It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar - <AUTHOR> http://adamharkus.com/never-too-late-learn-guitar/#.WZGS85RAHzM.hackernews <comment><USER3> As someone who has been playing for 35 years or so, here are some observations...

First and foremost, guitar is a pretty straightforward instrument for beginners. There's a reason it's the most popular instrument in the world. If you put in the effort, you can be playing something musical in a few months, and proficient in basic folk/rock music in a couple of years. It doesn't take "talent". It just takes effort.

Something that throws a lot of beginners is that we fret with our "weak" hand and pick with our "strong" hand, which seems backwards. That's only because they're beginners. Picking is _much_ harder than fretting. It doesn't seem that way when you're struggling with cramped hands for your first few chords, but good picking technique is the key to actually being good, and it's very challenging.

Don't try to learn on a crap guitar! If it has high action and truly hurts to play, or if it has bad tone, it'll drive you away. Learn on a good instrument. Virtually any guitar that costs over $200-300 new these days is good. You don't need to spend a fortune. And get it "set up" at a good guitar shop. It makes a huge difference in tone and playability.

If you're playing rock guitar, there's a real temptation to use _way_ too much distortion to get what you think is the sound on records. Most great rock guitar tones are much cleaner than they sound. When in doubt, use less gain.

And finally, the guitar is an incredibly deep instrument. After 35 years, I feel I know less now than I knew after three years. Approach with humility.

<comment><USER4> What is involved in getting your guitar "set up" anyway? I'm looking to get back into learning the guitar I bought a few years ago, and I mean it sounded fine to me when I brought it out to check on it, after a tuning, of course.

<comment><USER5> Basically: intonation and action. I'll explain.

Guitars are made of wood, an organic material, which is very susceptible to environment changes (humidity and temperature). So, after time passes, the wood may expand or contract, which changes the physical parameters of the guitar.

There are two forces at play: when tuned, the strings exert force pulling the fretboard "up". In most guitars, there's a long screw inside the fretboard, which pulls it "down".

"Tuning" a guitar means that the strings produce the right frequencies when plucked "open" (i.e. no fret pressed). Correct intonation means that the notes are still "in tune" (producing the right frequencies) along the frets of a same string. "Action" is the height between the string and the fret in different places at the fretboard (so, if you want to be precise, you'd say "6th string action at the 12th fret").

Action is mostly a matter of preference - lower means it's easier to fret the notes, higher means the strings ring out more freely, and therefore the notes sustain better. Can't go too low, or you'll start to experience "fretting" \- the strings hit neighbor frets while vibrating for a note, producing an unpleasant metallic buzz.

The actual physical parameters which influence intonation and action are basically neck bow/relief and string length (via small metal pieces in the bridge of the guitar which can be moved, if you guitar has them). This is what the luthier (the professional who sets up instruments) interferes with.

This is a general view - some guitars may have additional factors to consider. For example, in floating bridge electric guitars, you'd need to consider the bridge springs tension as well, for they will influence both string action and the whammy bar travel.

<comment><USER6> Great post, just to add some info:

The 'screw' that counterbalances the pulling force on the neck exerted by the strings is the "truss rod" which sits inside the neck (on an electric guitar and some acoustics); this rod is adjustable.

This adjustment influences the 'action'. But the 'action' is also set by the bridge saddles' height, which is adjustable. Most often this height is adjustable independently for each string.

Each time the action is changed (raised or lowered), intonation should be adjusted again, accordingly.

It sounds very complex but it isn't, it just takes a bit of patience and experience (for making a good judgement of what an ideal action would be).

To be honest, much more laborious and difficult is to tune a drum set so it sounds great. There are more adjustment points...

<comment><USER5> Good point, forgot to mention the name of the truss rod and the saddle height - which is arguably the most influential parameter in overall action.

I also second the opinion that it's quite approachable if you're patient and methodical.

Another tip (to _keep_ the setup working) would be to have the guitar professionally set up, then carefully measuring and writing down the parameters, so they can be reproduced later.

The hardest one is neck relief, but even this can be approached in a reproducible way by pressing the first and last frets on a string and measuring space left at the 12th fret with a "feeler gauge" or some other width reference (credit cards, stacked sheets of paper, etc).

<comment><USER6> Tip: Picks can work as a substitute feeler gauge. Pick thicknesses are often indicated on the pick (i.e. "2mm")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Warning! If you're middle-aged and thinking of picking up the guitar, you should realize that the public image of guitarists has shifted from "sexy gods" to "annoying hobos" sometime in the last two decades. If you are at least partly motivated by popularity (and who isn't), maybe pick another hobby that actually helps people be popular now, not in your imagined past. So in a sense, yes, it is sometimes too late :-(

<comment><USER8> If you're middle-aged, and still all that "motivated by popularity", then you're not doing middle-age right.

A 50-year old playing guitar is 1,000x cooler than a 50-year old mixing EDM tracks on Ableton, because he thinks it'll help him score 20-year old chicks or impress HN.

No matter what age you are, "adulthood" is pretty much another word for finally having enough self-confidence to do your own thing. It's pretty much always better than "childhood", which is the lack thereof.

<comment><USER9> >A 50-year old playing guitar is 1,000x cooler than a 50-year old mixing EDM tracks on Ableton, because he thinks it'll help him score 20-year chicks.

Corollary: A 50 year old mixing EDM tracks on Ableton because he likes it is just as cool as the first guy.

<comment><USER10> A 50 year old mixing vinyl with turntables and an analog mixer is cooler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I decided to start teaching myself guitar about three years ago, at the age of 24. I had always wanted to learn to play an instrument, but before guitar, nothing ever really stuck.

When I picked up the guitar, I approached it from a different angle. The key for me was realizing that I could treat this like a 20 year project. I bought myself a guitar book[0] and started working through it page by page. I stopped worrying about whether I was good good or not – instead, I began to find great satisfaction in simply getting better.

Three years later, I've made a ton of progress. Practicing has become a kind of meditation for me; it helps clear my head, and keeps me from getting burnt out with work.

[0] William Leavitt's "A Modern Method for Guitar." This book is a pedagogical tour-de-force, though it helps to have a little bit of music theory under your belt if you are going to learn from it without an instructor.

<comment><USER12> Great job! Here are some other great books for you: J.S. Bach - Six Cello Suites (transcribed for guitar) Jim Hall - Exploring Jazz Guitar Joe Pass - Virtuoso (find transcription(s) or do it yourself) Gene Bertoncini - Approaching the Guitar

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I'll be sure to look for these.

<comment><USER13> There's also Mick Goodrick's masterpiece, "The Advancing Guitarist". which is still probably the single most inspirational guitar specific book I've ever read. I've had it for 25 years and still find it inspiring to look at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who learned guitar recently in my late 20s, I can say don't overlook basic theory and the value of soloing/coming up with melodies.

For me, the creation aspect helped keep me interested. A lot of the beauty of programming is creating new stuff. If that's what you love about programming, try to create your own music as soon as possible.

You may want to start on ukulele first (4 strings/requires less pressure) to get the concepts down and start creating your own music faster.

<comment><USER15> I'd have to argue against starting with a ukulele. You miss out on the unusual tuning quirk present 6-stringed instruments tuned to thirds, where every string but one can match the tuning of the string above it by phrasing at the 5th fret, that string being the 3rd string (G) and the one above it (B,) you have to phrase at the 4th fret of the 3rd string to get the matching B of the string above instead of at the 5th fret.

I'd also say go with 6 strings because the typical chords can have more than 4 notes.

<comment><USER16> " _miss out on the unusual tuning quirk present 6-stringed instruments tuned to thirds_ "

A ukulele is tuned to thirds as well. It is basically the same as a four string guitar with a capo on 5th fret (with the typical quirk of having the lowest string being an octave higher)

" _I 'd also say go with 6 strings because the typical chords can have more than 4 notes._"

Typical chords for a beginner are minor and major chords which uses only 3 notes. And the augmented 7th have 4 notes which leaves you with quite some chords to play.

You will be limited by extended dominant 9th,11th and 13th but I wouldn't call those typical.

I think a ukulele can be fine to start as you'll get some very quick progress, but its limitations will come very quick as well.

<comment><USER15> "It is basically the same as a four string guitar with a capo on 5th fret (with the typical quirk of having the lowest string being an octave higher)"

5th fret represents going up at most 3 whole notes, not 8.

"Typical chords for a beginner are minor and major chords which uses only 3 notes."

Those are 'power chords' and not your full basic A-G chords. Your basic base E-chord is E-B-E-G#/Ab-B-E on a regular guitar and on a uke it's E-B-E-G#/Ab. Not even a major or minor, just the basic full chord itself runs at least four notes.

"I think a ukulele can be fine to start as you'll get some very quick progress, but its limitations will come very quick as well."

The limitations become apparent around day two when you realize the E you're playing on a uke doesn't sound as full or bright as an E played on a guitar. I put mine down after a week and never looked back. That was... 23 years ago.

<comment><USER16> Powerchords are usually only fundamental + fifth. you can play those on 2 strings only.

As long as you have 3 notes available you can make a full major or minor chord as it only involved a fundamental, third and fifth.

It will sound different on a ukulele especially because of the bourdon and wont sound as rich as it will hold less harmonics (no additional higher/lower strings to repeat the note) but that's still plenty of possibilities.

Too bad you had a bad experience with it but it still is a full fledged instrument capable of playing decent music. Of course trying to play guitar songs on it will sound disappointing most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I tried picking up a guitar this past week, and was overwhelmed. Just playing a basic chord was a struggle. How do you get your figure to press down just right on the string and not interfere with another. Amazed by people who can play effortlessly. The post encouraged me to try again. 15 min a day sounds like a reasonable practicing goal.

<comment><USER18> You can play a ton of songs with like 5-6 open chords. Find a song you don't hate that just uses G, C, and D majors, and drill the hell out of it until it's easy to transition between those. Way more fun to practice with a real song. You may pick up A-minor or something on the bridge of that song, which is nice. Pick up open A and E majors and E minor on top of that base and you can play rhythm on like 50+% of all guitar-heavy popular music ever written without going any farther. Then start working on barre and (relatedly) power chords and you'll get that number up to 90%. Wait to do that because barre chords require different hand muscles than open chords, so you'll hit trouble again when you start on them and no sense in tackling all that difficulty at the same time.

Take heart: once you get over the initial how-the-hell-can-my-fingers-even-do- that hump, learning enough guitar that it's pleasant to listen to is _quick_. You can hit that mark with casual practice inside 3 months, easily. By contrast, I spent years playing Alto Sax and got way ( _way_ ) better at it than I _ever_ was at guitar, but that was _never_ pleasant to listen to solo—most instruments you've got to be really really good at them before they're tolerable solo, but guitar's about as far the other direction as you can get.

<comment><USER19> My experience with barre chords is that I thought I could never get them right, but I kept trying them with very tiny variations, until one day I just got them. Never thought that I could play them correctly till the day before I got them right.

<comment><USER20> My realization with barre chords came from asking my instructor about how to play a barre A major chord. Seeing his finger bent slightly upwards at the last knuckle was the missing ingredient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As the late great Jimi Hendrix mused:

'Sometimes you want to give up the guitar, you'll hate the guitar. But if you stick with it, you're gonna be rewarded.'

I have been playing for 6 years and am just now getting to the point where I can confidently say that I "play" guitar. Its a long journey and at times painful. But stick with it as the rewards are well worth it.

Here are some tips for the new guitar player from my experience:

1\. You don't need an expensive guitar - you just need a good guitar. I know we walk into the guitar shop and dream of owning that Gibson Les Paul 59 Reissue or the Custom Shop Stratocaster or the PRS. But its not the guitar that makes the music - its you!

2\. Patience. Give yourself some time to see progress. Practice everyday, even if it is for 10 minutes. Pickup up the guitar and just do it for 10 minutes.

3\. Stick with it. The guitar will challenge you. It test your patience, tenacity, discipline, will power and your determination before it will give you anything back.

4\. To get the quickest path to start playing and having fun - Learn power chords first, bar chords next. And the minor pentatonic.

5\. Learn the notes on the fretboard as soon as you can. In fact start learning them form day one. Do one string at a time. Learn the root notes of the minor pentatonic and where they are in relation to each other.

If you do these five things first, you will be surprised how far you are going to get. These are the basic tools of most blues and rock guitarist and 90% of music of that genre can be covered by that.

If you have started the journey of learning the guitar, remember its is a journey that won't ever end. So enjoy it!

</comment><comment><USER22> Here's something I wish I'd realized when I first started playing. If you know the right set of chords you can play them in basically any order and they'll sound nice.

If you take scale like C major, there's a chord that goes with every note of the scale. On a piano this would be mean playing three note chords on the white keys only, all the way up. So for the key of C that gives you

C_major D_minor E_minor F_major G_major A_minor B_diminished C_major

Now here is the cool part: you can play those chords in virtually any order and they are going to sound good (although probably better to skip the B diminished chord, and also helps to start or end on C). It also works in the relative minor key, in this case A minor (still just white keys on the piano, essentially):

A_minor B_diminished C_major D_minor E_minor F_major G_major A_minor

Those chords are all easy to play on a guitar. It would also be easy to do this in the key of G major (E minor) on the guitar. They key doesn't actually matter, but those are easy for beginners. You can just number the chords 1 to 7, then pick any sequence of numbers, eg. 145623, or 4545261, and play it, and it will sound good, and you can make up a melody or a finger-picking pattern to go with it. For some sequences you might need to get a bit creative and vary the timing (eg. some chords will work better if you move through them faster than average, some you can linger on for longer than average), but you could make lots of good music from that alone.

<comment><USER23> Tycho as in the Scott Hansen Tycho? If it is then I would like to say four years ago I listened to your music in a depressed slump, a week later I picked up the guitar and never looked back.

Either which way, that's some good advice and as a beginner it's hard to realise these things if you're self learning. Scales can feel like a practice routine rather than a palette.

<comment><USER22> Not Scott Hansen Tycho, although I'll need to check out his music now that you mention it.

Theory can be very dry and confusing and frankly off-putting, but the above I think is something anyone can absorb and then start using. If you play chords from that set you can sing and make up a tune with the comfort that any of those chords is going to be a good option to play next, so it's very liberating and you can quickly try different things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can't you ditch all of that and use one of these cool new programs where they show you where to play on the guitar, you play in there, and the mic detects if you played correctly then proceeding with the next note?

I think RockSmith is one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaHsqGSetVo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaHsqGSetVo)

I think there are others that might look more pedagogical.

<comment><USER25> Rocksmith works with Bass and Guitar and is a lot of fun. Its basically rock band with real instruments.

It has some basic video lessons too.

The guitar <-> usb cable works with other programs too, though the reverse is not true (you needed to use the rocksmith adapter cable with the program).

melodics is the software to learn finger drumming (though they're adding real drums to the software).

<comment><USER26> > you needed to use the rocksmith adapter cable with the program

There's a nocable patch for PC, and for Mac you can create an aggregate audio interface named "Rocksmith USB Cable" so you can use any interface you like - it's much funner with Apogee gear than the toy cable!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been a professional guitarist since I was a teenager, and switched to upright bass about 3 years ago (I'm 40).

The biggest advantages to learning as an adult is on average you are going to have money to pay for lessons and a decent instrument, and are probably going to be more organized in terms of practicing and all that.

The disadvantages are that it's harder to network and find others at your level to play with. And, to be clear, the way to get good at, and enjoy music, is to play with other people. Even one-on-one lessons are a form of playing with others, and many adults use lessons as a proxy for playing with others.

Playing with other people was a very easy thing for me to do when I was coming up, and I'd imagine it would be significantly harder for an adult. But, I believe it's critical to enjoyment and success in music.

<comment><USER27> Yeah it's been a real struggle for me to find people to play with as an adult. It's hard to find adults who aren't either

A. really good, B. really bad, or C. too busy

<comment><USER13> I honestly think the best thing to do is to take lessons, and ask your teacher if they have other students who'd like to play with you.

You can also go to jam sessions if you live in an area that has a good music scene; I live in SF and there are regular jam sessions for bluegrass/jazz/folk/country/blues nearby. But, the thing about jam sessions is that you have to be able to play at a certain level to really enjoy them.

I think honestly the best solution is one that almost no one takes: hire really good musicians to play with you. When I was in music school, I had a professor that would literally say: "For all the money y'all pay in tuition, you would play better if you took that money and hired $famous_drummer and $famous_bassist to come play trio with you at your house".

Obviously if you are a beginner you don't need to hire the best people in town, but most professional musicians in this day and age are going to be happy for a gig like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Here's my $0.02: Learn barre chords straight away. Don't waste your time learning all the open chord songs you can before you jump in. Jump right into it. Open chords will be easy down the road.

Training your hand to barre strings with one finger, while moving the rest independently, is the most challenging, and the most rewarding thing to learn. It opens up so many doors to your playing.

<comment><USER29> Wow, I wish I had known before I started learning. Moving up and down the fret with barre chord is cool and easy once it is mastered. However, Barre chord is also the hard to learn to play, requiring a lot of finger contortion, and also probably most painful for players as the finger presses down on all 6 strings. A lot of beginners either skip or avoid barre like the plague. I've found that it is easier to do barre on either light string and/or electric guitar.

<comment><USER3> I hardly ever play full barre chords. I _can_ , but I don't. (I was subjected to practicing all the CAGED chord shapes as barres in circle of fifths up the neck, which is great for the hands and the brain.) I don't like the sound of six-string chords generally. So I mostly chord two or three strings at a time, and move what's getting picked from strum to strum to mix the low and high notes. It's much more dynamic and interesting, and sounds a lot less cluttered. But that's me.

The result is that my barres are lazy. Since I'm only trying to get three notes at most to ring clearly at once, I'm just muting the rest, which is a lot less effort. Muting technique is everything!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The "What Musicians Can Learn about Practicing from Current Brain Research" article[1] linked to in the practice section was interesting. The Mental Practice experiment mentioned is pretty amazing. I'm curious, what do people's practice schedules look like? I've been trying to regiment my practice schedule but it's not easy and the only resource I've used is Justin Sandercoe's intermediate practice routine[2] but it tends to lean toward a longer 1-hour workout. Has anyone found an effective method for 15-30 minute practice schedules?

[1]: [http://www.cti-home.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Practice-...](http://www.cti-home.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Practice-Current-Brain-Research.pdf)

[2]: [https://www.justinguitar.com/en/PC-502-IntermediatePractice....](https://www.justinguitar.com/en/PC-502-IntermediatePractice.php)

</comment><comment><USER31> If you are interested in learning /music/ and not just learning the /guitar/, I would strongly encourage you to start on the piano.

I started on the piano and moved to the guitar later, and I've now realised that the piano gives you such a good musical grounding, so much better than the guitar can. There's nothing quite like having it all laid out in front of you. It's the only way that things like sharps and flats make sense, it doesn't make much sense on a guitar and that makes musical theory difficult to learn.

<comment><USER32> I find the piano quite illogical. Playing a chromatic scale requires to jump from white to black keys. The guitar with its "basic" strings is actually much closer to the underlying physics (and thus mathematics), imho.

<comment><USER33> This might be true from a physics standpoint, but it's not from a musical standpoint. The vast majority of all western music was composed on a piano first. It really does help to know it when learning any western music. Even the chromatic scale on a guitar doesn't accurate represent the physics. It's still based on sqrt 2^12 mathematics, not natural waves. If you want true temperament it looks more like this:

[http://www.truetemperament.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/03/sl...](http://www.truetemperament.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/03/slider2-GTR8.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Glad to see this on here. Really, it's never too late to learn _anything_ , but I can offer context here as I have been playing for 25+ years.

I can say without a doubt that picking up a guitar is one of the best things I've ever done in my life. It is just so rewarding. There are no barriers to your level of achievement. Want to get better? Just play more. In fact, the first thing I do after a bad day at work is pick up my guitar. I know that I have at least something in my day that I can do better at than I could have the day before.

It's also tremendously rewarding to be able to kind of level-up to your heroes. I can play things now that I only dreamed of when I was a kid. Iconic solos and riffs that I thought required some kind of superhuman level of skill. Turns out it just takes a lot of practice. The difference being that those heroes _wrote_ those solos in their early twenties, while I'm merely _mimicking_ them in my late thirties. But I still get to hear those sounds coming out of my amp, created by my fingers.

What other hobby or activity could offer that? Most of us could spend 12 hrs a day in the driveway shooting hoops but could never even dream being the worst player in the NBA.

</comment><comment><USER35> Since there are so many guitar players in this thread, I'll go ahead and ask The One Question that pushed me away from playing (and keeps me away):

How do you know what to do with your _right_ hand?

Most books I've (admittedly, casually) read and most tabs on the internet are surprisingly silent about this.

<comment><USER13> The jazz guitar form of bikeshedding is discussing right hand picking technique. There is endless amounts of discussion on consecutive picking, alternate picking, sweep picking, gypsy picking, benson picking, etc.

Have a look at Tuck Andress' take on this to get a flavor: [https://www.tuckandpatti.com/pick- finger_tech.shtml](https://www.tuckandpatti.com/pick-finger_tech.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I say do it for fun. There are plenty of hobbies available to the middle-aged, and let's face it, one can spend a lot of money being mediocre (i.e., not dominating) at any of them - e.g. racing cars.

Those who have sore backs from time to time might want to avoid "traditional" Les Pauls.

<comment><USER15> Les Pauls are light. Here, hold my Steinberger Spirit headless 5-string bass. Let's see if you can even remain upright!

<comment><USER15> Guess nobody here knows the weights of either guitar. Here: Les Paul weighs generally 9 pounds. Steinberger XT-25 (the model I'm talking about) is 13 pounds. It will give you back problems playing it standing up for too long, this is why it comes with a built-in lap bar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I played the piano growing up, but pretty much stopped when I was 16 - <USER2> discovered sports, computers, girls

When I was 30, I decided to pick up the guitar.

Knowing how to read music was certainly a jump start, but it's certainly doable.

JustinGuitar.com is a fantastic resource, but finding a teacher is the best.

</comment><comment><USER38> What do experienced guitar players think about apps like Youcisian (which are basically interactive tabs with timing assistance and learning feedback)? Do they actually help in understanding the instrument and music composition?

<comment><USER39> Whatever helps you get over that initial hump of pain and frustration is a great asset to use.

I've found when learning guitar (and therefore music), that any holes you encounter seem to get filled in later; at one point or another.

Surrounding yourself with enough resources to close these holes is only good for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have been playing guitar on and off since college and it is one of my biggest joys and a great way to relax. I am self-taught so am missing a few key ingredients to really master the instrument but it remains one of my favorite hobbies.

I was put off learning to play guitar in high school by more experienced guitar playing classmates (as well as an actual clerk at a music store) who scoffed and sneered that someone would have the audacity to learn guitar so 'late'. The refrain was "you'll never be good, what's the point?"

(Of course, these were high schoolers and I shouldn't have been so easily swayed, but as a shy teenager hearing these types of things make you crawl back into your shell very quickly.)

I bring this up on this site because in many instances this "don't bother, the playing guitar club is FULL" attitude was prevalent when I began to learn programming around 5 years ago with the hope of changing careers (I'm mid-30s).

While seeking out guidance in various forums online it became clear to me that to many experienced programmers it was inconceivable that I'd ever be successful as a programmer while starting so 'late' and I shouldn't even bother.

The reasons were plenty: I didn't have a CS degree, I wasn't much interested in low-level programming (at the time), I didn't have an interest at getting a job at the big 4 and just wanted to write small web and mobile apps to start (the horror!), I didn't much care for committing to memory every sort algorithm in existence, etc. In short, how dare I knock on the door of their prestigious club?

Fortunately I ditched the learning online route and took the bootcamp plunge while it was just kicking off, where I found a similar community of people and some really awesome instructors who were extremely patient and encouraging. I can't speak for all bootcamp students but for me at least it remains, years later, one of the best decisions I've made and has transformed my career and life for the better.

Will I ever be a virtuoso, Carnegie Hall-playing guitarist or a "rock star" engineer at Google working on the most cutting edge AI? No, probably not, and I'm OK with that. Maybe in my next life.

But what I'm doing is making me happy and is a constant source of new knowledge and discovery. I would just hope that in the future, whatever our expertise(s) we are more careful not to be so quick to dismiss new learners as well as other interested people in other industries and walks of life.

</comment><comment><USER41> ok, so i have guitar but never use the thing, what are some resources to learn?

<comment><USER42> Justin Guitar[1] is a great place to start!

1: [https://www.justinguitar.com/](https://www.justinguitar.com/)

<comment><USER43> Edit: ignore this, it's false. Proof:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/1cgrdq/ama_this_is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guitar/comments/1cgrdq/ama_this_is_justin_from_justinguitarcom_ask_me/c9gc0dj/)

I don't know how this stuck with me for so long, I've practically known it to be true for as long as I've been playing. Huh.

\---

Interesting bit of trivia I learned long after I stopped using his resources: Tommy Emmanuel is his father.

<comment><USER44> I can find no reference to this; it appears he may have three daughters but they all share his surname. Source?

<comment><USER43> You're right, thanks for catching this. See my edit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Like with many things, to get really good you need to put in the time.

I'm playing for 14 years now, started with 18, and I'm a pretty mediocre player.

I know people who also started with 18 and got really good in under 4 years.

</comment><comment><USER46> I learned to play guitar as a kid, played some classical and jazz as a teenager and in my twenties, then put it down. I have a nice classical guitar sitting in my closet for a decade.

My problem is that although I can read music, understand some theory, can play chords and even some can play a little bit of complex music like Villa Lobos, I have absolutely no "ear". I can't even tune the guitar without help.

So this means I basically need to memorize or play from sheet music, which kind of got boring after a while.

<comment><USER47> You don't really need a good ear for tuning. Pick up a tuner, they're pennies nowadays.

When you're tuning by "ear", though, the trick is, on an acoustic guitar at least, to feel the body resonating. It's much more a feeling than a particular sound. I think very few people can just pluck an E note out of nowhere. That takes years of practice.

A general "ear" for melody and harmony comes from practice, exposure to different music styles, and playing with other people. Some stuff that sounds awful by yourself sounds much better with accompanying instruments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The last time I thought about getting serious about practicing was after I had read Anders Ericsson's book _Peak_. I was trying to come up with a practice routine that fit the deliberate practice model.

If you've gone down the same path and worked on optimizing your practice time, what did you come up with? I bought my first guitar in the mid-90s and have worked at it off-and-on since then and still can't play a single real song.

</comment><comment><USER39> As much as I love guitar, these principles can apply to any instrument, so don't think you're pegged into learning guitar because you started late.

You can pick up the bassoon or piano just as well.

</comment><comment><USER49> Isn't that a guittaron (fretless guitar/bass combo) in the image at the top of the post. I've been wanting to get one of those but have too many instruments already...

</comment><comment><USER50> This is an timely write up, bought a brand guitar way back 1 years back and still thinking if this is the right age to learn. This write up changed my prescriptive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. Start. Now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Instead of a private lessons, I use ArtistWorks.com. I am enrolled in the banjo course and have found the video lessons really effective.

</comment><comment><USER52> I started guitar in my mid forties.

Four years later, I've reached the point where (some) non-musicians are envious, and actual musicians categorize my sounds as "music" more often than not.

There's lot of great advice on this thread. (Especially about deliberate practice; and about avoiding instruments so cheap they'll just increase the difficulty while making you sound worse than you are.) I'll fill in a few notes from my own journey. YMMV.

Choosing a guitar:

* Steel string is hell on the fingers for a beginner. It is effective altitude training for nylon and electric. I love the tone and I'm really glad I started with steel string. However, had I known how hard it would be, I don't know that I'd have advised myself to start with it.

* Electric is easy-peasy (callus- and finger-strength-wise). I think a decent electric is cheaper than a decent acoustic too. Con: (1) you're less likely to pick up the instrument for two minutes of spontaneous practice when you walk past it on its stand. (I've probably got a lot of practice in from two minutes that turned into fifteen that turned into fifty.) (2) If you're a unmusical nerd like me, it's easy to get distracted from the hard work of making cleaning notes, by the comfort zone of playing with electronics.

* Nylon (classical) is easier on the fingers than steel but more difficult than electric. It might represent a happy medium between beginner fingers and practice activation energy, even if you don't play classical. Beware: new nylon needs to be tuned again every five minutes. After a month, it finishes stretching out, and holds its tuning about as well as steel.

* You can play any style of music on any guitar, __except __: (1) you can 't really bend (a blues staple technique) a nylon string; (2) electric guitars have much greater sustain than any acoustic guitar: if the music you want to play sounds more like a violin or voice (sustained, tonal) than like a piano (percussive), you need an electric; (3) let's not talk about slide.

* What everyone else says about too cheap a guitar (or, "guitar-shaped instruments", such as acoustics available for <$150-200). Specifically, you're looking for (1) "low action" (don't have to press a string too far for it to reach the fret), (2) good intonation (fifth fret low E is the same pitch as the open A, etc.), (3) stays in tune. Depending on your tolerance, you may also require (4) good tone (timbre). Cheap instruments are generally deficient on all of these, and this can really kill your motivation.

Decide whether you want to strum (harmony) or play individual notes (melody, or "lead"; also most of classical). These are almost different instruments. (For the beginner. A lot of melody is playing off of chord shape hand posiitons; and, coming from the other direction, embellished chords get to sound a lot like lead.) If accompanying (you sing or play harmonica, or can play with in a band), strumming is a valuable contribution. If you're playing solo, you probably need to play lead in order to have music that can stand its own.

Decide whether you want to play with a pick or finger style. It's easier to be loud with a pick, and it's especially easy to be loud strumming with a pick. If you're playing acoustic with a band, this may matter to you. Classical, on the other hand, is always finger style. Otherwise, don't make too much of this decision – there's a fair bit of technique to each, but most of what you need learn as a beginner applies to both, and if you continue with guitar you'll probably want both under your belt anyway. Just find some musicians or music that you want to sound like, and do what they do.

Choosing a learning style. Try each of the following; see which one(s) seem effective for you.

* Learn from an instructor. If this is how you learn best and you have funds and access, find someone you can trust, and then ignore everything else I've written.

* Play by ear. Listen to something, try to make your guitar sound like that. Many of today's older guitarists wore out vinyl records this way. Man I wish I could learn this way.

* Jam with friends. This may work if you're musically talented (I'm not), and/or coming from another instrument. Ditto.

* Learn by watching. Watch people's fingers, do what they do. If this is your learning style, YouTube is the golden age. My pseudo-science theory is that if you're good at learning from watching (e.g. sports, dance, watching people's hand motions when they sew, cook, juggle, drive, etc.), maybe you have a well-functioning mirror neuron system and this will work well for you. Yet another style I aspire to but suck at.

* Play from tab. Learn to play tab, and get some pieces under your belt. I kind of feel like this is the least-musician-y thing to do, but it matches my strengths so much better than the others that I went with this. At this point the road forks: (1) Classical: now learn the (newer!) standard staff, and leave tab behind – that was your starting wheels. (2) Folk/pop/rock/etc.

* Play from standard notation. This is really only used in classical repertoire. Even for classical, tab (which is the older notation) is still easier as a stepping stone, and has the advantage of building in performance notes about fingering, but if you're working with an instructor or you're not going to be put off by learning several hard things at once, then skipping tab gets you to the endpoint more directly.

* Play from chord diagrams or lead sheets. This is good for strumming (harmony). I'm not a strummer; don't have much to say here.

Practice:

* "What you do is what you do every day." 15 minutes / day beats two hours once a week

* "The journey is the reward." Find a way to enjoy the practice itself.

* Allocate some time each day for (1) skills, (2) repertoire, (3) noodling around. When you're starting, you won't have any repertoire (2), and there may not be much distinction between (1) and (3) ("I'm just trying to get _any single note_ to sound clean.)

* At any particular point, have one or more skills you're working on. I've iterated through: play without fret buzz, use each finger without fret buzz, finger adjacent strings, finger non-adjacent strings, chromatic scales, blues scales, various chords, various chord alternations, making a barre, hammer-ons and pull-offs with various fingers, flat picking at tempo, flat picking alternate strings at tempo, finger picking a chord, bending a note, banjo rolls. Spend fifteen minutes a day on each active skill. (Exception: when you're starting, you may only have strength or callus for five minutes. "It's a marathon not a sprint.") I probably spent fifteen minutes a day on barre for a week or two before hearing anything that even vaguely resembled success; eventually, it locked in.

* Learn to play at higher tempo by (1) playing as fast as you can with __zero __errors. Drop the pace until you can do this. There 's a theory that you can learn even faster by (2) playing even faster, with errors, so long as you also do (1). This has worked for me.

* Some great musicians swear by practicing with metronomes; some advocate doing without them so that you develop your own sense of rhythm. If the latter, record yourself and play it back against a metronome, so you can tell if your tempo is as good as you think is is.

* Isolate and repeat difficult sections. Spend a minute, or five, or fifteen, on the smallest problematic section (maybe a single chord, or chord alternation, or four notes from a melody); don't play the whole piece and only hit the problem spot every few minutes.

</comment><comment><USER53> that's a guitarron in the picture which, coincidentally, is the instrument I am trying whether to decide I am too late in my musical career to bother learning :)

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm 29 and have been playing guitar for at least half my life at this point. It's a great stress reliever and just fun in general. I'm not good by any stretch of the imagination, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying myself.

These are some of my personal recommendations for starting out:

\- Use an acoustic, you don't want to have to carry an amp around with you.

\- Learn to sing while you play early on. I think it's harder if you try to learn later.

\- If you learn a song, make it your own. Throw notes and rhythms in that don't necessarily belong. It's no fun being a robot.

\- Learn the pentatonic scale.

\- Don't be afraid to just try things. You're in the middle of a solo and don't know where to go? Jump up the neck and hope you land on something that sounds good.

\- Try to learn songs by ear. Even if you end up looking up the tabs, at least try to play by ear first.

\- Most of all, don't try to be perfect. Just try to have fun.

<comment><USER55> So I agree, except that I think starting out on an acoustic teaches a lot of bad habits, and can also be frustrating for beginners, because acoustics are simply more difficult to play.

<comment><USER56> I think the trick is to start with a _good_ acoustic. One with good action and one that stays in tune. Like a decent acoustic-electric from Ovation or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd recommend starting on acoustic too. It's the quickest and cheapest route to entry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> If I ever win the lottery, I'd love to learn to play the guitar, learn a few foreign languages, contribute to open source software, make a bonsai tree, read all the books I have in my apartment that are collecting dust, [a long list of other stuff I'd like to do].

I don't want a big house or an expensive car or "bling". I just wish I had the money to buy time.

<comment><USER58> You don't need to win a lottery to have the time to learn to play guitar (multiple foreign languages - yes you do). It is actually quite difficult to practice more than 15 minutes every day because of sore fingers and frustration. Lottery or no lottery - if you really want to do it you will be able to find 15 minutes in a day.

<comment><USER59> >because of sore fingers

Maybe in the beginning, but after having developed calluses you can basically practice for an undefinite period of time.

<comment><USER60> You need some skill as well, and that takes longer to develop than calluses. 8 hours of "twinkle twinkle little star" will drive anyone insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> > The best guitarists practice for hours every day

This is why I suck at guitar after 15 years (although I stopped for several). I just don't stick with it enough.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments everyone, and glad you enjoyed the article!</comment>


How can women effectively lead? - new-yc-acct http://www.quora.com/How-can-women-effectively-lead

<comment> new-yc-acct """Facebook's current surge on the secondary markets (for good or bad), its improved public perception and march toward financial success are all directly attributable to Sheryl's work, don't ignore that."""</comment>


Three.js editor - <AUTHOR> https://threejs.org/editor/ <comment><USER2> Three.js is a lot of fun to play around with, though I tend only to use its web editor to test my content for errors.

It's really simple to use Three.js using only vanilla JavaScript.

This is one of my recent experiments[1]; An animated human created using MakeHuman[2], animated in Blender, and rendered by three.js in less than 200 lines.

[1] [http://codepen.io/satori99/pen/Xjbvbr/?editors=0010#0](http://codepen.io/satori99/pen/Xjbvbr/?editors=0010#0)

[2] [http://www.makehuman.org/](http://www.makehuman.org/)

<comment><USER3> amazing. I am flabbergasted these resources exist. Great demo, BTW

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I love Three.js, its editor has been around for almost as long as the project itself and is sort of neglected by comparison. WebGL Studio[0] has a far more impressive editor, but its underlying engine is custom, so in most cases it isn't anywhere near as useful as Three.js due to the latter's ecosystem.

One thing I don't like about either editor is that they're web-based. While it makes a ton of sense on paper, I _hate_ doing any serious 3D work in a browser window. Something like Microsoft's Language Server Protocol[1] but for graphical editors would be amazing. Run the project in a browser window while having bidirectional flow of data between a native desktop editor and the browser window.

Unfortunately if you want to run something like Three.js inside of a native desktop editor, you'd have to embed a web runtime. That really balloons project complexity, so I can see why so many people prefer web-based editors when making web-based projects.

One alternative, at least for 3D applications, is multi-platform frameworks that also work on the web. Oryol[2] in particular comes to mind. Hypothetically you could build a native editor around it, with no need to embed a runtime. The native editor's viewport would just use native graphics APIs for rendering. Then when you like what you see, just compile the same thing for the web. While some edge cases may not make it that easy, overall it seems to be a far superior workflow than having to deal with web-based editors or embedded web within native applications.

Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 both have incredible, native desktop editors that support exporting to the web. Unfortunately, they both have massive runtimes that make their web footprints a joke, among other problems.

[0] [https://webglstudio.org/](https://webglstudio.org/)

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server- protocol](https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol)

[2] [https://github.com/floooh/oryol](https://github.com/floooh/oryol)

<comment><USER5> What makes you say it's been neglected? I scrolled back until i got tired (~3 years) of github's history page for the editor/ directory and it looks like a steady and active stream of development: [https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/commits/dev/editor/js](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/commits/dev/editor/js)

<comment><USER4> Its commit history represents a small fraction of overall commits on the project. While the editor can surely be considered under active development by normal standards, a Mr. Doob project raises the bar on that. It's not uncommon to see him average over a dozen commits a day on a regular basis for the entire three.js repo, in addition to managing and merging a ton of pull requests at the same time.

That said, I agree saying it's neglected is a bit unfair, so I've reworded my original statement qualifying it as _sort of_ neglected (far more diplomatic). Moreover, it isn't really fair for me to hold it to the same standards as production-grade editors, since I'm pretty sure its primary purpose is to simply give people a sandbox environment to play around in.

You'll be happy to know GitHub rate limited me around January 2015 of the commit history you linked, since there was so much of it. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want scene setup and polygon editing and animation creation try [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io) and it exports to the threejs and fbx formats as well. Clara.io is similar to blender and Maya in terms of its features.

<comment><USER7> thanks for that link, clara.io looks great after looking at it quickly, will be using it from now on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Try clicking one of the examples in the menu on the top, and then hit 'Play'. Love it! It is certainly great for playing around with WebGL, but still lots of work necessary if it wants to catch up to Unity or CopperCube and create complex WebGL games or scenes.

<comment><USER9> That's mostly because of the architecture of Unity3D being both efficient and productive and UE4 being much more so. They're _radically_ different architectures than what three/babylon have. And the fact that they both compile through Emscripten is proof AAA engines can be built for the web.

We're not too far away from SIMD, Atomics and SharedArrayBuffer as well as OffscreenCanvas in the browser (they're all available behind experimental flags today). I can definitely see a newcomer building a web engine from the ground up and beating Unity/UE4 in performance AND productivity for not having their overhead. Its a huge undertaking but nothing impossible.

What I missed the most doing WebGL work however were asset pipelines. Open- source engines barely support DXT compression, normalized integers and whatnot. We ended up writing our own (very crude) CLI tool to compress DXT1/5, ETC1 and PVRTC as well as a KTX parser to load them at runtime. I'll see if I can make them open-source - they're still a bit tied to our custom in-house webgl renderer.

<comment><USER10> It's worth checking out PlayCanvas for the asset pipeline. Texture compression is supported directly in the editor. [https://blog.playcanvas.com/webgl- texture-compression-made-e...](https://blog.playcanvas.com/webgl-texture- compression-made-easy/)

<comment><USER9> That's good to know!

We went with ImageMagick and PVRTexToolCLI driven from a node.js script. I'd go with GraphicsMagick now that I know about it; IM doesn't yield good DXT compression quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I prefer BabylonJS for their excellent support.

[http://editor.babylonjs.com/](http://editor.babylonjs.com/)

[https://medium.com/babylon-js/programming-with-the- babylon-j...](https://medium.com/babylon-js/programming-with-the-babylon-js- editor-ddab887c243a#.cv5ddrocj)

[http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/26619-new-official- babylo...](http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/26619-new-official-babylonjs- ruins-demo-live/)

[http://www.babylonjs.com/demos/ruins/](http://www.babylonjs.com/demos/ruins/)

<comment><USER9> We tried babylon for a mobile VR experience, needless to say the performances are mediocre at best. It runs well on PC because it can afford to waste 95% of the computer's power and still run smoothly for small scenes.

<comment><USER12> PlayCanvas has a renderer that has an optimized path for stereo rendering - achieves great perf on mobile. [https://blog.playcanvas.com/webvr-support-in- playcanvas/](https://blog.playcanvas.com/webvr-support-in-playcanvas/)

<comment><USER9> We had one as well. We're rendering VR with barrel distortion applied in the main vertex shader rather than as a post-process. Saves an expensive framebuffer (some mobile GPUs take as long as half a millisecond to switch render targets) at the cost of a slightly heavier vertex shader. It also requires geometry to be tesselated for the distortion effect to work.

We had to write our own polyfill for our implementation but it beats the post- process technique of webvr-polyfill quite easily.

That's how UE4 and Unity3D do barrel distortion as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool. Here's a similar idea but instead it uses a node graph editor: [http://idflood.github.io/ThreeNodes.js/index_optimized.html#...](http://idflood.github.io/ThreeNodes.js/index_optimized.html#example/rotating_cube1.json)

</comment><comment><USER14> Some nice examples you can use with this editor: [http://mrdoob.neocities.org](http://mrdoob.neocities.org)

</comment><comment><USER15> I like that it supports the standard Maya keybindings by default.

Would be cool to render the scenes out! Has anyone (sucessfully) run Cycles through Emscripten? :)

<comment><USER16> 01 Alchemist is working on it ^^ [https://dump.01alchemist.com/2016/12/31/future-webhpc- parall...](https://dump.01alchemist.com/2016/12/31/future-webhpc-parallel- programming-with-javascript-the-new-era-about-to-begin/)

<comment><USER17> Wow TurboScript looks interesting. I am supposing the bigger story here is in- browser 3d editors as the test-bed for the browser's taking over CPU future ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One thing I am not able to find anywhere on the whole threejs.org website - what is three.js?

<comment><USER2> The github project page has a bit more info than the threejs.org website.

It is a relatively small JavaScript library for creating and rendering 3D scene graphs in a browser. It enables you to code while thinking of scenes and the objects within them, rather than GPU buffers and what to put in them.

[https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A-Frame ([https://aframe.io](https://aframe.io)), a WebVR framework for three.js, also has an editor that works like a DOM Inspector. You just hit a shortcut on any A-Frame scene on the Web, and it'll inject an Inspector. Also integrated with A-Frame's version of the Unity Asset Store for components.

</comment><comment><USER20> unbelievably cool this all works so nicely in my browser.

<comment><USER21> If you like this: there are even 3D CAD tools that work in the browser. For example: [https://www.onshape.com/](https://www.onshape.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there an example to play around with?

<comment><USER23> Yep, hit the Examples menu.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> While this is fun to play around with, and definitely helpful when using threejs directly, for a fullblown editor on the web there is nothing that beats PlayCanvas at the moment.

<comment><USER25> How does that compare with [https://clara.io](https://clara.io)? I thought that was made by one of the core contributors of three.js (bhouston).

I don't use web editors for 3d so I have no idea, just curious.

<comment><USER10> Clara.io is a modelling, animation and rendering tool (in the style of Maya/Max/Blender)

PlayCanvas is a game engine (in the style of Unity/Unreal)

To put it another way. You build your 3D assets in Clara and import them into PlayCanvas to add interactivity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What's the license of this?

GitHub doesn't seem to say?

<comment><USER26> Ok. Found it, [https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/tree/master/editor](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/tree/master/editor) doesn't say, but [https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/](https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/) says MIT

<comment><USER16> Yup! MIT ^^

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The menus appear behind the page on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER28> Trying to edit scripts doesn't work for me

</comment><comment><USER29> Too many tutorials and examples rely on Three.js and similar frameworks, instead of using vanilla-JS together with WebGL.

</comment><comment><USER30> I remember taking a quick look at this when I experimented with THREE.js first, I didn't get the hang of it though and I ended up just using blender as the main editor for my game (levels, models and similar assets)</comment>


What's the Most Expensive Software per Byte? - <AUTHOR> https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/whats-the-most-expensive-software-per-byte/ <comment><USER2> Depending on your metrics for expense/cost, I'd tentatively suggest Boeing's MCAS - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Au...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_Characteristics_Augmentation_System)</comment>


Ask HN: Is Plivo free to receive inbound SMS from local numbers? - <AUTHOR> I am thinking about creating a project that will hopefully be receiving millions of inbound SMS messages per day if it became successful.
Plivo claims to offer free inbound SMS at least from local numbers.
Are there any caveats to that?
I am wary because "unlimited free" plans typically have hidden clauses that don't mean what they advertise.
Just curious if anyone has run into a situation like that, or if there is another better option to plivo? <comment><USER2> Why not ask them?</comment>


Product Hunt's Y Combinator video (and lessons learned) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rrhoover/5-years-of-product-hunt-b466eece118 <comment><AUTHOR> I've been doing a lot of self-reflection going into the new year and thought I would share some learnings building Product Hunt over the past 5 years, along with our YC application video (perhaps against my better judgement). :)

<comment><USER2> Do you mentor people?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do implicitly as I've gotten to know talented, motivated people

<comment><USER2> You looking for explicit mentees? :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


JetBlue to offer free inflight wifi in 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57514905-501465/jetblue-to-offer-free-in-flight-wi-fi-in-2013/

<comment><USER2> The WiFi on Virgin America has grown steadfastly slower as more people became aware of it, and despite the $10-$17 price point, has now reached the point of being nearly totally unusable on most of my flights.

Unless Jet Blue has a solution to provide significantly more bandwidth, I can't imagine that free WiFi is going to be less saturated than the paid option on Virgin.

<comment><AUTHOR> They claim it will have "exponentially more bandwidth than any other product in commercial aviation today". I know that's an incorrect and meaningless use of the term "exponential", but the bottom line is they're claiming it _will_ be a lot faster:

<http://www.jetblue.com/flying-on-jetblue/wifi/>

<comment><USER3> It's claimed the system will offer 12mbps or more to each passenger via ViaSat-1, which should offer 140 Gbps total throughput ("the highest capacity satellite in the world" with "more capacity than all current North American satellites combined")

[http://www.viasat.com/news/new-exede-internet-for- commercial...](http://www.viasat.com/news/new-exede-internet-for-commercial- airlines-viasat-designed-deliver-12-mbps-each-passenger-flight)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used wifi on a flight for the first time a few weeks ago- it was fantastic. Not perfect, but it converted six hours of dead time into productive time.

It got me thinking about how driverless cars will represent a similar change. They seem like they are one technical innovation that we'll definitely see in my working lifetime, and I'm looking forward to it. Imagine being able to start and end your working day on a laptop in the car, rather than wasting time commuting.

<comment><USER5> Wifi on flights has had the exact opposite effect on my productivity while flying. I used to be able to churn out interesting new things because I had no choice but to focus on them. Now I'm too weak to not be distracted by email, Twitter and HN to pass the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        will offer free basic Wi-Fi services until the service is installed on 30 airplanes

While nice to have, if the installation is anything like Gogo (less than 24 hours) it doesn't sound like it will be free for long.

<comment><USER7> Another link-bait post title. Just like the Manchester getting rid of airport scanners (catch: to be replaced by another type of scanner) and Russia's secret diamond field (catch: of hard to mine industrial-quality-only diamonds, which wouldn't affect the market).

<comment><AUTHOR> _"Our source claims that following this initial trial period, the service will remain free for "basic email and browsing" purposes, though you'll obviously be paying if you hope to stream Netflix during those cross-country flights."_

[http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/17/3347776/jetblue- inflight-w...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/17/3347776/jetblue-inflight-wi- fi-viasat-q1-2013)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I do most of my domestic flying on Delta, which has in flight Wifi (via Gogo) available on most (if not all) of their aircraft. The quality is really hit or miss. I've had flights where the connection was good enough to download large files (debugging symbols from Microsoft) and have one way Skype sessions (me typing, the other person with audio/video). I've also had flights where I could barely check my email. I'm not sure if it's the route flown or the other passengers using the connection or what, but the highly variable quality is annoying.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hopefully other airlines will follow suit. Airlines find any reason they can to upsell passengers, so it is refreshing to see one that will be rolling out a service for free. This fact alone makes we want to support their business.</comment>


We're rolling out our first new build to the Windows Insider Program - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2014/10/21/were-rolling-out-our-first-new-build-to-the-windows-insider-program/

<comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting part of this for me is the "ring progression" they have implemented allowing end users to choose from fast (builds as soon as they are available) and slow (week or more delayed).</comment>


Text Laundering - Confuse Duplicate Text Detectors - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.tumblr.com/post/291832725/text-laundering

<comment><USER2> BTW, many duplicate text detector algorithms are not fooled by this kind of transformation.

<http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~sam/stringmetrics.html>

I use cosine similarity and it works fine for my needs. ;)

</comment><comment><USER2> Google Translate is not bijective. ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it. You can know fool google by stealing content, then rendering it jibberish to a reader.

1) Couldn't you do this before? 2) What is the point of doing this?

<comment><USER4> Achieving higher search engine rankings by building a network of seemingly legitimate web pages that eventually link to a target page.

Everyone who ranks on commercially relevant SERPS seems to do this or, if they are lazy, just buy links from these networks. Check the backlinks on any top ranking commercial terms to see for yourself.

<comment><USER5> Jesus, there is just so much that I don't know it sometimes seems like I'll never catch up!</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Won't Say If It Will Use Your Brain Activity for Advertisements - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2017/05/22/facebook-wont-say-if-theyll-use-your-brain-activity-for-advertisements/?comments=1#comments <comment><USER2> @mods: Please fix the link, which is to the comments and not to the article (and the comments are currently abominable).</comment>


Built this because most business loan calculators online are stuck in Web 1.0  - <AUTHOR> https://www.fundastic.com/business-loan-calculator

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, it's embeddable and we even come up with a calculator for merchant cash advances! [https://www.fundastic.com/merchant-cash-advance-apr- calculat...](https://www.fundastic.com/merchant-cash-advance-apr-calculator)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you answer Yes or No questions for 5 cents a pop? Why or why not? - <AUTHOR> I was thinking of starting a project where people can ask you simple yes or no questions and you get paid 5 cents! Just to see what people think! <comment><USER2> I suspect the hard part would be finding people to pay to get their questions answered.

Sure I could spend £10 and ask a bunch of random people "Do you like cake?", but without more detail such questions will be simplistic.

If the answerers are being paid to respond it's only a matter of time until they get replaced by bots. I'd spend a few hours writing something to scrape an email, SMS, or web-page and just reply "yes, yes, no, no, yes, yes" if I was going to earn money from it.

In short it's a cute idea, a kind of crowd-sourced yahoo-answers, but "Yes/No" feels like too easy a reply. Forcing users to respond "properly" with actual detail doesn't help much either, if you get a question like "Why is the sky blue?". 50% of people will copy&paste from wikipedia, 25% of the people will think "That's too hard, I'll wait for another question", and the remaining 25% will say "God", "It just is", or "The answer doesn't matter, if it weren't blue you'd just ask why is it red".

In short:

* Simple questions are too simple.

* Complex questions will probably go to the wrong people, but they'll reply anyway to earn their money.

* You need to be able to "Judge" answerers on different metrics to stop bots.

* I suspect many answers would benefit from direct conversation between poster and replier; for example you might say "Your answer was interesting, but why did you say XX?" (i.e. Allow answers to be interactively refined.)

<comment><USER3> To extrapolate this a bit... it could be effective to ask a credit card provider a well phrased question 'how many people buy cake at 8am' and use their data-set which is probably being put into phase for this type of question now, but this feel a tangent from the original premise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ironically, the people that said "No" just answered a binary question for $0.00. So, does that mean their answer is "yes"?

<comment><USER5> Dont be so quick to draw the QED tombstone!

The OP is asking about answering questions plural as a low paid freelance gig.

Someone who cuts their grandmas lawn isn't saying they want to cut everyone's lawn for $5 each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You're asking the wrong question. Everyone will agree to answer yes or no questions for 5 cents. As another user mentioned, people get excited and think they could be earning $90 per hour, so you'll hear lots of people supporting your idea.

In reality you're going to have a difficult time finding people willing to pay for those answers, and that's where you'll succeed or fail. People answering questions will certainly not be earning $90 per hour, but they''ll be lucky to earn 10 cents per week, because I guarantee you'll be short on questions.

There are also countless reward services that pay people for answering questions or surveys, watching videos, signing up for offers, etc. As someone mentioned on Reddit, Google even has one ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.paidtasks&hl=en)).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Folks on Reddit seem enthused! [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5x7evy/people_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/5x7evy/people_of_reddit_would_you_answer_yes_or_no/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Depends on the person's financial state at the time. The contradiction this question gets to is ,if the question is worth a throw away amount, then no. But if the questioner research s the questionees expertise and pays to access it then yes.

Basically a long way to say no

</comment><comment><USER8> No. The questions I'm likely to be interested in answering are worth more than that. I fill out a survey for fun or to move the needle on some pet issue occasionally, but doing it for pennies seems neither fun nor profitable.

</comment><comment><USER3> You'd need some kind of captcha to stop bots, which would probable be prohibitive.

Or human bots, as @ 2 seconds per question, that would be $90 dollars per hour.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. The platform I was thinking about was mobile, so bots may be prevented there? Also the human bots would probably be bottlenecked by the fact that there would need to be askers asking the questions. Essentially, I am thinking of charging 8 cents to the askers per person.

<comment><USER9> I think you will find more then enough people willing to answer questions. Not necessarily hn readers though... Your bottleneck will be the question askers, people who want to ask (random) people questions. You would at least need to have some audience selection, e.g. only ask this question to asian females aged 28-48 interested in crocheting. That way the question askers maybe get some value out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> no, because thats a shitty use of my time. but i know lots of people who would happily sit in front of a computer clicking yes or no all day.

at ten questions per minute, thats a decent salary for a lot of folks.

</comment><comment><USER5> No, it seems like a dead end way to make money.</comment>


Want to Express Hatred Toward Gay People? There's an App for That... - <AUTHOR> http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view/want_to_express_hatred_toward_gay_people_theres_an_app_for_that

<comment><USER2> It is a little weird that Apple's "ratings" for age appropriateness of apps is totally based around sex, drugs, "strong language" and violence, but doesn't take stuff like this into account. While I don't think the app store should screen material based on ideological grounds, marking something like this as "4+" seems like they've taken an unreasonably narrow view of what's inappropriate. Really, the craigslist app I used to look for apartment listings is marked as 17+, but homophobic propaganda is appropriate for kindergarten kids?</comment>


Encrypted libraries leak lots of information in Seafile - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/350 <comment><USER2> Are people actually using Seafile? I found it interesting back then, and participated in this discussion but dismissed it as the author didn't really seem to take it serious. His statement:

"I don't quite understand why using a single IV for the whole library is vulnerable to known-plaintext attacks."

That might be an acceptable response if you're trying to build a secure system and don't fully understand your tools yet, not many people do, but it should be followed with an eager question on how to improve. Instead he follows up with:

"I know it's better to use different IV and key for each file/block. But that would greatly increase complexity."

As if that's an excuse. And besides, solutions had been suggested and it's not _that_ complex. Finally he just states that the security improvements are not scheduled.

<comment><USER3> I actually use SeaFile for some clients (since OwnCloud doesn't do client side encryption at all), after Wuala shut down last year. I actually was disappointed by the security and features too ([https://forum.seafile- server.org/t/encryption-the-pro-added-...](https://forum.seafile- server.org/t/encryption-the-pro-added-features/3887)), you cannot securely share sub trees/dirs like in Wuala (with their Cryptree).

Is there a better FOS alternative?

The Wuala service did had a lot's of deadlocks, either on server or the client side, and customer service was not done secure: please send over the log files (included file names) or the client storage block, etc...

<comment><USER4> In Peergos we are using exactly the cryptree data structure from wuala for our encrypted filesystem on top of ipfs. [https://github.com/ianopolous/Peergos](https://github.com/ianopolous/Peergos)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Note that Seafile seems to still be using a very old and EOL'd version of Django that has known security issues (currently v1.5.12, I believe).

[https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/1502](https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/1502)

</comment><comment><USER6> GEEZ. At first I wondered "is that really the way to disclose a vulnerability?", and then I saw that the date was 2013 and it doesn't really matter at this point.

<comment><USER7> It started in 2013 but the issue persists ever since, so I think it still matters.

The thing I don't get is that why can't I just aes-encrypt my file and upload somewhere for secure-backup, there is no way to break it unless you gave out your aes key.

<comment><USER8> So you transmitted AES(original) to the server, now what do you do when you want to update your file?

Transmitting AES(updated) to the server is bandwidth-inefficient and storage- inefficient.

Transmitting DIFF(AES(original), AES(updated)) gives you no filesize benefit.

You can do AES(DIFF(original, updated)) but that requires your local client to have the original file, or enough of it indexed to produce the diff - and it means that restoring the latest file means restoring a giant chain of increments - which means you'll probably want to periodically reupload the original file - which is bandwidth-inefficient and storage-inefficient.

You can transmit the encryption key to the server and have it rollup diffs. But that's not a good idea if you don't really trust your server (got some cheap cloud storage?)

The solution to this problem is to use a deduplication algorithm like content- defined chunking, as seen in attic/restic/obnam/tarsnap.

<comment><USER7> Learned something new. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMD Releases BIOS Fix for Booting Newer Linux Distributions - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Releases-Linux-Zen2-Fix <comment><USER2> This really should be fixed in systemd.

First, randomness should be done in the kernel, not in systemd.

Second, we should have a choice about whether to use hardware-based randomness or not.

Third, any failure to boot due to randomness is just inherently broken. I would LOVE to have someone explain to me how any system that even has the possibility of not booting because of a random number generator is in any way correct or desirable.

<comment><USER3> Well systemd did add a workaround but it's pretty hard to fault them here since their original implementation followed the RDRAND spec:

[https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/12536/commits/1c53d4...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/12536/commits/1c53d4a070edbec8ad2d384ba0014d0eb6bae077)

Systemd does not have its own random number generator:

[https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11810#issuecomment...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11810#issuecomment-509418688)

      > No, let's not roll our own PRNGs, we don't want to maintain that. it's fine to use the CPU RNG, the kernels or glibc's, but I don't want to maintain our own version in our codebase, sorry.

There are good reasons for using RDRAND for UUID generation since it's required very early during boot often before the kernel's random pool is filled. This sort of issue is especially common on embedded systems, I've had to use haveged to fill the kernel entropy pool otherwise many applications don't startup properly.:

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/442698/when-i- log-i...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/442698/when-i-log-in-it- hangs-until-crng-init-done)

<comment><USER4> So they can't use AT_RANDOM to either seed a prng or just use it directly?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: python or ruby for REST API creation - <AUTHOR>

Hi there
I want to build an REST API for a service, which may have some functions taking files as input parameters. (I want to HTTP Post them from client. of course this is example functionality, it will be more than that inside..). I am really good at .NET (with c# specifically) technologies but i really find it pain in ass when it comes to REST based API creation. Besides, i want to learn a dynamic language and platform, to use on my personal (until being proficient) projects.
My question is, which platform/language/technology do you suggest? There is python and ruby or my mind. But if you have other suggestions, i will be only glad to listen them..
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I know where you are coming from, I tripped over the REST aspects of the MVC framework recently. Found it rather difficult to have the same end points, couldn't have JSON, XML, form data going to the same URL. I almost walked away from the framework annoys I had to have a messy API.

I ended up creating my own controller class inherited from the normal controller class. Basically I had to set the 'Index' method to scoop everything and then manually detect the HTTP VERB and MIME type of the incoming request and then pass the request along accordingly. Quite nice solution, even built all the error handing and logging into the new class. Makes creating a new end point a dream.

Although I haven't tried yet I pretty sure doing this method will be handle webdav requests as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its good to see a fellow C# dev! I have worked with REST apps in Python(Django). My thought is ruby is better, because grass is always greener on the other side. Django doesn't fully support PUT/DELETE methods, you have to parse the parameters from a raw string.

[http://groups.google.com/group/django- developers/browse_thre...](http://groups.google.com/group/django- developers/browse_thread/thread/771238a95ceb058e?pli=1)

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't answer your question directly, but if you choose ruby, this book may be helpful:

[http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Design-Rails- Addison-...](http://www.amazon.com/Service-Oriented-Design-Rails-Addison- Wesley-Professional/dp/0321659368/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1316198366&sr=8-2)

</comment><comment><USER5> You can keep scala among the contenders as well. Lift especially makes it easy to provide REST api's <http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/liftweb/REST_Web_Services>

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm.. isn't scala depends on java? so i really want to work on one platform dependance. But thanks, i will examine.</comment></comment>


Introducing Glimp, real time footage through your phone - <AUTHOR>

Glimp -coming from 'Glimpse'- is our new way of giving our users access to real time footage of what's happening now around the world. Whether it is an event, concert, news or a social trending topic. By taking a glimp, check in, add the description and air it so that your friends and whole world gets to explore it. A glimp is a 24 second video that you record when you instantly want to share the moment. For example, you can see what's happening in a certain conference, Beyoncé concert , football match or night club through people taking glimps there. It is a map based application where you roam the world and choose where you want to see glimps. Moreover, smart search helps you to look for a certain user, hash tag or location (locations are powered by Foursquare). You can follow your friends and other users that air interesting glimps. So how do we guarantee it is live and not old post? Simply any glimp is taken through the app only and live for all users on map and user's profile only for 12 hours and then it disappears. To show appreciation you can 'airplus' a glimp and that automatically gives the glimp more minutes to stay on the map with maximum limit of 24 hours.
Our alpha version is now ready and we would be happy to know your feedback by sending it to your iPhone. Our beta version will be on the app store in couple of weeks. You can visit our website at www.glimpnow.com and Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Glimpnow <comment><AUTHOR> Dear Belal, I appreciate your question and I know it is a concern, that's why it is in the FAQ on our website. According to our privacy policy, location will be accessed if and only if you are posting a glimp to assure location accuracy and information reliability. You can check the Privacy Policy and FAQ at www.glimpnow.com

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems interesting, though I see how a lot of people will be concerned with privacy since its a location based app. So does your app keep track of the user's location all the time?</comment>


I Tried to Sell to a Customer Who Was Secretly a Master Salesman - <AUTHOR> https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/i-tried-to-sell-to-a-customer-who-was-secretly-the-yoda-of-sales-d54d7c6f84b3 <comment><USER2> This is a gem and so refreshing to read.

>Good selling is not about money changing hands; it's about relieving the customer of the anxiety that accompanies spending.

This us so true. We started a company two years back for providing 24/7 operational support. We grew from 5 people to 30 purely based on this maxim.

Our motto was "Work hard to let our customer sleep in peace" and it really paid off.</comment>


Germany's cyber-security agency recommends Firefox as most secure browser - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/germanys-cyber-security-agency-recommends-firefox-as-most-secure-browser/ <comment><USER2> Threat model! Firefox indeed does excel for the average citizen in terms of security. While people that know some infosec think CVE count and exploit mitigation is a priority. It has auto update for known vulns, for 0days,people who are targeted by attackers willing to burn a browser 0day on them have a drastically different threat model than the average citizen and frankly using Chrome because of CVE count is a bad strategy if you're one of those people (bromium,qubes os and other segregation based appsec is worth a consideration).

You have to appreciate how much privacy counts (Chrome failed telemetry on the BSI test)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not completely ridiculous, but it's exactly the sort of silliness you'd expect from bureaucrats (and zdnet!)

Firefox isn't the most secure browser, it just checks the most boxes on this particular compliance checklist which doesn't _really_ assess the security of the browser.

<comment><USER4> They provide arguments and data points why Firefox is the most secure browser. This is not silly, but allows to have a good discussion. Care sharing other evaluation results from reputable sources?

<comment><USER3> They provide arguments and data points _specifically designed to portray Firefox as the most secure browser_.

They missed super important checkboxes like "site isolation", which is a far more significant feature than most things included.

If this wasn't bullshit there'd be boxes nobody checks, but right now they just took a list of firefox features and worked from there.

<comment><USER5> There's this: "Web pages need to be isolated from each other, ideally in the form of stand-alone processes. Thread-level isolation is also allowed."

<comment><USER3> Yeah, deliberately chosen so firefox will tick the box.

Firefox is testing site isolation but it isn't ready yet, Chrome has it on by default.

Ask any firefox dev! They'll tell you they're far behind on this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Backup Your Entire GitHub and This Is How to Do It - <AUTHOR> https://leimao.github.io/blog/Backup-GitHub/ <comment><USER2> Obligatory "you're granting GitHub keys to a tool on the internet and should proceed with caution (and only give read permissions), lest something go wrong and you lose all of your data" warning.

<comment> toper-centage Better backup your github first!</comment></comment>


When Does Work Actually Get Done? - <AUTHOR> https://priceonomics.com/when-does-work-actually-get-done/ <comment><USER2> They didn't measure when work got done. They measured when people chose to update their project management software. That doesn't necessarily correlate in any way with when the work is actually getting done. So all of their conclusions are based on flawed assumptions and a bad data set.

Anecdotally, I am an active user of multiple project management platforms and do my best to keep them actively up to date. When I am in a state of flow and being productive I almost never break it to update the project management platform.

I'm honestly not sure there's much of a pattern to when it gets updated. Sometimes it's when I'm trying to get into a work mindset and remember what I did the day before. Sometimes it's when I'm winding down at the end of the day and making note of what I did. Sometimes it's in between tasks.

A better measure might be when git commits were made to repositories, but even that is a pretty imperfect measure. I often don't made small commits as a I work, but large ones once a cohesive portion of the task is complete (or several small ones as the same time using git add -p).

<comment><USER3> Thank you for pointing this out. I know that for myself, Jira updates and high productivity work are _anticorrelated_. I'm not going to update a ticket while I'm focused on code, and large blocks of flow-requiring work often don't even justify ticket updates until they're done.

Fundamentally, this data just looks like "people update tickets before lunch and before the end of the day", which is hardly interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This data was collected by a project management software tools company.

As such, I suspect most of it is bullshit generated whenever the people who do the actual work decide to key in the minimum amount of info in order to keep the "project management professionals" off their backs.

Monday mornings are a great time to get "boilerplate" work done to satisfy PM's.

When the _actual_ work gets done depends on the individuals, their teams, and the projects.

<comment><USER3> Even aside from, er, "defensive management", I doubt the quality of this data. My team has triage meetings Monday at 11 AM. The number of tickets 'created' or 'completed' during that one hour stretch is probably 30% of the total for the whole week, but that's a function of coordination and scheduling that says nothing about actual work completion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The time or day I complete a task is unlikely the same time or day I spent working on it.

If I complete a task at 11 a.m. I've probably worked on it the day before and just wrapped up final testing before 11 a.m. Same with Monday being the "most productive".

<comment><USER6> Not only that but just because your employer forces you to work at certain times doesn't mean you are most productive at those times.

<comment><USER3> For that matter, the time you're in the office updating tickets isn't necessarily linked to your work hours.

Lots of people operate on schedules like "think of a good answer to the problem at 8 PM, crank out two hours of work, roll in at 11 AM to test the fix and update the ticket". As far as this study knows, that work pattern equals "high productivity at 11 AM", even though all of the actual work happened during the "low productivity" timeframe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They gathered data of office robots that start to work between 8 and 9. Also it's only data of robots forced to use a particular tracking tool. Yes, a work cycle is 2-3-4 hours after having started fresh. Start at 11 and mark something as done at 14.

That sponsored article should be categorized using their book titles advertised at the bottom: "The Content Marketing Handbook", "Hipster Business Models" and "Everything is Bullshit".

<comment><USER8> "office robots" is a generalization you're making, and weakening your point with an insult.

That said, without actually describing in more detail how they measure it, yes, it's very, very circumspect. I'd wager even more so than just asking people "hey, when do you feel most productive?" Because the time I mark something done in JIRA, say, is barely correlated to when I spent the most time and focus on it (and even that correlation is not being picked up here. That is, I'd say "The time I spent the most effort on a problem is within 4 working hours of the time I marked it done, unless I completed it first thing in the morning, as I might wait until the end of the day to mark it done, and also barring a whole flurry of initial effort, it not getting me anywhere, I take a break, realized I was thinking about it wrong, go back and get it done in minutes").

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pairs well with the RescueTime piece: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16073745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16073745)

</comment><comment><USER10> Some of the bar plots seem misleading because of the scaling. The monthly one, for example, almost made me believe that January is half as productive as October. The "zero" level is not stated anywhere, but the lowest value is still halfway to the top.

This feels like intentional exaggeration to me. If the lowest value started at the base line, like they do e.g. in currency exchange plots, there would be no doubt about offset. This way, the initial impulse is to compare areas of the bars.

<comment><USER11> Your comment made me curious so I redid the plots with three different axes.

The first one starts from 5.5 which makes it look nearly identical to that in the blog post

[https://i.imgur.com/n0LZJd8.png](https://i.imgur.com/n0LZJd8.png)

The second one is where I let the y-axis run from 0 to 10 instead of from 5.5 to 10. In my opinion, this changes very little

[https://i.imgur.com/cmrnbDp.png](https://i.imgur.com/cmrnbDp.png)

The third one is with the y-axis from 0 to 100 which makes the effect significantly less pronounceable

[https://i.imgur.com/pk9Bs9n.png](https://i.imgur.com/pk9Bs9n.png)

Matlab code:

        m = 1:12;
        tasks = [7.2 7.6 8.3 8.1 8.2 8.4 8.6 8.4 8.8 9.5 9.0 8.0];
        bar(m,tasks);

        % axis([0 12.5 0 100]);
        % axis([0 12.5 0 10]);
        axis([0 12.5 5.5 10]);

        title('In which month do people complete most tasks');
        xlabel('Month');
        ylabel('Percentage people reporting completing most tasks');

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The article doesn't make it clear what their data source for this is - but I'd have thought that would have a big impact.

If you measure the time I commit code, you'll find the most happens just before I go home every evening; if you measure the time I mark tasks as complete in a task-tracking system it's at a scheduled daily stand-up meeting. So different data sources would show different results.

<comment><USER3> With a little digging - it's when tickets are 'created' or 'completed' in one type of project management software. (The article is basically an informal ad for Redbooth, where the blog post first appeared.)

Commit times would have been a decent metric, though devs obviously vary a lot in how they structure and time their commits. But this study used ticket- completion, and finds lots of work gets done at 10-11 AM and 4 PM. Which looks suspiciously like a whole day's work has been logged during morning standup and before-leaving ticket checks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't have precise statistics, but I'm basically worthless before 14h, and start getting productive at around 17h...

<comment><USER14> Me too, perhaps its because I'm a procrastinator and put off everything to the end of the day when I try to get everything done. Friday evenings are most productive!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems like every time I figure out something, it's first thing the very next day. Toiling away all day on a problem, only to solve it the next morning. So the first couple hours of work, probably my most productive.

<comment><USER16> I've found that sleeping on a problem is usually the best way to solve it if you're stuck. Sometimes you get too stuck into one way of thinking, can't see the forest for the trees, so to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The work week in my organization is M-Su. I'm not particularly awake on Monday mornings, so I fill out and submit my time sheet for the previous week, which may include support hours over the weekend. Due to my brain core dumping over the weekend anything I did the previous week, I have to piece together what I did from my calendar and Sent folder.

Usually my periods of high productivity are 10am-12pm, 3-5pm, and 7-9pm. (I'm not usually in the office after 5pm so my employer doesn't benefit from the last burst. But they would if I did.)

Friday is my day to get backlog stuff done. Depending on how you define productivity, I'm either highly productive at solving old bugs, doing documentation updates, etc. or not productive at all on Fridays.

I have to echo others' sentiments: the analysis is severely flawed.

[EDIT: Added paragraph starting with "Friday is...".]

<comment><USER18> Keep a log. Makes things way easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this take vacations into account? Otherwise I'm surprised to see such high productivity in the summer.

<comment><USER20> (<speculation>)Maybe because offices are calmer, so it's easier to concentrate?(</speculation>) It tends to work for me so I would be curious to know why it is so.

<comment><USER21> My guess as well. I normally work doing July, and take time off in August. You get to close a large number of tasks when other people are on vacation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So our work ramps up as people get to the office, and drops when we leave for lunch. Likewise, we ramp up as the year progresses, until we slow down at the holidays.

Am I missing something, or is this data so aggregated that it has become useless?

<comment><USER23> I'd stick my head out and guess they promote at year end. That's why people complete most tasks in Sep-Nov, just in time for promotion/salary increase. From January, no one cares about performance for another 6 months so performance is low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> January being the worst, and October being the best months for productivity matches my own perception. Not so sure about summer though.. when it's really hot, motivation tends to go down along with blood pressure :)

</comment><comment><USER25> This is not consistent with what I'm seeing. Monday before 2 pm nothing happens. Between Monday 2 pm and 5 pm suddenly everybody wants to get 2 days of work done and fails. And tuesday normal, regular, productive work starts, and continues until Friday. Usually the tough thing is on oneself to really stop between 5 pm and 6 pm because then the productivity drops severly.

My guess would be from these observations, that the most success happen Thursday around 3 pm. But maybe software development is special since there are few tasks that could be done in 1.5 hours anyways.

<comment><USER26> Everyone works 7:30 - 3:30 in my metro area in an attempt to beat rush hour. 11am (listed as the most productive hour in this article) is when folks start eating lunch.

<comment><USER25> Maybe that's why this is the most productive time. In that case I would be forced to agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I couldn't see what their data sources were, but I wonder if this is just tracking when people make most use of work-tracking software?

<comment><USER28> Top of the post says it's a sponsored article based on [https://redbooth.com/blog/your-most-productive- time](https://redbooth.com/blog/your-most-productive-time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can see that this must be an aggregation of different work patterns. I'm not a statistics person so is there some way to estimate the source 'curves' from this. I.e. I know that I'm most productive from around 7.30 am until about midday.

</comment><comment><USER30> If the data doesn't take country into account, seasons are not really a relevant metric as they might differ depending on the hemisphere you're in.

</comment><comment><USER31> How does this correlates with weather?

</comment><comment><USER32> It took two whole companies to produce a couple of extremely basic histograms? And given the flimsiness of the data (self-reported, no clear definition of "tasks"), neither company felt it was necessary to include a margin of error calculation, or other disclaimer? This is utter garbage, just filler to take up space on a blog (two blogs, actually) and patting themselves on the back for producing absolutely nothing.

<comment><USER33> Welcome to content marketing!

They produced getting this post to front page of HN and hence thousands of views, the simpler the analysis/data, the lower the cost of those views :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> when information is passed between peers ?</comment>