15 ms·

Time is the only real currency we have

595 points by hackeryogi 6y ago

smitty1e 6y ago
And yet it "keeps onslipping, slipping, slipping into the future". This implies that tomorrow is a bank.
julienreszka 6y ago
What about attention, attention is the real currency
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Attention is time. They are interchangeable for the discussion.
  - naringas 6y ago
    attention is 'dedicated' (or focused) time
  - carapace 6y ago
    Not at all. All moments are not created equal. If you're stressed out, hungry, got the low-blood sugar, tired, distracted, etc. your attention is much less valuable (to you) than if you're relaxed, well-fed and -rested, focused, etc. One of the greatest forms of "leverage" we have in the world is the capability of developing and focusing the quality of our attention, "concentration" or "one-point mind". That's why meditation is worthwhile (one of the reasons anyway) because, paradoxically, sitting and doing "nothing" for an hour makes the other 10~12 hours way more productive, due to the improvement in Q-of-A[ttention].
- naggreg 6y ago
  Isn't that equivalent to giving time to someone?
  - julienreszka 6y ago
    No it is not. Put idiots in a Stanford class they won't be able to do much of the time given to them by Ivy League professor since they won't be able to pay attention
    - rational_indian 6y ago
      I don't think this is a sound argument. How does it demonstrate attention being not equivalent to time? At best it shows the professor's attention / time / money can be wasted by dull students. Was this ever under dispute?
      - julienreszka 6y ago
        What was under dispute is whether time is the only real currency. I say it is not and I say it's attention that is the real currency because that's what you really allocate.
- dlkf 6y ago
  I think this is a very good point, and I find the reasons for which it is getting downvoted wholly unconvincing. Time is only good insofar as I have the mental/physical energy to take advantage of it. Lots of tasks double-dip in the time they take require from you - firstly when you perform them, and secondly, when you're too tired to be creative in the free time that is left over.
  - julienreszka 6y ago
    It is downvoted because many people who lack philosophical and historical culture believe in the myth of productivism. Largely debunked during the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement
toreminddit 6y ago
It’s well known. Business buy other businesses to save time.
pgt 6y ago
Ah, but what are you doing with the time you have? Is what you’re doing saving other people time?
- hackeryogi 6y ago
  Hopefully - that's what we're working on :)
lucb1e 6y ago
The movie "in time" (2011) kind of explores this. At the time, I wrote: > it gets you thinking. What prevents time from being used as currency? Or are we really doing the same by paying people an hourly rate instead of based on their accomplishments? Not to mention how many lives that million years capsule must have cost.
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  This explores it in a rather poor way. Once you and all your friends have a hundred year on your accounts, why not just stop working in this society and just go build a new civilization using bottle caps as means of exchange? Why being slaves to people who fix prices for everything all the time? Also. Economy there had no sense. Every person is passively using 24h worth of 'money' every day by simply existing. That means, to make ends meet they must earn 24h + some surpus to make a living, but the dude earned something like 5 hours in a shift (he had ~23:55 before shift, and 1:04:50 after. If shift lasted 8 hours, he was making just 13 hours per day - totally unsustainable. The idea was nice, but I feel it was a somewhat wasted potential.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    Yes sure, it's a mainstream movie and meant as entertainment rather than educatively. But for being a mainstream movie, I liked that it made me think about this.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Titanic was a mainstream movie, but the attention to detail is on another level entirely. They just didnt develop the concept enough and think though the consequences. There is a great plot in there somewhere
- Rerarom 6y ago
  I hated that movie, it showed only the very poor and the very rich, while showing that they don't make up the whole world. I couldn't empathize with anyone.
r32a_ 6y ago
This is why a fixed currency makes sense. You work and convert your time into currency which can be traded for other goods or services. When currency is manipulated, it allows the manipulator to make your currency worth more or less. effectively theft.
keiferski 6y ago
I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving people time. Just some quick thoughts: - Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars. - Minimization of waiting rooms. If your appointment will be delayed, you’ll be informed of it ahead of time via SMS. Time slots are strictly enforced to avoid overlap. - Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at a cash register. Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via delivery. - Adoption of remote work and minimization of unnecessary commutes. Plus faster public transit in general. Japan is pretty good with this (the Shinkansen is impressive.)
- naringas 6y ago
  there are many pedestrian overpasses in some big cities (like the one I live in) but it's not so simple, because then you have to climb up stairs, which takes more time... you walk more steps add some heavy duty sun and people rather wait in the shade down below rather than climb up. Also pedestrian overpasses tend to be really narrow (read: uncomfortable) Also, why should we be so stingy with time? it's better (IMHO) to lived relaxed, otherwise we will end up under conditions similar (they say) to amazon warehouse workers which have their bathroom breaks measured in seconds.
  - ReactiveJelly 6y ago
    > why should we be so stingy with time? Because it's fungible. If I save 10 seconds, maybe I get to keep those for myself.
    - zdkl 6y ago
      I think an interesting question is whether we are respectively good judges on the "real" value of those ten saved seconds vs more abstract quality of life issues such as mental health or reductions in stress.
    - 6y ago
celeritascelery 6y ago
> TurboCharge your Dev Environment This section feels like a stub where the author forgot to finish it. Was really hoping for some good ideas.
- hackeryogi 6y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. It does have a short write up on things to do. I have a lot more opinions on that, but was trying to balance out the overall length of the post. Will try having one out just on the dev environment :)
  - celeritascelery 6y ago
    Looking at it again I didn’t realize the following sections were actually part of that header because the headers were the same size and style. I thought it was only that one paragraph about Jedi. That was my fault.
the-dude 6y ago
TL;DR anyone? Time is money after all.
- carlosf 6y ago
  - be efficient at doing stuff - automate stuff - avoid time sinks - be pragmatic about technology choices This isn't article isn't about currency, btw.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Sure it is.
naringas 6y ago
it seems to me, that this has to do with a fundamental difference between selling products and selling services (I don't mean not software services) when you are making products (material widgets of any kind) it is possible to achieve marginal costs with parallel and serial manufacture, and with technology and specialized machines. but if you're selling service (e.g. a waiter) then it's not really possible to "industrialize" production the same way and don't get me started on software (becuase I wouldn't know how to start)
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
I'd really like to get better at touch typing, is GNU Typist a solid recommendation, or are there better ones?
- artsyca 6y ago
  If you're serious about typing ditch the QWERTY layout and learn something that's actually optimized for the language of your choice it's so naive to attempt mastery of a broken paradigm without ever questioning that paradigm as in the case of the broken and arbitrary key layout from 1873
- artsyca 6y ago
  As a recommendation I'd suggest the typing of the dead hands down the funnest way to learn touch typing as well I recommend the DVORAK key layout because it's much more suited to touch typing as one's hands require far less travel and therefore less propensity for error
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  If you can find one, a Gregg college typing typing self-study guide. https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="gregg%20college%20typing" https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="gregg... https://archive.org/search.php?query=Gregg+College+Keyboarding https://archive.org/search.php?query=Gregg+College+Keyboardi... Self-taught before secondary school in about six weeks, among my best investments ever. So long as it's a QWERTY layout, publication year really doesn'y matter.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  Found this, looks very nice: https://www.keybr.com/ https://www.keybr.com/
cryptica 6y ago
Unfortunately, in essentially all big corporations, the incentives encourage developers to waste as much time as possible - Mostly by focusing their attention on creating elaborate and ever-changing development processes and constantly adding unnecessary software complexity at the same time. This doesn't work well at all when you also allow individuals to detach themselves from any responsibility over the code that they produce. The culture of wasting time is so pervasive that the vast majority of developers who practice it don't even realize that they're doing it - Ironically, they're often the same people who write long articles about how to be productive and who brag about how organized and full their schedule is and how they're using all the latest productivity tools and how high their test coverage % is and how good their workflow and CI pipeline is... I call BS on all this. People who spend most of their time explicitly thinking about processes are bureaucrats. Truly productive people don't need to think about processes, they evolve naturally through sweat and tears; good processes are the byproduct (emphasis on the word 'byproduct') of a focused mindset of desperately wanting to achieve specific goals, not the mindset of ticking-off boxes from a static checklist where you don't even understand the underlying purpose of the work. You cannot be productive without a clear sense of purpose and goals. Unfortunately most software jobs today lack purpose - In this case it makes no sense to even talk about productivity. How can you know how productive (how fast you're moving towards your goal) you are if you don't even know what the end goal is. Finishing something is not a goal, it's a task. A goal is about a deeper purpose. Also if your goal is to help your company earn more money, this is only a worthy goal if you have a way to check your personal progress towards that goal. Usually this is not possible to do in a big company because there are too many people working towards different goals within the same company (sometimes even conflicting goals); the reality is that your work probably doesn't matter so there is no such thing as productivity in a corporate environment because it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal... However, if your goal is to maximize your personal ranking or salary within the company, this is a goal against which it is easy to measure progress; that's why personal goals trump company goals every time. KPIs are a ridiculous, completely futile attempt to fix this problem.
- andrey_utkin 6y ago
  This. I've been thinking about this for last few sleepless nights. I am at a start-up which has grown to 61 person. The tight connection of everybody's everyday contributions to company survival has declined. A rigourous accountability and incentives framework is still missing and there's no time and resources to build it now. Most of employees don't know what is more or less important and by how exactly much. I found interesting the concept of Internal Market. This book appears to be describing exactly what I got in my mind: "Internal Markets: Bringing the Power of Free Enterprise Inside Your Organization ".
ciconia 6y ago
Somehow the idea that time is our only currency is conflated with efficiency. Yes, time is the most limited resources we have, and therefore the most precious, but does this mean we have to squeeze every last bit of productivity from our time? Do we really have to keep running all the time, always optimising for more efficiency? I would say the exact opposite. If time is our most precious asset, let's rather spend it on what's really important: family, friends, community, environment, happiness, harmony. Let's pass our time doing things we love just the pleasure of doing it, rather than chasing after money, success of whatever. Let's live in the moment, for the moment.
- keiferski 6y ago
  I don’t think these are separate things at all. Being efficient with your work time is great because it lets you spend more time with family, friends, and so on. Long commutes are really the killer here: it’s super difficult to cook a family dinner if you get off work at 6:00, spend 30-60 minutes commuting home, 30 minutes buying groceries, another 30 minutes cooking, etc. Working from home and then cooking dinner with delivered groceries gives you an extra hour+ with your family.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    > Long commutes are really the killer here They are, but you are on HN so it's safe to assume you have other options, so why do you commute?
    - keiferski 6y ago
      I meant in general, for society. Personally I have a 10 minute bike commute to a private office because I prefer to have a little bit of space between work and home.
      - tluyben2 6y ago
        I think many people have that issue; they cannot actually stay at home doing what they want. It is a restricting factor actually creating the commuting issue you mention. Many people need to go to the office. I think it would be better to educate the kids to not have that mental hangup. Personally I never had that feeling (and never worked in an office for 25+ years; I am at my kitchen table and so is my wife); I was expecting to hear either of a) I have no other choice, because job/money b) I need space between work & home. Over the years I had business partners trying the same thing and getting divorced (like now with the virus; people simply cannot sit at home or endure their spouse and kids); maybe it wasn't too solid to begin with?
seventytwo 6y ago
Parameters of the universe are currency. Time is one of them, space (or area on earth’s surface) is another, and energy is a third. How these three things are used is what generates value to human beings. Each of the fundamental items can be traded individually, but money is used as a proxy for value. The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy. They produce some level of value using those two inputs, and receive money (a proxy for that value) in exchange. A person who can generate more value with the same amount of time and energy should be receiving more money than someone who generates less value, as money is only a proxy for value. People can also secure space. We’re used to thinking in terms of real estate, which always prices in the value of a structure or natural resources or potential on top of the raw spatial resource. But the raw three dimensional space can be traded as well, just like time or energy, as it is finite for humans. Money is just a tangible abstraction later on top of these fundamental parameters of the universe we trade. Providing lots of energy in a small space in a short period of time is incredibly valuable to humans, and so money reflects that. Using energy and time and space in a more efficient way to produce something in a factory is valuable, so money reflects that. It’s not that money isn’t real currency, it’s just an abstraction layer for tradable natural commodities like time, and energy, and space.
- kator 6y ago
  The only currency you're born with is time. The rest are acquired by the application of time.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    Lots of people are born with wealth. In fact that biggest factor in how much wealth you have is how much you are born with.
  - IggleSniggle 6y ago
    Really though? During that time, you occupy a space, and the spaces afforded you by the society you are born into define the constraints within which you can apply your time. That is, all of your "currency you are born with" is really "futures". Even the time on Earth you are allotted at birth is constrained by the environment you are born into.
zipwitch 6y ago
It seems appropriate to mention The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, a whirlwind sf novel where a large part of the story involves a city where the currency literally is Time. (When a person runs out of Time, they are transformed into a Quiet, mutely doing the necessary work to keep the city running, until they have earned enough Time to be restored to themselves.)
DrNuke 6y ago
Yeah, that’s why I can’t really understand fellows not willing to pay a tenner or two for any service, content or product that will make them spare hours and even days of their uniquely precious time!
carapace 6y ago
This is great! In re: time is money, it's even worse than that: attention is money. The quality of time varies with the "self-remembrance" if you will. - - - - Take time to "pop the 'why?' stack. In practice many of us are "yak shaving" and wasting a lot of time and effort on "low-leverage" actions. > yak shaving > [MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.] Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on. ~http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html - - - - The most metal programmers I know type hella fast. One guy in our office, we would play hangman and the only way to beat him was to figure out the word before he did, because the millisecond his brain "got it" you would hear a small explosion as he typed the word on his clicky keyboard in a single motion. If you figured out the word at the same time as he did he won. SOB could also write bug-free C++ by the page. At speed. Another guy I knew had a tiling WM and only used terminals. A vim man, he could type slightly faster then the system could respond, emitting a single stream of characters that flowed smoothly from vim to wm to shell and back again, his locus of attention flying around too fast to follow even if you knew what he was doing (editing and recompiling or whatever.) - - - - (Ooooo... Major points off for deep linking to XKCD without attribution. Bad pool. It's probably one of the most important and useful XKCD comicS. "Here’s an old comic..." ah, that's cold blooded.) Other than that, this is the best general advice for programmers that I've seen for a while. Yay!
- hackeryogi 6y ago
  Does xkcd even need attribution? I was sure most readers would recognise the art (if not the comic) :) Point taken and corrected (noob blogger mistakes!) Thanks!
  - carapace 6y ago
    You're a scholar and a gentleman! Well met! ("Does xkcd even need attribution?" Sir? https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ would you forego the delight of being the one who introduced somebody to XKCD? (^_^) <3 )
Rerarom 6y ago
I've often wondered what the world would look like if languages were actually theoretically different not just practically. I.e. what if you actually needed Fortran to write a program designed for scientific computation, or Prolog for GOFAI etc. Maybe some cases would fit into several languages ("I showed that SimCity is a special kind of database so you can write it in SQL") but you would have proven gaps in capabilities. Language disputes would be way more fun. P.S. After you finished thinking about this, think about what model theory would look like if Lindström's theorems were false.
fersho311 6y ago
I have a hard time empathizing with people’s desire for saving time or being efficient. I feel like all I have is time and I don’t mind helping others out when they need help, filling out useless forms, or waiting in line. Everything sort of have its own beauty. I’m not sure how I got here, but to me time just feels infinite.
- amakine 6y ago
  I really would love to believe that this mindset is possible, but I run into the following problem: If time really seems infinite to you, and you see the beauty in every "overly time-consuming" procedure, you must draw the line somewhere. If you wait in line, and every minute, the next in line is served, and you are standing in 5th place, you might think "ok, we've got to wait..give or take 5mins" Now imagine that every 50 seconds, someone cuts into the line ahead of you, with some plausible excuse (health-related, or "in a rush" or whatever else you'd accept). How many people do you allow to push you back before you decide to no longer allow people to cut ahead of you? I think that's where you draw the value of your time.
  - bittercynic 6y ago
    Not the one you asked, but I have a similar attitude, and some sense of trust and fairness is necessary to maintain this attitude. If I'm in urgent care for a relatively non-serious problem, and people who much more urgently need care keep getting served ahead of me, that just seems like the right way to do things, and I'll be happy to wait my turn, or eventually give up and go home. On the other hand, in line to pay for purchases I would not like for someone to cut in front of me. It's rude, and there is an established norm that they would be selfishly breaking.
mapcars 6y ago
>My Language is the best (Or, your language sucks) >No, it is not. Both Church and Turing proved that. This is not true, a simple check - are you writing in assembler/C? Why not? They are the fastest languages and both are perfectly complete from Church and Turing standpoint. But of course, there are thousands of other criteria that make the difference.
- ukj 6y ago
  Theoretical vs practical expressivity. You can always insist you were arguing for theoretical expressivity when people start throwing counter-examples at you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power_(computer_sci... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
seanwilson 6y ago
When comparing careers, I'm amazed how little people mention free time. You see people saying things like "I did blah to move from $X thousand a year to $Y thousand a year" but it's rare anyone mentions how much free time they have like "I earn $X thousand a year and have Y days off". I understand more money now could mean you'll have more free time later, but earning a lot with no time for your own personal growth doesn't sound great to me. I'd rather take a pay cut for substantially more time off.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  Over a forty year career, I only worked full time for perhaps 30% of that time. Sure, I left a lot of money on the table but my wife and I are still financially secure and working 25 to 32 hours a week on average gave me more time with friends and family, and time to write (which I enjoy doing). Spend effort on career and job skill development, but treat jobs as transactions of time for money, and I suggest devaluing the value of money once basic needs and saving for future needs are met.
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    > Over a forty year career, I only worked full time for perhaps 30% of that time. Sure, I left a lot of money on the table but my wife and I are still financially secure and working 25 to 32 hours a week on average gave me more time with friends and family, and time to write (which I enjoy doing). Exactly, that sounds amazing! I'd love to hear more people talk this way when they mention their earnings.
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Interesting premise and article. I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools. re: “ You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper,...” For difficult problems I think you do want to be this kind of person. Walking away from your laptop, sitting outside or anywhere relaxing with a pad of paper and a pen, and really thinking is a super power. The author’s good advice on spending a few minutes a day learning about your IDE/tools can also be applied to the idea of sitting quietly a few times a day with paper and pen and just thinking. If you don’t have this habit, how about trying it for just ten minutes a day to see if it pays off for your work style?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cloudier 6y ago
  This sounds like a good idea, and I’m planning to try it out. Thanks for sharing! I find that a lot of the time when I’m figuring out how to solve a problem, I need to read a lot of code. Is that something you do before you sit down with pen and paper?
  - mark_l_watson 6y ago
    I used to have the habit of printing out other people's code to read, and read it like I would a book. I stopped doing that a long time ago, but I used to get real value from doing that. I still like to read other people's code, but I am more likely to do it by browsing github on my iPad.
- wainstead 6y ago
  > I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools. Cannot one do both?
- almost_usual 6y ago
  I find myself discovering solutions to problems before falling asleep at night. Usually in some state of half awake and half asleep.
yahyaheee 6y ago
Power is currency
jiofih 6y ago
Isn’t it ironic that in the “young dev” section he tells stories of how he “set them straight” on their design choices, and then the next section is about the naivety of “your way is wrong”... The conversation on queues especially; I can absolutely side with the new dev there. Queues have guarantees, database writes have guarantees, you just pick the ones you care about, not decide based on irrational fear of losing data.
maitredusoi 6y ago
As time does not exist and is just a perception of the spirit, it cannot be a currency. Its apparence is too relative to oneself to have a scaling process...
moosey 6y ago
If you want to stop wasting your time, and want to learn something thoroughly and once, I would recommend learning how to use Anki effectively. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to learn new things, while simultaneously allowing me to remember them for far longer periods of time. I can currently stop an online course for months, and return to the same point when I come back, with far more knowledge of the subject than I had when I left. Anki, like using a calendar and communication tools effectively, is just pushing the burden of organization, memory and attention out of your head, and into your environment. This will not only save you time, but it will also, if set up right, give you that sense of peace of knowing that whatever you are doing is exactly where you should be. It's solid. I learned about it in "Learning How to Learn", but the mental concept stuff is from "The Organized Mind".
- keiferski 6y ago
  > learning how to use Anki effectively. I made this exact comment about two weeks ago, you might find it useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855046
  - moosey 6y ago
    In response to that previous comment, it should be noted that by using Anki daily, you will increase blood flow and connectivity in the hippocampus region. In turn, this will increase the amount of things that you can learn in a time period. I've been able to increase my new card count and review count over time without too much drain, and I answer questions far more quickly than I did when I started. It's my daily gym activity for my brain.
    - keiferski 6y ago
      I actually do Anki cards while at the gym, so I combine my physical and mental workouts ;)
- deleted 6y ago
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mauritzio 6y ago
What if we would give every person a fix amount of money every week during lifetime. Where money older then a year becomes worthless? No inherithing, no accumulation, no positive interest. Because every person is worth the same and all we do, is spending our lifetime doing stuff keeping us busy.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > Where money older then a year becomes worthless? No inherithing, no accumulation, no positive interest. Rampant inflation as every dollar is shoveled into assets.
  - mauritzio 6y ago
    Don't think so then there is no real inflation: the total assets equals automatically the amount of money month after month after month.. Better then the never ending growing amount of inflation paper we have noadays.
dathinab 6y ago
> Learn to type Fast Nah, IMHO the crux is not to type and still get stuff done. If you have to type tones of overhead it's what hurts. And with this I don't mean long method names (you have auto completion for that). But thinks like not using derives in Rust ;=) or not using annotations in Java. Also for many of the more well established languages there are ways to "connect a remote server to your IDE" so that you _never_ _ever_ need to manually ssh into a server and change thinks there with some text only based tool (besides the fact that there are a lot of server setups where you ain't be able to do that anyway).
grdeken 6y ago
Clearly you have not heard of memes, the only currency that matters.
borismus 6y ago
Here I was expecting deep truths: spend time with those you love, don’t squander your time on meaningless drivel that neither enhances the mind nor expands the heart. But all I got were software engineering life hacks!
DavidVoid 6y ago
If you really want to take the "Learn to type fast" advice to heart you can get a Georgi keyboard [1] and spend a few months learning stenography [2]. That can get you typing at above 200 WPM! (but it does require a significant amount of time to learn) [1] https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g
- progx 6y ago
  For a book author this seems a good thing, but for a developer? We use so many special chars, i cant imagine that it is faster.
  - DavidVoid 6y ago
    You can make custom chords for special chars and type them just as quickly as any other "word". Here's an example of someone writing some javascript code with a steno keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w I don't use it myself but I assume that it would be faster than regular QWERTY typing, but only once you've used it for several years.
jpswade 6y ago
I really didn’t think this got to the heart of what makes time being the only real currency such a great insight. The rest of the article goes on to deliver, frankly an opinionated way for young developers to act to maximise on their time. I really think this is short sighted and honestly all of that can be boiled down to having the ability to scale yourself effectively. It’s basically about Kaizen, continuous improvement, but perhaps ironically that takes time.
lisper 6y ago
I agree with the sentiment of this article, but strongly disagree with the title, and the advice to learn to type fast. The title is abuse (or misunderstanding) of the word "currency". Currency is an accounting mechanism. Time is, well, something else. It's an incredibly valuable commodity, a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient for any activity and hence any kind of progress, and one which you cannot make more of and so is worth using wisely. But comparing it to currency is a category error. Which brings me to my second point: it seems intuitively obvious that if you want to use time wisely you should use it efficiently, and typing faster is more efficient than typing slower. But this overlooks a crucial point: typing faster can only produce a linear improvement in your efficiency. If you type twice as fast, you will be able to type twice as many characters in the same amount of time. But there is another dynamic in play: if you type slowly, then the cost of typing will become more painfully evident to you, and that can motivate you to think about ways to type less, and that can lead to exponential improvements in typing efficiency. I have been coding for forty-one years. I never learned proper touch-typing, and so my typing has always been quite slow by coder standards. As a result, typing boilerplate is extremely painful for me, and I try to avoid it at all costs. That drove me to learn Lisp, and that has led me to a coding style where I only need a tiny fraction of the code that, say, a Java programmer needs to do the same job. So yes, I type 2x slower, but I only have to type 0.1x the amount of code for a net win of 5x. And the techniques that lead me to that win can be applied recursively. There are domains in which I can get 100x or 1000x improvements (i.e. 1 line of Lisp code is the equivalent of 1000 lines of Java or C). I never would have been motivated to learn those techniques if I were able to type fast.
- pipingdog 6y ago
  The very first time I typed in a C program to accomplish a specific task and it worked without defects was over a 300 baud dialup connection. Name the part of the car that enables it to go fast: the brakes.
- cmckn 6y ago
  The typing advice seems out of place in the post, but I would encourage everyone to learn touch typing purely for the enjoyment of it. I find it really satisfying. I also think there are ergonomic benefits that outweigh any increased efficiency. Like the author concludes, though, nothing is "absolutely wrong" and to each their own :)
PeterStuer 6y ago
That is what I have been saying to my friends for a long time. It is one of the most important things to learn. You can get back anything but time. So be very conscious about who you go give your time. No-one is 'offering you a job'. They are 'buying a piece of your lifetime'.
narrator 6y ago
One thing Marx got wrong was saying labor is the universal unit of COST and not of value. That cost does not always equal value is something that communism doesn't understand about human effort.
jccalhoun 6y ago
This is only true in the Western industrialized world. Monochronic time orientation is not the only orientation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics Time is only money if you think of it that way. If your typing speed is holding you back from things then sure learn to type faster. But I don't type nonstop for hours at a time. A sentence here or there and then reflection.
kaonwarb 6y ago
Reminds me of a quote from Brigham Young: "“Time is all the capital stock there is on the earth. … If properly used, it brings that which will add to your comfort, convenience, and satisfaction.” [1] I think of that occasionally when wasting my time in "free" distractions. [1] (Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, sel. John A. Widtsoe [1954], 214).
Aperocky 6y ago
The only real currency should be energy. Joules. MJs for sake of unit sanity. Energies are cheap where they're produced, but you have to spend extra MJs to send them to where you need it. Having a few thousands MJs in Pluto bank will make you rich there. But it requires millions of Earth MJ to send energy to Pluto. The exchange rate of course fluctuates with space infrastructure and flattens out when better technology of sending and storing energy becomes available.
kazagistar 6y ago
Currency exists purely as a construct of human minds. It depends on exclusive ownership and individuals, both of which are mental fabrications, and far more flexible then we make them out to be. Article has great advice though.
choeger 6y ago
> Figure how/where your application code runs. Most important advise to become a useful software engineer. I did not want to believe how many developers just did not give a damn about what exactly makes their code execute and when that happens.
acituan 6y ago
I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don't have an imperative to be as productive as possible. They don't have to make the most use of their time. They don't have to get as efficient as they could. These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But humans are not machines. Sure, we shepherd the machines, and sure sometimes we are in rivalrous dynamics that increasing efficiency has a payoff, but it is never the goal in itself. The real "currency" we have, if we are using the term in the sense of denoting essentialness, is our humanness, our mortality, our psyches, our connection with other people and seemingly mundane but meaningful parts of our lives. I mean, look how many of us started baking their breads and enjoying it. It is not a wise use of the "currency of time", but it is part of life very well spent, as our internal reward mechanisms have been telling us.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Yep. This attitude of being your own little manager of your own life and treating it like an incremental game is horrible. In James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games there one chapter on how the use of machines works both ways. It doesn't only shape the machine but it makes the person more 'machine-like'. In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around. It's I think very evident in the way we communicate today or how everything becomes 'gamified' or even how dating works. Success today has to be defined in formal or quantifiable terms not because anyone actually consciously chose to do it, but because it's the only way you can put it in a computer, which actually was supposed to exist to empower people. It's pretty sad honestly.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    > In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around. I remember an article a while back where archaeologists examined the bones of pre-Columbian women in America. The bones showed the signs of long term debilitating, repetitive work from kneeling and grinding, by hand, corn into flour. Just last night I watched an American Experience episode on the guy who revolutionized wheat farming. He spent his youth on a farm, harvesting corn by hand, estimating that he'd harvested 1 million ears per season by himself. He was amazed at how wonderful it was to get a machine that mechanized corn harvesting. I'd much rather mow my lawn with a mower than a pair of scissors. In the 1960s, my dad was writing a book. My mom would type up the drafts for him. Every new draft meant my mom would spend hours banging it out on the typewriter. Think how much easier that is today with our "dehumanizing" computers. Can you imagine today typing the whole thing over again because you made a misteak? Machines have largely free'd us from dehumanizing labor, not caused it.
noiv 6y ago
Check out the work of Carlo Rovelli and start considering time as a human construct. It is not needed to explain the world and physics around us. Isn't framing time as a currency while proposing it as part of the universe just an attempt of fraud? It feels like getting offered shiny glass beads while taking things of real value.
- subhobroto 6y ago
  > It feels like getting offered shiny glass beads while taking things of real value It indeed is if you consider majority of work is not time sensetive even if the person explicitly telling you so, absolutely convinces you that's the case. This becomes clearer when you move on from an employee to a business owner and the only person you answer to is your customer. Unless there's a literal environmental disaster, like when my community went up in flames during the California fires - everything else can wait. Even during the flames burning, houses that were almost on fire were in a waiting line behind houses on fire. The only reason why "it was due yesterday" works is because the employee believes their value is worth less than what the employer values them at.
deleted 6y ago
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dfischer 6y ago
What if Karma is real and that’s the only currency we need?
zelly 6y ago
This article is a real failure in the rule of Profile Before Optimizing. Changing your editor or whatever is a micro-optimization. Among professions where typing is involved, programmers type the least number of keystrokes. Secretaries and data entry clerks type much more and often much faster than programmers. Also, a lot of typing is not even characters into the editor but keyboard shortcuts. The real time killers are mental--fatigue, boredom, procrastination, anxiety, and so on. How many hours do you spend a week on HN or social media? How long are you going to take to do that big refactor you've been putting off? How long do you spend in useless meetings or chats you're not persuasive enough to get out of? At what point is RTFMing too long procrastination? How long do you spend watching N*tflix at home if you really want to get that side project done? The bottleneck is never your typing speed or your editor commands. That is snake oil by script kiddies trying to sell you something.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  That's a great and underappreciated point. I'm really fond of my endless tinkering in Emacs, to optimize and automate away all kinds of repetition and tedium. But when I do a honest accounting I realize that, even though my newest tweak that took 30 minutes to make will probably save me a hundred hours in the long run, I'll blow more than a hundred hours over the next month procrastinating on HN because of anxiety about starting tasks. Like I'm doing right now - I was supposed to take an hour off for some personal "me and my thoughts time" an hour ago. But HN is just more immediately gratifying. It's true for me and I guess for many (most?) programmers: the limiting factor is inadequate capacity to control my own emotional state.
  - zelly 6y ago
    > I'm really fond of my endless tinkering in Emacs, to optimize and automate away all kinds of repetition and tedium Me too, my .emacs.d directory has thousands of commits. It's fun. All procrastination is fun. It feels mischievous and therefore exhilarating.
deleted 6y ago
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lerpapoo 6y ago
some are worth more than others.
koolhead17 6y ago
Stoics[1] said the same many thousand years back. * On shortness of life by Seneca
hartator 6y ago
Money is technically just a proxy of other people time when you think about it.
kiewszvaf123 6y ago
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DesiLurker 6y ago
its attention much more than time, attention is compressed time.
HeavyStorm 6y ago
Time would be a currency if had inherent value, and furthermore, if that value was normalized for all people. Time has value, but the value isn't inherent to it, it how you use the time. And that value is relative to the individual, can't be traded between peers, sold or bought. Time is probably a concept as far from currency as I could ever imagine. (I once read that Focus is more valuable than time, btw. It's also not a currency, but it has much more value)
abiogenesis 6y ago
> If you write code for long enough, you will come across code that would want you to become the proverbial psychopath and shoot the original author. I do come across such code all the time, and most of the time it's my own code.
lcall 6y ago
I wrote here about direction in life. Simple tech; I hope it is skimmable/browseable: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854588981.html http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854588981.html . I think direction matters more than speed. Even without a belief in God, but I explain why I do.

595 points by hackeryogi 6y ago

smitty1e 6y ago

And yet it "keeps onslipping, slipping, slipping into the future". This implies that tomorrow is a bank.

julienreszka 6y ago

What about attention, attention is the real currency

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Attention is time. They are interchangeable for the discussion.
- naringas 6y ago
  attention is 'dedicated' (or focused) time
- carapace 6y ago
  Not at all. All moments are not created equal. If you're stressed out, hungry, got the low-blood sugar, tired, distracted, etc. your attention is much less valuable (to you) than if you're relaxed, well-fed and -rested, focused, etc. One of the greatest forms of "leverage" we have in the world is the capability of developing and focusing the quality of our attention, "concentration" or "one-point mind". That's why meditation is worthwhile (one of the reasons anyway) because, paradoxically, sitting and doing "nothing" for an hour makes the other 10~12 hours way more productive, due to the improvement in Q-of-A[ttention].
naggreg 6y ago
Isn't that equivalent to giving time to someone?
- julienreszka 6y ago
  No it is not. Put idiots in a Stanford class they won't be able to do much of the time given to them by Ivy League professor since they won't be able to pay attention
  - rational_indian 6y ago
    I don't think this is a sound argument. How does it demonstrate attention being not equivalent to time? At best it shows the professor's attention / time / money can be wasted by dull students. Was this ever under dispute?
    - julienreszka 6y ago
      What was under dispute is whether time is the only real currency. I say it is not and I say it's attention that is the real currency because that's what you really allocate.
dlkf 6y ago
I think this is a very good point, and I find the reasons for which it is getting downvoted wholly unconvincing. Time is only good insofar as I have the mental/physical energy to take advantage of it. Lots of tasks double-dip in the time they take require from you - firstly when you perform them, and secondly, when you're too tired to be creative in the free time that is left over.
- julienreszka 6y ago
  It is downvoted because many people who lack philosophical and historical culture believe in the myth of productivism. Largely debunked during the 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement

toreminddit 6y ago

It’s well known. Business buy other businesses to save time.

pgt 6y ago

Ah, but what are you doing with the time you have? Is what you’re doing saving other people time?

hackeryogi 6y ago
Hopefully - that's what we're working on :)

lucb1e 6y ago

The movie "in time" (2011) kind of explores this. At the time, I wrote: > it gets you thinking. What prevents time from being used as currency? Or are we really doing the same by paying people an hourly rate instead of based on their accomplishments? Not to mention how many lives that million years capsule must have cost.

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
This explores it in a rather poor way. Once you and all your friends have a hundred year on your accounts, why not just stop working in this society and just go build a new civilization using bottle caps as means of exchange? Why being slaves to people who fix prices for everything all the time? Also. Economy there had no sense. Every person is passively using 24h worth of 'money' every day by simply existing. That means, to make ends meet they must earn 24h + some surpus to make a living, but the dude earned something like 5 hours in a shift (he had ~23:55 before shift, and 1:04:50 after. If shift lasted 8 hours, he was making just 13 hours per day - totally unsustainable. The idea was nice, but I feel it was a somewhat wasted potential.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Yes sure, it's a mainstream movie and meant as entertainment rather than educatively. But for being a mainstream movie, I liked that it made me think about this.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Titanic was a mainstream movie, but the attention to detail is on another level entirely. They just didnt develop the concept enough and think though the consequences. There is a great plot in there somewhere
Rerarom 6y ago
I hated that movie, it showed only the very poor and the very rich, while showing that they don't make up the whole world. I couldn't empathize with anyone.

r32a_ 6y ago

This is why a fixed currency makes sense. You work and convert your time into currency which can be traded for other goods or services. When currency is manipulated, it allows the manipulator to make your currency worth more or less. effectively theft.

keiferski 6y ago

I’ve often wondered what society would look like if optimized for saving people time. Just some quick thoughts: - Crosswalks and traffic lights would become non-existent and replaced with more pedestrian overpasses, turning/merging lanes, and other designs. Waiting for the light to change is a huge waste of time for both pedestrians and drivers. It seems like we might get this eventually with self-driving cars. - Minimization of waiting rooms. If your appointment will be delayed, you’ll be informed of it ahead of time via SMS. Time slots are strictly enforced to avoid overlap. - Purchase and checkout items while you shop, rather than waiting in line at a cash register. Or just skip shopping in person and order everything via delivery. - Adoption of remote work and minimization of unnecessary commutes. Plus faster public transit in general. Japan is pretty good with this (the Shinkansen is impressive.)

naringas 6y ago
there are many pedestrian overpasses in some big cities (like the one I live in) but it's not so simple, because then you have to climb up stairs, which takes more time... you walk more steps add some heavy duty sun and people rather wait in the shade down below rather than climb up. Also pedestrian overpasses tend to be really narrow (read: uncomfortable) Also, why should we be so stingy with time? it's better (IMHO) to lived relaxed, otherwise we will end up under conditions similar (they say) to amazon warehouse workers which have their bathroom breaks measured in seconds.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  > why should we be so stingy with time? Because it's fungible. If I save 10 seconds, maybe I get to keep those for myself.
  - zdkl 6y ago
    I think an interesting question is whether we are respectively good judges on the "real" value of those ten saved seconds vs more abstract quality of life issues such as mental health or reductions in stress.
  - 6y ago

celeritascelery 6y ago

> TurboCharge your Dev Environment This section feels like a stub where the author forgot to finish it. Was really hoping for some good ideas.

hackeryogi 6y ago
Thanks for the feedback. It does have a short write up on things to do. I have a lot more opinions on that, but was trying to balance out the overall length of the post. Will try having one out just on the dev environment :)
- celeritascelery 6y ago
  Looking at it again I didn’t realize the following sections were actually part of that header because the headers were the same size and style. I thought it was only that one paragraph about Jedi. That was my fault.

the-dude 6y ago

TL;DR anyone? Time is money after all.

carlosf 6y ago
- be efficient at doing stuff - automate stuff - avoid time sinks - be pragmatic about technology choices This isn't article isn't about currency, btw.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Sure it is.

naringas 6y ago

it seems to me, that this has to do with a fundamental difference between selling products and selling services (I don't mean not software services) when you are making products (material widgets of any kind) it is possible to achieve marginal costs with parallel and serial manufacture, and with technology and specialized machines. but if you're selling service (e.g. a waiter) then it's not really possible to "industrialize" production the same way and don't get me started on software (becuase I wouldn't know how to start)

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

I'd really like to get better at touch typing, is GNU Typist a solid recommendation, or are there better ones?

artsyca 6y ago
If you're serious about typing ditch the QWERTY layout and learn something that's actually optimized for the language of your choice it's so naive to attempt mastery of a broken paradigm without ever questioning that paradigm as in the case of the broken and arbitrary key layout from 1873
artsyca 6y ago
As a recommendation I'd suggest the typing of the dead hands down the funnest way to learn touch typing as well I recommend the DVORAK key layout because it's much more suited to touch typing as one's hands require far less travel and therefore less propensity for error
dredmorbius 6y ago
If you can find one, a Gregg college typing typing self-study guide. https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="gregg%20college%20typing" https://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q="gregg... https://archive.org/search.php?query=Gregg+College+Keyboarding https://archive.org/search.php?query=Gregg+College+Keyboardi... Self-taught before secondary school in about six weeks, among my best investments ever. So long as it's a QWERTY layout, publication year really doesn'y matter.
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
Found this, looks very nice: https://www.keybr.com/ https://www.keybr.com/

cryptica 6y ago

Unfortunately, in essentially all big corporations, the incentives encourage developers to waste as much time as possible - Mostly by focusing their attention on creating elaborate and ever-changing development processes and constantly adding unnecessary software complexity at the same time. This doesn't work well at all when you also allow individuals to detach themselves from any responsibility over the code that they produce. The culture of wasting time is so pervasive that the vast majority of developers who practice it don't even realize that they're doing it - Ironically, they're often the same people who write long articles about how to be productive and who brag about how organized and full their schedule is and how they're using all the latest productivity tools and how high their test coverage % is and how good their workflow and CI pipeline is... I call BS on all this. People who spend most of their time explicitly thinking about processes are bureaucrats. Truly productive people don't need to think about processes, they evolve naturally through sweat and tears; good processes are the byproduct (emphasis on the word 'byproduct') of a focused mindset of desperately wanting to achieve specific goals, not the mindset of ticking-off boxes from a static checklist where you don't even understand the underlying purpose of the work. You cannot be productive without a clear sense of purpose and goals. Unfortunately most software jobs today lack purpose - In this case it makes no sense to even talk about productivity. How can you know how productive (how fast you're moving towards your goal) you are if you don't even know what the end goal is. Finishing something is not a goal, it's a task. A goal is about a deeper purpose. Also if your goal is to help your company earn more money, this is only a worthy goal if you have a way to check your personal progress towards that goal. Usually this is not possible to do in a big company because there are too many people working towards different goals within the same company (sometimes even conflicting goals); the reality is that your work probably doesn't matter so there is no such thing as productivity in a corporate environment because it's not possible to measure the impact of your work in relation to achieving a real company goal... However, if your goal is to maximize your personal ranking or salary within the company, this is a goal against which it is easy to measure progress; that's why personal goals trump company goals every time. KPIs are a ridiculous, completely futile attempt to fix this problem.

andrey_utkin 6y ago
This. I've been thinking about this for last few sleepless nights. I am at a start-up which has grown to 61 person. The tight connection of everybody's everyday contributions to company survival has declined. A rigourous accountability and incentives framework is still missing and there's no time and resources to build it now. Most of employees don't know what is more or less important and by how exactly much. I found interesting the concept of Internal Market. This book appears to be describing exactly what I got in my mind: "Internal Markets: Bringing the Power of Free Enterprise Inside Your Organization ".

ciconia 6y ago

Somehow the idea that time is our only currency is conflated with efficiency. Yes, time is the most limited resources we have, and therefore the most precious, but does this mean we have to squeeze every last bit of productivity from our time? Do we really have to keep running all the time, always optimising for more efficiency? I would say the exact opposite. If time is our most precious asset, let's rather spend it on what's really important: family, friends, community, environment, happiness, harmony. Let's pass our time doing things we love just the pleasure of doing it, rather than chasing after money, success of whatever. Let's live in the moment, for the moment.

keiferski 6y ago
I don’t think these are separate things at all. Being efficient with your work time is great because it lets you spend more time with family, friends, and so on. Long commutes are really the killer here: it’s super difficult to cook a family dinner if you get off work at 6:00, spend 30-60 minutes commuting home, 30 minutes buying groceries, another 30 minutes cooking, etc. Working from home and then cooking dinner with delivered groceries gives you an extra hour+ with your family.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  > Long commutes are really the killer here They are, but you are on HN so it's safe to assume you have other options, so why do you commute?
  - keiferski 6y ago
    I meant in general, for society. Personally I have a 10 minute bike commute to a private office because I prefer to have a little bit of space between work and home.
    - tluyben2 6y ago
      I think many people have that issue; they cannot actually stay at home doing what they want. It is a restricting factor actually creating the commuting issue you mention. Many people need to go to the office. I think it would be better to educate the kids to not have that mental hangup. Personally I never had that feeling (and never worked in an office for 25+ years; I am at my kitchen table and so is my wife); I was expecting to hear either of a) I have no other choice, because job/money b) I need space between work & home. Over the years I had business partners trying the same thing and getting divorced (like now with the virus; people simply cannot sit at home or endure their spouse and kids); maybe it wasn't too solid to begin with?

seventytwo 6y ago

Parameters of the universe are currency. Time is one of them, space (or area on earth’s surface) is another, and energy is a third. How these three things are used is what generates value to human beings. Each of the fundamental items can be traded individually, but money is used as a proxy for value. The most common trade is when a person can trade their time and their body’s energy. They produce some level of value using those two inputs, and receive money (a proxy for that value) in exchange. A person who can generate more value with the same amount of time and energy should be receiving more money than someone who generates less value, as money is only a proxy for value. People can also secure space. We’re used to thinking in terms of real estate, which always prices in the value of a structure or natural resources or potential on top of the raw spatial resource. But the raw three dimensional space can be traded as well, just like time or energy, as it is finite for humans. Money is just a tangible abstraction later on top of these fundamental parameters of the universe we trade. Providing lots of energy in a small space in a short period of time is incredibly valuable to humans, and so money reflects that. Using energy and time and space in a more efficient way to produce something in a factory is valuable, so money reflects that. It’s not that money isn’t real currency, it’s just an abstraction layer for tradable natural commodities like time, and energy, and space.

kator 6y ago
The only currency you're born with is time. The rest are acquired by the application of time.
- jandrese 6y ago
  Lots of people are born with wealth. In fact that biggest factor in how much wealth you have is how much you are born with.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  Really though? During that time, you occupy a space, and the spaces afforded you by the society you are born into define the constraints within which you can apply your time. That is, all of your "currency you are born with" is really "futures". Even the time on Earth you are allotted at birth is constrained by the environment you are born into.

zipwitch 6y ago

It seems appropriate to mention The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, a whirlwind sf novel where a large part of the story involves a city where the currency literally is Time. (When a person runs out of Time, they are transformed into a Quiet, mutely doing the necessary work to keep the city running, until they have earned enough Time to be restored to themselves.)

DrNuke 6y ago

Yeah, that’s why I can’t really understand fellows not willing to pay a tenner or two for any service, content or product that will make them spare hours and even days of their uniquely precious time!

carapace 6y ago

This is great! In re: time is money, it's even worse than that: attention is money. The quality of time varies with the "self-remembrance" if you will. - - - - Take time to "pop the 'why?' stack. In practice many of us are "yak shaving" and wasting a lot of time and effort on "low-leverage" actions. > yak shaving > [MIT AI Lab, after 2000: orig. probably from a Ren & Stimpy episode.] Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on. ~http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html - - - - The most metal programmers I know type hella fast. One guy in our office, we would play hangman and the only way to beat him was to figure out the word before he did, because the millisecond his brain "got it" you would hear a small explosion as he typed the word on his clicky keyboard in a single motion. If you figured out the word at the same time as he did he won. SOB could also write bug-free C++ by the page. At speed. Another guy I knew had a tiling WM and only used terminals. A vim man, he could type slightly faster then the system could respond, emitting a single stream of characters that flowed smoothly from vim to wm to shell and back again, his locus of attention flying around too fast to follow even if you knew what he was doing (editing and recompiling or whatever.) - - - - (Ooooo... Major points off for deep linking to XKCD without attribution. Bad pool. It's probably one of the most important and useful XKCD comicS. "Here’s an old comic..." ah, that's cold blooded.) Other than that, this is the best general advice for programmers that I've seen for a while. Yay!

hackeryogi 6y ago
Does xkcd even need attribution? I was sure most readers would recognise the art (if not the comic) :) Point taken and corrected (noob blogger mistakes!) Thanks!
- carapace 6y ago
  You're a scholar and a gentleman! Well met! ("Does xkcd even need attribution?" Sir? https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ would you forego the delight of being the one who introduced somebody to XKCD? (^_^) <3 )

Rerarom 6y ago

I've often wondered what the world would look like if languages were actually theoretically different not just practically. I.e. what if you actually needed Fortran to write a program designed for scientific computation, or Prolog for GOFAI etc. Maybe some cases would fit into several languages ("I showed that SimCity is a special kind of database so you can write it in SQL") but you would have proven gaps in capabilities. Language disputes would be way more fun. P.S. After you finished thinking about this, think about what model theory would look like if Lindström's theorems were false.

fersho311 6y ago

I have a hard time empathizing with people’s desire for saving time or being efficient. I feel like all I have is time and I don’t mind helping others out when they need help, filling out useless forms, or waiting in line. Everything sort of have its own beauty. I’m not sure how I got here, but to me time just feels infinite.

amakine 6y ago
I really would love to believe that this mindset is possible, but I run into the following problem: If time really seems infinite to you, and you see the beauty in every "overly time-consuming" procedure, you must draw the line somewhere. If you wait in line, and every minute, the next in line is served, and you are standing in 5th place, you might think "ok, we've got to wait..give or take 5mins" Now imagine that every 50 seconds, someone cuts into the line ahead of you, with some plausible excuse (health-related, or "in a rush" or whatever else you'd accept). How many people do you allow to push you back before you decide to no longer allow people to cut ahead of you? I think that's where you draw the value of your time.
- bittercynic 6y ago
  Not the one you asked, but I have a similar attitude, and some sense of trust and fairness is necessary to maintain this attitude. If I'm in urgent care for a relatively non-serious problem, and people who much more urgently need care keep getting served ahead of me, that just seems like the right way to do things, and I'll be happy to wait my turn, or eventually give up and go home. On the other hand, in line to pay for purchases I would not like for someone to cut in front of me. It's rude, and there is an established norm that they would be selfishly breaking.

mapcars 6y ago

>My Language is the best (Or, your language sucks) >No, it is not. Both Church and Turing proved that. This is not true, a simple check - are you writing in assembler/C? Why not? They are the fastest languages and both are perfectly complete from Church and Turing standpoint. But of course, there are thousands of other criteria that make the difference.

ukj 6y ago
Theoretical vs practical expressivity. You can always insist you were arguing for theoretical expressivity when people start throwing counter-examples at you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_power_(computer_sci... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit

seanwilson 6y ago

When comparing careers, I'm amazed how little people mention free time. You see people saying things like "I did blah to move from $X thousand a year to $Y thousand a year" but it's rare anyone mentions how much free time they have like "I earn $X thousand a year and have Y days off". I understand more money now could mean you'll have more free time later, but earning a lot with no time for your own personal growth doesn't sound great to me. I'd rather take a pay cut for substantially more time off.

mark_l_watson 6y ago
Over a forty year career, I only worked full time for perhaps 30% of that time. Sure, I left a lot of money on the table but my wife and I are still financially secure and working 25 to 32 hours a week on average gave me more time with friends and family, and time to write (which I enjoy doing). Spend effort on career and job skill development, but treat jobs as transactions of time for money, and I suggest devaluing the value of money once basic needs and saving for future needs are met.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  > Over a forty year career, I only worked full time for perhaps 30% of that time. Sure, I left a lot of money on the table but my wife and I are still financially secure and working 25 to 32 hours a week on average gave me more time with friends and family, and time to write (which I enjoy doing). Exactly, that sounds amazing! I'd love to hear more people talk this way when they mention their earnings.

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Interesting premise and article. I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools. re: “ You don’t want to be the person who thinks their problem through on a piece of paper,...” For difficult problems I think you do want to be this kind of person. Walking away from your laptop, sitting outside or anywhere relaxing with a pad of paper and a pen, and really thinking is a super power. The author’s good advice on spending a few minutes a day learning about your IDE/tools can also be applied to the idea of sitting quietly a few times a day with paper and pen and just thinking. If you don’t have this habit, how about trying it for just ten minutes a day to see if it pays off for your work style?

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cloudier 6y ago
This sounds like a good idea, and I’m planning to try it out. Thanks for sharing! I find that a lot of the time when I’m figuring out how to solve a problem, I need to read a lot of code. Is that something you do before you sit down with pen and paper?
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I used to have the habit of printing out other people's code to read, and read it like I would a book. I stopped doing that a long time ago, but I used to get real value from doing that. I still like to read other people's code, but I am more likely to do it by browsing github on my iPad.
wainstead 6y ago
> I do disagree with a lot of it since I believe more in maximizing human potential through mindfulness and tuning ourselves instead of our tools. Cannot one do both?
almost_usual 6y ago
I find myself discovering solutions to problems before falling asleep at night. Usually in some state of half awake and half asleep.

yahyaheee 6y ago

Power is currency

jiofih 6y ago

Isn’t it ironic that in the “young dev” section he tells stories of how he “set them straight” on their design choices, and then the next section is about the naivety of “your way is wrong”... The conversation on queues especially; I can absolutely side with the new dev there. Queues have guarantees, database writes have guarantees, you just pick the ones you care about, not decide based on irrational fear of losing data.

maitredusoi 6y ago

As time does not exist and is just a perception of the spirit, it cannot be a currency. Its apparence is too relative to oneself to have a scaling process...

moosey 6y ago

If you want to stop wasting your time, and want to learn something thoroughly and once, I would recommend learning how to use Anki effectively. It has reduced the amount of time it takes to learn new things, while simultaneously allowing me to remember them for far longer periods of time. I can currently stop an online course for months, and return to the same point when I come back, with far more knowledge of the subject than I had when I left. Anki, like using a calendar and communication tools effectively, is just pushing the burden of organization, memory and attention out of your head, and into your environment. This will not only save you time, but it will also, if set up right, give you that sense of peace of knowing that whatever you are doing is exactly where you should be. It's solid. I learned about it in "Learning How to Learn", but the mental concept stuff is from "The Organized Mind".

keiferski 6y ago
> learning how to use Anki effectively. I made this exact comment about two weeks ago, you might find it useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855046 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22855046
- moosey 6y ago
  In response to that previous comment, it should be noted that by using Anki daily, you will increase blood flow and connectivity in the hippocampus region. In turn, this will increase the amount of things that you can learn in a time period. I've been able to increase my new card count and review count over time without too much drain, and I answer questions far more quickly than I did when I started. It's my daily gym activity for my brain.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    I actually do Anki cards while at the gym, so I combine my physical and mental workouts ;)
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mauritzio 6y ago

What if we would give every person a fix amount of money every week during lifetime. Where money older then a year becomes worthless? No inherithing, no accumulation, no positive interest. Because every person is worth the same and all we do, is spending our lifetime doing stuff keeping us busy.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> Where money older then a year becomes worthless? No inherithing, no accumulation, no positive interest. Rampant inflation as every dollar is shoveled into assets.
- mauritzio 6y ago
  Don't think so then there is no real inflation: the total assets equals automatically the amount of money month after month after month.. Better then the never ending growing amount of inflation paper we have noadays.

dathinab 6y ago

> Learn to type Fast Nah, IMHO the crux is not to type and still get stuff done. If you have to type tones of overhead it's what hurts. And with this I don't mean long method names (you have auto completion for that). But thinks like not using derives in Rust ;=) or not using annotations in Java. Also for many of the more well established languages there are ways to "connect a remote server to your IDE" so that you _never_ _ever_ need to manually ssh into a server and change thinks there with some text only based tool (besides the fact that there are a lot of server setups where you ain't be able to do that anyway).

grdeken 6y ago

Clearly you have not heard of memes, the only currency that matters.

borismus 6y ago

Here I was expecting deep truths: spend time with those you love, don’t squander your time on meaningless drivel that neither enhances the mind nor expands the heart. But all I got were software engineering life hacks!

DavidVoid 6y ago

If you really want to take the "Learn to type fast" advice to heart you can get a Georgi keyboard [1] and spend a few months learning stenography [2]. That can get you typing at above 200 WPM! (but it does require a significant amount of time to learn) [1] https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g

progx 6y ago
For a book author this seems a good thing, but for a developer? We use so many special chars, i cant imagine that it is faster.
- DavidVoid 6y ago
  You can make custom chords for special chars and type them just as quickly as any other "word". Here's an example of someone writing some javascript code with a steno keyboard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w I don't use it myself but I assume that it would be faster than regular QWERTY typing, but only once you've used it for several years.

jpswade 6y ago

I really didn’t think this got to the heart of what makes time being the only real currency such a great insight. The rest of the article goes on to deliver, frankly an opinionated way for young developers to act to maximise on their time. I really think this is short sighted and honestly all of that can be boiled down to having the ability to scale yourself effectively. It’s basically about Kaizen, continuous improvement, but perhaps ironically that takes time.

lisper 6y ago

I agree with the sentiment of this article, but strongly disagree with the title, and the advice to learn to type fast. The title is abuse (or misunderstanding) of the word "currency". Currency is an accounting mechanism. Time is, well, something else. It's an incredibly valuable commodity, a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient for any activity and hence any kind of progress, and one which you cannot make more of and so is worth using wisely. But comparing it to currency is a category error. Which brings me to my second point: it seems intuitively obvious that if you want to use time wisely you should use it efficiently, and typing faster is more efficient than typing slower. But this overlooks a crucial point: typing faster can only produce a linear improvement in your efficiency. If you type twice as fast, you will be able to type twice as many characters in the same amount of time. But there is another dynamic in play: if you type slowly, then the cost of typing will become more painfully evident to you, and that can motivate you to think about ways to type less, and that can lead to exponential improvements in typing efficiency. I have been coding for forty-one years. I never learned proper touch-typing, and so my typing has always been quite slow by coder standards. As a result, typing boilerplate is extremely painful for me, and I try to avoid it at all costs. That drove me to learn Lisp, and that has led me to a coding style where I only need a tiny fraction of the code that, say, a Java programmer needs to do the same job. So yes, I type 2x slower, but I only have to type 0.1x the amount of code for a net win of 5x. And the techniques that lead me to that win can be applied recursively. There are domains in which I can get 100x or 1000x improvements (i.e. 1 line of Lisp code is the equivalent of 1000 lines of Java or C). I never would have been motivated to learn those techniques if I were able to type fast.

pipingdog 6y ago
The very first time I typed in a C program to accomplish a specific task and it worked without defects was over a 300 baud dialup connection. Name the part of the car that enables it to go fast: the brakes.
cmckn 6y ago
The typing advice seems out of place in the post, but I would encourage everyone to learn touch typing purely for the enjoyment of it. I find it really satisfying. I also think there are ergonomic benefits that outweigh any increased efficiency. Like the author concludes, though, nothing is "absolutely wrong" and to each their own :)

PeterStuer 6y ago

That is what I have been saying to my friends for a long time. It is one of the most important things to learn. You can get back anything but time. So be very conscious about who you go give your time. No-one is 'offering you a job'. They are 'buying a piece of your lifetime'.

narrator 6y ago

One thing Marx got wrong was saying labor is the universal unit of COST and not of value. That cost does not always equal value is something that communism doesn't understand about human effort.

jccalhoun 6y ago

This is only true in the Western industrialized world. Monochronic time orientation is not the only orientation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronemics Time is only money if you think of it that way. If your typing speed is holding you back from things then sure learn to type faster. But I don't type nonstop for hours at a time. A sentence here or there and then reflection.

kaonwarb 6y ago

Reminds me of a quote from Brigham Young: "“Time is all the capital stock there is on the earth. … If properly used, it brings that which will add to your comfort, convenience, and satisfaction.” [1] I think of that occasionally when wasting my time in "free" distractions. [1] (Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, sel. John A. Widtsoe [1954], 214).

Aperocky 6y ago

The only real currency should be energy. Joules. MJs for sake of unit sanity. Energies are cheap where they're produced, but you have to spend extra MJs to send them to where you need it. Having a few thousands MJs in Pluto bank will make you rich there. But it requires millions of Earth MJ to send energy to Pluto. The exchange rate of course fluctuates with space infrastructure and flattens out when better technology of sending and storing energy becomes available.

kazagistar 6y ago

Currency exists purely as a construct of human minds. It depends on exclusive ownership and individuals, both of which are mental fabrications, and far more flexible then we make them out to be. Article has great advice though.

choeger 6y ago

> Figure how/where your application code runs. Most important advise to become a useful software engineer. I did not want to believe how many developers just did not give a damn about what exactly makes their code execute and when that happens.

acituan 6y ago

I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don't have an imperative to be as productive as possible. They don't have to make the most use of their time. They don't have to get as efficient as they could. These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But humans are not machines. Sure, we shepherd the machines, and sure sometimes we are in rivalrous dynamics that increasing efficiency has a payoff, but it is never the goal in itself. The real "currency" we have, if we are using the term in the sense of denoting essentialness, is our humanness, our mortality, our psyches, our connection with other people and seemingly mundane but meaningful parts of our lives. I mean, look how many of us started baking their breads and enjoying it. It is not a wise use of the "currency of time", but it is part of life very well spent, as our internal reward mechanisms have been telling us.

Barrin92 6y ago
Yep. This attitude of being your own little manager of your own life and treating it like an incremental game is horrible. In James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games there one chapter on how the use of machines works both ways. It doesn't only shape the machine but it makes the person more 'machine-like'. In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around. It's I think very evident in the way we communicate today or how everything becomes 'gamified' or even how dating works. Success today has to be defined in formal or quantifiable terms not because anyone actually consciously chose to do it, but because it's the only way you can put it in a computer, which actually was supposed to exist to empower people. It's pretty sad honestly.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around. I remember an article a while back where archaeologists examined the bones of pre-Columbian women in America. The bones showed the signs of long term debilitating, repetitive work from kneeling and grinding, by hand, corn into flour. Just last night I watched an American Experience episode on the guy who revolutionized wheat farming. He spent his youth on a farm, harvesting corn by hand, estimating that he'd harvested 1 million ears per season by himself. He was amazed at how wonderful it was to get a machine that mechanized corn harvesting. I'd much rather mow my lawn with a mower than a pair of scissors. In the 1960s, my dad was writing a book. My mom would type up the drafts for him. Every new draft meant my mom would spend hours banging it out on the typewriter. Think how much easier that is today with our "dehumanizing" computers. Can you imagine today typing the whole thing over again because you made a misteak? Machines have largely free'd us from dehumanizing labor, not caused it.

noiv 6y ago

Check out the work of Carlo Rovelli and start considering time as a human construct. It is not needed to explain the world and physics around us. Isn't framing time as a currency while proposing it as part of the universe just an attempt of fraud? It feels like getting offered shiny glass beads while taking things of real value.

subhobroto 6y ago
> It feels like getting offered shiny glass beads while taking things of real value It indeed is if you consider majority of work is not time sensetive even if the person explicitly telling you so, absolutely convinces you that's the case. This becomes clearer when you move on from an employee to a business owner and the only person you answer to is your customer. Unless there's a literal environmental disaster, like when my community went up in flames during the California fires - everything else can wait. Even during the flames burning, houses that were almost on fire were in a waiting line behind houses on fire. The only reason why "it was due yesterday" works is because the employee believes their value is worth less than what the employer values them at.

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dfischer 6y ago

What if Karma is real and that’s the only currency we need?

zelly 6y ago

This article is a real failure in the rule of Profile Before Optimizing. Changing your editor or whatever is a micro-optimization. Among professions where typing is involved, programmers type the least number of keystrokes. Secretaries and data entry clerks type much more and often much faster than programmers. Also, a lot of typing is not even characters into the editor but keyboard shortcuts. The real time killers are mental--fatigue, boredom, procrastination, anxiety, and so on. How many hours do you spend a week on HN or social media? How long are you going to take to do that big refactor you've been putting off? How long do you spend in useless meetings or chats you're not persuasive enough to get out of? At what point is RTFMing too long procrastination? How long do you spend watching N*tflix at home if you really want to get that side project done? The bottleneck is never your typing speed or your editor commands. That is snake oil by script kiddies trying to sell you something.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
That's a great and underappreciated point. I'm really fond of my endless tinkering in Emacs, to optimize and automate away all kinds of repetition and tedium. But when I do a honest accounting I realize that, even though my newest tweak that took 30 minutes to make will probably save me a hundred hours in the long run, I'll blow more than a hundred hours over the next month procrastinating on HN because of anxiety about starting tasks. Like I'm doing right now - I was supposed to take an hour off for some personal "me and my thoughts time" an hour ago. But HN is just more immediately gratifying. It's true for me and I guess for many (most?) programmers: the limiting factor is inadequate capacity to control my own emotional state.
- zelly 6y ago
  > I'm really fond of my endless tinkering in Emacs, to optimize and automate away all kinds of repetition and tedium Me too, my .emacs.d directory has thousands of commits. It's fun. All procrastination is fun. It feels mischievous and therefore exhilarating.

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lerpapoo 6y ago

some are worth more than others.

koolhead17 6y ago

Stoics[1] said the same many thousand years back. * On shortness of life by Seneca

hartator 6y ago

Money is technically just a proxy of other people time when you think about it.

kiewszvaf123 6y ago

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DesiLurker 6y ago

its attention much more than time, attention is compressed time.

HeavyStorm 6y ago

Time would be a currency if had inherent value, and furthermore, if that value was normalized for all people. Time has value, but the value isn't inherent to it, it how you use the time. And that value is relative to the individual, can't be traded between peers, sold or bought. Time is probably a concept as far from currency as I could ever imagine. (I once read that Focus is more valuable than time, btw. It's also not a currency, but it has much more value)

abiogenesis 6y ago

> If you write code for long enough, you will come across code that would want you to become the proverbial psychopath and shoot the original author. I do come across such code all the time, and most of the time it's my own code.

lcall 6y ago

I wrote here about direction in life. Simple tech; I hope it is skimmable/browseable: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854588981.html http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854588981.html . I think direction matters more than speed. Even without a belief in God, but I explain why I do.