doable, though. But if I were really uncertain, maybe I'd first target once per two months, and then see how much more frequently I could do memorable things before it started feeling like a difficult burden.
I have started and stopped journaling times over the years. When I initially got a smart phone, i started taking photos of mundane everyday things. I’ve now been consistently doing this for many years.
It just takes a few seconds to take out the phone and snap a few photos. I have many short videos and photos of my kids over the years doing them mundane that I treasure with my life.
I've started just keeping a text list of "interesting things that I did / happened to me this year". It's nice to look back on at the end of each year - my primary reaction is "OMG that was this year??"
From this view it's clear how wasteful ontogeny is. All of that physical and psychological development takes too much valuable time and investment. And we haven't even gotten to Gina's retirement years yet. Clearly the future is in using 3D bioprinting to build fully formed adults as if sprung from the brow of Zeus. Skill and memory transfer are a technical problem only as long as we cling to our bias against our artificially intelligent upgrades. Aging is defeated by implanting our old model weights into a new print. So much efficiency is waiting if we dare to free ourselves from convention.
I love this! I was similarly inspired by the Wait But Why article[1] and made a chrome plugin several years ago that shows this for my life every time I open a new Chrome window[2]. It's also a handy countdown for big events like vacations or The Singularity (which starts in 7,259 days) that I want some time to prepare for.
Readit News
(You're on one right now, naturally.)
I get the same feeling when people say "RSS is dead". I read dozens of websites via RSS and my RSS reader still works fine. Very few blogs I want to read don't support RSS.
It's not a competition for a limited size of pie; the pie is still growing at a frightening pace, along with all its pieces.
Deleted Comment
She's the best. :)
All calendars show week numbers.
I am also a big fan of setting yearly goals. Been doing this for a couple of years now. This has sort of converged into a tradition of having ~12 goals per year.
Each item is something quantifiable and achievable. For example, a goal of mine is 'losing x amount of weight', as opposed to 'becoming fit' - this I won't expand into other domains however, if the context is making a game, it would be 'publishing a game', and not 'publishing a game that sells a million copies', as the latter depends on factors outside of your control, luck, etc.
The way I set up my own goals, they are achievable if I were to focus on these for a quarter alone. They are not big, huge deals. But I don't focus on these for a quarter of course, I have to go to work, and I have a family and loved ones that I enjoy spending time with. Yet it is also an anchor I look at occasionally, and if the list is having too little progress, I get the message that I should work on these for a while. I find it to be a nice balance.
0: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.calendar show-weekdate true
Yet another fun fact: with %V week numbers, the date 2024-12-30 (December 30, 2024) was 2025-W01-1 (the Monday of week 1, 2025). Thus strftime needs two different ways to specify the year: %G denotes the year that goes with %V week numbers, %Y denotes the year that people usually think of when they ask "what year is it". Unfortunately %G comes before %Y on the strftime man page, so people who scan the page quickly can easily pick %G when they really want %Y. I've seen a few bugs caused by this.
I have also seen the corresponding bug in SQL, using IYYY instead of YYYY. This boggles the mind, but apparently when some people read "ISO 8601 week-numbering year", they only see "ISO 8601 ... year", think "yes, that's the date standard we use" and don't care about the "week-numbering" word in the middle.
I've done a bunch of thinking around how to organize things in dates, etc, and often wondered if I should be using week numbers. Never thought to look up if it's a common practice in any countries.
That one also lets you look up other weeks by number, which is occasionally useful. But the calmer design of https://vecka.nu is very pleasant!
Indeed. A week is basically 2% of a year, which is quite a chunk. You basically get 50 ticks a year, and that ticks quite fast.
In case you are wondering how an year goes by that fast, this is how.
One of the most mentally and physically crippling things I’ve ever done was work too hard, for too long. I worked and earned more money than I thought I ever could but… All I truly got out of it was a lesson. To never do it again. I would have earned enough but also enjoyed my life had I just calmed down a bit.
I’m sure you know as well as I do, if not better. It seemed worth noting though.
Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg [ironically, the podcast is very long - over 3 hours - speaking of not wasting time, but after initial annoyance I'm glad I watched it all.]
The positive insight that can come out of that is use every week and don't waste it, and and if you can, move your long-term dreams closer to the here and now.
I made a version of that spreadsheet for "the rest of my life" to hand it into my office as a reminder. (Even if I will live until 90, it fits my laptop screen without scrolling...)
Most people on their deathbed would counsel you to focus on relationships rather than productivity.
Maybe some people who have wasted half their life being completely unproductive say “I wish I focused on relationships more” on their deathbed. But many others might say “I wasted my whole life, I wish I got it together.” The thing is, those people don’t write books or give seminars on how to live a good life. They die alone and are quickly forgotten.
There is nothing wrong with your work being the focus of your life. Many people derive great pleasure and satisfaction from, and make a positive impact on the world with, their work. Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness. (I’m aware that much work is drudgery, I refer mainly to the kind of work one can derive joy from, which I suspect many of us on HN have in our lives.)
The question “is it okay to work all the time” is explored rather well here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/search-engine/id161425...
Finding work that is inherently enjoyable and purposeful to you is still great if you can find it. But that’s not always possible, and I’ve been increasingly interested in the ideas in books like “Flow”, which details the ways people in all manner of circumstances find purpose/enjoyment from the work in front of them.
There's so many reasons why purpose should be found outside of work.
However ... I do believe that any job should provide dignity and "purpose" in the narrower sense of something the person doing it believes needs to be done. Any job done full time (however a culture defines that) should also make a reasonable lower middle class life possible.
https://www.visualistan.com/2015/02/what-do-7-billion-people...
Though, I'd argue it should be 18 years free by their math. They lump a subset of leisure activities into another category as if those are beyond your easy control.
Commuting, working, grooming, etc - sure, you could optimize those, but it's harder to deviate from the norm. But TV/video games? Doesn't seem like the same discussion.
I fully understand why people buy lottery tickets. Hope beats probability on every single instance. I, a Master of Statistics graduates, buy them too.
Apparently? That's the only thing stopping you from "getting rid of your family" whatever that would mean in practical terms?
Are you Chris Watts' younger brother?
Jesus, wonder if some people even deserve families...
I had planned to retire by 40 and be done with this work nonsense. Now I'm in my mid 30s and that doesn't seem possible.
However I will say if you have a highly variable income ( one year you make 100$ an hour, the next year you have no work), you should max out your 401k during the good times. Having 30k in retirement funds that you'll get smacked for drawing on is better than nothing.
Too late now. I'm comfortable, but I think the era of 300k TC is done.
I also regret that I gave up a FAANG level opportunity because my faily doesn't want me to go to another city. I would hit well over 200K TC by now -- a very comfortable salary in Canada.
I think Europe has done more good for the world than bad in the last few decades. On the other hand we're still feeling the effects of US involvement in the middle east.
As for politicians in the states having influence... congress is supposed to make the laws that the president executes. The joke is that the US is now operating in complete opposition of that. The president rules by decree, congress members have no real influence and would get decimated in a re-election campaign if they act out of favor of the president. I'd say politicans in the US have less influence do effect change, not more. In fact non-politicians like Musk/Thiel have more influence than politicians, that's more the case than it has been in many decades.
Dead Comment
Simply dropping the "a", turning the word from a noun into an adjective, would make the phrase sound more friendly.
Clinton signed the “Don’t Ask or Don’t Tell” legislation and Obama was originally in favor of the the protection of marriage act. They both have changed as the winds have changed.
Also she called out that prop 8 banning gay marriage was signed in California.
For those who don't speak fluent Latin, that means "one of those will be your last". Ominous reminder indeed.
I made an app to try to address this about a decade ago which I called Bucket52, the idea being that every week you put one memorable thing in it. Trying to do this just for a year was surprisingly difficult.
When it comes to doing something new/memorable, I'd be fine with aspiring for just one thing per month (with the assumption that sometimes/often I'd end up with more than that).
I think the way to make things like this work is to start with a low-ambition target, and then scale up until just before the point where it starts to feel difficult to keep it going. I'm not sure I could keep up a cadence of doing one memorable thing per week. Once a month seems doable, though. But if I were really uncertain, maybe I'd first target once per two months, and then see how much more frequently I could do memorable things before it started feeling like a difficult burden.
https://medium.com/@markracette/make-every-day-matter-9ac6db...
Life is precious and finite. Memento mori.
1. https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
2. https://res.cloudinary.com/genco/image/upload/w_1200/v173967...