(A better ending sentence from martin might've been "We don't want to incentivize 100-day streaks." But that has its own, orthogonal downsides--oh, GitHub's in the business of setting incentives? Uh oh... So all in all, I think I understand his choice of phrasing.)
> The current social bandwagon can be summarized as: “Work is bad. Hard work is toxic. Perseverance is not healthy”. HN is just reflecting r/antiwork ethics. Complete and utter social non-sense. People have just stopped thinking for themselves.
This is generally not even-keeled behavior.
"Everything in moderation" dates back to 6 BC. This was clearly an reinterpretation of that basic idea. No reason to hop into a tirade into the death of hard work or something.
I thought this is “Hacker News”. The tone here has slid significantly in last 5 years. Folks like Martin apologizing indirectly.
I think you vastly misunderstand the entire point of antiwork. Its not saying go sit on a couch all day. Its to recognize you have a life outside of work and its okay if work isn't your driving factor in life.
You can learn to persevere and push yourself many many ways. Work is not the only way. Not excelling at your job does not mean you are lethargic and resentful.
Success is measured many different ways, by many different people. You seem to measure it by how hard you work, that's great. Doesn't mean everyone has too.
> Not a single comment on HN in last few years encourage hard work and mentally exhausting yourself.
I am astounded that not pushing yourself to mental exhaustion is what you consider anti-work. If I'm not willing to abuse my own body for the good of a company I'm destined to be lethargic and smoke weed all day? What the hell kind of scale is that?
Pushing yourself to mental exhaustion, is stupid and pointless. It's been thoroughly studied, by the time you've hit mental exhaustion you are not doing anywhere near your best work. Hell I've seen it myself. I noticed my code quality and code output fell drastically the more exhausted I became. I can not stress enough how much better you are not doing that.
Looking through your own post history I see clear signs of trying to work while exhuasted.
> it takes me forever to make anything with code. Like hours to do something simple.
This was literally me until I learned to not push myself so hard. I had the exact same problem and it turns out for me at least trying to learn programming while exhausted did me no favors. I worked all day came home and tried to learn and struggled the exact same way you are. It wasn't until I was able to learn more during the day while not exhausted that it really started to click with me.
You more then anyone need to really reconsider what I posted earlier. Please for you own health.
I find too many people mistaking velocity for progress to be an almost insolvable organization problem. if you want to end up with mega lines of code that are all part of a useless of incomprehensible solution that is certainly a job, but might fail as a life's contribution.
I am no longer an eager youth, but when i was, the thing that hooked me to push on past limits, was my excitement and joy about solving real problems, at scale, with software, with a simple yet powerful idea. It was not any history of frequent commits or risong to rhe 95th %ile or the barren useless of a streak. It was having an idea born out of real needs and made simple enough to need almost no comlexity to implement. Having that novel simplicity go into production and be used was motivation for a lifetime of work.
I certainly have periods of stillness and more restful learning than prodigious output, but they are, for me at least, completely necessary. they may be fairly lethargic as well.
Well one might start to excessively think like a computer!
For example, most humans can account for the imprecise nature of language and understand that "for anyone" doesn't necessarily mean every individual human on earth, but rather a sizeable portion of people. And "isn't good" is speaking relative to the poster's ideas rather than them claiming to have determined an absolute measure of the term "good".
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But a computer struggles with such fuzzy constraints and falls back to the most literal interpretation of any statement.
At which point the GPT-3 model the computer is running might regurgitate some overreaction by jumping from someone essentially saying: "everything in moderation" to interpreting it as an attack on hard work and good work ethics.