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Time is the only real currency we have

blog.theboringtech.io

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Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#61

Post by carapace »

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

- - - -

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!

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#62

Post by keiferski »

tluyben2 wrote: post #54
keiferski wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

> 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?

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.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#63

Post by andrey_utkin »

cryptica wrote: post #34

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 t…

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 ".

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#64

Post by IggleSniggle »

kator wrote: post #42
seventytwo wrote: post #39

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 valu…

The only currency you're born with is time. The rest are acquired by the application of time.

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.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#65

Post by viceroyalbean »

mikestew wrote: post #56
IggleSniggle wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has also been a thing at many US grocery stores for many years now, but inexplicably, many people don't use them.

I don’t use them because I just assume it’s going to be a personal information harvest fest, and it won’t work as advertised anyway. Like most other software-driven things these days.

Personal information is a fair point, though that goes for any loyalty program (which I presume you also don't use), but what do you mean by "won't work as advertised"? The function that's advertised is that you can scan items as you walk through the store and once you get to the checkout the only thing you do is pay, which is exactly the function that's provided.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#66

Post by ClumsyPilot »

lucb1e wrote: post #43
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

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.

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

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#67

Post by seventytwo »

kator wrote: post #42
seventytwo wrote: post #39

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 valu…

The only currency you're born with is time. The rest are acquired by the application of time.

It’s certainly the most valuable natural resource a person is born with, by far, but I’d argue there’s also technically space and energy there, too. The space a baby consumes is almost valueless, and the energy output is also (though thoughts of babies being harvested in The Matrix come to mind).

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#68

Post by Rerarom »

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.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#69

Post by tluyben2 »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #21
naringas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That sounds stressful...

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#70

Post by Rerarom »

lucb1e wrote: post #8

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.

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.
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