Ask HN: What are good resources for life advice? - <AUTHOR> What are other good resources to read from? Any source that are as good as PG essays on how to think in life?<p>Sources can be videos, audios, recordings, essays, blogs, etc. Anything. <comment><USER4> First and foremost, what you are describing is metacognition - thinking about the way you think. Hopefully that will aid you in your search for things!

Secondly, here are some of my favorite influential material:

\- Li Ka-Shing, Tips on Life. My takeaway: invest in yourself. [https://addicted2success.com/success-advice/asias-richest- ma...](https://addicted2success.com/success-advice/asias-richest-man-li-ka- shing-shares-advice-for-young-entrepreneurs/)

\- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture. My takeaway: don't limit yourself [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7zzQpvoYcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7zzQpvoYcQ)

\- Guy Kawasaki, Make Meaning. Aimed for startups, but equally applicable in life. My takeaway: Have the proper motivations for doing things. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQs6IpJQWXc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQs6IpJQWXc)

\- Admiral William H. McRaven, Make your bed. My takeaway: if you want to change the world, start by changing yourself. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70)

\- David Foster Wallace, This is Water. My takeaway: Take a big picture view, and don't sweat the small stuff. [https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster- wallace-this-is-water/](https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is- water/)

\- "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about."― Rumi

\- Man's Search for meaning. My takeaway: We make meaning. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Me...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning)

\- "All the livin that you're saving, won't buy your dreams for you" \- Townes Van Zandt

\- Idiot wind by Bob Dylan My takeaway: Your reaction to things can be just as bad as the actual thing. [https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/57330/](https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/57330/)

\- Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius, Seneca. My takeaway: Focus on what matters. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5617966-a-guide-to- the-g...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5617966-a-guide-to-the-good- life) (read this one first for a good foundation) [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97411.Letters_from_a_Sto...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/97411.Letters_from_a_Stoic) [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30659.Meditations)

\- Buddhism. Our takeaway: Meditation is important, the doctrine of emptiness (not nihilism!) is super interesting. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104949.How_to_See_Yourse...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104949.How_to_See_Yourself_As_You_Really_Are) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhammapada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhammapada) [https://www.shambhala.com/the-pocket-dalai- lama-14965.html](https://www.shambhala.com/the-pocket-dalai-lama-14965.html) [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25942786-the-mind- illumi...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25942786-the-mind-illuminated) [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3346233-buddhism](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3346233-buddhism)

\- Leonardo Da Vinci My take away: There is a beautiful intersection between tech and art. Great things could not exist without a little of both. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684622-leonardo-da- vin...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684622-leonardo-da-vinci)

\- The Alchemist My takeaway: It's not the destination it's the journey. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/865.The_Alchemist](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/865.The_Alchemist)

\- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. My takeaway: Seek out quality, whatever the hell that is! [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629.Zen_and_the_Art_of_M...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/629.Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance)

\- Why we sleep. My takeaway: go the fuck to bed. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we- sleep](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep)

\- Anti-Cancer Diet. My takeaway: don't eat shit. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1886829.Anticancer_A_New...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1886829.Anticancer_A_New_Way_of_Life)

\- Non-violent communication. My takeaway: You can (and should) communicate your needs respectfully. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/560861.Non_Violent_Commu...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/560861.Non_Violent_Communication)

\- Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela. My takeaway: There is a difference between institutionalized action and individual action. Forgiveness is the only path forward. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318431.Long_Walk_to_Free...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/318431.Long_Walk_to_Freedom)

\- A people's history of the US. My takeaway: Things are getting better. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767.A_People_s_History_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767.A_People_s_History_of_the_United_States)

<comment><USER5> I heard about non violent communication only last week. Heard there's a course and a workshop too on this.

Very eager to master Non Violent Communivation coz more often than not I find myself in loss for the right word.

<comment><USER6> If you find yourself at a loss for words often, you might find it useful to talk to yourself more often, rehearsing how you would explain something. Showers are good for this. Parks are too, but there you should carry a handful of papers and occasionally pretend to look at them .

<comment><USER5> Thanks for your pointers.

Apart from the point to which you have replied, there's one more I would like to add.

I am an Indian, and have a bit of an accent. Am trying to rub it off. I work for US clients and have observed that I can't crack jokes as easily as they do, nor do I sound as natural in a friendly banter as well as they do. Also, in the excitement of the conversation, sometimes my American client mumble off something which I am unable to grasp, and which my Indian colleague is able to understand with surprising ease. (The fact that my Indian colleague is vernacular medium educated freaks me off even more)

Also, I am preparing for IELTS the second time (Band 8 in first attempt). I am particularly weak in listening. To remediate that, I listen to a BBC podcast everyday called "The Archers". I miss out on at least 5 points in the podcast, unable to decipher what they meant. That's one area I am trying to improve at.

The other one is speaking itself. To put in simple words, I am trying to make my speech as fluid as water. The person I am conversing with should be able to understand me effortlessly. Right now my speech is quite rigid and not that articulate. I scored band 8 in speaking in IELTS. To take things forward, I learnt about this shadowing technique from YouTube's Emma's channel and from someone on HackerNews. The bottom line of the shadow technique is, pick up a favorite show - and speak along with whatever the character says, do this for all episodes, and finish the series. One person on HN said that in order to perfect his Mandarin, he shadowed on Chinese TV series for 9 years straight.

In addition to this, I also record myself and speak on some random topic daily for 2 min(Topic is mostly from IELTS speaking tests). Go through the recording. Spot pronunciation / intonation/ articulation mistakes. Take one more go at the same topic. And see if there's improvement.

Do you have any other ideas apart from these in your mind which can help me with improving my speech?

I am also planning to gobble up all books related to languages written by Steven Pinker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was going to suggest Dr. Peterson, but Ctrl+F revealed a veritable graveyard of downvoted comments about him already. That's too bad.

So I'll go with Steve Pavlina's [0] work instead.

Steve Pavlina's blog is a mix of solid personal development advice mixed with a journal of his self experimentation.

His most interesting work is on belief systems, and on deliberately installing new belief systems to improve your life.

An interesting note is that he has released most of his work into the public domain. I'm working on audio versions of his articles.

[0]: [https://stevepavlina.com/](https://stevepavlina.com/)

<comment><USER8> I used to love Steve's writing (back in the game developer days and some after). But I got the impression that he was becoming more and more eccentric/crazy.

I haven't read his articles in a while, so maybe they are more sane now.

<comment><USER9> About 10 years ago Steve seemed really on the level of someone like Joel regarding software development and general life advice.

Now it seems Steve is all crazy stuff.

For example this is Timecube level thinking: [https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2019/02/your-10-dimensiona...](https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2019/02/your-10-dimensional- self/)

<comment><USER10> I disagree. I don't believe Pavlina has the track record of Joel regarding software development. His life advice at that time was "stop sleeping, you'll do more and let's see how far we can ride that secret thing" while claiming being telepathic and talking to birds.

Now I wouldn't be surprised if Steve made way more money than Joel.

<comment><USER8> These seem to already be the crazy days.

I remember when he was selling games way before any "indie games", even before Bejewled if I remember correctly.

I also thought regarding sleep, that he woke up every morning at the same time, and went to bed when he was tired.

<comment><USER7> He does. But for 6 months, he just took a 20 minute nap every 4 hours (no 'core' sleep).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is a quick book that goes into how we internalize meaning that drives happiness from purpose that helped me figure out this out better than many other "journey > destination" books.

Bed of Procrustus by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a bunch of quick aphorisms that takes less than an hour to read and gives good insight into Taleb's form of critical thinking.

Between the Devil and the Dragon by Eric Hoffer has essays from a self- educated, laborer philosopher and has helped me to understand much about how I think through things and why.

<comment><USER12> Aside: _The True Believer_ is well worth the read. Though I may have some issues with Hoffer's conclusions in his work, I've never regretted the time spent reading him.

<comment><USER11> True Believer is included in Between Devil and Dragon.

I like how you stated "I've never regretted the time spent reading him" as I don't agree with many of his statements and sometimes his writings seem a bit self-involved or exegesis in need of a peer review, but I've found it valuable to read through and think the power of some of the ideas I keep, or just strongly disagree, are worth all the material I discard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Books on Stoicism. In particular, "A Guide to the Good Life"

Some good stuff here:

[https://www.theschooloflife.com/](https://www.theschooloflife.com/)

<comment><USER14> Seriously? I thought they were cartoonishly bad. A group of hipsters dispensing cheap philosophic pills for lazy fake intellectuals.

<comment><USER15> True true. They don't even teach Philosophy. their video is the embodiment of cognitive ease.

<comment><USER14> Yep. I'm really surprised to see them upvoted on HN to be honest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and his many tens of hours of content on YouTube.

If you're willing to entertain the idea for a brief moment that the Bible has any wisdom at all, his Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories is a must. I recommend them even if you aren't willing, in fact. They converted me, and i was a fairly nihilistic atheist for almost all of my thinking life.

<comment><USER17> I see Jordan Pererson gets downvoted here, but recommend all critic to read "12 rules for life" themselves. This book helped me a lot.

<comment><USER18> I did read it. I decided not to take life advice from someone who writes, about a two-year-old child: "I picked him bodily off the playground structure, and threw him thirty feet down the field. No, I didn't. But it would have been better for him if I had." It's a 'joke', but it's a weird joke. I believe he thinks this over-aggression makes him seem dominant and powerful; in reality, a grown man getting so furious at an infant that he fantasises about throwing it is just odd. I can see why young men on the internet find it appealing to be told that being aggressive is actually cool and powerful and good, but that doesn't actually make it good advice.

I also don't agree with his sexual-marketplace ideas about how women choose mates, and why it's a good thing for women to choose men who behave badly towards them because they'll change: "[female lobsters] identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him. This is brilliant strategy, in my estimation. It's also one used by females of many different species, including humans. ... His aggression has made him successful, so he's likely to react [to the female] in a dominant, irritable manner. Furthermore, he's large, healthy and powerful. It's no easy task to switch his attention from fighting to mating. (If properly charmed, however, he will change his behaviour towards the female. This is the lobster equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest-selling paperback of all time, and the eternal Beauty- and-the-Beast plot of archetypal romance. This is the pattern of behaviour continually represented in the sexually explicit literary fantasies that are as popular among women as provocative images of naked women are among men.)" Is this good advice or information for men or women? Personally, I don't think so, but since it bears absolutely no relation to how I chose my partner, I suppose Peterson would say I am some kind of outlier or unusual female. Readers may make their own minds up about the quote.

<comment><USER19> > in reality, a grown man getting so furious at an infant that he fantasises > about throwing it is just odd

You are getting that backwards. In reality, people think that way. They get angry with kids. They may even think violent thoughts. Tragically, they may actually be violent.

Any time you make a statement about what's weird about interactions between adults (especially parents) and kids, you should clarify that you do or do not have kids. So, I'll ask, do you have kids? I ask because we can be rational in an HN discussion. Dealing with kids tests that rationality.

> Is this good advice or information for men or women?

Men who are "alpha male" types get more selection. This may or may not be true. The "should" (rational decisions) is a different argument. JP is trying to explain how things ARE (and he could be wrong on that.) That's different from advice and the information is neither good or bad.

<comment><USER18> He is just describing "how things are", not giving advice or telling you what you should do, in his self-help advice book about his "rules for life"? That's surprising to me, I must say!

<comment><USER19> Heh, good point.

Okay, you're right. It's a self help book with advice. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What sort of "life advice" do you want?

I think for starters is to realize there is a lot of contradicting life advice. Then the other thing is wether people follow the advice they give others.

There is a Carl Jung quote:

> Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.

Personally for me, understanding life is understanding the pros/cons of every scenario.

The pros and cons of short term thinking.

The pros and cons of long term thinking.

The trade offs between both. There are trade offs in everything we do. Understanding them, and accepting them is important.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, came here to say the same thing. There's so much advice out there, different advice is good for different people at different times, and none of it can cover life in full.

One way to think of it is that reading advice puts you in the perspective of the advice-giver, instead of your own. Like, when you read a book titled "99 ways not to be a loser", you begin worrying if you're a loser and seeing everything through that lens. And then you read "35 ways to become a decent person" and suddenly being a loser isn't a problem anymore, now there's something else on your mind. And so on. It stops you from seeing your life on its own terms, from many angles and the actual weighting of each, which is very personal. It requires living, not reading.

<comment><USER22> That is part of the reason that I have thought long about maturity models: a collaboratively-built step-by-step approach. Not everyone is in the same place, but there are some best practices that can help us all, when we are ready for them. More at [http://lukecall.net](http://lukecall.net), under "Life lessons".

(ps: I am a religious person and the content is heavily influenced by that, but I hope the concept, and present/future software, are amenable to about any worldview.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger [https://www.harrisonbarnes.com/the-psychology-of-human- misju...](https://www.harrisonbarnes.com/the-psychology-of-human-misjudgment- by-charles-t-munger/) (You may wish to scroll down to "psychology-based tendencies that, while generally useful, often mislead")

</comment><comment><USER24> Naval has a lot of good content.

I would start with his tweet storm: How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):

[https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936?s=21](https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936?s=21)

<comment><USER25> This is just a bunch of vague garbage. Sure, "don't trade your time for money, invest and make money off of your investments", but saying so is a lot harder than doing. All of this vague garbage is a lot easier for white upper class people that get nice interest free loans from their white upper class parents.

<comment><USER26> Naval is an Indian Born Self-made guy. Sure, it is hard. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

<comment><USER25> I didn't know that about Naval. I'm used to hearing this sort of self-serving advice from "self-made" people that really weren't self-made at all. The reason this vague helpless advice is appealing to people is because the implication is that it IS easy, and that everyone CAN do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an > older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, > how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then > eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is > water?" -- David Foster Wallace

This is a nice analogy about how hard it is to understand what we live in every day. To know about 'water' I learned a lot from Thomas Eriksen -- Small Places, Large Issues. It's an introduction to cultural anthropology and it's a great academic read, but it also taught me a lot on a personal level; to clearly recognize different schools of thought and see their particular and universal value.

Good contextual knowledge of this sort tones down the general chaos of life for me. It just helps a lot to have a solid mental model of cultures and ideologies, know their overlaps and contradictions, and to have the ability to relate specific thinkers to this model.

</comment><comment><USER28> I recommend Mark Manson – he's got a popular blog ([https://markmanson.net](https://markmanson.net)) on topics like these and also wrote a great book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.

</comment><comment><USER29> Derek Sivers' blog. One of my favourite pieces of his, There is No Speed Limit:

[https://sivers.org/kimo](https://sivers.org/kimo)

</comment><comment><USER30> 12 rules of life by Jordan Peterson. Also Peterson's YouTube channel has loads of free lectures.

<comment><USER31> It's pretty hard to avoid the reactionary politics when consuming Peterson, but if you can yeah you get mostly tried-and-true basic self-help advice.

<comment><USER16> It's funny. He took like one political stance and then got labeled awful things. We can just skip past the trans thing. It's ok.

For those that don't know: he interpreted a law that was passed in Canada as compelled speech law and decided that was a line that shall not be crossed, no matter the presumed benefit. That line happened to coincidentally involve trans people and, well, it's the late 2010s, so that speaks for itself. It takes about three minutes of listening to him talk on the subject to understand that his singular life's mission is to figure out what is necessary to prevent totalitarianism ever again. Compelled speech laws are something we ought to be on the defensive for in that regard. The fact that it involved trans people is irrelevant to him and should be irrelevant to us.

<comment><USER32> > It takes about three minutes of listening to him talk on the subject to > understand that his singular life's mission is to figure out what is > necessary to prevent totalitarianism ever again

I spent some time listening to him, and that wasn't my impression. It struck me as a mixture of contrarianism, attention seeking behaviour and latent transphobia.

<comment><USER33> My impression is that your comment is a mixture of contrarianism, attention seeking behaviour and latent transphobophobia. Can't refute it, can you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Zen mind, beginner's mind - Shunryu Suzuki. I don't think it's life advice. But, it certainly had a profound impact on my life.

As an entrepreneur, I found the best way to learn about life is to read biographies of successful people, especially the ones that speak of the transformations.

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein - <USER2> Isaacson

<comment><USER35> >Zen mind, beginner's mind - Shunryu Suzuki. I don't think it's life advice. But, it certainly had a profound impact on my life.

Just wanted to second this. One of the few books that has actually changed the way I view everything in life, and led to a years long deep dive into eastern philosophy.

<comment><USER36> Third here. I was talking about this book just yesterday on HN and also briefly with my team at work. It's definitely not life advice, but it also helped me change the way that I view most things in life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _The Conquest of Happiness_ by Bertrand Russell.

Never knew unhappiness after I read this. Highly recommended.

Another one is _Méditations_ by Marcus Aurelius.

 _Lives_ by Plutarch if you have the patience.

</comment><comment><USER35> Socrates, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rosseau, Kant, Nietzche, J.S. Mill, Camus, de Beauvoir, Arendt.

</comment><comment><USER37> Your parents, grand parents and other paternal figures like coaches teachers aunts uncles and siblings

<comment><USER38> Very happy to find this obvious answer. People always look far for what can be found right here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I recently finished reading "The Wisdom of Insecurity" (1951) by Alan Watts. I have to go back through it again to grasp it further. It's a short read (~150 pages). I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER40> I like Aaron Swartz's Raw Nerve series: [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve)

<comment><USER41> Disclaimer: This is it's a series of posts on how to get better at life written by someone that ended their own life.

<comment><USER42> Why is that a disclaimer and why does your comment sound like knocking on something good? If you haven't watched the documentary "The Internet's Own Boy" [1], check it out. The amount of harassment (mental and emotional) he faced could also bring most other people to take steps that they never would've imagined themselves doing.

It's very easy to knock down others. But you haven't lived his life, and you just cannot know how it was for him and what pushed him to take his own life.

Would someone put down any works by Ian Murdock (founder of Debian) because he also took his life?

I find these kind of criticisms, based on some actions of a person who otherwise contributed a lot, very silly and downright insulting in the meanest of ways.

Next time you want to write a disclaimer on Aaron Swartz, you could perhaps describe it as how the FBI and DoJ went too far and killed him in more ways than one.

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet%27s_Own_Boy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet%27s_Own_Boy)

<comment><USER43> On the other hand, someone here mentioned Viktor Frankl, who had been through a lot worse than what Aaron Swartz faced, and survived. Which one of them is more qualified to give life advice?

<comment><USER42> Both are qualified to give life advice based on their experiences. In fact, others are also qualified. Good life advice usually stems from struggles that one has gone through. There doesn't need to be a scale or measure on who is more qualified.

<comment><USER43> What if you need to choose only one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Funes- Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius. It's the hardest pill I've ever tried to swallow in my life; in fact, I am still in the process of doing so. It goes over the mental process and ruminations of assuming the greatest commitment a human being can make: that which you make to reason and nature. Taking full responsibility of your existence is a daunting proposition, but initiating the process is a fruitful enterprise.

Just a warning, though: be prepared for thanatophobia while reading it, since it has "memento mori" written all over it.

<comment><USER44> For people that may want to put a little Stoicism in their lives, you may want to try this book: The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living: Featuring new translations of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius [1]

This one-per-day, helps me absorb them in a slow and steady manner.

[1]: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Daily-Stoic-Meditations- Perseveranc...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Perseverance- translations/dp/1781257655/)

(link is not associate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Any body remember when Alone was writing The Last Psychiatrist?

<comment><USER46> For those in the blank:

[https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/archives.html](https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/archives.html)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastpsychiatrist/](https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastpsychiatrist/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I frequently scan Quora for interesting perspectives on life. I really like to learn from the personal stories of individuals. Of course, you have to take everything with a grain of salt, as Quora is not peer-reviewed or scholarly supported, but exactly this raw and unfiltered content makes it attractive.

You can learn best from the mistakes of others. It's a kind of wisdom of the crowds-approach.

(I don't work for Quora, nor do I participate in their partner program)

</comment><comment><USER48> Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Basically the introduction to Stoicism philosophy)

<comment><USER49> Seconded !

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> My favorites:

 _The Last Lecture_ by Randy Pausch

 _How to win friends and influence people_ by Dale Carnegie

</comment><comment><USER22> Coming late to this but ... I have thought long about maturity models: a collaboratively-built step-by-step approach. The famous coach John Wooden said something like "the trouble with all the good new books is they keep us from reading all the good old books".

Not everyone is in the same place in their personal growth process, or has time to read as much as needed to find what is best and most applicable to them, but there are some best practices that can help us all, when we are ready for them. So the intent is to capture those, for any area of life (which I have grouped under mental, physical, spiritual, social/emotional).

I have posted much more at [http://lukecall.net](http://lukecall.net), under "Life lessons". (I think the site is lightweight/responsive, and skimmable.)

(ps: I am a religious person and the content explains why, and is heavily influenced by that. Also, I hope the concepts, and present/future software to help with it, can be helpful, given almost any worldview.)

</comment><comment><USER51> David Chapman - <USER3>

[https://meaningness.com](https://meaningness.com)

<comment><USER52> Wow, didn't expect it here. Chapman is an amazing guy. Influenced mostly by Buddhism, has a good grasp of western philosophy and his insights into AI make things even more interesting (he was playing part in the GOFAI).

The message is very subtle, but much closer to reality than most of the other suggestions here. The difficult part is that it requires letting go a lot of views to which we are very attached. Not your typical feel-good motivational book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> [https://waitbutwhy.com/](https://waitbutwhy.com/)

</comment><comment><USER54> How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams.

An extremely concise life advice book. Doesn't wander around ideas. Well- written.

Of all 'self-help' books I have read, this is the only I truely recommend.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're in for a 15min/day kinda thing, try out the Harvard Classics. Reading them acts as a great barometer for the 'stickier' problems that we humans face. Totally free to download and read here: [https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212](https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212)

Daily Reading Guide here: [https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120612_1](https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120612_1)

</comment><comment><USER19> Morgan Housel for financial advice. Just Google the name and follow his Twitter feed if you have an account there.

I have learned a ton through playing poker. The game has a lot of carry-over into real life. Luck vs Skill. Variance. Take a look at the link for a great review on a great book about poker.

[https://25iq.com/2018/10/13/lessons-from-annie-duke- author-o...](https://25iq.com/2018/10/13/lessons-from-annie-duke-author-of- thinking-in-bets-making-smarter-decisions-when-you-dont-have-all-the-facts/)

</comment><comment><USER55> I think Poor Charlies Almanac is great as it covers the mental models. It also has a wealth of life advice.

You can also subscribe to the fs blog or their podcast The Knowledge Project. They do a lot with mental models.

The book The Art of Thinking Clearly is another great book that covers biases of the mind in one to two pages each.

The Tim Ferris podcast surprisingly has some amazing guests filled with life advice. I just listened to one with Jim Collins, author of Good to Great. It was absolutely fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER56> A wonderful book that's a little off the beaten path for HN is "Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life," by Anne Lamott.

</comment><comment><USER57> I enjoy the writings of Kapil Gupta. In fact I found them life-transforming. Naval is mentioned here - I believe him and Kapil are friends.

He writes on mastery, seriousness and the Truth.

His Twitter: [https://twitter.com/KapilGuptaMD](https://twitter.com/KapilGuptaMD).

And some excerpts from his writings:

> _" Cleverness and insincerity are loud. Seriousness is quiet"_

> _" The Mind does not assault man for his mistakes. It assaults him for the > cover-up"_

> _" If there was one single thing that stands between man and his freedom, it > is the belief that he has time"_

> _" What must be understood is that human beings' lives harden into routines. > They harden into a way of being. At some long-forgotten moment many moons > ago, they settled. For things they swore they would not settle for...today's > compromise is tomorrow's resentment""_

> _" People are who they are. And they will do everything in their power to > remain who they are. And the Mind will make certain of this"_

> _" The common man is afraid of "losing." The Legend is afraid of not > arriving at his ultimate capability. These are fundamentally different > paths"_

</comment><comment><USER58> Pocket's must reads are full of lots of self-development articles: [https://blog.getpocket.com/2018/11/2018-must-reads-on- pocket...](https://blog.getpocket.com/2018/11/2018-must-reads-on-pocket/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Joe imbriano, The Fullerton Informer is a good start. He covers many issue related to technology, health, government, self improvement etc.

[https://thefullertoninformer.com](https://thefullertoninformer.com)

www.YouTube.com/thefullertoninformer

</comment><comment><USER60> I would suggest the readings at [https://betterhumans.coach.me/a-directory-of- advice-that-wor...](https://betterhumans.coach.me/a-directory-of-advice-that- works-e7a177844a46)

<comment><USER61> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> There is great a number of Alan Watts talks on YouTube. For more information [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts)

</comment><comment><USER63> The Knowledge Project [https://fs.blog/the-knowledge- project/](https://fs.blog/the-knowledge-project/)

</comment><comment><USER64> [https://academyofideas.com/](https://academyofideas.com/)

</comment><comment><USER65> [http://www.actualized.org](http://www.actualized.org)

</comment><comment><USER66> Go out and explore the world and try meet interesting people ;) no better resource then that

</comment><comment><USER67> Sam Altman's blog. I like this article [https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days- are-long-but-the-decades...](https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but- the-decades-are-short)

In particular. Do new things often as it slows down the perception of time.

</comment><comment><USER68> I like Coach Red Pill on You Tube. Some of his stuff is pretty insightful.

</comment><comment> git-pull I'm biased in favor of audiobooks since they fit with strolls. Books are for sitting, walking burns calories :)

Books:

 _How to Win Friends and Influence People_ and _How to Stop Worrying and Start Living_ by Dale Carnegie

Taste testing:

 _PhilosophersNotes_ is like sparknotes for self-help books. Can be used as a way to discover / screen books you'd like.

Audio:

 _Psychology in Seattle_ 's episodes regarding Attachment Theory (6 episodes). The reason why is it's a swiss army knife for understanding relationships and behavior. These episodes are paywalled though, but there are free episodes available if you use a Podcast app.

Like aphextron mentioned Socrates: _Republic_ , _Apology_ by Plato are really good. The one narrated by Ray Childs.

Audible for _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ by Robert Pirsig (it's like a Socratic dialog about what Quality is)

A lot of stuff by The Teaching Company / Great Courses in general have been good quality (maybe I've been lucky).

</comment><comment><USER69> Stoicism books, Markmanson.net, books by Brene Brown

</comment><comment><USER70> If my kids ask me for advice about buying a house, taking a job, doing a degree, etc, I'll refer them to bogleheads.org without hesitation.

</comment><comment><USER71> Dear Sugar, the Rumpus advice column.

</comment><comment><USER72> On the Shortness of Life by Seneca

</comment><comment><USER73> Maybe not the place to admit it but I'm more of a Naval fan myself...

<comment><USER74> Who is that, where can it be read?

<comment><AUTHOR> Twitter @naval.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Not sure if spending time on life advice is better than on life itself.

<comment><USER76> By reading such resources and articles, I learned from the mistakes that the authors painfully learned themselves or observed in their lives. Putting what I learned from them into practice would save me so much time and money, by not repeating those mistakes or at least minimize them. They are my mentors across different space and time.

<comment><USER43> What makes you think you would have repeated those mistakes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 12 rules of life by Jordan peterson

</comment><comment><USER77> If you already know all the usual advice or don't think highly of them, try the graduate level works of Kapil Gupta.

\- kapilguptamd.com

\- He appeared in a few episodes on 33voices podcast

\- two recent appearances in Crazy Wisdom podcast with Stewart Alsop

<comment><USER43> Are you serious? That website looks like total bullshit.</comment></comment>


RSA Discusses How Flash Owned Them - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.rsa.com/rivner/anatomy-of-an-attack/

<comment><USER2> dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2398520>

and that was the original, without a useless packetstorm frameset a la 1994.</comment>


Utility Token Pegged On Electronic Float - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/impalacoin-which-is-anticipated-to-be-africas-most-succesful-crypto-will-be-pegged-to-electronic-8307520016eb <comment><AUTHOR> Africa is burdened by poor economic leadership, currencies that are difficult to convert and old colonial borders that were drawn for administration rather than economic markets and are inconsistent with the growth of the large commercial markets such as COMESA.

Low banking and insurance penetration affects 70-90% of the unbanked in Africa. This has led to a thriving informal exchange and remittance market which is largely cash driven that enables international commerce. Cash is risky, expensive and limiting in terms of credit growth, financial inclusion and bulk purchases.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ImpalaCoin is a utility token built on the Stellar Network, designed to be used within the ImpalaPay platform and will be easily transferable between users. It will be supported by wallets and exchanges that already support Stellar lumens.</comment>


Yahoo! - Frequently Asked Questions (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/info/help.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "Is the Yahoo! database really built by people?

It is indeed. All suggested sites are visited and evaluated by Yahoo! Surfers who decide where the sites best belong. This ensures that Yahoo! is organized in the best possible way, making the directory easy to use, intuitive, helpful, and fair to everyone."</comment>


Best PHP Framework for 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/best-php-framework-2015-sitepoint-survey-results/

<comment><USER2> I've tried nearly all of the frameworks listed. I still don't understand the love for Symphony. It's extremely bloated and over complicates everything. I also found that Doctrine, the main ORM used, generates SQL that's not very efficient. I had to constantly break out of it.

My thought is that big companies like it because servers are cheaper than developers. So even though it's extremely inefficient, it saves money in the long-run.</comment>


Odeo Releases Twttr (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/ <comment><USER2> I kinda like this idea, will definitely give this a try!</comment>


Smartcow Is Building a Raspberry Pi for AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/raspberry-pi-for-ai-startup-smartcow <comment><USER2> Always interesting to see new tech coming out, but at $1800/unit it sounds quite different from a "raspberry pi".

<comment><USER3> I agree it's misleading to call it a Raspberry Pi equivalent at that price point.

I see where they're coming from though. Since their intended customer is startups, $1800 is money that a lot of their future customers will probably not even have to think twice about spending.

But they really shouldn't compare it to the rpi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tl;dr

 _" Tera is a circuit board with ports to accommodate up to eight industrial- use cameras or other internet-connected equipment, 1 TB of memory, and the Nvidia Jetson TX1 chip (with support for its successor, the TX2). Kwok says Tera computes at 1 to 1.5 teraflops per second, with a power input of 12 volts, 5 amperes."

"Smartcow uses Nvidia's TensorRuntime Engine, on top of which it's built its own software development kit."_

</comment><comment><USER5> Using Nvidia's TX line will give this plenty of juice for doing AI tasks, but isn't really the same price class as a Raspberry PI.</comment>


Landing on Venus: The toughest spaceship we've ever built - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160705-the-toughest-spaceship-weve-ever-built <comment><AUTHOR> One interesting proposal: Using a Stirling engine powered by burning lithium fuel and using carbon dioxide from the Venusian atmosphere as the oxidizer. And conveniently, lithium is liquid at Venusian surface temperatures.

</comment><comment><USER2> Solar panels can work when it's overcast. Of course they may not work in that kind of heat. Seems 10% of falling sunlight reaches the surface of Venus, or 20% of Earth's, which is 5 times more than the Juno probe gets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Solar is even more practical if your lander can bounce back and forth between the surface and high altitude. Instead of a rover type design, you could make a lander that's kind of halfway between a submersible and an airship. The lander would descend to the surface, hang out for a while doing sciency stuff, then when the coolant starts to run low it would ascend to high altitude, use solar panels to rebuild the coolant supply (you could just use nitrogen from the atmoshpere), and then it could descend again.</comment></comment>


Drizzle: Rethinking the MySQL Database Kernel - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7379/

<comment><USER2> Would have been nice if they got Moore's Law right. (nr of transistors, not clock speed)</comment>


Cue – A language for defining, generating, and validating data - <AUTHOR> https://cuelang.org <comment><USER2> It looks like an alternative to Jsonnet which has schema validation & strict types. IMO, Jsonnet syntax is much simpler, it already has integration with IDEs such as VSCode and Intellij and it has enough traction already.

Cue seems like an e2e solution so it's not only an alternative to Jsonnet, it also removes the need of JSON Schema, OpenAPI, etc. so given that it's a 5 months old project, still has too much time to evolve and be mature.

We're heavily using Jsonnet for our data modeling ([https://github.com/rakam- io/recipes](https://github.com/rakam-io/recipes)) and pretty happy with it. We also have plans to add support for JSON Schema which is adopted by many of IDEs so that VSCode makes us feel like we're writing Java, not a Jsonnet file.

Cue is Google's 6th attempt and given that Jsonnet already has traction and works well out of the box, I would invest my time into Jsonnet at this time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Okay, so I've spent some time trying to understand this, and I think it's actually really cool, but I found the "About" and "Concepts" documents tumid and murky.

Here is my understanding of the basic concepts:

\- It allows a schema-like set of constraints to be declared for JSON (and therefore for YAML & TOML) in a syntax that is an extension of JSON.

\- Cue deals with types (sets of values) where JSON deals with single values. Ordinary JSON syntax for a _primitive_ value denotes a set containing that one value. For example, `a: 1` means that the set of possible values for `a` is {1}. Cue calls this a concrete definition.

\- Cue provides operators for union (`|`) and intersection (`&`) of sets, and inequalities for ranges of numbers, and so on. `1 | 2` denotes `{1, 2}`.

\- Built-in names provide the types `int`, `float`, `string`, etc.

\- Cue "struct" types look like JSON objects, associating names with sets. Each name/value pair is a constraint, and all constraints must be met. For example, `{a: int}` denotes "the set of objects that have a property `a` with the value in `int`".

\- Properties can be referenced by name; this allows a property defined in one place to be used a type (set) definition in multiple places.

\- When a name is bound more than once, the sets associated with each binding are intersected. This means that enforcing a schema reduces to simply combining the schema definition with the "concrete" bindings and throwing an error when an empty set is encountered.

BTW, if I _do_ have it all wrong and what I've described above is not an accurate description of Cue, then I think I'll have to go build what I've described.

Some reasons I'm afraid I'm off-base:

\- What's with the lengthy discussion of lattices, and related terminology? Sure, we can construct a lattice from the set of possible types and a "subset of" operator, but that's another level of abstraction away from the necessary concepts, so I don't see what value it adds.

\- The `|` operator is described as constructing a sum type, when it seems to me it _must_ actually be a (non-discriminated) union. Elsewhere the `|` operator is described as "computing the join", which to me would mean finding an element in a lattice, but for this to make sense to me I have to think of it as adding an element to the lattice (again all the lattice or poset terminology serves only to obfuscate things).

<comment><USER4> > What's with the lengthy discussion of lattices, and related terminology?

It's how the author thinks about the values. All the operations move a value up (|) or down (&) the lattice and those operations are associative, commutative, etc. Moving down past the concrete values gets you bottom, the error value, so 1 & 2 is _|_. It fits into things like default values where (using # for * because HN formatting doesn't do escape sequences) a: int | #1 and a: int | #1 unify to 1 because #1 & #1 = #1 but a: int | #2 added would result in a: int because #1 & #2 = _|_ so there is no default anymore.

I don't think the extended discussion on lattices is particularly useful. A much better intro is the tutorial [1] plus the concepts page [2]

[1] [https://github.com/cuelang/cue/tree/master/doc/tutorial](https://github.com/cuelang/cue/tree/master/doc/tutorial) [2] [https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic/](https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic/)

The motivation is clearly to build a tool for configuring kubernetes but I see the combination of data, validation, and order independence as being valuable outside that use. I've definitely had projects where it'd fit. The main reason I'd think twice is because it does add a LOT of concepts for something that can be pretty simple on most projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is an interesting example showing what it looks like: [https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/e5d8d09b3ba2e4f48c84a3b5...](https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/e5d8d09b3ba2e4f48c84a3b5da2acbf0716379bf/doc/tutorial/kubernetes/manual/services/cloud.cue)

I used the following command on the cloned repository to find it[1]:

      find . -iname '*.cue' | xargs ls -l | tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f5,9 | sort -n

[1] Note that 'find' has a '-printf' option which could have been used to simplify this one-liner.

<comment><USER6> Or just search the files directly in github? Just type T and .cue

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If configuration starts becoming more complex than looking up key value pairs, why not just write it in the programming language you are using? More languages / serialisation just adds another layer of complexity. Config as code is actually really neat.

<comment><USER8> What if you're using multiple programming languages?

<comment><USER9> Then just pick one of them. This may be simpler than introducing another language to the project.

<comment><USER8> What if you are interfacing between multiple projects? It's not about introducing another language, it's about integrating pre-existing systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a better title would be "Cue: A constraint programming langue (from some people who work[ed] at Google)".

When you consider the use of this language within a distributed system it's pretty freaking brilliant. [https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic/#the- value-lattice](https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic/#the-value-lattice)

</comment><comment><USER11> This might cause confusion with cuesheets, which already exist and have the same extension: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_\(computing\))

<comment><USER12> Or worst, it could be seen as a first attempt of takeover. What will be the next targeted extension?

<comment><USER13> What a strange comment. Extensions aren't the property of anyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like that validation feature could theoretically save a lot of people that occasional 1 hour of their time that was wasted because of a typo in a config file leading to a cryptic error message.

<comment><USER15> This is literally a feature of XML everyone complained about when JSON was the hottest thing, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very interesting, I can think of a lot of places where this would be useful for managing infrastructure.

I highly recommend reading about some of the internals, it is making me rethink a lot of how configuration should be done.

[https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic/](https://cuelang.org/docs/concepts/logic/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Cue was discussed previously here

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20362951)

Looks like there is a nice new web site.

It seems a bit too feature laden to take off IMO.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems like an interesting language, but I'm very disappointed that my first attempt to view example code took 5 clicks.

The most important part of any programming language website is a short example snippet: put it above the fold on the front page!

<comment><USER19> Well at least you could find an example.

I couldn't find anything after like a minute of searching. Unless we're counting the gif that slowly shows you an example project letter by letter.

<comment><USER20> Someone please link to the code.

<comment><USER21> The website is under active development at the moment and their are incomplete parts. For the code links please take a look at the following tutorial on GitHub at the moment.

* [https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/master/doc/tutorial/basi...](https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/master/doc/tutorial/basics/Readme.md)

* [https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/master/doc/tutorial/kube...](https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/master/doc/tutorial/kubernetes/README.md)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > A key thing that sets CUE apart from its peer languages is that it merges > types and values into a single concept. Whereas in most languages types and > values are strictly distinct, CUE orders them in a single hierarchy (a > lattice, to be precise).

That's cool!

<comment><USER23> In TypeScript, an upper bound of "foo" and 5 is any. But I wonder what a lower bound of those two is supposed to be in Cue.

<comment><USER24> I can't keep upper and lower straight, but `"foo" | 5` would allow either "foo" or 5, and `"foo" & 5` would be "bottom" (also spelled "_|_", essentially an error)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm feeling both really pissed and validated right now. I thought this was going to just be a normal thoughtless config language that would only be successful as a Google project. Then I looked at the theoretical basis page. I have no formal proof about this, but I've been talking about this type of a type system with my parents and high school CS teacher for a while now! My idea sounds like this: a value is simply an actual binary string. The "type" that classifies any data is described as a formal grammar, where the binary string is a formal language. If the language can parse a given binary value with the formal grammar, that value is an element of the set (type). This naturally leads to a structural type system which can be described using existing set theory and implemented using existing parsers and formal language theory. Of course, this leads to type -> type functions which describe dependent and refinement types naturally. It's great to see this idea being broadcast on the front page here, as I can see it very clearly as a superior type system. I'm really regretting not writing a formal article about it sooner!

<comment><USER26> > Of course, this leads to type -> type functions which describe dependent and > refinement types naturally.

could you expand on this? i don't understand how you get this from grammars.

(on a side note, i think that dependent types usually mean you can write functions from values to types, not type -> type?)

<comment><USER25> Yes, I mistyped that bit. I meant to say that because types (as a grammar) are values, they can be inputs and outputs of functions. The functions can fill in the hole that dependent/refinement types fill, by taking context into account (the grammars which describe simple types being context free). Type -> Type fill in for type constructors like this infinite list:

      InfiniteListOf = Type ->
        Type & InfiniteListOf Type

That function just morphs a simple grammar into another grammar. Imagine now if we could calculate something in between:

      IncrementingInfiniteListFrom = number ->
        number & IncrementingInfiniteListFrom number+1

That's where the dependent types come in, naturally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems really interesting after a quick read-through. Specs that allow range- based validation look useful, and the structural declarations also feel like they'll help reduce a lot of boilerplate and repetition. I wonder how this compares with Dhall and Jsonnet, both of which I've been looking into as a safer alternative to templated YAML. With Google putting its weight behind this I'm curious if it'll start finding its way into K8s.

<comment><USER28> A safer yaml:

[https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/](https://hitchdev.com/strictyaml/)

<comment><USER19> I am really curious why people are downvoting this.

I've always thought that a more restrictive and simpler version of yaml would be a good alternative.

<comment><USER28> Folks upset at the sibling comment weren't here at the time. The reaction was swiftly negative, and there are few charitable reasons to be found for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You'd think they'd make it easier to quickly seem examples of the language.

</comment><comment><USER30> How does this compare to jsonnet or hocon? Why would someone choose this over generating configuration files with a "scripting" language like python?

<comment><USER31> CUE improves in Jsonnet in primarily two areas, I think: Making composition better (it's order-independent and therefore consistent), and adding schemas.

Both Jsonnet and CUE have their origin in GCL internally at Google. Jsonnet is basically GCL, as I understand it. But CUE is a whole new thing.

<comment><USER24> jsonnet is basically GCL, but after like five failed attempts to rewrite, replace, or fix GCL, which included creating a formal semantics of GCL pointing out all the problems. I believe there was a final successful attempt to fix it.

The Cue docs talk about jsonnet explicitly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> TIL how to use cat with STDIN.

</comment><comment><USER33> A lot of these systems ignore the querying side of a schema i.e. in graphql you can define a schema then query only certain parts of the schema so only parts of the schema are enforced at runtime

</comment><comment><USER34> Would like to know more on how its a good fit for database schemas? Does anybody here use any DSLs for database schemas? If yes, what and why?

</comment><comment><USER35> Does it sport working on binary data, it would be a cool thing to have in some applications, to validate conditions on binary data.

</comment><comment><USER36> my time at Google has made me hate GCL so much.

<comment><USER37> I was going to say, this looks a lot like GCL. Dynamic scope, recursive lookup in parent scopes, templates [1], everything. GCL is neat and all, but I'd almost rather write my job configs by building thin python or lisp scripts to emit json or protos.

1: [https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/master/doc/tutorial/basi...](https://github.com/cuelang/cue/blob/master/doc/tutorial/basics/templates.md)

<comment><USER38> AFAIK, cue is written by the author (or one of them?) of GCL, and purports to fix a lot of what is wrong with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The syntax looks a lot like Coffeescript, which I use for defining and generating data.

</comment><comment><USER40> Cute. Is there something that takes in Cue and makes a GUI editor for the format?

<comment><USER41> Wouldn't the optimal one be a mode for your editor of choice?

<comment><USER40> I mean a form, with blanks and pulldowns. There's enough info in Cue to generate one. Not just a syntax checker that tells you that you got it wrong.

<comment><USER41> I don't think a gui to work with cue files is a good substitute for a gui for regular users to configure whatever you are configuring because its unlikely to be able to define valid data to the same degree as an actual app.

If its for a technical individual to configure your software I don't know that such a gui would be superior to your favorite editor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Welcome to kubernetes new configuration language!

</comment><comment><USER43> They should just foist BCL and Borgmon upon the gullible masses. All cloud development will be set back years while people (try to) figure it all out.

<comment><USER44> We used to joke that open-sourcing Borgmon would be an industry-disabling move, but Prometheus is very popular which just proves there's a lot of people with poor taste in software.

FWIW Piccolo has also leaked into the industry in the form of Pystachio.

<comment><USER45> Gullible mass member here. What's better than Prometheus?

<comment><USER44> Eating glass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The post title is misleading. This is a more of 20% project, not an officially Google supported one.

<comment><USER47> There's no difference.

<comment> joatmon-snoo There is a large difference between battle-tested tech maintained by a properly staffed team and a proof of concept built by someone in their spare time.

The title certainly made me think that it was the former, even though it's the latter.

<comment><USER48> > _maintained by a properly staffed team_

This seems to describe very few Google products. Almost daily, I have the following thought: "Has anyone at Google actually even used this product?"

(Most often with Assistant, but definitely with other products, too)

<comment><USER49> Just because you don't like doesn't mean it's not built and supported by a large team following some VP or PM vision. Boondoggles cost a lot of resources.

<comment><USER48> Perhaps I have a different definition of "maintained" than Google does. For me, it means that it's not just online, but also has bugs regularly fixed and features added.

Most Google services (off the top of my head: Voice, Talk, Reminders) seem to reach v1 and then stop dead in their tracks. They're online, but that's it. Thousands of people request fixes or features, and they go completely unheard.

Google employees on HN have confirmed this, saying that the company rewards new products that drive ads, but not the work involved in improving and maintaining existing products. That explains why Google's released the following products for messaging, and none has been amazing: Talk, Hangouts, Voice, Wave, Allo, Hangouts Chat, and Messages/RCS.

Most of these overlapped at some point, and if you've used any of them, you wouldn't describe them as "maintained". They're more like "abandoned without publicly announcing anything".

If there's a VP or PM vision anywhere at Google that lasts for more than a year, I'd love to know what it is. It seems like a company with a thousand committees and no real creative leadership.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> How is this better than yaml?

<comment><USER51> Less footguns, built-in validation, strong types. Me gusta.

<comment><USER15> So..why not use XML?

<comment><USER52> Because while XML has types and schemas, the actual implementation and ergonomics is absolute garbage. Those things matter to intelligent people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Obligatory: [https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png)

</comment><comment><USER54> The tl;dr is buried deep in the docs

> CUE is an extension of JSON. This improves familiarity and makes it easy to > get going quickly.

> In its simplest use case, CUE can substitute for a more pleasant way to > write JSON.

<comment><USER55> So it's a google branded yaml?

Let's raise a glass to our blue eyed comrades who'll adopt this fully, only for google to decide in 2-3 years to completely and aggressively kill it again for no apparent reason.

<comment><USER56> Pardon for slamming my ignorance down on the table here: I know Google has a tendency of killing _products_ but I'm not familiar with many of their engineering tooling being similarly sunset with comparable frequency.

Any named examples? I'm sure there are-and likely they just elude me at present, maybe seeing their names will jog the memory probably?

<comment><USER57> jsonnet? :)

<comment><USER24> The jsonnet mailing list still has activity. Is the project dead?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Feels like an also crappy jsonnet

</comment><comment><USER59> Well, it doesn't look very backwards compatible to me ;)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_\(computing\))

</comment><comment><USER60> Ill prolly get downvoted for this:

What i want to see, is a company which will provide as a service, basically devops deployment, monitoring and provisioning regardless of the cloud provider.

Such that i can say "deploy this" and it will eval, track and monitor the cost of the deployment across aws, azure, gcp, etc and i can click controls to see/kil/scale wherever...

Thus, i dont care about cloud provider deployment language, etc...

<comment><USER61> checkout [https://apex.sh/up/](https://apex.sh/up/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Disclosure: I work on Tree Notation.

If the authors would like to discuss how Tree Notation may be a better syntax for this language, please feel free to get in touch: firstname.lastname@example.com or firstname.lastname@example.com.

Here is a demonstration of what a Tree Language for config files could look like: [https://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20config](https://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20config)

<comment><USER15> Stop commenting on every HN post, thanks

<comment><USER62> Fact: I've commented on fewer than 1% of HN posts today alone.

Fact: my post is very relevant to the OP and I'm offering to help them.

Fact: I've been a member of this site for over 12 years, and never comment on a post unless I think it adds value to the discussion or would be helper to the parent.

<comment><USER63> Fact: What you wrote was essentially a private, directed comment that should have been a private email, and added literally nothing to the discussion.

<comment><USER62> > should have been a private email

That's a good suggestion. I didn't think of that. But thinking about it, I guess I don't want to bother the OPs inbox. If they are interested, they can get in touch.

> added literally nothing to the discussion.

I disagree. When I post a new language, and someone shares a link to a related language, those are often the most valuable comments.

Validating, defining, using data: sound like things Tree Notation syntax is perfect for. Cue's semantics are great, and presentation and execution, I just think potentially a syntax switch is worth exploring. I understand the strategy to be able to parse JSON as cue, and that's probably the way to go for now, but in the future Tree Notation syntax might offer compelling advantages.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google, driving the getaway car for online bandits? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/google-driving-the-getaway-car-for-online-bandits.ars <comment><USER2> Lame. Quoting an MPAA CEO as a source? Could you possibly find a more biases source, or one less attached to reality?</comment>


First Programmable Memristor Computer - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/semiconductors/processors/first-programmable-memristor-computer <comment><USER2> Are memristors real? I feel like I've been hearing about how memristors are going to revolutionize computing for as long as I've been paying attention (~10 years). And yet, they never arrive. I also recall some detractors who say it's all marketing and "true" memristors aren't going to be viable for a super long time. Can anyone from HN summarize what the deal with memristors is?

<comment><USER3> I work on memristor based crossbars for neural network computation. Memristors are real, but we're pretty far away from mass scale commercial products.

<comment><USER4> Any recent article recommendation? :)

<comment><USER3> [https://www.ece.ucsb.edu/~strukov/papers/2018/natcommMLP2018...](https://www.ece.ucsb.edu/~strukov/papers/2018/natcommMLP2018.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Obligatory reminder that "memristor" is mostly a marketing hype word at this point. No clear example of the original memristor hypothesis has ever been crafted, and there is wide disagreement on what should or shouldn't be called a memristor, and it's not even agreed whether a memristor can physically exist _at all_. And hearing about the "first" memristor <whatever> is basically a biannual occurrence.

Also, reminder that even if someone manages to make a real memristor and everyone agrees it is a memristor, it may not end up being a big deal. They have some nice hypothetical properties, but they're not magic, and any widespread use would probably take decades.

<comment><USER2> What is "the original memristor hypothesis"?

What definitions of memristors would make them physically impossible?

What hypothetical benefits are so compelling about the physically possible definitions?

<comment><USER5> In the 60s/70s, an EE/CS guy named Leon Chua did some clever math that suggested we could build transistor-like devices that had a non-linear relationship between charge and flux and called it a memristor. He didn't build one, and as far as I know it's not something he's spent all that much time on since.

In the 90s somebody at HP must have mentioned memristors in hearing range of their marketing department and suddenly HP was going to have a product to market in a few years.

Yeah. Never happened. Nobody's done it.

In theory, such a device could allow us to do things like build extremely low power non-volatile memory (a flash replacement, basically). A lot of marketing hype has talked about completely replacing computer RAM with non-volatile memristor-backed memory, but again, neither it nor anything like it has happened. But as it turns out, battery-backed DRAM covers a multitude of sins anyway.

The actual debate over physical possibility is because it's _too_ low-power, to the point that an actual implementation might violate lower theoretical limits on the amount of energy required to change the state of a bit. In other words, it might violate the second law of thermodynamics, which is something of a problem.

<comment><USER6> Yes, memristors are real, and no, their properties are not magic[1]. As I stated elsewhere on this thread, you can even make them at home[2]. It's even been discussed here on Hacker News before[3].

[1] [https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/76097/what-a...](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/76097/what- are-the-characteristics-of-a-memristor)

[2] [http://sparkbangbuzz.com/memristor/memristor.htm](http://sparkbangbuzz.com/memristor/memristor.htm)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9853984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9853984)

<comment><USER5> They are real if you accept the branding of of companies trying to sell products that don't really do much to people who are lured in by buzzwords. Those of us who actually do real work have serious doubts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Arrays of memristors can do these tasks efficiently because they become > analog computations instead of digital.

What does this even mean in a computer? How can you do a non-digital computation?

<comment><USER8> Bit depth becomes continious, essentially. Instead of a 32 bit number, you just have any number you please, as it's continuous. Granted, there _are_ restrictions in translating this to memristors, but thats essentially the gist.

The real key feature of memristors is not the math or any of that stuff, it's that all that math is stable under power cycling and it take nearly no power to compute things. The article mentions that they preformed 188 GigaFlops with about 0.3W of power. The human brain is about 20W at about 1 ExaFlop (a VERY coarse estimate) for comparison.

This power savings opens up the doors for very good computation (ML stuff) on very tiny power sources.

<comment><USER9> How's that "bit depth" different from the bit debth you get when you implement a simple analog summing circuit?

<comment><USER10> The number of elements required is much less.

<comment><USER8> The 'standard' summing circuit [0] typically requires an op-amp, which is in itself a multi-element component, and a few resistors. With a memristor, you can theoretically skip the op-amp and just use the passive elements, though an op-amp is likely still needed to read out the very small signals [1].

[0] there are MANY ways to skin this cat, but here is a simple one: [https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/wp- content/uploads/2013...](https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/wp- content/uploads/2013/08/opamp11.gif?fit=457%2C223)

[1] [https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1205-141021211518-conversion...](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/1205-141021211518-conversion- gate01/95/proposals-for-memristor-crossbar-design-and- applications-11-638.jpg?cb=1413926248)

<comment><USER10> The opamp is mainly needed of impedence matching. There are several ways to contruct such circuits using just inverters.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: From 0 to 1000$ in one week? - <AUTHOR>

HN has a very interesting demographics: entrepreneurs, developers, designers... I'd like to put you into a real-life challenge:<p>- You have 0$ in your bank account.<p>- You need at least 1000$ by the end of the week.<p>- You have your own skills and expertise, but no job and 0 contacts.<p>What would you do? <comment><USER2> Take out a loan or ask a sibling/friend.

</comment><comment><USER3> Steal a lot of wallets.

</comment><comment><USER4> Freelance?</comment>


Ask HN: Made a hack for musichackday, now getting meeting requests. Need advice - <AUTHOR>

I'm pretty young, and have some experience dealing with small business, but lately I've had three or four people from bigger corporations sending me emails asking to meet up and talk about collaborating. They aren't hackers like me, or tech VCs, they are music business people.
I just don't know what to expect. Is there anything I should or shouldn't do. Should I bring people with to these meetings? I was planning on open-sourcing the code but I feel like these guys will be the first people trying to talk me out of it.
Any guidance or help would be much appreciated. <comment><USER2> I don't really see a problem here. I think your are on a great path.

Well, talk to them. Just don't do something you don't feel like doing. If you want to open-source your stuff do it. Put it under a business-friendly license and there should be no worries.

I guess, they just saw a lot of potential in your abilities. They're probably interested in powering up their work force a bit.

If you get a bad feeling about what they propose: don't do it. And don't make any decisions on right the spot. Don't let the pressure get to you.

If you should bring people or not depends on what kind of meeting it really is and what they want. Can you find out more about them? Well, they are talking about collaborating, so I'm fairly sure you don't need to bring a lawyer IMHO. I'd go alone.</comment>


Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government  - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband-faster-and-cheaper-blame-the-governme/?a_dgi=aolshare_facebook

<comment><USER2> This was posted 4 days ago; <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2709834> and has 138 comments.</comment>


Jerry Yang: "We're Done" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/28/jerry-yang-were-done/ <comment><USER2> Ugh. The absurdly misleading title totally ruined this article for me.

Usually when you put someone's name followed by quotes that means, ya know, they actually said something. Isn't that supposed to be journalism 101? Don't put quote marks around something unless, ya know, it was a direct quote? And not your personal interpretation of body language and tone?

<comment><USER3> I think newspapers usually use single quotes when paraphrasing someone (e.g., <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24856034/>).

I doubt Arrington has taken Journalism 101.

<comment><USER4> I read single quotes as quoting someone too (and in my reading that's what the article you linked to is doing).

I'm pretty sure you don't "need" quotes to "paraphrase" someone, you could just write the characterization, in, you know, words.

Anyway, I agree: very weak, tabloid-esque title.</comment></comment></comment>


Winklevoss twins become first Bitcoin billionaires - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/12/02/winklevoss-twins-become-first-bitcoin-billionaires <comment><USER2> Wow, admittedly my perception of these guys was totally skewed after seeing the movie The Social Network. When I read about their original investment in 2013 I totally wrote it off as being a hairbrained move. Clearly succumbed to my own biases in passing that unfair judgment. Good for them for being so savvy.

<comment><USER3> Or....it was a hair-brained move, but it happened to turn out well for them, and now you're succumbing to post-fact rationalisation bias that rich gamblers who get a payout at a point in time actually know what they're doing...

Edit: ironically?, the fact that most people partake in this bias actually increases such people's likelihood of being successful in the future.

<comment><USER4> Or it was neither a brilliant nor a hair-brained move and was a reasonably calculated risk which paid off likely due to a mix of luck and prescience? There were many reasonable, intelligent people out there who weren't blinded by the anarchy/libertarian hype and yet still speculated Bitcoin's price would skyrocket based on rational predictions and bets.

The fact that these guys were partly on the ground floor for the rise of one of the most influential tech companies in the world and very much on the ground floor for one of the (so far) highest ROI assets and biggest technological advances (practical blockchain, consensus, and cryptocurrency tech; not Bitcoin in particular) of the past 50 years shows that at the very least they're probably not bozo meatheads in the way Sorkin and Fincher portrayed them (as entertaining as the movie was).

<comment><USER5> Folks, the word is spelled _hare_ brained.

<comment><USER6> I'm impressed that you created a new account to contribute to the conversation with such a substantive, thought-prevoking comment.

<comment><USER7> It's "thought-provoking", not "thought-prevoking".

<comment><USER6> Thank you, Merriam-Webster.

<comment><USER5> The name's Noah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Satoshi Nakamoto was the first bitcoin billionaire, quite a while ago. Assuming Satoshi is one person. But I suppose nobody really knows who it is.

<comment><USER9> that was my first thought too, satoshi is if memory serves worth around 11 billion now so even if the reality is that he is a few people theyre all probably billionaires

<comment> m-i-l It is claimed Satoshi has around 1M BTC[0]. But this is only "worth" something if the private keys haven't been lost, forgotten, or intentionally or accidentally destroyed, and given the lack of movement there is no evidence of this.

[0] [https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well- deserved-f...](https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved- fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand the liquidity of bitcoin, maybe someone can please explain to me.

If I'd bought what today is, say, $100M, and I wanted to cash all of it out tomorrow, could I do it? Could I actually have $100M in my bank account the next day?

Edit: ok, not in one day. Let's say, over 6 months, whatever it takes. Can I withdraw $100M?

<comment><USER11> Now I'm no crypto-currency expert, but from the outside looking in it seems like: In _theory_ Bitcoin is worth $10k each or whatever it is now, but in _actuality_ it's only worth whatever arbitrary limits the various 'exchanges' set on real-money withdraws? So how is this "decentralized"? There's still a semi-central location you have to go to in order to get any real, actual currency out of it.

<comment><USER12> Transactions in bitcoin, eg sending a bitcoin from one wallet to another, occur on the blockchain and are decentralized. The fiat value of bitcoin, however, is determined by supply and demand for that bitcoin-fiat cross, just like anything else in open markets. That trading for these crosses occur on the exchanges.

> There's still a semi-central location you have to go to in order to get any > real, actual currency out of it

This is definitely still the case. The exchanges themselves, though, could potentially be implemented via blockchain. This would likely reduce transaction costs and could make them more secure. In this case the would actually be decentralized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How long I wonder before we reach the top of this particular bubble.

If anything, this story is likely to perpetuate the bull market in Crypto for a while longer. We'll probably get more stories of the most unlikely bitcoin billionaires over the next few months which will just add more fuel to the fire.

My guess is that some sort of action by financial regulators will cause the bubble to burst, but quite when that happens who knows. In the meantime, its going to be fascinating to see how it develops. Its history in the making, a case study for the future.

<comment><USER14> gold is a 2000 years bubble, which financial regulator, US accounts for 25% of the trading volume, in Japan is legal tender, the problem for 1 single country to let's say ban it, is that you don't want to be left behind, unless you're a dictatorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To me this is just the typical example of people that profited handsomely because of: 1- being sons of rich people and 2- being disgustingly lucky

Bitcoin is a braindead bubble with no fundamentals whatsoever, these guys just happened to have a few million lying around, they put it into something that made absolutely zero sense and ended up billionaires.

<comment><USER16> > being disgustingly lucky

Getting lucky once can happen. Getting lucky twice, with Facebook and Bitcoin, is so improbable that it asks for a different kind of explanation.

<comment><USER17> Lots of people with high risk-tolerance got _kind of_ rich by buying Bitcoin early. The only difference with the Winklevosses is that they had a lot more money to leverage in that early investment. It's not improbable that _someone_ was going to have a lot of money and put it into Bitcoin.

<comment><USER16> It's also not improbable that someone got involved in the earliest stage of what was Facebook by pure luck.

However, both those things together are starting to get just a little bit improbable from the pure luck standpoint, don't you think?

<comment><USER17> Any professional investor is riding on a combination of a very long lucky streak, and portfolio-based risk-adjusting. Paying attention to the Winklevosses here is a selection effect; you're ignoring everyone who executed the exact same investment _strategy_ they did, but ended up making bad bets rather than good ones.

You can entirely explain away the Winklevoss' success by supposing an investor pool of sufficient size that you can pick a set of first-pass winners (1:10000, say) and then pick a second-pass winner from that set (1:10000 again), where they happened to be the ones to be drawn, and everyone else wasn't. The sheer number of people _trying_ to win explains away the improbability required to win—in exactly the same way that the number of people entered into a lottery explains away the improbability of the winner's guess.

Also, we only know who the Winklevosses are _because_ they were a first-pass winner. So there's no reason to privilege them here; it'd make much more sense to look at _all_ first-pass winners (in this case, early Facebook investors), rather than this random famous example of one, and then ask about this set's _cumulative_ probability of _at least one_ of them having gotten even richer from an early Bitcoin investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only if they sell, and wouldn't a $1B sale pretty much tank it? Is there enough financial coverage from the banking sector behind the exchange houses to cover such a large sell?

<comment><USER19> This is true of any company equity as well. If Bezos decided to unload his entire stake in amazon, for example, the stock price would tank. At that level, it's all based on valuation, not liquidation value

<comment><USER20> Right, but there is a fundamental value to Amazon. The stocking never go to zero dollars just because of Bezos selling because the company is clearly worth more than that.

If the Winklevoss twins tried to sell just 1% of their stake, $10 million, what would happen to the price of bitcoin? Would they have $990 million of bitcoin left?

I'm guessing it would be a hell of a lot less. I think it would cause a panic.

I'm not going to say would go to zero, but I'm willing to bet it would drop a TON more than Amazon stock would if Bezos sold 1%.

<comment><USER21> USD trade volume for bitcoin has been around 2 to 11 trillion in the last month.

[https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/historical- data...](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/historical-data/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The only unique thing about this story is the amount of money they initially gambled.

There are lots of people who gambled on bitcoin in 2013, and the only difference is that they couldn't afford to gamble $8million.

I don't really find that particularly interesting or newsworthy

</comment><comment><USER23> I always think once you are lucky, twice you are good

<comment><USER24> Unpacking that for others:

The Winklevoss twins were onto something with social networks. Then they were onto something with bitcoin. So basically they're not just lucky but good at catching onto the next new thing.

<comment><USER25> Without seeing how many failed investments they've made that's not really a fair assumption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg is worth $70B so the nerds still win

<comment><USER27> At the current growth rates, they will easily beat Zuckerberg to $1 trillion of personal wealth. If the current growth rates could be sustained, in 10 years their personal wealth will rival the GDP of the entire country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Roger Ver is also a Bitcoin multi Billionaire.

<comment><USER29> Proof?

<comment><USER28> He signed a message a while ago with a large amount of BTC and is known to be one of the earliest BTC whales.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This dude on HN is worth some $3bn, assuming he HODLed (EDIT to add: he/she bought 259684 BTC for $3000 in the wake of Mt Gox)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2676263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2676263)

</comment><comment><USER14> is not bad, if they sell and the bitcoin price crashes, so what if it crashes, will only get more adoption, because is more useful than gold, especially with the new generation, and gold market cap is so much bigger than bitcoin, I would love a crash to buy some, rather than spending it on things I don't really need.

</comment><comment><USER31> Glad for these guys. Murky Marc stolen their idea and fucked it up, 1b is a nice compensation for that!

</comment><comment><USER28> Well deserved.

</comment><comment><USER32> Lottery winners hailed as geniuses, news at 11.

</comment><comment><USER33> We do not know about their other investments that tanked. This is how investment world generally works. You lose most your bets but the one bet that gives result pays for it and more.

</comment><comment><USER34> They seem to have a knack of making big money from other people's projects.

</comment><comment><USER35> This comment is totally Off topic. Thats a warning so that if you'd rather stay on topic it doesn't waste your time!

I'm not sure if your account is banned @pussypusspuss.. but it seems like a cruel fate to be commenting, have your comments removed, and have no knowledge of your punishment. I think itd be better if you knew your condition so I'm leaving this comment to let you know. I hope the rest of hacker news doesn't mind this!</comment>


Ask YC:  Why does adsense try to find ads relevant to web page content rather than to the user? - <AUTHOR>

Why not ask the user to specify what sorts of ads he/she would like to see while using a site? <comment><USER2> Seriously? No Effort > Effort. Relevant to context > irrelevant to context. Or you can use adpinion.com instead of adsense.

You've been asking a lot of fundamental adsense related questions - have you seen wolf-howl.com or digitalpoint.com's forums or seobook.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> If a user does not specify targeting keywords, then it could revert to content-based targeting. Giving a user control over what advertising he/she will see might make him/her more interested in those ads.

<comment><USER2> Do you like ads? Do you click on ads? Do you pay attention to ads?

<comment><AUTHOR> If they were more accurately targeted, I might be more interested in checking them out.

<comment><USER2> Why don't you click on ads? Why don't you like ads?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't like ads in their current form. However, I can't say I will never like ads in any form.

I suspect that most people don't care for ads because they are not really relevant.

<comment><USER2> Did you notice the huge CTR rate drop when Google changed the clickable area from the entire ad unit to just the link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have a reference that this is the cause?

In any case, the future of ads is seamless integration with a site so that you have no idea it's an ad at all before you click it.

<comment><USER2> [http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/11/accidental-clicks- fade-i...](http://adsense.blogspot.com/2007/11/accidental-clicks-fade-into- background.html)

A large % of the traffic to adsense was accidental clicking, a large amount of effort was expended on tricking users into accidently clicking on those links by making them look like they were same-site links. Of course that became a TOS violation.

On a CPM basis I can see some value in having a brand associated with a flash game, or having websites sponsored by something. I think you're trying to build a faster horse. Sites that turn margins and backgrounds into advertising, which exist, are more likely to gain traction than another "pin the tail on the donkey" "click here to shoot the monkey" flash/js ad.

Of course this would be far better addressed by someone from AdPinion.com as their entire business model appears to rely on giving people the ability to view more relevant ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It does target to the user based on your searches and other things (assuming you're cookied). It just doesn't ask for explicit input from the user which is counter to the "google way" of abstracting that kind of control away from the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you think if you were explicitly asked for what ads you would like to see that you would pay more attention to those ads?

<comment><USER2> Ads I would like to see: none. If I can't have that option I'm going to cast my vote with Adblock on FireFox and you're not going to get an option. Find a better way to monetize pls kthx.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would the web look like if everyone used Adblock? Not much free content I would guess. Would you like that better?

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure there'd be a ton of free content. How much of the content one the internet earns its creators more than they spend on coffee?

<comment><AUTHOR> Anything good enough to become popular. .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> best use of ads I've ever seen is on Kingston.com (Ram)

\- you select your pc model then the ram size, then click on the you see a ad that compares the perfect ram on 3 different sites.

\- I think most comparison sites are just big ads, and that is ok as long as there is a vaule ad.</comment>


The Kitchener Snack Bar - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381454414/a-food-lovers-dream-the-kitchener-snack-bar?ref=home_location

<comment><USER2> I've suggested a similar idea to a few people. I called mine the "fine dining food court" (FDFC).

There would be one dinning area that is served by 4 different chefs. These chefs would be at the stage in their career where they want to get out and run their own restaurant, but do not yet have the money or the name recognition to pull it off. The FDFC would be a stepping-stone for them to that goal.

The FDFC owner would provide a large kitchen divided into 4 independent work areas (much like the kitchens you see on cooking competition shows like "Chopped" or "Next Iron Chef" or "Top Chef"). There would be a large pantry and walk-in fridge stocked by the FDFC, which any of the 4 chefs could take from as needed. There would also be some private pantry and fridge space for each chef that they could stock on their own.

The FDFC would deal deal with front of house, and would also provide sous chefs to assist the chefs (the chefs could also bring their own assistants, of course), and would deal with all the business aspects of the FDFC.

Each chef could provide several dishes for the menu. The menu would be sure to credit each dish to the appropriate chef.

The idea is that it is a lot cheaper for a chef to lease a cooking spot at FDFC than it is to open a new restaurant. He can spend a few months at FDFC, concentrating on a doing a few signature dishes well, to showcase his talent to the public and to potential restaurant investors, so he can get the name recognition and financial backing to strike out on his own.

The chefs would just deal with food. The FDFC would operate a bar for those who want to drink before dinner (or instead of dinner...) and would also deal with wine.

One of the owners of the FDFC should be an experienced and successful restauranteur, who would provide advice to the chefs if they wanted it.

The beauty of this is that the owner of the FDFC makes his money from the bar and from wine, and from leasing space to the chefs. If a particular chef's menu bombs, there will be another young chef eager to take his place. This should be a lot less risky financially for the FDFC owners than owning a traditional restaurant.

<comment><USER3> FYI putting "food court" in the same sentence as "fine dining" is a bit of a non-sequitur for most people.

At least where I'm from, food courts are pretty much synonymous with cheap, greasy fast food.

<comment><USER4> I think the cognitive dissonance is kinda the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had to do a double-take. Kitchener, Ontario making the front page of HN? Obviously, this was not to be :)

<comment><USER6> I had the exact same reaction :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They do something like this in DC - [http://www.unionkitchendc.com/](http://www.unionkitchendc.com/)</comment>