I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am
located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned, I appear to be well outside the solar system.
After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your message at some point. If I write a response immediately, it will go out in the next outgoing batch--typically around 24 hours after I collected your message, but occasionally sooner or later than that. Please expect a minimum delay of between 24 and 48 hours in receiving a response to your mail to me.
If your message is hard to understand or responding takes real work,
the response could take longer.
So please wait 48 hours after sending a message before you resend it,
remind me about it, or ask if I have received it. If it has been less
than 48 hours, the absence of a response from me only means you have not given me time to answer.
If you are having a conversation with me, please keep in mind that each message you receive from me is a response to the mail you sent 24 to 48 hours earlier, and when writing it, I probably had not yet downloaded your later mail.
If you are in big hurry to speak with me, and one day's delay would be a serious problem, you can ask my FSF assistant to phone me. Send mail to <rms-assist@fsf.org> saying what you would like to talk with me about, and giving your telephone number. You can also call the Free Software Foundation office at 617-542-5942 (weekday Boston business hours) and ask them to phone me on your behalf. If it's really important, try both!
An intermediate measure is to email me your phone number and ask me
to phone you.
But if there isn't enough hurry to warrant phoning me, please don't bother the FSF people. The mail you already sent me will reach me before any mail they could send me now on your behalf. I will respond as soon as I can.
If you do not wish to receive this message ever again, please send a message to rms-autoreply-control@gnu.org with the subject "OFF".
Otherwise, you might receive a reply like this one up to once a month.
Early in my professional career, I learned something: nobody in the professional world wants to hear what anyone else has to say, unless money is involved (e.g. one of you is the other one's client or customer), and even then they want to hear as little as possible. I had to learn how to professionally communicate with my employers and clients, which means learning to say as little as humanly possible while still mostly getting the point across.
To people who think like rms, these rules are very helpful, but I think many people will get the impression that he is being very rude by having a long document with his preferences.
Those sort of riders are a sentinel to signal that the venue read the contract carefully, not diva behavior, as is commonly assumed. If they caught the brown M&M's thing, they probably got all the stuff about rigging safety, so you don't have to grill them on those things. Otherwise, you'd better double check.
Honestly, I think that such clauses can have opposite effect. I mean: how can you treat the other party seriously if they put such ridiculous, childish demands like 'no brown M&M" in contract?
> ...how can you treat the other party seriously if they put such ridiculous, childish demands like 'no brown M&M" in contract?
If you don't know what you're doing, you won't treat the other party seriously. This is a strong signal to the other party that you don't know what you're doing and SHOULD be avoided.
If -however- you do know what you're doing, then you take the other party seriously even when you come across such demands because (as shawn-furyan said):
> Those sort of riders are a sentinel to signal that the venue read the contract carefully... If they caught the brown M&M's thing, they probably got all the stuff about rigging safety, so you don't have to grill them on those things. Otherwise, you'd better double check.
I'm not sure if this is accurate, but the brown M&M thing started after Van Halen performed at a college gymnasium and their stage setup inflicted tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage to a facility that, if the organizers had read the rider, was never fit to host such a show.
This applies to RMS -- when he's on the road, he's often at the mercy of the event organizer for transportation and lodging arrangements (either directly or indirectly by them providing information). If they mess up, he's in real trouble.
You do not know why that clause is there. When somebody asks for something and you do not understand why, and decide you don't want to do it, it is the sensible thing to ask for explanation. It is the childish thing to ignore it.
His time is important enough, and he is contacted/harassed/solicited by so many people that he expects people who waste it have to do it on their own terms.
If he reaches to YOU, and he still demands that, then that's another story.
I don't see that as self-centred at all. He is politely explaining how email fits into his schedule and offers you alternatives if you need to speak with him urgently. That is a lot better than people who get your email but just ignore it for a day or more until you end up sending a "did you get my email".
Also RMS replies to a lot of the random emails he gets. Much more than a lot of people who are as well known as him to be fair.
Sounds to me like you are just not a big fan of RMS so find a negative in everything he does that isn't quite the norm.
Probably old enough to learn by experience that you have to fight for the control of your own time and attention. If you get people used to quick replies to any small issue, they will later expect it.
Even big computers (e.g., VAXes running Unix) used to transfer e-mail by way of dialup. In the days before everyone had internet access, some hosts would only have intermittent dial-up connections to other hosts, and they'd transfer e-mail over UUCP. If these machines were in underfunded organizations like university departments, they'd make their calls at night when long-distance calls were cheaper. It could take a day or two just for an e-mail to get across the country, and another day or two for the reply to get back.
My first access to the web was via UUCP exchange via a local BBS that exchange mail with their upstream 4 times a day, coupled with the CERN mail<->web gateway...
I tend to do email once a day in the morning when I get to work. I mostly don't look at it again after that unless there's something particularly critical at issue.
I have an ongoing exchange with a guy that's contributed bug fixes to one of my projects where the average response time (both ways) is on the order of months. It's become a standing joke. I have a mail from him sitting in my inbox right now. It's been there a few months - I'm sure I'll reply to it in a month or three.
You gotta understand, despite what you may think of RMS (and I may share some of your negativity), he is practically WORSHIPPED amongst parts of the *nix community. The man certainly has some condescending opinions about software, but he is not conceited about his own celebrity - he quite certainly would gladly give it up if he could. This is the message of someone who knows he gets more email than he can adequately respond to in a timely basis and still do anything productive at all with his day. He's doing the best he can.
I agree that we can't fault famous people for not being able to answer every email immediately, but
>The man certainly has some condescending opinions about software, but he is not conceited about his own celebrity - he quite certainly would gladly give it up if he could.
Which is why he's happy to let Linus get all the credit?…
It's not like he wants to call it RMS/Linux. Many people have contributed to the GNU project, and one doesn't have to be looking for self-publicity to advocate for its recognition.
Actually, back in the 80s, people normally wrote email of about that length, and since gaming was uncommon, had the leisure to read well-written prose from their peers.
Sometime around 2000, busy people started complaining about this practice, and old timers started to hold their tongues. I knew the era was over when my Millennial co-worker one cube away asked me to not interrupt him and IM him instead, since he had to take off his earphones. About the same time, my boss complained about how long my (senior engineer, explaining matters related to the immanent demise of the company...) emails were -- frankly managers were busy and 1-2 sentence ought to explain about this O-ring problem.
Your projection of self-centeredness on the part of your elders is unbecoming and ill-informed. You are merely young.
I am young. RMS has written a very simple email, well laid out and information dense. There is no external referencing and it is easy to skim read.
I find most "short" messages lack key details, requiring me to either search out more information, request a clarification, or abandon the conversation (due to anticipation of the pain continued communication would cause). This is more time and mentally expensive to me than reading a longer more precise message.
To me, this seems to be making two opposite points. One reason to prefer asynchronous interruptions (like IM) to their synchronous counterparts (like out-loud conversation), is so that you have the leisure to deeply read long-form writing (like well-written emails or (hopefully) well-written documentation).
My guess is that his secretary still uses emails even if he's not. So basically he has just transfered his communication tasks to another person and somehow it is ok for him to enslave a person for jobs he doesn't want to do since he's a much more "important" human being. This is pure arrogance.
I think I will start to question what I learned from this guy. Maybe I give up on latex, not that there is a better alternative.
> in that regard I don't think secretaries are essential.
Ah, now we've gotten to the very nut of it: you don't think that secretaries are essential. Never mind that the sort of folks who employ them seem to think that they are: you, who aren't in their position, don't, and that's enough.
I'm reminded of pg's famous essay on the Blub Paradox. Programmers who use a semi-powerful language can see that others are less powerful than theirs, but can't see that more powerful languages offer anything much. Likewise, folks at one level of society can easily see that it makes sense to hire others to grow their food and make their clothes, but can't see that it makes sense for others at other levels to hire people to manage their schedules and correspondence.
You aren't in the position of the secretary and that's enough.
If I know advanced programming languages, what features they offer, what problems they are aimed to solve and most importantly what drawbacks these features have while interacting with each other and still prefer simpler languages since they force you to think in simpler terms and reduce the problem to it's very basic which usually makes your program much clearer to other people, how does that make me a bad programmer? And most importantly, what does this have to do with what I say?
I'm sorry you think the many people employed as secretaries should lose their jobs because you think their job is "unessential", but that attitude is patronizing and demeaning to the people who hold those positions. This world isn't about you, and you you have neither the right nor the authority to tell them how to live their lives.
Then why not give that choice to everyone else as well? Most of us are working because we're being "threatened with hunger or homelessness". I think it's bad and as a civilization we're reaching the level when we could - and should - end that, but that is a completely orthogonal topic to whether or not secretaries have important jobs.
Which means you have an issue with people doing paid work in general, not Knuth in particular.
I guess you never buy anything too -- or have people e.g. build your house, or the street cleaners take your garbage, the taxi driver to drive you etc.
It's my responsibility to give people a response, no matter how unpopular they are. Just because I'm saying things people don't want to hear doesn't mean I'm wrong. People tend to ignore/downvote things when it's not in their best interest. I can't stand it, you shouldn't either. If you don't find my ideas appealing don't write stuff like this, don't downvote and also don't upvote. And if you don't have a problem with HN limiting my replies while you could say anything you want to me then you have a serious issue. You need a serious update to your value system if you're fine with people silenced for their ideas.
> My secretary also prints out all nonspam email messages addressed to taocp@cs.stanford.edu or knuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu,
She definitely does use email. I don't see what is so wrong with paying someone else to do the necessary time consuming tasks with low priority when you have other high priority things to do. Should there also be no janitors?
Personal secretaries used to be fairly common, and don't have to be viewed with disrespect. If you ever work in a large institution, you learn that the secretaries know more about how the organization works than you ever will, and can make your life much better. Most people accept that specialization and division of labor are part of the modern industrial economy.
Knuth is an oddball curmudgeon, and probably a bit autistic (watch his lectures), but he has managed to make the most of his strengths, and contributed to humanity with very little damage.
Well, fame is an indication for what the society value. How else would you measure it? Money? Respect? Something else? Which of these measures secretaries are good at?
Are you saying you disagree with the idea of a secretary at all? I mean, handling mail and communication is one of the main tasks of a secretary. If you're against that because he is making someone do tasks he doesn't want, then I imagine you'd also be against the concept garbage men as well. The thing is, they get paid and choose to go into that profession - some may even enjoy it.
So what's wrong with that? Or did you mean something else? I just don't see why someone would question his books/teachings based on his personal strategy for email communication.
I'm not entirely sure what you think the job description for a secretary role would be... but normally handling communications is absolutely within its scope.
If you want to argue that the concept of having a secretary in the first place is arrogance, and object to all those roles around the world, go for it. But singling out one person is just flawed logic.
>My guess is that his secretary still uses emails even if he's not. So basically he has just transfered his communication tasks to another person and somehow it is ok for him to enslave a person for jobs he doesn't want to do since he's a much more "important" human being. This is pure arrogance.
Sorry what?
Is that part of the very job of a secretary?
Is't not any much "slavery" than you ordering food from a waiter or asking a store assistant for a pair of shoes...
> So basically he has just transfered his communication tasks to another person and somehow it is ok for him to enslave a person for jobs he doesn't want to do since he's a much more "important" human being. This is pure arrogance.
You know that this is like, the basis of entire civilization? The specialization of labour - you do what you're good at, I do what I'm good at, and we exchange the value produced by our work. His secretary is probably being paid for the job, and given that he/she specializes in e-mail correspondence, he/she will be much more efficient with it than Knuth himself could ever be.
"this guy" gave to the world more than you ever will, and indeed has much more important thinking to do than waste it on deciphering and responding to emails.
When you get over your insecurity complex, maybe try to see the bigger picture and be happy he spent his time thinking how to better educate / help others and not just one sole email. Your comment is actually incredibly more arrogant than Knuth ever was or will be. Do you think his secretary is in shackles or something? You call a man who devoted his life to education "purely arrogant." Get over yourself.
Oh, I have read the response on my mobile and now it's gone, I wish it wasn't.
While I appreciate your effort to defend me I don't really need it. I don't mind having these kinds of responses at all. I may actually prefer it. It's the silent downvotes that gets to me, and HN holding me back with my "frequent" replies and whitening my words because God forbids someone could see an opinion they might disagree..
Of course this is no news to me. I'm quite used to having people with opposing views at my position. In fact, I don't think I have been with a person that I can easily relate to for a very long time. In my point of view, the main problem is that there are very deep social problems within our setting and most people doesn't even want to see it. They seem to prefer staying in their comfort zones, doing what they do so far as they have learned growing up while going along the flow. I think this is delusional and I have zero tolerance left for it.
I have come to realize HN community is full of these people. This is not to say there aren't any people I can agree with, it's just that it's extremely difficult to cultivate the conversation when you become a minority. In that regard, HN nowadays is quite an unhealthy formation. This was something I was aware for a long time. I didn't take any action so far because most of the time I'm here for only the links anyways. But links here are filtered by the upvotes/downvotes of this same community. I guess now it's time for me to move forward. I will close my account and hopefully never enter this site again.
Again thanks for your effort, but I think it's much better for people to express what they actually think than to censor them behind big man's words or else communication becomes impossible.
I should have said "you're acting like a clown." But I like the idea of having you realize that making a statement such as "enslaved" in regards to a secretary merely doing the job assigned to her (and is free to quit doing so at any time) is silly. To expound upon that Knuth is arrogant is even funnier. These two individuals are engaged in innocent, free-willed jobs and you come in like the moral chief of police saying the secretary is enslaved and that Knuth is arrogant. This is why I say "get over yourself" and do still mean it.
Regardless, I appreciate your response.
> In my point of view, the main problem is that there are very deep social problems within our setting and most people doesn't even want to see it
Sure, but a secretary doing her job is not one of them.
> They seem to prefer staying in their comfort zones, doing what they do so far as they have learned growing up while going along the flow.
> I think it's much better for people to express what they actually think than to censor them behind big man's words or else communication becomes impossible.
Both true statements. You might have good intentions, but I would think twice before calling something like Knuth arrogant and ask yourself, who's the arrogant one? Who's the one dictating how people should live? Is it Knuth, who is merely living in a way who thinks it'll best optimize his educational findings or is it you, who is judging the situation as if you know what they both want and what's good for them?
On September 30, members of Stanford's Computer Science Department gathered to bid farewell to Phyllis Astrid Benson Winkler, on the occasion of her retirement after 32 years of service. During those years she was one of the key reasons for our department's successes; thus she indirectly had a substantial influence on the progress of computer science as a whole. We appreciated her intelligence, her efficiency, her world-class expertise at producing beautiful technical documents, her team spirit, her willingness to go the extra mile, and her contagious laughter.
I was fortunate to have had Phyllis as my secretary and essential co-pilot during the past 28 years; without her I could not have accomplished nearly as much. She typed more than 200 of my papers, most of which required several rounds of revisions. She buffered all of my mail and telephone messages. She administered the editorial work of more than a dozen technical journals, and helped out with numerous research projects. She made online indexes of all the correspondence in our files. She did all of the initial keyboarding for the new editions of The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1 and 3 (see below) --- amounting to more than 1500 printed pages of what printers used to call ``penalty copy'' because it is so hard to do. And so on and so on; what a team we made! And she was simultaneously also serving as secretary for several other faculty members.
When I originally wrote the TeX typesetting system, I intended it to be a tool just for Phyllis and me, but mostly for Phyllis. Soon other people decided to use it too, but Phyllis's influence on the TeX project has nevertheless been enormous. One of the events at her retirement party was the reading of a resolution recently passed by the board of directors of the TeX Users Group, expressing their appreciation for all of her contributions during the past 20 years. I'm sure people all over the world are sad that they will no longer be communicating with her at Stanford, yet wishing her happiness as she changes to a life of voluntary community service.
I can't express in words the enormous debt of gratitude I feel, but I have tried to do that in part by dedicating the book Literate Programming to her. I certainly wish her a long and productive life in retirement."
Thanks for posting it, this is very nice indeed. Kudos to him for sharing the credit. Maybe he's not that of an evil person as I have pictured before. But the discussion around here made me realize once more that there is still a problem lying around here. People tend to attribute the works we see around to a single person when in reality it's a team's work. And I'm not only talking about the very close circle these people are working with but also many others in the service industry that we interact daily in an indirect fashion. This is very dangerous. It makes people think that their work is inferior since it is not as useful as what these "celebrities" are doing and eventually leaving them the only choice to give up and rather worship these people instead. This is what I see everyday.
Also note that, while you can see these kinds of notes lying around, there are also many places these don't exists at all. If I were to know Donald Knuth from his wikipedia article, I would not be aware of his secretary at all. So there is some credit but not to the extend that I would like to see.
I think this is a serious issue that needs to be dealt with. Maybe anonymous writing could be a solution, I dont know..
Why would you ever think of Don Knuth as an evil person?
From my few years of contacts with him in the early 80's (he was on the board of our company, a spin-off from the TeX project), he was one of the most gracious, kind, thoughtful, humble people you could ever meet. And I think anyone who met him would agree.
You're right - I had to dig around to find it (on the Android app). It's nowhere near as clear as it is in Facebook Messenger. (And of course there's no `read to here`).
On the contrary, this passage sounds quite hostile:
> If I run across such a message that was misaddressed --- I mean, if the message asks a question instead of reporting an error --- I try not to get angry. I used to just throw all such sheets in the wastebasket. But now I save them for scratch paper, so that I can print test material for The Art of Computer Programming on the blank sides.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
I think that many of us have jobs in which we have to be both "on top of things" and "on the bottom of things" to varying degrees.
For example, when I'm trying to write a tricky piece of code, it goes much better if I can shut out interruptions like Knuth does and concentrate on the task at hand. If people expected me to reply immediately to their non-urgent e-mails, it would be a lot harder to concentrate.
Also, people who expect me to answer their e-mail or phone call immediately are making the presumption that whatever they have to ask me is more important than whatever I currently happen to be doing. In most cases, it's not.
Looks neat. I tried to download from the MAS, but I use the incompatible 10.10, and I don't want to upgrade my OS. Is there a way to download it regardless?
Knuth does read emails and reply them, the only difference from the rest of us is that he may do it on print out of original emails, and usually in batch.
I had an uncle who was a vice president at a fortune 50 company. The executives at the company were not allowed to have a computer at their desks. They all had secretaries who dealt with email, calendars, spreadsheets, etc. The point was that if they were sitting behind a computer doing time consuming clerical work required to interact with a computer, they were being distracted from much more important tasks. The company was more interested in having people at that level who could delegate and organize than to actually do the work themselves.
The skills and kind of work that makes a person successful at one level often leads to lack of success at another.
While I agree with your premise about different types of work, and while I agree there's some level of clerical work required to interact with a computer, computers can do far more than clerical work, and can provide intellectual leverage when used properly. Banning a high-level executive from using something that gives them intellectual leverage holds the organization back.
You have to think, people - especially senior executives at fortune 50 companies - don't like being arbitrarily held back when they have a job to do. If they want to use a computer, I imagine that these ambitious people would fight the CEO tooth and nail to get access to one. Probably people on the board whom the CEO is politically motivated to please are also banned from using these computers.
People tend not to ban things before they're widely used and cause some sort of problem. I imagine there was a time at his company where his executives used computers. People would have a memory of the time before the computer ban, and compare it every day to the time after the computer ban.
These executives probably had stellar track records, had the motivation to do better, had the previous experience of using computers, had political sway, and still failed to convince the CEO.
And yet, with nothing more than a brief description of the abstract idea, and a firm belief that computers are valuable, a Hacker News commenter has been able to diagnose that it's holding their company back.
That's not to say that CEOs can't make bad decisions, but we don't even know what the company does or what they sell. Probably neither of us have worked there. It seems a little premature to rebel at his decision.
Exactly. The C level human I work for types at 10 WPM and their responses looks like Charlies posts from Flowers for Algernon. Not the best use of their time.
They talk at about 2.3 million words per min and a 20 second conversation gets sent back by the exec assistant or one of the reports. Brilliant person, email isn't their forte.
"Is this the most important use of my time" is on their wall. Email isn't it. It works other ways, a voice mail from Hawking isn't the best use of his time.
The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)"
Before everything was wired to the internet in the late 1980s, UNIX and bboard message apps were as popular as email. You were either there to get the message or it didnt matter. I see mobile message apps enjoy a resurgence in the past decade.
There is something that feels disingenuous about taking a conscientious position against email, and then saying that you do actually use email, just by way of a "human spam filter" instead of an automated one.
With that said, I certainly recognize the need for very-deep-focus jobs to be uncoupled from the "right-now" pace expectations of email. So I think Knuth is making a smart decision for the kind of work he does (and one that could be useful to other people in similar lines of work), but he's just presenting/explaining it poorly.
It's sorta like the person who proclaims "I don't have internet access, and I'm better off for it", and then goes on to say that they have a personal assistant whose job is to handle all their online accounting/shopping/research/etc for them. Maybe they personally are better off for their particular workflow, but the really are using the internet, just by proxy, and their implied value statement about themselves compared to people who do use the internet (directly) is not really valid.
He is very specific when he said that the only incoming email he welcome is about bugs and errors in TAOCP. Also he doesn't rant against email, just explained why is not for him and encourage people to use regular mail to communicate with him.
People chose to select their truths and ignore any which do not fall within the bounds of (what they believe to be) an acceptable life narrative. When someone makes a truth a person is not fond of apparent to them, they receive it as though it were an insult instead of an entirely accurate observation.
If the truth hurts so much that a person takes offence, then they should take action to change so that the observation no longer holds true. If the truth is in regards to something they are incapable of changing, then it should not be a truth they can be held accountable to as it is not within their power to change it.
Knuth's blunt honesty may seem rude to some, however the same result is reached if he provides that truth in (what is considered by most) a polite fashion, or (what is considered by most) a rude fashion. The only ultimate difference between the two is that the 'rude' version reaches its conclusion much faster, saving time and effort for any involved parties.
When I was around Stanford in the early 80's (second employee at Imagen, a laser printer spin-off from the TeX project), I'm pretty sure Knuth already handled his email via his secretary.
Edit: Oh, right, see the summary elsewhere about his secretary Phyllis Winkler at her retirement.
I don't really understand why people become so anti-email. I'm a deeply introverted person, so it's not like I don't understand wanting to be left alone, but if I don't want to be interrupted... I close my email viewer. The asynchronous nature of email makes it great for introverted people. I used to get a TON of email at one of my prior jobs, and, like, it was fine. Just wait till it's convenient to open it. If it's actually urgent they'll call or send an IM.
I'm not accusing Knuth of this, but I think some people just use email as a way of humble-bragging. "I'm so important it's overwhelming!" Yeah wow. We're all so impressed.
That there might be why you haven't learnt to hate Email (or other forms of asynchronous communication). If you want to learn to hate, try running a few mildly successful Open Source projects. Or try participating in other lame company flame email thread.
The fundamental problem with email (and other forms of asynchronous electronic comms including Github pull requests and Facebook messages) is there's little burden on the sender. The entire burden is carried by the recipient. It's too easy for the sender to turn impulse into wasting someone else's time. Snail mail at least costs a stamp and a trip to the letter box.
Synchronous communication costs just as little, and it's vastly more disruptive. I've done all the things you mention, I guess the fact that I can easily turn off email makes me not care. Sure someone can callously waste my time with an email.. And I can callously delete it. Plus, if I think an email is a waste of time, I can just not respond.
Email has been scaling just fine for years. And I've run some reasonably successful open source projects (including SpamAssassin at the height of its success). I really don't see the problem.
The fact that an email is easy to send without knowing the recipient is a huge benefit of email. No other electronic communication system offers this benefit (and unfortunately it enables spam, but that's an entirely different discussion).
After catching dust for 15 years on my bookshelf, I sold the 3-volume edition of The Art of Computer Programming this week through a used book service. No regrets.
He was still on email. He just delegated the work to someone else. Sounds like a good arrangement for someone with his level of contribution. I'd rather he didn't spend his limited time reading his junk mail either.
Knuth has a point. Although I use email and couldn't work without it, I think we haven't yet realized email's insidious invasion of our world, and its pernicious change of our work habits. Suddenly the Inbox has become a tyrant dictating our daily schedule. Since when do others have priority over our time and attention, expecting immediate replies to their intrusions?
Companies and organizations have not yet grasped the negative impact on productivity that email has wrought. Like drinking from lead goblets in another era, it's going to be a while before we get it. We need email, but it needs to be put in its place.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadI am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned, I appear to be well outside the solar system.
After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your message at some point. If I write a response immediately, it will go out in the next outgoing batch--typically around 24 hours after I collected your message, but occasionally sooner or later than that. Please expect a minimum delay of between 24 and 48 hours in receiving a response to your mail to me.
If your message is hard to understand or responding takes real work, the response could take longer.
So please wait 48 hours after sending a message before you resend it, remind me about it, or ask if I have received it. If it has been less than 48 hours, the absence of a response from me only means you have not given me time to answer.
If you are having a conversation with me, please keep in mind that each message you receive from me is a response to the mail you sent 24 to 48 hours earlier, and when writing it, I probably had not yet downloaded your later mail.
If you are in big hurry to speak with me, and one day's delay would be a serious problem, you can ask my FSF assistant to phone me. Send mail to <rms-assist@fsf.org> saying what you would like to talk with me about, and giving your telephone number. You can also call the Free Software Foundation office at 617-542-5942 (weekday Boston business hours) and ask them to phone me on your behalf. If it's really important, try both!
An intermediate measure is to email me your phone number and ask me to phone you.
But if there isn't enough hurry to warrant phoning me, please don't bother the FSF people. The mail you already sent me will reach me before any mail they could send me now on your behalf. I will respond as soon as I can.
To contact the Free Software Foundation, use one of the addresses in https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/email.
If you do not wish to receive this message ever again, please send a message to rms-autoreply-control@gnu.org with the subject "OFF". Otherwise, you might receive a reply like this one up to once a month.
Professional field and the hacker and activist cultures are very different in nature.
Never having met the guy, that doesn't really sound like rms' MO.
https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!msg/mysoci...
To people who think like rms, these rules are very helpful, but I think many people will get the impression that he is being very rude by having a long document with his preferences.
If you don't know what you're doing, you won't treat the other party seriously. This is a strong signal to the other party that you don't know what you're doing and SHOULD be avoided.
If -however- you do know what you're doing, then you take the other party seriously even when you come across such demands because (as shawn-furyan said):
> Those sort of riders are a sentinel to signal that the venue read the contract carefully... If they caught the brown M&M's thing, they probably got all the stuff about rigging safety, so you don't have to grill them on those things. Otherwise, you'd better double check.
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/david-lee-roth-van-halen-brow...
This applies to RMS -- when he's on the road, he's often at the mercy of the event organizer for transportation and lodging arrangements (either directly or indirectly by them providing information). If they mess up, he's in real trouble.
If he reaches to YOU, and he still demands that, then that's another story.
Also RMS replies to a lot of the random emails he gets. Much more than a lot of people who are as well known as him to be fair.
Sounds to me like you are just not a big fan of RMS so find a negative in everything he does that isn't quite the norm.
For more on this, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Mail_routing
>The man certainly has some condescending opinions about software, but he is not conceited about his own celebrity - he quite certainly would gladly give it up if he could.
Which is why he's happy to let Linus get all the credit?…
Sometime around 2000, busy people started complaining about this practice, and old timers started to hold their tongues. I knew the era was over when my Millennial co-worker one cube away asked me to not interrupt him and IM him instead, since he had to take off his earphones. About the same time, my boss complained about how long my (senior engineer, explaining matters related to the immanent demise of the company...) emails were -- frankly managers were busy and 1-2 sentence ought to explain about this O-ring problem.
Your projection of self-centeredness on the part of your elders is unbecoming and ill-informed. You are merely young.
rms is just old school.
I find most "short" messages lack key details, requiring me to either search out more information, request a clarification, or abandon the conversation (due to anticipation of the pain continued communication would cause). This is more time and mentally expensive to me than reading a longer more precise message.
My guess is that his secretary still uses emails even if he's not. So basically he has just transfered his communication tasks to another person and somehow it is ok for him to enslave a person for jobs he doesn't want to do since he's a much more "important" human being. This is pure arrogance.
I think I will start to question what I learned from this guy. Maybe I give up on latex, not that there is a better alternative.
We all employ others to do things for us, some people just do so with fewer middlepeople.
Ah, now we've gotten to the very nut of it: you don't think that secretaries are essential. Never mind that the sort of folks who employ them seem to think that they are: you, who aren't in their position, don't, and that's enough.
I'm reminded of pg's famous essay on the Blub Paradox. Programmers who use a semi-powerful language can see that others are less powerful than theirs, but can't see that more powerful languages offer anything much. Likewise, folks at one level of society can easily see that it makes sense to hire others to grow their food and make their clothes, but can't see that it makes sense for others at other levels to hire people to manage their schedules and correspondence.
A good secretary is a lever for a decision-maker.
If I know advanced programming languages, what features they offer, what problems they are aimed to solve and most importantly what drawbacks these features have while interacting with each other and still prefer simpler languages since they force you to think in simpler terms and reduce the problem to it's very basic which usually makes your program much clearer to other people, how does that make me a bad programmer? And most importantly, what does this have to do with what I say?
I'm sorry you think the many people employed as secretaries should lose their jobs because you think their job is "unessential", but that attitude is patronizing and demeaning to the people who hold those positions. This world isn't about you, and you you have neither the right nor the authority to tell them how to live their lives.
I guess you never buy anything too -- or have people e.g. build your house, or the street cleaners take your garbage, the taxi driver to drive you etc.
employ
> important
uniquely skilled
> pure arrogance
division of labor
She definitely does use email. I don't see what is so wrong with paying someone else to do the necessary time consuming tasks with low priority when you have other high priority things to do. Should there also be no janitors?
Knuth is an oddball curmudgeon, and probably a bit autistic (watch his lectures), but he has managed to make the most of his strengths, and contributed to humanity with very little damage.
He never implied there are famous secretaries.
So what's wrong with that? Or did you mean something else? I just don't see why someone would question his books/teachings based on his personal strategy for email communication.
If you want to argue that the concept of having a secretary in the first place is arrogance, and object to all those roles around the world, go for it. But singling out one person is just flawed logic.
Sorry what?
Is that part of the very job of a secretary?
Is't not any much "slavery" than you ordering food from a waiter or asking a store assistant for a pair of shoes...
You know that this is like, the basis of entire civilization? The specialization of labour - you do what you're good at, I do what I'm good at, and we exchange the value produced by our work. His secretary is probably being paid for the job, and given that he/she specializes in e-mail correspondence, he/she will be much more efficient with it than Knuth himself could ever be.
"this guy" gave to the world more than you ever will, and indeed has much more important thinking to do than waste it on deciphering and responding to emails.
When you get over your insecurity complex, maybe try to see the bigger picture and be happy he spent his time thinking how to better educate / help others and not just one sole email. Your comment is actually incredibly more arrogant than Knuth ever was or will be. Do you think his secretary is in shackles or something? You call a man who devoted his life to education "purely arrogant." Get over yourself.
While I appreciate your effort to defend me I don't really need it. I don't mind having these kinds of responses at all. I may actually prefer it. It's the silent downvotes that gets to me, and HN holding me back with my "frequent" replies and whitening my words because God forbids someone could see an opinion they might disagree..
Of course this is no news to me. I'm quite used to having people with opposing views at my position. In fact, I don't think I have been with a person that I can easily relate to for a very long time. In my point of view, the main problem is that there are very deep social problems within our setting and most people doesn't even want to see it. They seem to prefer staying in their comfort zones, doing what they do so far as they have learned growing up while going along the flow. I think this is delusional and I have zero tolerance left for it.
I have come to realize HN community is full of these people. This is not to say there aren't any people I can agree with, it's just that it's extremely difficult to cultivate the conversation when you become a minority. In that regard, HN nowadays is quite an unhealthy formation. This was something I was aware for a long time. I didn't take any action so far because most of the time I'm here for only the links anyways. But links here are filtered by the upvotes/downvotes of this same community. I guess now it's time for me to move forward. I will close my account and hopefully never enter this site again.
Again thanks for your effort, but I think it's much better for people to express what they actually think than to censor them behind big man's words or else communication becomes impossible.
Regardless, I appreciate your response.
> In my point of view, the main problem is that there are very deep social problems within our setting and most people doesn't even want to see it
Sure, but a secretary doing her job is not one of them.
> They seem to prefer staying in their comfort zones, doing what they do so far as they have learned growing up while going along the flow.
> I think it's much better for people to express what they actually think than to censor them behind big man's words or else communication becomes impossible.
Both true statements. You might have good intentions, but I would think twice before calling something like Knuth arrogant and ask yourself, who's the arrogant one? Who's the one dictating how people should live? Is it Knuth, who is merely living in a way who thinks it'll best optimize his educational findings or is it you, who is judging the situation as if you know what they both want and what's good for them?
"The End of An Era
On September 30, members of Stanford's Computer Science Department gathered to bid farewell to Phyllis Astrid Benson Winkler, on the occasion of her retirement after 32 years of service. During those years she was one of the key reasons for our department's successes; thus she indirectly had a substantial influence on the progress of computer science as a whole. We appreciated her intelligence, her efficiency, her world-class expertise at producing beautiful technical documents, her team spirit, her willingness to go the extra mile, and her contagious laughter.
I was fortunate to have had Phyllis as my secretary and essential co-pilot during the past 28 years; without her I could not have accomplished nearly as much. She typed more than 200 of my papers, most of which required several rounds of revisions. She buffered all of my mail and telephone messages. She administered the editorial work of more than a dozen technical journals, and helped out with numerous research projects. She made online indexes of all the correspondence in our files. She did all of the initial keyboarding for the new editions of The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1 and 3 (see below) --- amounting to more than 1500 printed pages of what printers used to call ``penalty copy'' because it is so hard to do. And so on and so on; what a team we made! And she was simultaneously also serving as secretary for several other faculty members.
When I originally wrote the TeX typesetting system, I intended it to be a tool just for Phyllis and me, but mostly for Phyllis. Soon other people decided to use it too, but Phyllis's influence on the TeX project has nevertheless been enormous. One of the events at her retirement party was the reading of a resolution recently passed by the board of directors of the TeX Users Group, expressing their appreciation for all of her contributions during the past 20 years. I'm sure people all over the world are sad that they will no longer be communicating with her at Stanford, yet wishing her happiness as she changes to a life of voluntary community service.
I can't express in words the enormous debt of gratitude I feel, but I have tried to do that in part by dedicating the book Literate Programming to her. I certainly wish her a long and productive life in retirement."
Also note that, while you can see these kinds of notes lying around, there are also many places these don't exists at all. If I were to know Donald Knuth from his wikipedia article, I would not be aware of his secretary at all. So there is some credit but not to the extend that I would like to see.
I think this is a serious issue that needs to be dealt with. Maybe anonymous writing could be a solution, I dont know..
From my few years of contacts with him in the early 80's (he was on the board of our company, a spin-off from the TeX project), he was one of the most gracious, kind, thoughtful, humble people you could ever meet. And I think anyone who met him would agree.
Is the use of "versus" in the headline correct in English? There isn't anything adversarial going on here, it is just his email policy.
In other places "versus" even seems to be used as a synonym of "and".
On the contrary, this passage sounds quite hostile:
> If I run across such a message that was misaddressed --- I mean, if the message asks a question instead of reporting an error --- I try not to get angry. I used to just throw all such sheets in the wastebasket. But now I save them for scratch paper, so that I can print test material for The Art of Computer Programming on the blank sides.
For example, when I'm trying to write a tricky piece of code, it goes much better if I can shut out interruptions like Knuth does and concentrate on the task at hand. If people expected me to reply immediately to their non-urgent e-mails, it would be a lot harder to concentrate.
Also, people who expect me to answer their e-mail or phone call immediately are making the presumption that whatever they have to ask me is more important than whatever I currently happen to be doing. In most cases, it's not.
I made an app that shows you how often you check your email: http://focuslist.co/escape/ (and other distracting websites)
The skills and kind of work that makes a person successful at one level often leads to lack of success at another.
People tend not to ban things before they're widely used and cause some sort of problem. I imagine there was a time at his company where his executives used computers. People would have a memory of the time before the computer ban, and compare it every day to the time after the computer ban.
These executives probably had stellar track records, had the motivation to do better, had the previous experience of using computers, had political sway, and still failed to convince the CEO.
And yet, with nothing more than a brief description of the abstract idea, and a firm belief that computers are valuable, a Hacker News commenter has been able to diagnose that it's holding their company back.
That's not to say that CEOs can't make bad decisions, but we don't even know what the company does or what they sell. Probably neither of us have worked there. It seems a little premature to rebel at his decision.
They talk at about 2.3 million words per min and a 20 second conversation gets sent back by the exec assistant or one of the reports. Brilliant person, email isn't their forte.
"Is this the most important use of my time" is on their wall. Email isn't it. It works other ways, a voice mail from Hawking isn't the best use of his time.
I sense there's a joke here. Did anyone get it?
With that said, I certainly recognize the need for very-deep-focus jobs to be uncoupled from the "right-now" pace expectations of email. So I think Knuth is making a smart decision for the kind of work he does (and one that could be useful to other people in similar lines of work), but he's just presenting/explaining it poorly.
It's sorta like the person who proclaims "I don't have internet access, and I'm better off for it", and then goes on to say that they have a personal assistant whose job is to handle all their online accounting/shopping/research/etc for them. Maybe they personally are better off for their particular workflow, but the really are using the internet, just by proxy, and their implied value statement about themselves compared to people who do use the internet (directly) is not really valid.
If the truth hurts so much that a person takes offence, then they should take action to change so that the observation no longer holds true. If the truth is in regards to something they are incapable of changing, then it should not be a truth they can be held accountable to as it is not within their power to change it.
Knuth's blunt honesty may seem rude to some, however the same result is reached if he provides that truth in (what is considered by most) a polite fashion, or (what is considered by most) a rude fashion. The only ultimate difference between the two is that the 'rude' version reaches its conclusion much faster, saving time and effort for any involved parties.
Edit: Oh, right, see the summary elsewhere about his secretary Phyllis Winkler at her retirement.
I'm not accusing Knuth of this, but I think some people just use email as a way of humble-bragging. "I'm so important it's overwhelming!" Yeah wow. We're all so impressed.
That there might be why you haven't learnt to hate Email (or other forms of asynchronous communication). If you want to learn to hate, try running a few mildly successful Open Source projects. Or try participating in other lame company flame email thread.
The fundamental problem with email (and other forms of asynchronous electronic comms including Github pull requests and Facebook messages) is there's little burden on the sender. The entire burden is carried by the recipient. It's too easy for the sender to turn impulse into wasting someone else's time. Snail mail at least costs a stamp and a trip to the letter box.
TLDR: Right now email doesn't scale
The fact that an email is easy to send without knowing the recipient is a huge benefit of email. No other electronic communication system offers this benefit (and unfortunately it enables spam, but that's an entirely different discussion).
Companies and organizations have not yet grasped the negative impact on productivity that email has wrought. Like drinking from lead goblets in another era, it's going to be a while before we get it. We need email, but it needs to be put in its place.