Ask HN: Is it realistic to earn £1000/$1600 per week? - <AUTHOR>

The short of it: I want to earn £1000/week (~$1600) as a freelancer.
I'm in the UK (not London) and I've found that the majority of prospective clients consider this too high. I've been mostly a lurker on HN for a few years now so it's entirely possible I'm being unrealistic and spent too much time reading about SV/US rates ($100/hr and so on).
Now I can do front end, HTML, CSS, JS, work with bootstrap or code from scratch, I can also do backend PHP and some JS there too. I've also got a couple of iOS/Android apps under my belt. I understand the front/back end crossover is sought after, but perhaps that's not really the case? Perhaps it's the mention of PHP?
To head off some possible responses: I am trying to expand my skillset as I do know a lot of people here frown upon PHP to put it mildly, for example trying to pick up on Python and Angular, but I can't spare too much time when the rent is 2 weeks late and Christmas is approaching fast - and I seriously doubt anyone would pay me to learn as I go!
So I am being unrealistic? Do I need to lower my expectations - and if so, how low would I go? <comment><USER2> It is entirely possible to earn that much (and more) in London, outside of London - assuming you're not in a complete backwater that much should be possible.

I'd say rather than worrying about what technology you know, spend a bit of time focusing on the business side - how you find and attract clients, how you negotiate, what business areas you target etc. It is likely that the clients you are dealing with have unrealistic expectations of what engineering costs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rates for PHP start around £250 per day up to around £350 per day. Good Javascript developers (and I mean good - client and server side with decent framework backgrounds) can earn upwards of £450 per day.

However your best bet is to look here [http://www.jobstats.co.uk/](http://www.jobstats.co.uk/) and do some searches.

From a return on investment point of view you are probably better focusing on Java and .Net, however if you are creative then focus more on CSS jobs.

The most important thing is to stick with technologies that are popular and to ALWAYS be learning.

Good luck!

<comment><USER4> Where do those javascript developers work to get that type of money?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, of course you can do it and no you don't need to lower your expectations - £1000 is easily doable for nearly any city/conurbation. If you need money now (which your post implies), get yourself onto Jobserve and start chasing all those PHP/JS contracts. Some devs hate recruitment agencies, but they can be a contractors best friend for cash flow; hard to do less than £250 per day in the UK, great for getting cash.

Also, while its hard to swallow long term esp. if you have a family, there is always the option of relocating for a couple of months.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a freelancer, but I have hired freelancers. You didn't say where you are based, but in London a normal day rate is anywhere between £350 - £550.

If you're a good PHP dev then don't talk that down—your client doesn't care what's cool at the moment. They're more interested in getting something that works and delivered on time.

If I wanted to be a freelancer that earned £1000 per week, I'd start by just telling people my day rate is £200 per day. Then use whatever personal connections, friends of friends, to find work and use that to build a early network of clients. The freelancers I've hired in the past are generally through personal recommendations so think about people who come into contact with your target market and approach them to see if they're willing to put a good word in for you.

If you're looking to be trained then you're likely to have more fun getting a permanent job where they're willing to invest money to train you.

Obviously, this is unlikely to happen over night so may not be the solution to your current problem.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER7> Currently doing GBP450/day full stack (node and frontend JS) for A Well Known Tech Company on a short term contract for a major project.

I previously worked for the other Well Known Tech Company, and from what I can tell all these places, even if they're filled with Genius Programmers, use contract agencies to make marketing apps.

</comment><comment><USER8> $1,600 USD is very realistic.

I work full time, but also spend ~12 hours a week on freelancing, and am making ~$2,000 every 2 weeks from this.

If I went full-time I could make more, I think, and so could you.

I focus almost exclusively on PHP, but also offer Vagrant/Puppet services that go well together with my PHP projects.

<comment><USER9> So if you're working 12 hours a week as a freelancer, how do you propose this to your customer? "I can do the work over the course of a week, whilst doing 3 hours a day", or something?

<comment><USER8> Exactly. I make it extremely clear that my time is limited, and that my available time is during off-business hours during the weekdays, and on Sat/Sun.

<comment><USER9> Awesome, glad I'm not going about this the wrong way.

I'm doing a lot of work at the moment; overtime and freelancing. Juggling time is always hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the responses - looks like it may be possible after all :)

I had dealt with a few recruiters for contract jobs before but they all seemed to offer "perfect" positions which then vanished to be replaced with less enticing ones. I had sort of assumed they were making stuff up to get me on a list, but it might be worth investigating again. This time I'll see what research I can do to make sure they are half decent recruiters!

Appreciate the comments and hopefully I can do something with this advice.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am guessing here but you are probably suffering from product-market misfit here. Most probably your clients' needs could be served with a Wordpress install, a few plug ins and a shiny theme on top. They would happily pay £300 for that and you can still make a decentish profit.

You are providing a service at a tick higher level than that, which they don't really need. I guess you see where I am going with this; you need to find clients that actually need your skills.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, this is perfectly reasonable and chances are you can make more than this. If you're struggling with this amount, you either need to tell a better story that justifies your value or find better prospective clients. Remember, people aren't hiring a coder, they're hiring someone that can make their business better/make them money/put out a fire/something else that's valuable to them emotionally.

Also, is there a reason you don't move to London if your earning potential would increase there?

Btw, as an aside: PythonDeveloper if you see this, you're hellbanned.</comment>


Is Bitcoin Becoming More Stable Than Gold? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/04/19/is-bitcoin-becoming-more-stable-than-gold/ <comment><USER2> > "The last 24 days mark the longest period in which bitcoin prices have been > less volatile than gold prices, going back to 2010."

Twenty-four days is not enough time to extrapolate any real meaning. It could be just chance, it could be indicative of a long-term trend, but I'd file this headline under the category of "questions to which the answer is no".

<comment><USER3> >I'd file this headline under the category of "questions to which the answer is no".

Obviously if Bitcoin goes tits-up it will not be more stable than gold. There seems to be a non-trivial probability Bitcoin will go tits-up from shitty governance alone, but barring that it seems to me that Bitcoin has the potential to be far more stable than gold. Access to gold is dependent on a large amount of geopolitical factors that could all change at any time, as well as mineral extraction technology that is getting better all the time.

Extrapolating far enough, we'll never find an asteroid that's miraculously made almost entirely out of Bitcoin.

I'm curious as to whether your viewpoint is the same for all cryptocurrency or just Bitcoin.

<comment><USER4> The characteristics from which gold derives it's value are basic facts of the universe.

The characteristic from which bitcoin derives it's value is a brand name. A 'bitcoin asteroid' can be found by simply copying the bitcoin source code and building a stronger brand.

<comment><USER5> > The characteristics from which gold derives it's value are basic facts of > the universe.

Yeah, human ability to worship.

<comment><USER4> I was thinking more along the lines of resistance to corrosion, elemental arrangement of particles, etc.

Theoretically, human ability to worship should be transferable to any object of worship.

<comment><USER6> There are better alternative for those properties than Gold, however. Gold just happens to be the same color as the presumed Sun-god.

<comment><USER4> ohh..

Better go tell a large percentage of the world that they are wrong and they should all buy bitcoin then.

<comment><USER3> These are the only two options for you? Gold was created by God with all the properties to function as a medium for exchange (literally the belief of Islamic State), and what exactly, that Bitcoin is the One True Medium of Exchange and we should all melt the gold and use that?

Fortunately even Bitcoin enthusiasts are less gung-ho about their currency then some gold-nuts like Islamic State.

Source for Islamic State: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG7YXKE4x3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG7YXKE4x3w)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interestingly, the all-time Bitcoin price graph looks a lot like the Gartner Hype Cycle:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

Whether or not this really is a "plateau of productivity" remains to be seen however.

<comment><USER8> It looks to me more like the Hunt Brothers' attempts to corner the silver market from 1970-1980, and the fallout thereafter.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday#/media/File:Si...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday#/media/File:Silver_price_in_USD.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Currencies aren't really "stable" in and of themselves, _relationships_ between currencies are stable.

<comment><USER10> Wrong. If you can buy the same amount of most things with the same amount of currency over a period of time, then we say that currency is stable.

<comment><USER11> We rather say the economy is stable, then. If most things go awry after a war, that's not because of the currency and nobody will care about the currency either ... except for traders crossing borders and exchanging currency. In the world market, if currency is treated as a commodity, other currencies count as _most things_ , I guess.

So, you may be right and your parent will also.

<comment><USER10> > If most things go awry after a war, that's not because of the currency and > nobody will care about the currency either

Then why are you bringing this up? You said it yourself: "that's not because of the currency". It's because the things you buy became too expensive or too cheap. If the currency remains stable, you could still buy the same amount of most things in other countries not affected by the war.

<comment><USER11> > things you buy became too expensive or too cheap.

> if the currency remains stable

> you could still buy the same amount of most things in other countries not > affected by the war

Sure I can, sure, but whether or not the currency remains stable is the very question, not a hypothesis. This is circular reasoning. If _most things_ are still sold in exchange for the currency in question, then that currency is still only as stable as the economy that is selling _most of the things_ , by your own definition of an economy of _most things_.

I'm just saying you have a dysfunctional definition.

<comment><USER11> to put it in other words, I'd readily assume a currency couldn't be stable if it wasn't serving its intended purpose, being representative of economic state.

<comment><USER10> That's not its intended purpose. Its intended purpose is representing debt. That's why fiat money bills are called IOUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Analysis is obviously flawed, question to me is what might motivate the WSJ to run a story like this.

Any ideas?

Are papers/journalists legally required to disclose any holdings that relate to stories they cover?

<comment><USER13> So, I'm not a lawyer, but IIRC journalists are not _legally_ required to disclose holdings. However, professional ethics definitely does require that they be transparent. For what it's worth ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ My guess is that WSJ just wanted to run a clicky story about bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Other posters have pointed out that Bitcoin has only been more stable than gold for a 24 day period. To me, this means that the floor of bitcoin volatility is now within the ceiling of gold volatility. While this says nothing about which is more volatile, it is notable nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've always wondered how much of the wild fluctuations in the early days were due to Mt Gox manipulating the economy.

<comment><USER16> I think Mt Gox may have largely contributed to it and perhaps was even the main instigator, absolutely, but we need more evidence. I'm very interested to see what comes out of the Japanese criminal court case against Mark Karpeles, it may reveal a lot of important historical information here.

There's been some speculation that the Bitcoin Halvening may affect the price soon: [http://www.thehalvening.com](http://www.thehalvening.com)

Personally though, I'm perfectly fine with Bitcoin prices being stable. The gold rush craziness was really toxic for Bitcoin in the end.

<comment><USER17> > [http://www.thehalvening.com](http://www.thehalvening.com)

Lol. "Real time data: total number of bitcoins: <number that isn't even an integer, let alone a multiple of 25>"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Weird that they chose the last 24 days, when I've been noticing for quite a long time that it's been stable just below 400. I've been watching bitcoin since it was around 12$, and it's been amazing to me to see how stable it's been in the last 2 years despite a lot of recent drama, including the mtgox scandal, the story surrounding changes to the block size, etc.. If you look at the log-scale graph, it's been incredibly stable since 2014, roughly half of its history, as compared to the first half: [http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25z...](http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zvzl)

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that varying from between 200 and 400 is by any means "stable", but compared to its growth in previous years it's incredible to me that it hasn't dropped back below 200 after the initial upswing to 1000, but rather has hit about half way (~400) and stayed there. To me this means people must be actually using it, not just randomly throwing it around, but I don't know. _Someone_ thinks a single bitcoin is still worth about 430$ right now, and after all the ups and downs surrounding it over the years, I think that's kind of amazing. --

(personally I just wish I had never played around with buying and selling and had just held onto the 12 or so bitcoins I bought at 20$ in 2012... :( but, well, I'll count myself lucky, they probably would have gotten lost along with the 2 that I had in mtgox..)

</comment><comment><USER19> They are different things, Gold is Money.... bitcoin and the dollar are currencies. One will always have value, the other represent value and if people lose faith in them their value will become zero which already has happened in the history of humankind hundreds of times. The only difference with bitcoin is that as far as I know its not corruptible unlike other currencies which the maker of the currency always end up creating more than they are supposed to.

</comment><comment><USER20> Has BitCoin finally reached equilibrium between malware ransomers selling BitCoins to malware Victims (exchanges mediated) for recycling?

<comment><USER4> I forgot about that. I was thinking the only (ultimately unsustainable) uses bitcoin had happened upon were buying contraband, and exit scam type swindles, I forgot about extortion.

I was thinking these were unsustainable because authorities have made clear their intent to go after the contraband use, and the tendency for the markets themselves to be exit scams. And the swindles seem unsustainable because after awhile all the bitcoins would be concentrated with the swindlers with no one left to swindle.

With the extortion though, theoretically the extorters could sell to the extorted.

(At least until someone can figure out a better way to dole out system permissions to reduce the feasibility of that cryptolocker bullshit.)

For that to be sustainable though, there would have to be some veneer of other legit activity going on in bitcoin, if was just extorters selling directing to the extorted, the extorters would be pretty easy to track down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One might as well ask "Can Bitcoin prevent cancer?" based on "In the last 24 days people who own a lot of Bitcoins had fewer cases of cancer than the general population!" (Which I'd wager is probably true, but for reasons having nothing to with Bitcoin itself.)

</comment><comment><USER22> That's a good question.

Assume that most civilization has been wiped out by a meteor or atomic weapon and we find ourselves covered with dust cloud back in stone age.

What would be more stable? A network of computers connected to the net and exchanging a database of numbers in the size of few gigabytes, or some commodity produced naturally by our mother earth.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am skeptical of bitcoin, mainly because it has limited convertability to sovereign currencies backed by military power. I surely see the value of digital currencies, however sovereign backing and convertability is necessary to expand beyond a niche.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'll invoke Betteridge's law on this one (the answer is no). With all the recent drama around the blockchain direction and power struggles among the developers, it's rather difficult to make a serious claim that bitcoin is going to be stable at all. I think this is more a commentary on the volatility of gold than on the stability of bitcoin.

<comment><USER25> As usual on HN: "Hacker News law of Betteridge's law of headlines: If the headline is applicable Betteridge's Law will _always_ be mentioned. " [1]

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842803)

<comment><USER13> No idea why you got downvoted, since this is hilarious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Gold is based on something tangible and useful. This minimizes it's maximum drop. A safety net if you like. Bitcoin does not have this, so when/if it crashes it can hit 0.

<comment><USER27> The long term value of gold is based on the price of mining new ounces of gold. Likewise, the long term value of Bitcoin is based on the price of mining new coins, which is based on the mining network.

The only way Bitcoin would go to zero is if a fatal architecture fault is found, which is quite unlikely.

<comment><USER28> There is already a fatal architecture flaw - someone owning 51% of the mining power could reck havoc. We just need some way for someone to make enough money out of bitcoin's failure.

<comment><USER29> Someone owning 51% mining power could reak havoc by falsifying transactions... Could they control the price in general?

<comment><USER6> They could take all the coins. All of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone when the next blockchain reward halvening will happen? Its pretty close and it will surely shake up the bitcoin price.

<comment><USER10> [http://bitcoinclock.com/](http://bitcoinclock.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Gold isn't stable. it never has been.

</comment><comment><USER11> No, it isn't.

</comment><comment><USER32> Bettridge's law of headlines is out in full force today.

<comment><USER10> Hacker News law of Betteridge's law of headlines in full force today: If the headline is applicable Betteridge's Law will always be mentioned.

<comment><USER33> Maybe if Betteridge's Law wasn't so often true we wouldn't see it brought up every time.

<comment><USER10> Or maybe if so many people didn't want to sound smart with little effort...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Meet the inventor of the mouse wheel - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000865.html <comment><USER2> It's fascinating to see the synergy between the Microsoft Office division and the Hardware division in pushing this revolution. I guess MSFT gets it right sometimes.</comment>


Traffic Hacks: How One Driver Can Vastly Improve Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://trafficwaves.org/

<comment><USER2> I changed my driving patterns after first reading this remarkable essay some years ago. Now I follow what I affectionately call the "zen of driving", to wit: leave a huge gap in front of me, drive at a constant speed where possible [1], avoid using the brakes except in case of emergency, and so on.

On long driving trips through mixed traffic, I have made several observations, some obvious and some surprising:

* Driving in congestion is no longer stressful. It just isn't. (Hence the "zen".)

* Dramatically improved fuel economy.

* It's possible to drive through even wildly erratic traffic (swinging from 100 km/h to 20 km/h) without ever touching the brakes. It becomes a kind of game. Manual transmission helps.

* Some other drivers seem to figure out what I'm doing, and they fall into place behind me at a reasonable distance. I've had people follow me for hundreds of kilometres this way.

* Even though you'd assume leaving a huge gap in front is an invitation for other motorists to cut ahead, they rarely do - especially in congestion. If they do, I just let them race up to the front of the gap and then fall back by a single car length to restore the same gap.

I absolutely swear by this driving method. It's easier on the car, easier on the heart, and even serves to create a bubble of calm around you in an otherwise turbulent flow of traffic.

\</comment><comment>

[1] Edit to qualify "drive at a constant speed". As I noted later, my speed ranges dramatically based on the congestion level - what remains more or less constant is the safe opening in front of me. Sorry for any confusion with my original choice of words.

<comment><USER3> That's not "zen" -- it's artificial regularity. Zen would be driving at what feels like a natural speed, only adjusting that when circumstances dictate, and "letting go" of your attachment to forward progress when something stands in your way. Instead, you're driving at an artificially limited speed to try to regularize your driving experience. You're tricking yourself into feeling less frustrated by consciously eliminating frustration triggers from the driving experience; a zen approach would involve simply choosing to feel less frustrated by "realizing" that the frustration triggers really don't matter.

> Even though you'd assume leaving a huge gap in front is an invitation for > other motorists to cut ahead, they rarely do - especially in congestion.

That's heavily dependent on time and place. I've lived in many different regions, and done a lot of driving in those areas. I've noticed that the tendency to fill in gaps is heavily dependent on local driving culture and the specific demographics on the road at a particular time of day.

> I absolutely swear by this driving method. It's easier on the car, easier on > the heart, and even serves to create a bubble of calm around you in an > otherwise turbulent flow of traffic.

That may, to some extent, be an illusion. Some people are infuriated by other drivers they perceive as holding them up -- which often includes people who are "wasting" lane space by letting a gap of thirty car lengths lie unused in front of them. Personally, I only get annoyed with such people when they try to keep other people from filling that gap, because as far as I'm concerned a steady gap (given a steady general traffic speed) creates irregularities in grouping through which ambient traffic can accelerate itself, but people who maintain a huge gap then rush to block out people who want to move into it are increasing the danger of driving and doing nothing to help improve the flow of traffic.

<comment><USER2> >That's not "zen" -- it's artificial regularity.

Please see my edit in my original post to clarify what I meant to write. In fact my speed ranges up and down based on the level of congestion, whereas the safe buffer I maintain in front of me remains constant - and by safe I mean long enough that I don't have to use my brakes when traffic slows.

As for my use of "zen", don't read too much into it. It was just a tongue-in- cheek reference to the fact that I stopped trying to fight the flow of traffic and instead simply pass through it as peacefully as possible.

>That's heavily dependent on time and place.

My observations are limited to highways in Ontario, Quebec, New York State, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.

>I only get annoyed with such people when they try to keep other people from filling that gap

Hey, man, you're welcome to it. Blocking another driver from filling the gap would mean accelerating to close it, which kind of defeats the purpose of maintaining it.

<comment><USER4> I'm a Zen Master, I have the degree to prove it. Your use of the term has been approved by the ZCUZ (Zen Committee On The Use Of "Zen").

<comment><USER4> Children these days have no respect for Zen Masters.

<comment><USER3> Is that self-referential?

<comment><USER4> No, at least I certainly did not mean it to be. ;-)

The original comment, for those that don't get it yet, was a stab at apotheon's comment. It was an attempt to avoid the argument of "what is Zen" before it gets out of hand, as it's been known to do on other sites.

If you're curious, an example: <http://zenhabits.net/2007/01/why-zen- habits/#comments>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This man is a saint. For years I've wished more people understood these principles. Instead, I get drivers who are angry at me for leaving a big space in front of my car. If only I pulled up right behind the car in front of me, they'd be 60 feet closer to their destination!!

I wish more people would check this site out. Traffic is a _real problem_ that wastes billions of taxpayer dollars and hours on the road every year.

Another idea to make the roads better: lane-specific _minimum_ speeds. Think about it. It would actually solve a ton of common traffic problems.

<comment><USER6> Another problem is drivers who insist on driving in the left lane at all times and refuse to move over. IIRC, the left lane used to be referred to as the 'passing' lane...

<comment><USER7> In the UK it still is, and passing on the left is illegal. I like that system more that all lanes equal.

<comment><USER8> So if there is a slow car there, what do you do? Does everyone wait behind them until they turn/exit or decide to switch lanes?

<comment><USER7> If there's a slow car in the outside lane, and they're not making any attempt to overtake anything, you generally flash them until they move over. They are, after all, breaking the law.

<comment><USER9> What if a car is in the passing lane doing the speed limit? Asking them to move out of the lane so another driver could pass by speeding, breaking the law, doesn't make much sense either.

<comment><USER7> It's a grey area, although usually accepted that 90% of drivers drive faster than the speed limit anyway.

If it's a 70 limit, and someone is in the passing lane doing 70, you'd still flash them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some Japanese scientists did a study to show how traffic jams can appear of of nowhere. They told 22 drivers to drive in a circular path at 30 km/h. A traffic jam appeared, and moved backward. The video is here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M>

<comment><USER11> It's not 'out of nowhere.' It's because we're humans. We're paranoid and reactionary. You wouldn't see that with robots.

<comment><USER12> Cynical much? How about it's because we have bounded cognitive abilities, limited perceptive accuracy and slow reaction times?

<comment><USER13> You're forgetting the natural caution and fearfulness that protect us from depending too much on our limited abilities when safety is at stake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ever since I can remember, I've always thought this was obvious, a product of random slowdown being amplified by reaction time delay. Motorway pileups are well known to be exacerbated by close driving, because each subsequent driver has to brake harder and harder to stop. Jams are just a less dramatic form of the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER15> "WHY must a bottleneck develop at a merge zone? Well, obviously because there's too many cars on one road. And because everyone must take turns slowly merging together. WRONG! Wrong wrong wrong. Even during extremely low-traffic conditions, everyone still takes turns, yet everyone merges as a high speed flow,like a zipper. A bottleneck never appears."

New York city drivers are really excellent at the zipper merge thing. While living there, I got really used to not having to slow down much at merge points. Everyone just drove at a decent speed using all available lanes then smoothly merged at the point where the lane was closed.

Moving back to Pennsylvania, people start queuing up in one lane a mile before the merge point, and traffic grinds to a stand still. This is insane. Usually, though, if you do the sane thing and use the other lane up to the merge point, you can get in without trouble.

Maybe I was one of the early mergers before I lived in New York, and have just blocked it out of my memory. Now, though, seeing it happen really grates on my nerves. One of many reasons I'm glad I hardly ever drive anymore. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> I've been driving like this ever since I heard a show on Wisconsin Public Radio where they interviewed a traffic researcher. One thing that is _not_ true, however, is that "cheaters" are always wrong.

For instance, there is significant research that suggests in a 2 lane situation where both lanes must merge into one single lane (road work ahead, for example), it makes more sense for both lanes to proceed uniformly toward the point where they must merge. Most people would assume this would cause a deadlock at the point where the merge occurs, but it doesn't. When both lanes are allowed to proceed without switching lanes towards the point where they both must merge, they will achieve far better results than if they were to organize into a single lane prior to that point.

This makes people /really/ angry. Once, when there was approximately 2 miles notice for road work, I stuck with the right lane and did not merge into the left lane like everyone else. I actually had a large pickup truck attempt to cut me off from proceeding in an EMPTY lane.

Of course, this only holds when there is an inevitable traffic jam. When it comes to /avoiding/ traffic jams, you are better off maintaining distance to allow other drivers to merge.

</comment><comment><USER17> It saves a lot of gas too. I've always tried to get through stop and go traffic smoothly without using the brake, but I always did it for my own gas consumption. I never had this macro look at it.

<comment><USER18> Especially if you drive a standard transmission. Staying off the brake makes a huge difference, and makes for less clutching as well. For bonus points, you can put the car in neutral while coasting, although some don't think that's safe.

<comment><USER19> On modern cars with manual transmission, the motor is powered with some gas when it is not engaged. However when you leave it engaged an just don't push the pedal, no gas is needed. (Although the motor brakes somewhat. I don't know which effect is stronger.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't this imply that cities could alleviate traffic pathologies by hiring people to drive carefully down the highway?

<comment><USER21> This was the focus of a short video a group of college students made a few years ago, "A Meditation On the Speed Limit."

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5366552067462745475>

<comment><USER22> Is that the video in Atlanta where they drive side by side around I-285 at the speed limit of 55 mph? It's an interesting social experiment, but I'm surprised none of them were driven off the road. Traffic on the left on 285 generally moves at 70 - 80 mph here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> i think its interesting that i used to drive like this site describes for the exact reasons it talks about. and now i don't/can't. the difference? i moved to atlanta.

rush hour drivers here operate under a greedy algorithm. they see an opening that will allow them to speed up or gain extra distance immediately, and they'll take it, for no other reason than to be going faster right now, to be farther down the road right now.

and that includes eating up my buffer zone, forcing me to break/stop, killing my flow optimization.

<comment><USER24> That (in addition to the fact that everyone lives in the suburbs) perhaps provides some of the explanation for why Atlanta rush hour traffic seems to be some of the worst in the country, despite having more lanes and a smaller population than cities that have better traffic.

<comment><USER3> I have had to commute on two of the top ten worst rush hour stretches of highway in the country (and they're within a few miles of each other in southern California, on the 91 and I-10). Noodle is exactly correct that such driving "cultures" do exist, and they make this consciously regularizing driving style worse than useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a fast driver, and one thing I will never understand are those who will do anything and everything to box in a fast driver, or to prevent them from cutting into a lane and taking off. I see fast drivers as excited molecules, looking to escape. What often happens when a fast driver is being blocked is they'll switch lanes back and forth, looking for their escape, creating this wave of hesitation, causing this big low speed anchor to form.

Someone driving fast won't suddenly stop the speeding after being blocked. Just let them go!

<comment><USER25> I am a fast driver, but in traffic I switch to wave abatement. It seems only logical to help the system when there is no way to personally benefit. (Except that moving to the right-most non-merging lane will help you avoid waves and move faster.) My prioritized rules of the road are:

      1) go whatever speed you like
      2) empty lane to your right? move right
      3) no car in front of you and a car behind you? move right as soon as possible
      4) slower car in front? move left if you can

These simple rules cover most situations in a way that benefits everyone involved. They do not cover some minority cases: aggressive tailgaters and high relative lane speeds (I leave a buffer lane if > 10 mph and no cars behind me).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I read this a while ago and I try to do it whenever I find myself in traffic. If nothing else, it is immensely less frustrating to drive a constant 15mph than to drive 30mph half the time and be at a complete stop half the time.

</comment><comment><USER27> While I have not conducted any format experiments in the efficacy of the advocated driving method, I can report that it's far more relaxing than tailgating. Give it a try!

</comment><comment><USER28> When I accidentally end up on Rt 128 at rush hour, I do this.

(I note that I was on a mailing list with a bunch of relatively smart people once, and I mentioned what I did - and even among the smart folks there was a lot of outrage because I was driving "wrong" or "stupidly".

That reaction contributed to me leaving the list shortly thereafter. )

<comment><USER29> How happy I am to live (and work) at the portion of Rt 128 which is separate from I-95!

But every time I go down to Boston, or far away to other urban areas, I can never keep the distance that I want because someone would certainly cut in. So I increase the distance again, to avoid tailgating, then another guy gets in between us, etc, etc. And so we have a peloton of cars moving at 65+ mph a few meters away from each other. Not too pretty.

<comment><USER3> Nice use of "peloton".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting, my instinct has always been to try to "punish" the cheaters by preventing them from merging in, thinking that this would discourage this behavior. But I can't really stop this, and the article provides a good explanation for why you might as well just let people merge in front of you.

<comment><USER30> The problem is that allowing merges incentivizes zooming ahead in the merge lane, which should result in there still being drivers who can't merge, creating the jam. I don't have a good solution for this.

<comment><USER24> To an extent I think you're right and some people will do it regardless. On the other hand, smoothly flowing traffic creates an incentive to not zoom ahead in the merge lane. There's less of a feeling of a need to cut ahead and people don't seem to do it as much when there isn't already a jam. (That is, the jam provides an incentive to cut in front of everyone)

And if people were to implement this strategy, the provided space gives an incentive for those zooming ahead to merge a little sooner rather than risk waiting half a minute for someone to let them in right at the exit. It's been my experience that most of the "cheaters" will merge a little sooner if there's space rather than zoom up right to the end. They'll still be passing you, which is IMO aggravating, but at least things will move a little sooner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For anyone else fascinated by traffic patterns and driver behavior, I recommend reading Traffic: Why We Drive The Way we Do and What It Says about Us

The author goes into fascinating detail about driver psychology and discusses similar ideas like those mentioned in the essay.

Link to book: [http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says- About/dp/03072...](http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says- About/dp/0307277194/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251250678&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've actually done this on my way to/from work, and it makes a legitimate improvement in my commute.

</comment><comment><USER32> _How One Driver Can Vastly Improve Traffic_

Yes, but that one driver is _never_ the guy in front of you.

</comment><comment><USER33> I respect this guy's patience, but the primary reason that one car can make such a big difference in this case is because 520 (one of the most important commuter roads in the Seattle area) is just two lanes in each direction. One car on a three lane road will just be passed.

The counter-point to this, in my opinion, is that at some point psychology comes in to play and you have people starting to get aggressive and angry because of a few people forming a "rolling-road-block". It's not rational but it definitely happens.

I would support 3PM-7PM dynamic speed limits on 520W toward the bridge. If the speed was brought from 60 (just past 405) to 30 as you approach the bridge it could probably keep things moving smoothly through the traffic burst.

</comment><comment><USER34> I read this site a few years back and I've done a bit experimenting. I'm convinced that leaving space in front and avoiding sudden changes on speed are really helpful. Some times I have even seen traffic jams disapear if I leave a lot of space in front.

</comment><comment><USER35> This essay should appear as a Public Service Broadcast through all media outlets.

</comment><comment><USER3> My biggest complaint about this is that it's going to give many people who don't _actually_ help traffic, and just drive slowly, feel self-righteous about their driving habits. Yes, in some circumstances this driving style can help traffic; no, it doesn't mean that driving 15MPH slower than ambient traffic is justified "for the greater good", especially if you're the type who jealously guards the thirty car lengths in front of you, accelerating to keep people from changing lanes in front of you.

</comment><comment><USER36> Nice, patient guy but there's a better way yet if you can afford to gamble with your time a bit (don't try this if you can't afford to lose a little time).

When confronted with a single backed up lane, use the uncontended lanes to zip to the front of the wave and merge in _at speed_. Maintaining speed is important. If you don't find an opening, you'll have to abort and find another route to your destination.

The up-side is that this almost always pays off and you waste little time slowed by traffic or slowing others. The reason is because many people who queue up resign to the monotony and pull out their phone or their air drums, etc. They pay enough attention to brake consistently but not enough to accelerate as soon as is possible.

The vast majority of the time, you can slip in front of one of these 'sleepers' before they notice the opening or have fully accelerated. Because of inertia, they will go through an acceleration period where you pull away from them leaving them a very sufficient gap.

Another way to look at this is using the available real-estate to ascertain a proper zipper-merge. If done right, you wait less and no one gets stuck behind you. This is especially useful if you commute five days a week--the payoffs over time are well worth the occasional crap out.

<comment><USER16> I take issue with your theories. The "payoffs" you allude to do not exist. Your "zipper-merge" costs you gas money, and if you took the time to watch the video, you'd realize that you are considered a "cheater". Cheaters feel better about having gotten in front, but what they don't realize is that the "sleeper" is providing a way for cars to merge, thus alleviating the jam in the first place. All you're doing is typical busy-body traffic maneuvers that soothe your rattled frame, but do nothing to actually get you to your final destination any faster. The difference between maintaining adequate distance and doing your patented "zipper-merge" have been proven to shave at the _most_ , a minute and a half off of your commute. Even if you do this five days a week, you're saving roughly 8 minutes. If you think that's worth it, then you should also be aware that the vast majority of accidents occur while changing lanes.

<comment><USER37> Actually, this study (<http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/wz/workshops/accessible/McCoy.htm>) lends credence to the claim. Late merges have better throughput than early merges when encouraged by traffic signs and uniformly adopted.

The study does not directly address the effect of "cheating" late merges which can create waves, but did note that traffic signs which strongly encouraged early merging by everyone increased overall transit time through construction. That suggests that the default case is better.

That makes a little sense to me: a single lane can bear less traffic, so extending the amount of distance everyone has to spend in a single lane might result in higher latency overall, if not necessarily lower throughput.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Constant velocity" applies to lane changes, as well. I hate when people are going 70mph and slow down to the 55mph of the car in front of them, THEN change lanes. No, change lanes as you're coming up on them so that you maintain a constant velocity.

Related to this is the need to "stay right". Especially in CA, some of my fastest travel happens in the far right lanes because people think of lanes as a "speed" rather than a "function", and so the right lanes are empty while the left lanes are crowded and slow.

The number one lane is not the "fast" lane, it's a "passing" lane. Guess what? The number two lane is a passing lane, too. If you're not passing anyone, you should be on the far right side of the road.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a representation of classic game theory. If all participants cooperate to drive as described, the traffic clears. If nobody else helps to open up space, however, you will personally arrive at your destination slower by driving passively, even though many others behind you will benefit. And since this type of driving requires some degree of altruism, you can pretty much rule it out as a realistic outcome without introducing another constraint (eg. as mentioned in the article, state troopers merging into traffic and forming a rolling barricade).

<comment><USER40> However, if _everyone_ carried 10-15 extra car-lengths ahead of them, the total capacity of the road would be greatly diminished; you would just be moving the jam to the on-ramp.

The peak performance of the system is actually a mix of altruism and selfishness.

<comment><USER27> That's a fallacy, addressed by the site -- in short, the benefit gained by minimizing jams more than offsets the increased space between vehicles.

<comment><USER40> I think you may have misunderstood my point, which is that peak performance is attained when a few drivers drive altruistically (as the author does) and the rest drive "normally". If all drivers choose the same behavior (all altruistic or all normal), then the system doesn't work as well. This is interesting from a game-theoretic standpoint.

The author says much the same thing on his FAQ page:

 _If EVERY driver was to constantly maintain a HUGE space regardless of speed, then it would probably cause problems. The merge-zones might stop jamming, but the capacity of major highways would be reduced. On-ramps would become choked as traffic backed up into them, and there would be slowdowns extending far out into the countryside._

It is, of course, a purely theoretical problem, since there is no shortage of non-altruistic drivers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I completely agree with the moving wave! I have pondered this very same pattern myself. I'm excited to see it documented and shared on the web.

Taking this "zen" driving a step further and imagining an ideal world of cars that never break down on the highway and where the process of merging onto and exiting from a highway could be scientifically mastered such that the speed of the nearby cars is at most nominally affected, it is not inconceivable that cars could travel at speeds far beyond what is considered safe today.

</comment><comment><USER42> My friend and I have designed, in our 6th semesters, a 8085 microprocessor based, congestion-aware traffic control for crossroads.

The system uses switches on the roads ( replaced using RFID or other sensors placed on the ground or at the sides of the roads ), that detect the load on each path and route traffic accordingly.

Not much, but it worked like a charm !!

</comment><comment><USER43> Makes me think of Drum-Buffer- Rope from Theory of Constraints. Maybe we need a pull system for roads. There are a few onramps on criminally undersized (due to nimby nutsos) highways in my area where a traffic light limits flow onto the road at busy times- smart. Then the same people put in stoplights at the ends of the offramps, backing traffic up onto the highway.

</comment><comment><USER44> BTW, sorry if this sounds off-topic, do you know any good books/articles on Traffic? I'm very much fascinated by this too. Thanks.

<comment><USER20> Not even close to off-topic. Traffic problems (and queuing theory) have a long history in CS, and the related problems have applications all over the place.

<comment><USER44> Can you recommend any good books related to Traffic issues for a beginner and intermediate? Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> While I find letting the 'cheaters' in grates too hard on my soul I alway try to practice driving at the average speed and avoiding using the brake. If for no other reason than to avoid wear on the car (in the UK most cars are still manual and so each start is a tiny bit more wear on the clutch as well as the brakes).

</comment><comment><USER46> Kinda related and interesting/amusing - "This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord. Beat That, Punk.":

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/01/guy-can- get-59-m...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/01/guy-can-get-59-mpg- plain-old-accord-beat-punk)

</comment><comment><USER47> One has to wonder whether same principle can be applied to economics.

I.e. that continous and moderate spending instead of savings somehow keeps the wheels moving in the economy.

</comment><comment><USER48> This works, but the trouble comes when some guy in a big truck starts heavily tailgating you and flipping you off.

<comment><USER25> That would be unfortunate, since a heavy truck has the most to gain by not changing speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> If you want to help traffic, stop hitting your damn brakes so much. Brakes are for strong deceleration, and most deceleration in traffic can be handled by letting off the gas. Once you get good at this, follow as closely as possible in a traffic jam without applying your brakes.* There's nothing better a skilled driver can do to alleviate a traffic jam. The jam is physically shorter and people behind you are less likely to apply their own brakes as a result of these measures.

* This has the added benefit of making for a smoother ride, which also encourages those behind you to ease off the brakes.

<comment><USER50> Driving in Los Angeles, this is exactly what I do... I'm convinced that most traffic jams are caused by people needlessly applying their brakes and slow cars clogging the fast (far left) lane.</comment></comment>


Minimum Lovable Product - <AUTHOR> https://firstround.com/review/dont-serve-burnt-pizza-and-other-lessons-in-building-minimum-lovable-products/ <comment><AUTHOR> I liie esr's definition (for community building, but works for MVP too):

> _plausible promise_. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It > can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not > fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can > be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future. > [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral- > bazaar/cathedral...](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral- > bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s10.html)

In some cases, the problem you're solving might adequately define the "promise" you're trying to fulfil.</comment>


State of the Site: Metafilter financial update and future directions - <AUTHOR> https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24814/State-of-the-Site-Metafilter-financial-update-and-future-directions <comment><USER3> Metafilter might be the internet community with the single highest quality of discourse on the internet. Yes, easily outdoing even HN. I really hope it comes through this intact.

<comment><USER4> I disagree with this, but not because MeFi users are wont to flame or bait or argue in bad faith by default.

I paid for a membership almost a decade ago and haven't been on Metafilter in probably 6 years now. Even back around 2012 it was getting to the point where there was a clear ideological bent - namely a postmodernist, anti-capitalist, anarcho-socialist-lite, ideology. That would be all well and good except arguing from any other pov, if only for argument sake, would get piled on and not discussed in a way conducive to productive conversation.

Seems to be happening everywhere on the web now - including HN. Just this week someone argued that this statement I posted was "almost racist":

 _I also don 't think this is desirable as a framework for AGI - as humans, despite our intelligent status, are quite unstable and sub-optimal in groups._

How someone gets "racist" from that statement is really mind boggling. Not exactly a great environment for discussion.

<comment><USER5> It looks like they just mis-read you as saying that there are particular sub- groups of humans that are sub-optimally intelligent, when what you charitably appear to be saying is that evidence of our intelligence as a species gets cloudy when we start working in groups as opposed to individuals.

<comment><USER4> _evidence of our intelligence as a species gets cloudy when we start working in groups as opposed to individuals._

Indeed. I strive for clarity above all things in my writing, but it seems increasingly impossible to navigate the minefield of offense-taking. I try to largely ignore it, but prevailing ideologies don't really care about arguments that are controversial, and immediately jump to labeling.

<comment><USER5> I don't know. In basically no other place in my adult life other than Hacker News am I ever seriously confronted, by people I'm actually talking to, with the idea that non-white people are inferior to white people (intellectually or otherwise). It basically only happens to me here. And the (bogus) argument that science conclusively shows certain racially-defined subgroups to be inferior is the most common form that sentiment takes. So I wouldn't be surprised if people here were hypervigilant about that.

I'm not looking for people to be racist (I get a sinking feeling in my stomach when someone whose comments I've read before on HN says something that betrays a belief in racial superiority; it's not pleasant). But I am pretty regularly on the lookout for subtle or coded appeals to that logic.

<comment><USER4> And as we can see, simply stating your opinion here - which is effectively anti-racist and anti-fascist gets you grayed out.

However I do encounter racists in my daily life and it's pretty unnerving - <USER2> only because I or my father have been on the receiving end of their racism (we're not white by the way). So I'm acutely aware of it, yet I'm hesitant to bring up any argument that is counter-narrative - irrespective of whether the argument is about race or not - for fear of being singled out.

I think - based on what dang has commented to me personally and I've read elsewhere - HN has taken the approach that political/social controversy in and of itself is counterproductive to reasonable online dialog, so anything that has even a whiff of polarization needs to be very closely monitored. Obviously that's a matter of judgement and while I disagree, it's apparently the direction they want to go, so be it.

<comment><USER6> I think the relevant guideline puts it well:

> _Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets > more divisive._

<comment><USER7> The inadequacy of this guideline and couching most moderation along its lines is why the problem and 'dynamics' as tptacek puts it, exist in the first place.

The site selects for and breeds civil, substantive racists and misogynists (along with the hyper-sensitized responses) like a hospital breeds antibiotic- resistant superbugs.

<comment><USER8> I can see selects for, but breeds seems a stretch. Unless you mean breeds civility within racists and misogynists, which seems beneficial?

<comment><USER7> Yes, mostly the second thing. It's the opposite of beneficial - because the guidelines say 'don't be a meanie/obvious blowhard' and most people who get called out for anything are called out for something along those lines, bigots who adapt to these can and sometimes do last on the site for _years_.

HN's mods put in a great deal of effort in and are surprisingly successful at containing the far more basic and common human impulse to be a jerk to strangers online. They have rules, they enforce them, they publicly shame rulebreakers, etc. You are explicitly not allowed to be an asshat on HN and everyone knows it. The place would be better if 'don't be a bigot' got the same treatment. All caps users and transgressors against HN's fundamentalist quotation marks cult† are exposed to more public opprobrium than your typical "human biodiversity" sea lion.

†This bit is a dumb[1] joke[2]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I haven't heard of Metafilter in forever, it always seemed like a pretty obscure community. How come it takes $38000 a month to run this site? It can't be getting that much traffic.

EDIT: ok, upon reading the TFA most of it goes to pay the wages of employees, but what do they all do is unclear.

<comment><USER10> Last I checked: There are multiple moderators and one Tech guy. Historically, they prided themselves on providing "real jobs" with adequate pay and benefits.

The numbers I'm seeing suggest the full time staff probably make better than $50k/year and the part-time staff likely make some pro-rated equivalent, so to speak.</comment></comment>


Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/swedish-six-hour-workday-trial-runs-into-trouble-too-expensive <comment><USER2> This pilot was actually not 6-hour workday, but 30 hour workweek. Yes, it is true that the politicians that decided it called it for 6-hour workday, but in reality is was 30 hour workweek and nothing else, because of how the facility works with scheduling and so on (regulations etc).

Nurses worked between 5 to 7 hours on day shifts resulting in a 30 hour workweek. Night shifts was 6 to 8 hours.

I think it is important to stress this fact that it was about workweek and not workday. Almost all media reporting on this (Swedish as well) misses this fact. You have to read the report to get that.

Personally I rather work more one day and less the other. It is the flexibility over a week that is more interesting than over a day.

report after 18 months 2016-10-11

[https://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/files/104/75...](https://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/files/104/757fe9ed-702f-401a-b275-c3c45fcfae99.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Seeing as how even the PDF you link says in the first sentence "6-hour workday" ("6 timmars arbetsdag"), I can see why there is some confusion about the specific details.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that does not really help. That shows that it is important for journalists to read the fine print.

In Sweden, 6-hour workday is a well known political slogan, probably why that was used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They're abandoning it because of an obvious requirement? Did someone not realize that in a 24 hour operation that consists of physical activities, cutting hours would require more people to carry the same workload?

<comment><USER5> Yeah this sentence was a bit of an anticlimax:

"Preliminary results concluded that it achieved all of these aims, but the city had to employ an extra 17 staff, costing 12m kroner (£1.4m), Bloomberg reported."

Am I missing something because that seems painfully obvious without even having to to undertake the experiment no?

That being said I absolutely love that the Swedish government was willing to entertain such an idea and undertake such an experiment.

<comment><USER6> My interpretation is that the cost could be calculated beforehand but not the benefit. If the outcome was a dramatically improved care and well-being of patients that saw much shorter hospital stays OR an unanticipated reduction in the need for staff as a knock on effect of shorter workdays, then the benefit might have been considered worth the cost.

<comment><USER5> I see. That certainly makes much more sense. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My utopian society workweek is 4 days/8 hours.

That extra day off would do far more for people than one or two less hours every day. So 4x8=32 hours, vs 6x5=30 hours. I would even bargain for 4 days/9 hours, or 4x9=36 hours.

That third day is huge. It's the difference from having only enough time for some leisurely weekend activities, to having enough time to take a mini-3-day- vacation every week (short flights, etc.).

<comment><USER8> I'd much rather do 5x6h, I suppose the difference might be if you have small children.

<comment><USER7> You're probably right, if I did have kids I would prefer 5x6h until I shed that responsibility (they leave the house once adults).

But as someone without kids, being able to take short flights or trips every week over 3 days would be awesome.

I guess ideally, since 5x6h and 4x8h are only two hours apart, a utopian workplace would offer its employees either option -- the people who chose 4x8h would make 2h more wages weekly.

<comment><USER8> I do 40 flexible hours already, so I do a couple of hours in the evening or on the weekend, just to get a 6-7h typical day, to fit the schedule with school pickup etc.

If I wanted, I could work 4x10 (With some sweet talking to a manager perhaps). I'd very much prefer to have 30, 32 or 35h to distribute over the week though, it would make the planning a lot easier. In that case I'd do e.g. 5x6 now that my small children needs early pickup, but I'd go to 4x8 when I have larger children who can bike home from school, so we can go on a weekend trip with friday off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I imagine the optimal working day depends on the work one is doing. I used to work 8 hour shifts at Circuit City and leave with plenty of energy. But 8 hours of solid coding leaves me exhausted.

I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I believe that includes developers.

<comment><USER10> And truthfully, it is going to depend on the person to at least some extent as well.

IMO, anything that doesn't include being at work as part of your actual job duties should have no number of required work hours. You either get enough work done or you don't. If you aren't getting the expected amount of work done, then you'll eventually get fired. If you can out perform everyone else on the team and work 8 hours a week, so be it(just don't expect to get any brownie points when it comes raise time unless you put in more time).

Things like retail/food service are obviously things that require being at work certain hours so talking about shortening hours for that time of work is productive. For creative work/management/executive work though, I think we should move to a more flexible approach.

<comment><USER11> So here's a question that I continually ask myself as I work at my remote, salaried 6-hour-a-day developer job that I've been doing for the last year:

how do I know how much work is enough?

If I gauge by productivity, that's cool... I'll just be really fast and get my stuff done and then go play banjo or whatever.

But then when folks hand me a crufty WordPress site that is misbehaving and it could be anything between "visit the route that resets the route cache" and "debug three or four broken and unfamiliar JavaScript libraries and their interaction with terrible PHP code" there is a problem, because to my boss those could be the same amount of work.

When I am doing green field work, or working with very nice, clean technology that I understand well, it's easy enough for me to have expectations about how much to do, even (or perhaps especially) when I am dealing with a large, multi-month effort where there is a lot of fluidity in hitting specific goals.

But how do I say "oh, I worked enough today" if I don't have an hourly commitment? I agreed to a certain period of my time specifically because sometimes I look up and have worked 8-10 hours.

I'm the only programmer on my team, by the way, so there aren't a lot of metrics we can pull from about performance.

This is a real question I think about a lot, and I'd be happy for an answer: how do you set a workload expectation with no reference to how much effort or time I am expending when time estimation is difficult?

<comment><USER12> Absolutely. I don't fully understand workplace cultures (including my own) that claim to care more about "getting your work done" than "hours in a chair." The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of effort. And not just because some people are vastly more productive than others, but also because it's often the case that when reading a bug report, you don't know if the fix will take 3 or 3000 lines of code until it's actually done.

Of course, over time your output averages out, and if you work about as hard as someone at about your skill level you'll have similar outcomes. This works ok for yardsticking at engineer-heavy organizations. Doesn't solve the problem for a solo developer like you though.

<comment><USER13> Good points... It all depends on who sets the milestones for "getting the work done".

If a sales guy commit more features to the customers than reasonable, do you need to put in more hours to "getting the work done"? Does he need to stick around late till your are done to penalize him also? If a sales guy doesn't make a sale as aniticipated does he need to stick around until he makes a sale and "gets his work done"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It doesn't seem like the best type of business to experiment on. It would make more sense in a business where hours worked more obviously is not the same as productivity.

When I read about this in The Guardian way back when, they mentioned three other cases:

 _Brath_

For Maria Bråth, boss of internet startup Brath, the six-hour working day the company introduced when it was formed three years ago gives it a competitive advantage because it attracts better staff and keeps them. "They are the most valuable thing we have," she says – an offer of more pay elsewhere would not make up for the shorter hours they have at Brath.

The company, which has 22 staff in offices in Stockholm and Örnsköldsvik, produces as much, if not more, than its competitors do in eight-hour days, she says. "It has a lot to do with the fact that we are very creative – we couldn't keep it up for eight hours."

 _Toyota_

At Toyota service centres in Gothenburg, working hours have been shorter for more than a decade. Employees moved to a six-hour day 13 years ago and have never looked back. Customers were unhappy with long waiting times, while staff were stressed and making mistakes, according to Martin Banck, the managing director, whose idea it was to cut the time worked by his mechanics. From a 7am to 4pm working day the service centre switched to two six-hour shifts with full pay, one starting at 6am and the other at noon, with fewer and shorter breaks. There are 36 mechanics on the scheme.

"Staff feel better, there is low turnover and it is easier to recruit new people," Banck says. "They have a shorter travel time to work, there is more efficient use of the machines and lower capital costs – everyone is happy." Profits have risen by 25%, he adds.

 _Filimundus_

Linus Feldt, boss of Stockholm app developer Filimundus, says the six-hour working day his business began a year ago is about motivation and focus, rather than staff simply cramming in the same amount of work they used to do in eight hours.

"Today I believe that time is more valuable than money," Feldt says. "And it is a strong motivational factor to be able to go home two hours earlier. You still want to do a good job and be productive during six hours, so I think you focus more and are more efficient."

Source: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency- up-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-turnover- down-sweden-experiments-with-six-hour-working-day)

</comment><comment><USER15> In the Bloomberg story, but not in the Independent story:

"Still, the added hiring by the municipality has helped the coffers of the national government by reducing unemployment costs by 4.7 million kronor during the first 18 months of the trial due to new jobs, according to the interim report."

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Something in those numbers doesn't add up. I gather they maintained the salaries. Good. They had to hire more people, at a cost of 12 million kronor. This mechanically reduced unemployment, and saved the state 4.7 million kronor. Shall I deduce the unemployed people were paid 40% less than the salary they got? Something is wrong there: in France, unemployment insurance maintains 75% of the base salary. Saving only 40% looks quite low.

I need a more detailed analysis. If generalised, this would significantly reduce unemployment. We could thus lower the unemployment insurance rates. I've seen predictions this basically balances out: we can sustain the current effective salaries at no cost.

The way this is presented here, this theory appears to be false. Does it? I'm sure we can draw a more definite answer, but this article is not enough.

<comment><USER16> It could be their first job, they could have been long-term unemployed (you don't get aids forever) or they could have had jobs with lower salaries before.

<comment><USER17> So far we haven't been able to cure aids.

<comment><USER18> I think the parent meant: "you don't receive aid, forever"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _the costs outweigh the benefits_

Well, if you put a low enough price on people's happiness, health, and quality of work, then yes I guess.

Anyway: I hope the people involved in the pilot and happily doing 6 hours shifts now, won't take it too hard if the pilot should be stopped and they're back to 8 hour shifts.

<comment><USER20> The trial was for 68 employees and cost $1.7 million USD (they had to hire additional staff). Imagine you took that $1.7m and spent it on those 68 employees. $25,000/employee would go a long way to increasing happiness with perks etc.

<comment><USER21> Yes I suppose the real question is would those employees "elect" for a 6 hour day with a 25% pay cut, or not...that would give you something of a feeling for whether the benefits out weight cost, as it were...

<comment><USER20> As mentioned elsewhere in this message, it depends on the job really. Nursing staff in a nursing home might benefit more from shorter shifts. Someone that is sitting at a desk taking phone calls or entering data might benefit from a bit longer of a day.

I'm more in the latter camp and my colleagues and I have been talking about doing 4x 9.5 hour days and just rotating who gets Friday's off vs the rest of the week. I could easily come a bit earlier, leave a bit later and get tons of benefits from 3 day weekends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The main reason this _very_ small scale experiment seems to be scrapped early is not because of costs, but politics. Right-wing politicians have seemingly wanted to end it as soon as possible for quite some time now - and obviously voted against the proposal from the start as well. And at this time and age, employee satisfaction and health benefits doesn't hold up against screams about costs.

<comment><USER23> Source on that?

<comment><USER22> Only in Swedish unfortunately: [http://www.gp.se/nyheter/g%C3%B6teborg/sextimmarsprojektet-s...](http://www.gp.se/nyheter/g%C3%B6teborg/sextimmarsprojektet- skrotas-i-f%C3%B6rtid-1.5343)

It seems like the experiment was concluded as planned in the end but they still tried to end it early.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to see more experiments with a 4-day/8-hour work week.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour- workweek/)

<comment><USER25> Agree. Six hours a day seems foolish. All that time getting ready for work, commuting, etc only to spend six hours at work. I'm a much bigger believer in just being closed on Fridays if possible

<comment><USER26> Somewhat on topic: I work 4-days/10-hours: 2 morning hours from home, commute to the office clears my head, 8 hours in the office, and Friday is free.

Pros:

\- three-day weekends all year long

\- 20% less commute time

\- magically enforces the "Read-only Friday" rule

\- if I have to handle an emergency on Friday, it means overtime pay

\- Friday is good for running errands

Cons:

\- clients/coworkers still work on Fridays, so I can't ignore my email entirely

\- occasional meetings happen on Friday

This is probably not a good schedule for everyone, but I have been working it for 2 years now and I like it a lot. Although none of my coworkers are following this example...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Problem for Göteborg is lack of money. Göteborgs economy is one of the worst in Sweden, about 50 billion SEK in debt. City took money from other areas to fund this pilot. This is always going to the problem in a well regulated budget like for a city. Therefore they ended it.

These kind of nursing jobs in public sector is low wage and high work load, no regulation on formal training, but usually some sort of grammar school education. 97% who works with it are women.

What the public employer want to do here is to use the number of work hours, instead of high salary, to attract young people. Thats the long term scheme.

Wages in public sector in Sweden is falling behind private sector more and more. You can get more paid to clean someones apartment than a newly educated registered nurse with proper training from a university gets when signing up for work in the public sector.

Lots of young Swedes go to Norway and work there instead and get much better pay.

</comment><comment><USER27> This was a bad industry in which to pilot this. There are obviously hard time requirements in terms of when such a facility has to be staffed. Obviously, cutting everone's hours means that other people will have to be hired to pick up the slack. It's hard to believe that no one saw this coming. I'd be more interested in seeing the impact of a 6-hour working day on a business that doesn't function in this way.

</comment><comment><USER28> So, 1.5 million US dollars over two years (less, if you account for the saved unemployment costs. ref. trynewideas comment), for happier employees and better care. I personally have a hard time seeing this as any form of indication that it's "spiraling out of control".

I agree with other commenters, this smells of politics more than economics.

<comment><USER20> $1.5 million for 68 employees at a nursing home.

I work in a healthcare system with 120,000 employees. Let's say we reduced hours to 6. Using the Swedish numbers, that would cost our organization $2.6 billion dollars, or roughly 10% of annual budget.

<comment><USER28> The costs are not trivial, I agree. But neither are the stated benefits. I personally value those benefits, even at a 10% premium.

<comment><USER29> I personally would be willing to have a 10% pay cut to work only 6 hours a day

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately, at least in the US, going down to 6 hours a day makes you a part time employee, at which point you lose a lot more than even 25% of your pay. Frequently benefits are pared down to the point of extinction, including health, vacation and holidays.

<comment><USER29> what's stopping you from being a salaried employee that just happens to work 30 hours a week?

<comment><USER28> Employer expectations of 40-50 hours of work a week, with corrective action as the stick that enforces it.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, that's true. My point is that nothing is stopping companies from offering 30 hour work weeks and also benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm mostly amazed that their nurses are only working 8-hour shifts. In the US, it's common to work 12-hour shifts (but only 3 days/week).

<comment><USER20> This was in a nursing home, so depending on the level of care, there might only be 1 nurse on staff overnight. They could still be doing 8 hour shifts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If this experiment shows that the costs are too high reducing working hours, I wonder how UBI could be cost effective.

<comment><USER32> UBI can't be cost-effective as a living wage. Living wage UBI would cost more than the entire current US government budget.

Some UBI proposals aim to replace all of the current welfare systems with one UBI system that costs the same. (That wouldn't be what happens, but let's consider it for the sake of argument.) Those proposals have to limit UBI benefits to an amount that is below a living wage in order to stay within the budget of the current welfare system, assuming everyone receives the same amount of money (that's the definition of UBI, and any system that gives different amounts to different people is not universal or basic.)

Plus, the government's budget would have to shrink if tax receipts drop, which they would clearly do if lots of people chose to live off UBI instead of working. So even the non-living-wage UBI proposals are probably unrealistic.

UBI seems like a good idea at first, but it seems less attractive the more you look at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> My own really short story, I (sysadmin/ops/programmer) currently work remotely about 4 hours per day, and I'm way more productive than when I worked 8.

<comment><USER34> Do you mind expanding on why that is? I hear this often and I'd like it to be true, but I find it hard to believe.

<comment><USER33> I suspect it's a number of reasons.

\- I work to my own schedule. There's no artificial start time. If I feel like I've got something to contribute at any point I sit down and do so. If I feel inspired or get in the zone I'll do 6 or eight hours, if I don't I'll do none, or just a couple of hours.

\- Conversely, if I don't feel up to it, uninspired, tired, whatever, I can stop. Taking a break/nap and coming back to something is incredibly valuable.

\- I'm so much less stressed than when I was working an 8 hour job. Way more relaxed, so my mental state overall is way better.

\- If I sit down and program/operate for 4 hours I spend the rest of the day effectively letting my brain churn on problems. I'm still thinking about the problems that I am working on, I have way more "shower moments".

6 months ago I worked an 8 hour per day job (from home still) and my own personal observation is that I'm way more effective in 4 hours now than I was in 8 at my old job. I _feel_ productive.

This might not work for other people obviously, maybe I just need/like a larger proportion of my time to be thinking time over implementation time.

<comment><USER34> I agree, working 4 hours a day will feel more effective than the last 4 hours of an 8 hour day, but the question is whether it's actually twice as effective. And perhaps it's so for very high level tasks, but I'm pretty sure for some things you just need to clock in the hours, like closing 100 tiny bugs because you're launching in a few days.

<comment><USER33> I agree, though a lot of the time what I need to do requires just thinking about stuff, sometimes I need to plough on and just _do_ stuff. 6 hours of coding something, writing, whatever. When that happens I just do the work.

I'm lucky in that I can work the hours I need to work. Last week I did days that lasted 4, 6, 1.25, 1.75 and 4 hours (the 1.x days I had other stuff on).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> To be honest I think thats not a nearly throughout economic analysis.

To begin with, as noted in the article by having to pay more people, it removed some from unemployment. That as noted in the article basically halved the cost of the extra cost.

But hold on. Someone removed from unemployment doesn't just sit and look pretty. Unemployment benefits are usually nothing to write home about compared to an actual wage and where previously one could just subsist they newly employed individual could now Consume much more strongly. Consume in this case means buying tomatoes, buying starbucks, buying cinemas tickets, buying dresses and whatever. All this stuff moves the economy.

The question is then, has the economic impact of all this economy moving been taken into account?

</comment><comment><USER36> Note that "Sweden" did not conduct any 6 hour day experiment.

This was done in one municipal workplace with a few dozen employees.

[http://www.snopes.com/sweden-6-hour- workday/](http://www.snopes.com/sweden-6-hour-workday/)

</comment><comment><USER37> Url changed from [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/sweden- six-h...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/sweden-six-hour- working-day-too-expensive-scrapped-experiment-cothenburg-pilot- scheme-a7508581.html), which points to this.

Submitters: please don't submit an article that's clearly lifted from another publicly available source. Submit the latter instead. This is in the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

</comment><comment><USER38> What a waste of a study. If they the end result is that they didn't realize the cost up front. I think this is just a poorly written click bait title.

100% they knew the cost. The outcome was :

>The take away was largely positive, with nurses at the home feeling healthier, which reduced sick-leave, and patient care improving.

While we are headed to super automation and the reduction of workforce (And a stagnant or growing GDP) it is either free money for the non-workers or reduced work hours. It's Jetson's again.

</comment><comment><USER39> If you did the study in the IT-industry. What would the result be if you would measure code commits and code quality for a large sample of programmers with [4,6,8] working hours?

<comment><USER40> In general it's difficult to measure the productivity of developers, since the a single commit can mean years of maintenance. Measuring the code quality is equally hard: linting and code conventions will only get you so far, designs need to be reviewed by humans.

In short: [http://nesma.org/2015/01/programmer-productivity-is-waste- of...](http://nesma.org/2015/01/programmer-productivity-is-waste-of-time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Maybe instead of automation taking away jobs, people will end up working less hours. This was a reduction of hours without automation, so 17 nurses had to be hired

<comment><USER42> You absolutely nailed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This felt like click bait, it's about a Swedish nursing home - I was assuming this was related to office / tech work as it was high up on HN. It does sound ridiculous that reducing hours mean hiring 17 other staff - I've heard of tech companies being able to handle a few less hours per working week and benefiting from it.

</comment><comment><USER44> Everyone in the job market needs be on such a roster or it won't work, thus it is not a failure in itself.

If every business was required by law to have a tea lady (or man) per every 50 employees it would not make any business uncompetitive, and would be sustainable, and it would reduce unemployment, and I'd get a cuppa.

</comment><comment><USER45> I would take a 10 hours day, 4 work days and a three days long weekend over a 6 hours workday routine.

Edit 1: 9-6 is 9 hours -_-

<comment><USER46> Would you take it if the 10 hour day was 8am-7pm with an unpaid hour for lunch, and the 6 hour day was 9am-4pm (with something approaching a 25% pay reduction.)

9-6 is 8 hours + lunch, aka a standard work day.

<comment><USER45> We do 9-5 or 8-4 and everyone "kind of" take lunch during those 8 hours and managers don't throw a fit about it. Unlike my last employer, where managers were sticklers about covering lunch hour or favored eat your lunch at desk kinda deal. I would be totally fine with a 8am-7pm -- disciplined 10 hours day. I don't have a family, but i can see people appreciating and spending a three day weekend with their kids. Also for young people, this can take the concept of "seekender" to more literal levels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> saverio-murgia Here on HN I always read people saying that you are more productive working 5 to 6 hours a day instead of 8. According to the people claiming that, the people who got a 25% cut in working hours should have performed better thus accomplishing the same amount of work. That obviously did not happen.

<comment><USER47> I think it's different with physically intensive jobs, such as nurses in the trial, and mentally intensive jobs, such as programming etc. The latter may very well end up being equally or more productive, while physically intensive jobs probably would end up with reduced productivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I am under the impression that 6-hour days are widely adopted in France. Anyone know more of it?

<comment><USER49> This is completely false. French workers (at mid-management level and above - not hourly workers) work long hours. Longer than German and Nordic countries, for example, where leaving at 5pm is the norm and leaving later is more a sign of poor work planning than of dedication.

I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the weekends and have more vacations.

<comment><USER50> This is not my experience. I work for a French multinational games company and I'm situated in Sweden.

It's astonishingly common for my French counterparts to "arrive" at there computer at 10:30 each day and head out the door shortly before 17:00. Not to mention the 1.5hour or so lunch they tend to take.

This is a sample of maybe 20 people, and maybe it's a culture of the company more than the country, but I've noticed they like to shake hands with everybody on the floor before starting their day, and they also like to take a coffee first and have a chat. For me though, I operate "remote" and when they are not available on Lync/Skype then they may as well be not working because they're.. not.. working.

it is a stark contrast to my team who are jacked in before 9, and save for a few hourly strolls to the canteen and lunchtime do not leave until 18:00. (unless something breaks then we stay, which is common in crunch times.)

<comment><USER51> I think I work for the same French multinational games company ;-)

I do work with people from both our Swedish and French studios and I can definitely confirm what you said, both ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm wondering why they didn't begin with 7 hours, if it should have been expected that more money would have been spent. I feel the world is so wrapped in money that we are stuck choosing money over wellbeing...

<comment><USER53> Probably so the shifts could be organized better. If the nursing home runs 24 hours, it's easier to move from 8 hour shifts to 6 than to find a way for some people to be on 7 hour shifts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> The article is light on details. What "costs" are they talking about?

<comment><USER55> They needed to employ 17 extra people on top of the 68 employees taking part in the pilot, in order to guarantee the level of service. Which to me is a win (17 people got a job) but it is clearly a cost increase that the employer was not ready to accept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I think it's not a good business example to test cutting hours. Taking care of somebody 6 hours instead of 8 leaves a 2 hours shortage, which therefore must be covered.

</comment><comment><USER57> The headline reads: "the costs outweigh the benefits."

Except there's no mention of the greatest benefit: improved quality of life for all participants.

</comment><comment><USER58> I still miss the days when I was working in a power plant and worked a 40-hour week, over four days. Especially since the schedule was arranged so that the off-days were staggered to produce a four-day weekend every other week.

The only downside was, ironically, on holiday weeks, because the holiday pay was only 8 hours, which resulted in still having to work four shorter days, and often screwing up a long-weekend cycle.

</comment><comment><USER59> Wow. The sad state of journalism... and of critique from readers at this site.

Obviously bumping salaries by 1/4 is not reasonable.

In order for costs not to outweigh benefits that clinic would need to be some kind of utopia...</comment>


Enabling Continual Learning in Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> https://deepmind.com/blog/enabling-continual-learning-in-neural-networks/ <comment><USER2> This builds on the ideas behind PathNet, previously discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13675891)

Whereas PathNet permanently freezes parameters and pathways used for previously learned tasks, in this case the authors compute how important each connection is to the most recently learned task, and protect each connection from future modification by an amount proportional to its importance. Important pathways tend to persist, and unimportant pathways tend to be discarded, gradually freeing "underused" connections for learning new tasks.

The authors call this process Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC). Figure 1 in the paper does a great job of explaining how EWC finds solutions in the search space of solutions that are good for new tasks without incurring significant losses for previous tasks.

Very cool!

<comment><USER3> that's pretty incredible - I'm no AI expert but it certainly sounds like this algorithm provides an ANN equivalent of neuroplasticity, which seems like a big step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm confused. I don't get what the novelty in this is. It looks like all they do is include an input that identifies different tasks and then trains one neural network to learn a separate distributions for each task, with some weight sharing...

<comment><USER5> It may be an obvious solution, but has anyone done that before? While retaining the ability to have said weight sharing?

<comment><USER4> Of course, people have done this before [1]. There is quite of bit of research looking into Multi-task learning. Just look through some of the references in that Luong et all paper. Deepmind has been putting out some amazing research lately, but this paper definitely does not fall in that category.

1\. [http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/luong2016iclr_multi.pdf](http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/luong2016iclr_multi.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sidenote: On the list of contributors I noticed there are Research Engineers and Research Scientists. What is the difference between the two?

<comment><USER7> Research engineers turn theory, pseudocode, or smaller proof of concepts into a more fleshed out implementation. Once a research project exceeds a few thousand lines of code it becomes useful to have dedicated engineers doing architectural design, owning unit testing / backtesting frameworks, code quality control, etc.

Source: was a research engineer at Intel Labs several years ago.

<comment><USER8> While this is true, it is also sometimes merely based on your degree. I was a "Research Engineer" doing the same work as "Research Scientists" because my degree was in "Computer Engineering" not "Computer Science."

So, YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This came out two days ago and uses what they call intelligent synapses to improve multi-task learning: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04200](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04200)

Seems closely related.

</comment><comment><USER10> "..After learning a task, we compute how important each connection is to that task."

Anyone know if this was expanded on in the whitepaper?

<comment><USER11> Presumably you could track e.g. the average gradient of the error with respect to each weight.</comment></comment>


HPE, AMD win deal for U.S. supercomputer to model nuclear weapons - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hpe-amd/hpe-amd-win-deal-for-u-s-supercomputer-to-model-nuclear-weapons-idUSKBN20R2RY <comment><USER2> Where is the Supercomputer for modeling the global spread of pandemic disease? When was it built? What are its specefications? Who operates it?</comment>