Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for the iPad - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/baldurs-gate-enhanced-edition/id515114051?mt=8 <comment><USER2> I can understand not supporting iOS 4.x. Memory management got a whole lot less annoying with ARC (automatic reference counting) in iOS 5.x.

But there are a lot of people, myself included, who won't upgrade our devices to iOS 6 because we want a Maps product that works and, you know, has public transit directions. Until that changes I'm staying on iOS 5.

It's a shame. I'd buy this in a heartbeat. I love to support actual games (social "games" not being games by my definition), which seem to be becoming increasingly rare.

<comment><USER3> For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.

I know as a developer I'm not even _thinking_ about iOS 6-only releases until the middle of next year. Which is a bitch because dealing with the iPhone 5 without autolayout is no fun at all.

<comment><USER4> > For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all > done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.

The iPad 1 has 256 megs of RAM. The iPad 2 has 512, The 3 & 4 a gig.

"Requires iOS 6" is the easiest way, as a dev, to get the store to enforce the requirement that your app needs more than 256 Megs to run comfortably.

<comment><USER5> For comparison, the original version of Baldur's Gate required 16 MB of RAM (32 MB recommended).

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, I think that ran in much lower resolution and in 8bit color.

<comment><USER7> If you still have the original disks, you can recreate the magic with GemRB.

<http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm such a geek for these old isometric games. If you are too, I'd recommend checking out Project Eternity ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project- eternit...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity)) and Wasteland 2 (<http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2>) on KickStarter.

Both were very successful in raising funds, so I'm hoping we see a renaissance of the genre and some new IP.

<comment><USER9> If you like these, you should check out the RPGs by Spiderweb Software. They're available for iPad as well as Mac and PC:

<http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/products.html>

<comment><USER10> dont forget Fallout 1 and 2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> shawn-butler I wonder how much effort had to go into reworking the orginal codebase to make this performant. The Infinity Engine that was used for BG didn't use OpenGL acceleration until BG2 and IcewindDale. I bet this was a fun project to work on.

I doubt they are using the GemRB open source implementation [0] since it is GPLv2.

[0]: <http://www.gemrb.org/wiki/doku.php?id=start>

</comment><comment><USER11> Baldur's Gate is one of my favorite games of all time, and I'm generally behind the Enhanced Edition - I hope a new generation of gamers will be inspired by the world of BG, as I was 14 years ago.

Having said that, playing BG:EE on PC for the past week I've been disappointed by the lack of polish, and the number of bugs still present. GameBanshee - probably the most respected site about computer RPGs - published a pretty critical review (of the PC version):

[http://gamebanshee.com/reviews/110209-baldurs-gate- enhanced-...](http://gamebanshee.com/reviews/110209-baldurs-gate-enhanced- edition-review.html)

I hope the iPad version benefited from an extra week of polish. An earlier build was rejected, implying the have done some bug-squishing:

<https://twitter.com/TrentOster/status/275743862507589632>

</comment><comment><USER12> It looks like it requires iOS 6, so I won't be able to play it on my 1st gen iPad. Sad times!

<comment><USER9> The developers were seeing out of memory issues on the iPad 1, thus the requirement for iOS 6. I believe there is still some hope they can get it to run, but ultimately, that didn't hold up the release:

<https://twitter.com/TrentOster/status/276748438882902016>

<comment><USER13> Yeah, the original iPad is the most memory-constrained ARMv7 (i.e. iOS 5-capable) iOS device out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I for one think it's nice that this story hasn't been flagged. It's a Friday, and this was welcome news for me. Thank you, @adamwintle, for the post.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know how the save system works? Can you hit the home button at anytime and come back in to the game later right were you left off?

</comment><comment><USER16> Finally! There's one game I've been waiting for on the iPad for _ages_. The burning question: is it a literal port or did they speed up some of the awfully slow "go fetch a broomstick from the other side of the map at walking speed" quests that are so common at the beginning of the game?

<comment><USER11> More-or-less a direct port. They added a stand-alone 'arena mode', and a few new NPC companions, 2 of whom have an associated quest/new area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was going to get this on PC, but 20 bucks for a game a still have sitting on my shelf is a bit much.

OTOH i will jump on it when it comes to Android, not only a much more reasonable 10 dollars but i think the touchscreen experience might add value in its own right.

<comment><USER18> The total price is the same, the PC version includes several DLCs, while on iOS you buy them separately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would love to see a gameplay video on the iPad. The controls could be very tough...

<comment><USER9> Here's the first half of the tutorial:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pOqwUoJniPQ

I feel like the controls are pretty decent. It's pretty much a straight port from the PC, so the menus are the same, etc. The hitbox for small items can be a bit of an issue, but that's my only complaint so far.

You may want to browse through the TouchArcade forums for more feedback and videos:

<http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=169358>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hm, did I time it wrong or why did no one see my earlier submission? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4887373>

</comment><comment><USER21> In app purchases DO NOT work on iPad version. I paid 3 bucks and the new character is nowhere to be found with ZERO EXPLANATION as to what to do after they took my money.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is the first thing that's made me want an ipad for anything more than marking up web development work.

<comment><USER23> On Android you could play it (and Icewind Dale, etc) with the FOSS [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforg...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforge.gemrb)</comment></comment>


Instruction-less computation - <AUTHOR> http://kristerw.blogspot.com/2015/08/instruction-less-computation.html

<comment><USER2> Turing-Completeness is a wonderful thing. In fact, it's pretty cool just how many things in various systems are Turing complete: [http://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete](http://www.gwern.net/Turing-complete)

</comment><comment><USER3> Related: an x86/x64 obfuscator that transforms a program to use only mov instructions [https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator)

</comment><comment><USER4> Meh. I thought this would be something cool like 110 rules. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110)

</comment><comment><USER5> Do compilers take advantage of these features?

<comment><USER6> I would think that task switching and interrupts are much slower than actual processor instructions. So there is no reason for compilers to use it.

<comment><USER7> A task/context switch involves dumping the entire contents of the registers and caches, loading the new values and resuming execution of the other task. It most likely messes up your pipeline - it's several orders of magnitude slower than just executing a simple instruction.</comment></comment></comment>


Why our ETL tool doesn't do transformations - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stitchdata.com/why-our-etl-tool-doesnt-do-transformations-1b2e88c581c3#.i0a4nk5hf <comment><USER2> Hey Jake! What about something like geocoding, where you have to query an HTTP API for each record? It seems like doing transformations in SQL will always have a ceiling relative to a scripting language like python, no?</comment>


Stop making your developers design your product - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloco.io/blog/2016/stop-making-your-developers-design-your-product <comment><USER2> As a developer, I'm only too aware of my limitations in the design-world. Give me requirements, and I'll make it work.

If I'm left to guess at what you want, it'll be a waste of time because you're not happy with my interpretation in many cases.

Respect me as a developer by doing your homework and telling me what you need (please!).

<comment><USER3> I think the main distinguishing personality trait between developers and designers is that designers actually enjoy the exploration and experimentation process of design. Developers can do it but they clearly don't enjoy it.

The same could be said for many designer's view of development. Even if they are capable, they clearly do not enjoy spending the majority of their day solving problems, chasing edge cases, and learning more languages/paradigms/patterns/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I disagree completely with this article. I think designing is intertwined with development and you can't have one without the other.

If anything, developers should take a more active role in learning about how to incorporate modern design standards into their code.

<comment><USER5> And designers should take a more active role in being aware of the limitations of the systems they are designing for. I've worked on a number of projects where feedback from developers about things the designer is obviously not aware of, from scheduling and effort to technical constraints, were met with derision and holier-than-tho attitude.

The article is advocating for working together, not at loggerheads with each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think word "design" is a bit overloaded here. There is a difference between what "design" is for designers (like Jonathan Ive) vs that for the developers/engineers. I am guessing what article is saying is the former one.

Having said that the line is far more blur than what the article is saying.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Developers, of course, have fewer skills and experience designing. And they didn't take part in the research process"

Well then, include them in it...</comment>


United Airlines STILL using police to remove passengers in spite of promise - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/04/17/engaged-couple-removed-united-flight-wedding/ <comment><USER2> Listen, I'm not a United fan, but this stuff stinks of people jumping on the outrage train.

This is pretty clear what happened:

> Soon after moving to other, empty seats in the economy cabin a few rows up, > flight crew denied their request to pay a supplement for the seats, which > United sells as "economy plus", and told them to move back to their original > seats, Hohl said.

So, they were not in their original seats when the plane was boarding. They don't allow this while people are boarding because the flight team needs to match people boarding to the manifest & it screws up other people who's seats they might be taking.

They might allow you to switch seats AFTER takeoff, but that's a different story.

The other part of the issue is they didn't move to comparable seats.

> "We thought not a big deal, it's not like we are trying to jump up into a > first-class seat," Hohl told KHOU. "We were simply in an economy row a few > rows above our economy seat."

From a fare standpoint, they're actually a different fare class. Just because it's not a different cabin, doesn't mean that's a headache. I'm not 100% sure of their policy, but United _certainly_ isn't obligated to change people's seats and upgrade them once they're already issued a ticket & booked on the flight. Can you imagine the nightmare that ensues after people start requesting upgrades, exit rows, premium economy, etc when people are trying to board with children, suitcases that don't fit in bins and all the other stuff that happens in economy on boarding?

This article ([https://www.yahoo.com/style/united-airlines-kicks-couple- off...](https://www.yahoo.com/style/united-airlines-kicks-couple-off-plane-en- route-wedding-181721817.html)) is pretty clear that the sleeping man was awakened and their seats were available for use and there's no clear reason why they refused to return to their original ticketed seats.

Like I said, I'm not a United fan, and I do everything I can to avoid flying them & use my points on their partner airlines internationally (which aren't bad actually), but this stuff screams of novice flyers not knowing the rules of the air and trying to milk the bad press train United is having.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER3> The couple "found another passenger sleeping sprawled across their seats after they were the last to board the flight".

They moved to other empty seats. They didn't go to first class or business class, they simply took other empty economy seats. They may not even have known the difference between various economy seats. The majority of airlines in the world don't differentiate economy seats.

United should have asked the sprawling passenger to unsprawl, and punish the sprawling passenger if necessary, not the couple.

<comment><USER4> How was a man sleeping across their seats during boarding? I have a hard time imagining a person doing this and not being told not to be a flight attendant. They make multiple passes up and down the cabin telling people to sit up with their bags properly away.

<comment><USER2> This is probably one of those incidents where "draped across the seats" is a guy who boarded early, sitting aisle and fell asleep with his arm on the chair.

The people tried to get a better seat and got told no. Then they made it into a headline story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Headline is "United Airlines Reportedly Removed an Engaged Couple from a Flight to Their Wedding." The submitted headline would seem to violate site guidelines.

<comment><USER2> Not to mention, they're still ALLOWED to use police to remove passengers who refuse to comply with flight attendant instructions...which is what happened here...

EDIT: It seems it was a US Marshall...not technically police.

<comment><USER6> It's not even "in spite of promise" (in the HN headline as of this comment); the promise was not to do it when they are overbooked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > flight crew denied their request to pay a supplement for the seats, which > United sells as "economy plus", and told them to move back to their original > seats, Hohl said.

Sounds like they should have removed the guy sleeping in seats that weren't his, not folks who were probably cooperating with the flight crew. Or there's something missing in this story.

<comment><USER2> They woke him up and moved him.

See this article - [https://www.yahoo.com/style/united-airlines-kicks-couple- off...](https://www.yahoo.com/style/united-airlines-kicks-couple-off-plane-en- route-wedding-181721817.html)

They refused to sit in their ticketed seats, which is why they were removed.

<comment><USER7> Ah, I had a feeling something wasn't quite right with the account in the article. That makes it pretty much a non-story.

<comment><USER2> Yes, it's another "outrage against United" story - but in this case, it's seems more likely that it's just a whiny customer who didn't listen to the flight staff and who's behavior affected the flight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This story repeats the falsehood that the United flight was "overbooked". Explanation here:

[https://www.inc.com/cynthia-than/the-controversial-united- ai...](https://www.inc.com/cynthia-than/the-controversial-united-airlines- flight-was-not-overbooked-and-why-that-matters.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a United fan, but there is a big point of their story that is confusing. Why was a man napping across a row of seats during boarding?

<comment><USER9> I presume that the man was already boarded from a previous segment of a multi- segment flight, and that segment was lightly-booked enough to nap across multiple seats.

This would be especially likely when boarding at a hub airport--like ORD. The fully-booked portion of the flight is from the hub to the end destination, but those passengers are coming in from N feeder routes. So 1/N of the feeder passengers can remain on the plane instead of getting out to make a connection.

But even so, you still need to have enough of your ass in your own seat to be belted in during takeoffs and landings. That makes it mighty difficult to sleep across 3 or more seats through a stop.

Looks suspicious. I suspect this couple was embellishing to surf a wave of anti-United sentiment for a bit. The guy was probably asleep in his own seat, and they just didn't want to climb over him and sit 3-to-a-row when other rows were empty. I wouldn't put it past United to seat an affianced couple in separated seats with a stranger seated between them, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm afraid their culture is too far gone and it will be a long, slow descent. They're news fodder now.

<comment><USER11> Or, this will all blow over in 1 month, like it always has before, and while they will churn travelers temporarily, the next Delta/et al scandal will churn them right back to United.

Plus the dollar is king and RyanAir proves you can spit on people and treat them like trash and they will line up to fill every plane as long as the price is right.

<comment><USER12> How people direct their outrage at these kinds of stories is pretty fickle, too. Right now, because of a quite egregious case, people are more skeptical of police removing people from planes than they used to be (which is probably good). But in a few months there will be some case of a passenger removed from a plane in circumstances that look bad for the passenger and/or trigger common pet peeves, and then we'll have a chorus of pro-police internet commentators saying "FINALLY someone did something about these assholes, I hope they start doing this regularly!!!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most airlines aren't incentivized to treat customers as human beings... that's the bargain. That's the diff between Virgin / JetBlue and United / American.

ProTip(TM): Virgin counter at LHR is probably the best on planet earth. Super friendly and helpful.</comment>


LibreSSL: More Than 30 Days Later - <AUTHOR> http://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2014-libressl.html <comment><USER2> I've said this before, but kudos to the OpenBSD Project for shouldering a disproportionate share of the burden of maintaining core bits of our libre/open infrastructure. I can't think of anyone in tech who has not benefited mightily from OpenSSH and who will not benefit mightily from LibreSSL.

This article is a good reminder for me to get off my arse and cut my meager grad-student checks to the EFF and OpenBSD project.

<comment><USER3> > disproportionate share

Disproportionate based on/compared to what? (I agree that the openbsd folks do a ton of good, I am just trying to understand your references here)

<comment><USER2> What spindritf said. OpenBSD has an extraordinarily high impact-to-X ratio, for many values of X (funding, notoriety, number of contributors, unnecessary problematization, glamor, etc.).

Even though I'm more likely to use OS X or Linux these days than OpenBSD, OpenBSD would fare better in the absence of most Linux distros, than most Linux distros would fare without OpenBSD.

<comment><USER4> You're probably using plenty of OpenBSD software anyways like pf in OSX

<comment><USER2> Wow, I'd forgotten that one. I guess that really proves the point about OpenBSD being everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Among the good and bad stories this year, so far, LibreSSL is the good story of the year.

Also happy to hear a bit about the ressl API. To me it sounds like a focused, high-level API that makes it easy to get right and hard to get wrong. So kind of like NaCl. It's clearly the future -- look at the huge amount of software being written for Sodium now, for example. It's huge.

<comment><USER6> Relatedly is there an SSL implementation based on NaCL anywhere?

<comment><USER7> Not exactly the same thing, but there's CurveCP which is essentially a TCP replacement for creating encrypted communication tunnels. It is part of NaCL and uses the same crypto primitives.

It's a really interesting project, but it's not ready for production use just yet, and even when it is I don't think that replacing SSL is necessarily what it's targeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > In particular, we answer the question "What would the user like to do?" and > not "What does the TLS protocol allow the user to do?"

This makes me think of the laudable approach taken by the developers for the Cryptography library for python. Expose functions to users with _sane and safe_ settings to users, and provide the abilities to override the defaults if you really must (but in such a manner that it's extremely clear that you're stepping into dangerous territory)

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting and quick work. The story of the libcrypto SRP glass house makes me feel like a little kid who just heard a ghost story.

Is OpenSSL being notified of security bugs you all find in your pairing down process?

<comment><USER10> > Is OpenSSL being notified of security bugs you all find in your pairing down > process?

Determining whether a bug can actually be exploited (on what system, under what configuration?) is hard work, and it's harder still to prove a negative. Mostly the OpenBSD devs just fix the bug and move on. If it looks like the typical kind of a bug that could lead to crashes, they release a patch against the previous two releases (assuming the code is present there).

A lot of the bugs they fix turn out to be "security bugs" only long after someone else finds that out on a version of the code running on another system not hardened by the OpenBSD devs.

After 5.6, if any serious bug is found, you can expect to find a patch for it on [http://www.openbsd.org/errata56.html](http://www.openbsd.org/errata56.html) ; however, as the code between LibreSSL and OpenSSL diverges, it won't be obvious whether they apply to OpenSSL at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's pretty surprising that they are using CVS for a new project

<comment><USER12> What's so surprising? OpenBSD folks don't fall for the next new shiny thing. 10 years from now, something else might take over git, and everyone will jump to it. OpenBSD folks don't care, if what they have works, they stick to it.

<comment><USER13> Do you consider "git" a shiny new thing?

Using CVS over git in this day and age is a very dumb decision. They may make up for it in other, good decisions. But this decision is a dumb one.

<comment><USER14> _> But this decision is a dumb one._

What is it with this obsession with telling people _how_ to get sh't done? If they write their code on used kleenex using wax crayons and share that using carrier pigeons, I don't give a sh't as long as the finished product is fine.

<comment><USER15> It's a perfect example of bike-shedding.

Most readers have no way of evaluating their crypto primitives, or their nuclear power plant, or a zillion other things.

But we _can_ evaluate their source control!

<comment><USER16> That bike shed would be way more robust if you used FP to paint it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is some agonizing done over the rewrite culminating in the need for a redesign of the API. I've wondered why there wasn't a light-weight library that simply implemented the _smallest_ number of protocols to delivered the necessary components for a secure _HTTPS_ connection. You'd have some other library for other protocols, but this one should have the feature of being as light-weight (and small) as possible. Wouldn't that be the cyphersuite of choice for most hosting facilities?

</comment><comment><USER18> Off-topic, but the markup of that page is really interesting. I've never seen someone do this before:

LibreSSL: More Than 30 Days Later
 Ted Unangst
 email@example.com

LibreSSL was officially announced to the world just about exactly five months ago. Bob spoke at BSDCan about the first 30 days. For those who weren't there, I'll quickly rehash some of that material. Also, it's always best to start at the beginning, but then I'll try to focus on some new material and updates.

openssl

<comment><USER19> What's so strange about this markup? It's plain html.

<comment><USER20> He's probably unaware of tag omission[1].

The site uses it incorrectly, though: The
 tag belongs at the start of a paragraph - it is _not_ a separator like
.

[1] [http://www.w3.org/TR/html- markup/p.html#p-tags](http://www.w3.org/TR/html-markup/p.html#p-tags)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It kinda bugs me when time-sensitive articles (like those about software) are published without a date on them. The article does not mention a date when it was written, I assume it was recently. It mentions "2014-09-09 FreeBSD advisory", and the date today is 2014-09-28, so September 2014 is a good bet.

<comment><USER22> It was presented at EuroBSDCon2014, but you're right that's not really obvious IN the paper (it is indicated in the URL).

A more chronological catalog is at [http://www.openbsd.org/papers/](http://www.openbsd.org/papers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Look at all the points where memory is allocated, and then make sure it is > freed, exactly one time, no more, no less.

C is clearly the wrong language for something this security critical if that's where your bugs are. C++ solved this many years ago.

<comment><USER24> While I agree that C is the wrong language for security-critical applications (and I write this as a mostly C developer myself), I strongly disagree that C++ is a better language. Sure, it has constructors and destructors and pass- by-reference, but that's not enough, and cons/destr's don't fit the common memory usage-model of performance-critical applications (where an SSL library is often used), which use preallocated memory pools.

<comment><USER25> Seems like an area where Rust could really shine.

<comment><USER26> How about Ada?

<comment><USER27> I think - please correct me if I'm wrong - that Ada has pretty much the same problems as C if you use manual dynamic memory management. Ada supports Garbage Collection in theory, but it is optional, and I don't think many implementations actually supply a GC. Especially since Ada apparently is often used in realtime systems where dynamic memory management is usually avoided altogether (there is a subset of Ada specifically designed for building realtime software that explicitly prohibits any dynamic memory management).

Ada is - as far as I remember - much safer with regards to buffer overflows and bounds checking. But the bigger problem is probably that far more developers know C than Ada, and that something like an SSL library intended for widespread use needs to work with many different compilers and linkers. If you use GCC, I think it is possible to compile Ada code using the GNU Ada compiler and link it to C code compiled using the GNU C compiler, but I am not sure how things look if you use some other C compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So...

* it's broken on other platforms

* they broke features in their releases (no QA/testing?)

* they're making a new API based on requirements of their own programs that doesn't provide many of the OpenSSL features.

* they're using CVS, no public code reviews available. There's no evidence some of the changes were reviewed by someone other than who made the commit. (OpenSSL now does reviews)

* no public audit available.

* they have some hateful note about hipsters on their web page as an excuse after 5 months to not make it readable. So unprofessional it hurts.

* Most changes were done five months ago, with not much at all done for two months.

* The test/ directory has very few changes at all. No extra tests have been added.

* I can't find a release plan, architecture documentation, or any documentation a serious software project should have. (OpenSSL is working on these though)

Finally... their official distribution website doesn't use SSL. That's a major security issue of the face palm variety.

Not. Inspiring. Confidence.

The OpenSSL project on the other hand has been doing some good work. Please see the projects road map from July to see what they are changing. [https://www.openssl.org/about/roadmap.html](https://www.openssl.org/about/roadmap.html)

<comment><USER29> > they have some hateful note about hipsters on their web page as an excuse > after 5 months to not make it readable. So unprofessional it hurts.

Are you talking about this [http://www.libressl.org/](http://www.libressl.org/) ? That's one of the most readable webpage ever.

<comment><USER30> On iOS the font used to be a horrible script - really hard to read.

Currently it's comic sans (or a clone of it).

I personally fucking love the site and wish wish wish more people would stop throwing weird stuff in websites. I do think the dig at hipsters is pointlessly antagonistic. Isn't there an evangelism guide for people in open source projects?

<comment><USER31> > evangelism guide for people in open source projects

There are, tons of them. OpenBSD traditionally doesn't give a fuck, and backs up that attitude by shipping solid products.

Not exactly surprising given the history of the project (started by de raadt after being kicked out of NetBSD for being hard to work with).

If external reviews, github pull requests and documentation galore are important to the GP, they better stop using OpenSSH, which is developed using the same unfathomable development methods as libressl.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the Signal messenger creates a lock-in effect - <AUTHOR> http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/signal-lock-in.html <comment><USER2> Hello, I understand your situation. You may want to try Serkit Messenger as it support both public and private chats simultaneously. With Serkit messenger, you can make any of your chat private just by click of a button. Android and iOS links below:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.serkit&hl=e...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.serkit&hl=en) [https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1094142111](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1094142111)</comment>


Show HN: Colivingly, a coliving community for makers - <AUTHOR> https://coliving.ly/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, thanks for checking this out. I've been working remotely for a while, and am now trying coliving out.

I had this idea knocking about for a while to book appartments with other makers, developers etc. One of the most important parts I wanted to solve with this is to create safe community where we can meet people to colive with that are more trustworthy. Let me know if you have any thoughts about the concept, thanks!

<comment><USER2> Nice home page :)

Whats the difference between "co-living" vs "roommates"? Not trying to be snarky, I got this feedback when I had the page open.

If its for makers, are things like tool shops important to highlight? Or are digital makers included?

I would have liked to browse the co-living profiles, just to see where you have options. All of the calls-to-action involve applying of giving up some info.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey that's a great thought 'co-living' vs 'roommates', reminds me of this: [https://twitter.com/sugarsh0t/status/929976876474417153](https://twitter.com/sugarsh0t/status/929976876474417153)

Maybe it's the same thing. Although, the amount of 'co-living' initiatives popping up all have similar values to promote a the sense of community and support in addition to just living together.

So I think the word co-living differentiates from roommates because of the type of initiative it's used for. I could add a page to explain more.

>If its for makers, are things like tool shops important to highlight?

I only actually thought of digital makers. In the application, I ask for profession and interests, so if I see more physical makers, I can add some more relevant questions for that.

Either way, I'll look to clarify this.

>I would have liked to browse the co-living profiles. All of the calls-to- action involve applying of giving up some info.

I agree, it would be great to see some profiles before giving away any information. This will come next as more people join though. The main purpose now was to validate the idea before building the profile sections.

Thanks again for your feedback, all your queries are on my todo list for the site!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Covid-19 interactive national mortality trajectory analysis - <AUTHOR> https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/robinshields/CovidTrajectory/blob/master/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> This was a very quick and exploratory proect using JHU data. It has some features I could not find elsewhere: polynomial fits to national trajectories and population normalized mortality rates.</comment>


Free GSM stack in development - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Free-GSM-stack-in-development-937233.html <comment><USER2> This is a great project and worth all the support it can get!

The proprietary firmware in mobile phones/smartphones is annoying, we have no access and no idea what it is doing / which information it sends to the network.

I want my Android phone to only run open source software!</comment>


Airbnb, Proposition F and the Shared Hypocrisy of Bay Area Housing - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/03/prop-f/ <comment><USER2> "Each unit lost to commercial short-term renting costs the city somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000 a piece"?!?! This makes absolutely no sense to me, and the linked slides don't make it any clearer.</comment>


App Doesn't Deserve a Subscription Cost - <AUTHOR> https://tapandswipe.net/blog/your-app-doesnt-deserve-a-subscription-cost <comment><USER2> I agree with some of the author's concerns in his blogpost. But the real context of his post is here: [https://twitter.com/airmailer/status/1150562754534748161](https://twitter.com/airmailer/status/1150562754534748161)

To me, this sounds like a desparate reason to try to captialise on moving to a subscription-based plan. In-app subscription for email push notifications with multiple account support? I'm not convinced.

I'd rather use/migrate back to the stock email app than subscribe to something like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I agreed with author, until recently. Everyone hates it when their favorite utility app becomes abandonware. And the reality is that keeping an app up to date with all the new features on a mobile platform is non trivial. Many times I really wish that apps would switch to subscription model so that I can pay to make sure they don't get forgotten about. In a software world that requires constant updates, consistent payments makes sense.</comment>


Jason Calacanis interviews Reddit/Hipmunk Co-Founder Steve Huffman - <AUTHOR> http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/this-week-in-startups-76-with-steve-huffman/

<comment><AUTHOR> Talks about the founding of Reddit, the dynamic between Reddit and Condé-Nast, what it's like to become a millionaire, and how Hipmunk got off the ground.

<comment><USER2> Glad you liked the interview. Thanks for submitting it to HN (though a bit late for it to get traction, I suspect). Plenty more insights to come on blog.hipmunk.com if you're interested!

<comment><AUTHOR> _Thanks for submitting it to HN ..._

Thanks for buying me a beer in DC at a Drankkit a long time ago. :)</comment></comment></comment>


Progress in graph processing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015-12-24.md <comment><USER2> I hugely appreciate the whole section that's a "rant" on synchronicity.

Algorithms should always produce the same results on the same inputs. There. I said it.

Relaxing constraints on large graph processing or AI systems because A) threads are hard and B) we're tossing in random values anyway is a mistake that's made research in these areas far too hard to reproduce and reliably quantify, and that in turn makes progress very difficult.

We can engineer better than this. Build random systems with deterministic seeds. Pass the seeds down in initialization trees if necessary; never refer to a global random source from another thread, and providing a whole system with enough "random"ness for stochastic behaviors AND keeping it deterministic and reproducible is 100% possible. When going concurrent, build flows and when there's a merge, sort results before passing on: determinism AND parallelization _are_ possible.

As a personal anecdote, my first forays into ML are covered with rand() calls, and in retrospect, it's head-smashingly obvious that this was a Bad Idea. I spent huge amounts of time re-running the same code, then making a one- character change to a constant or sign somewhere, then re-running it dozens of times again to be sure it had any predictable impact at all. If I had made it deterministic, it would be obvious immediately, and I could have iterated much faster. It would also be far easier to farm out a CI/lab cluster with different (but consistent) rand seeds to gather meaningful results in bulk. I could have saved hundreds of hours of my attention (and sanity), even on small projects.

Once these things become a bar for minimum viable quality in research, we can start catching, debugging, and improving -- stuff like the "kingmaker scheduler" problem the author describes can be made to vanish.

If only we had a video of Ballmer chanting "Determinism! Determinism! Determinism!"...

<comment><USER3> > As a personal anecdote, my first forays into ML are covered with rand() > calls, and in retrospect, it's head-smashingly obvious that this was a Bad > Idea.

It's a perfectly fine idea, except that like you said you needed to keep better control over your seeds, and probably also could have benefitted from some kind of test harness. (Not to mention it sounds like your metrics were a bit underpowered)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We are building a graph processing library on GPUs: [http://gunrock.github.io/](http://gunrock.github.io/) Our publication explains why our library runs faster, and in one word: load-balancing, since fundamentally, graph problems are irregular problems. If you look at the road map section, we are moving towards dynamic graphs and also planning to try out asynchronous method by using MIS/coloring. Please try it out, any kind of contribution is welcome.

</comment><comment><USER5> In terms of system support for graph algorithms that don't fit the "think like a vertex model", check out the arabesque paper from sosp 2015 (" arabesque: a system for distributed graph mining").

<comment><USER6> a comprehensive survey on "think like a vertex" frameworks has been recently published in CSUR:

[http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2818185](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2818185)

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.04405](http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.04405)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome article.

My take on this is that 'interesting' graph problems tend to be NP-(.*), or reduce to a handful of well-known standards. Some of these standards, like breadth-first traversal, work quickly and are therefore standard interview questions. Other standard solutions, like page-rank, are effectively eigenvalue problems which take N^3 time to find the true solution. N^3 is generally too slow for large-scale production systems, though, so we end up introducing some randomness and battering the algorithm into an almost-linear time approximation algorithm that can run on a thousand machines no problem; this is where Pregel comes from.

As someone who loves playing with graph algorithms, I would absolutely love to be wrong in this world-view, and learn that mine eyes have been carefully shielded from the beautiful variety of graph problems that aren't in one of these three classes... So I'll make a resolution to try to keep my eyes open for surprises in 2016.

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought this article great fun to read. If only this was the modern scientific voice, instead of bloodless passive-voice humble-bragging.

I also liked the sequence of posts explaining timely data flow and its implementation in Rust: [https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015...](https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015-09-29.md)</comment>


I trick my well-developed procrastination skills - <AUTHOR> https://wolfgang.gassler.org/trick-my-procrastination-skills <comment><USER2> When I've done a great job of procrastinating, I normally have a lot anxious energy that I feel I need to get rid of so I go for a 30 minute walk or run. During this outing I repeat the Mentat Mantra from the Dune film to myself the entire time.

"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion."

I then arrive home ready to work, feeling like I can accomplish anything. I take a quick shower if I've been for a run then go to the kitchen and go through the ritual of making a cup of tea. I sit down at my desk, finally ready to begin. Then I'll pick one last HN comments section to read. I normally pick the one that has the most comments. After that's done I desperately search for anything else that I could justify doing. Then I've got a pretty good chance of starting unless it's close to lunchtime.

In all seriousness though I've learned to just accept it without guilt and stop torturing myself. I'll spend a couple days out of the office and not even try being productive, maybe have a long weekend. There's no point in suffering in front of a computer screen if I'm not going to be productive anyway. Might as well sit in the sun with a cup of tea and listen to the birds.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me a little of:

 _" I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet, in a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now."_

 _" After I remove the icepack, I use a deep pore-cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water-activated gel cleanser, then a honey-almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub."_

...

<comment><USER4> _' Try getting a reservation at Dorsia now!'_

Fun fact, apparently the creator of American psycho said that if it were to be remade today it would be about SV instead of Wall Street. Having been around the tech block for some years now and rubbing shoulders with various people from the industry I'm really starting to buy this.

<comment><USER5> What is SV? I don't know this initialism

<comment><USER6> Sillycon, ahem, Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a master procrastinator. Mostly because I have so many things I could do that I have this background feeling that I'm neglecting everything else if I focus on one thing. And I get distracted easily and I hate trying to come back in the middle of something.

However, for some things, I have systems to cope.

I make -very- simple unbreakable rules.

I got fat, decided I needed to fix it, so now I set an alarm at 6am every second day and go to the gym.

No excuses, no fighting, the only thing I -have- to do is run for 10 minutes and then I can go home, if I do that, then I'm fine. I allocated an hour for training. What I find is that after I've started, I can continue without a problem. It's just the getting started.

I have other rules, if there's 4 forks in the sink, I stop everything and wash the dishes. No postponement.

If the milk is 1 day to expire, I stop everything and go shopping, I take the trash with me. (part of the rule)

If there are six or more t-shirts in the laundry I will remove my bed-sheets do a laundry load.

If the day is Sunday and I am about to eat I water my plants.

When I want to go to bed, I have to write down the first thing I will do the next day.

Incredibly simple rules that stop me in my tracks is the only way I can kick my own arse into doing something, otherwise I'll just let things go.

The simple rules thing only works because I convince myself that I cannot break the chain that I have set in motion. "all those other times I did it, I can't break it now, how pathetic is that". (alternatively when I start one: "I only lasted a week, wow, that's terrible, I have to be better than that")

\--

caveat emptor: this does not work for my day job, because my job involves focus, and you might notice that most of my rules are about doing something mundane.

<comment> non-entity See, I'm good at making "unbreakable" rules, but I'm _much_ better at breaking them.

<comment><USER7> See my advice about trying to make it a chain.

Once you've done it twice maybe three times, you don't want to reset the progress. Over time it gets easier (because you're making a habit) and because there's even more of a ritual involved.

You'd be undoing all the hard work you've done. You won't break it.

Just get 2-3 iterations of the rule under your belt..

<comment><USER8> This happened to me with my weight loss. I made a chain of it and did intermittent fasting for 9+ months with maybe one hiccup, but even on that hiccup day it was not a complete break, but just a bending of my rules (16 hours vs the normal 20, etc).

However, when Christmas came around, I started traveling and relaxed a lot more, feeling good about my progress from the months before.

It's not May and I'm just now hopping back on the train with the same intensity I had before. I usually got to 16+ hours, but my food choices were shit and I was overeating. Every time I ate when/what I wasn't supposed to though, I felt like an even bigger failure and used those emotions to justify my bad behavior.

It's been 1 week now since I've gone back to my more strict regimen and last night I really really really wanted to go out and get a burger around 1am. I managed to wait out the craving but it was insanely difficult and it's affected my work performance today.

All that to say, the chain is powerful in both directions. After you break it the first time, it's a lot easier to break again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I read the whole thing, but knew from the get go that these tricks wouldn't work on me.

Mostly because I know the source of my procrastination and it boils down to two things:

1\. I've gotten away with a lot of stupid shit in the past.

2\. Because of that I think too highly of my skills.

I have no incentive to start preparing tasks or being organised because I've come to enjoy the thrill of doing everything in the last minute.

<comment><USER10> >I have no incentive to start preparing tasks or being organised because I've come to enjoy the thrill of doing everything in the last minute.

I tend to do this a lot and so far it's managed to work for things that actually have deadlines, though it always ends up being more stressful. I find though, with things that don't have deadlines it kind of falls apart and last minute just becomes never happens.

<comment><USER11> Doing what they said (and I'm good at it) just stresses me out to the point that I don't even sleep the night before. I'm sure it's terrible for my performance the next day of said stressful thing, too.

It also causes my work to back up which leads to even more stress.

I forgot where I read it but there was something about ADD people getting so used to living in constant anxiety that they need it to thrive. I've been trying really hard to live with less anxiety and knocking my work out early has really helped.

<comment><USER10> Yeah I find it's usually the stress itself that finally pushed me to actually do that last minute rush to actually do the thing. Which probably isn't the healthiest way to go about completing tasks in the end and doesn't necessarily lead to the best quality work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For me, the source of my procrastination usually falls into one these buckets:

a) Not motivated or interested enough in the work

b) Not feeling mentally sharp

c) Overwhelmed and disorganized

I don't find it useful to spend time building productivity systems, because productivity comes and goes for me based on many factors. That's usually OK. But when I do find myself in a productivity rut, the solutions are usually straightforward:

a) Not motivated? Take a step back and find a new angle on the work that seems appealing. Might require seeking new perspectives from others. In some cases, it will require a competitive angle.

b) Exercise and read more in place of technology time

c) Simple to-do lists, with basic categorization and priority does the trick for me here. This is especially true when leading a team on a project. At its most primitive, this is a spreadsheet with columns for "TODO, category, priority, blocked-by, assigned" etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> Like many here, I'm also a procrastinator (and my wife is much worse). My strategy, somewhat similar to Mr. Gassler's, was honed over decades of heartache and failure and occasional successes:

\- write down a plan

\- break plan into very detailed micro-steps

\- do at least one of the micro-steps. Feel a sense of accomplishment. Now the rest of the steps seem less formidable.

\- accept that my brain is often foggy and slow, so give it a few hours or overnight to mull a plan. Don't beat myself up for not getting it done today (and possibly screw it up).

\- exercise a lot (I love running and get a high from it, so it's not hard to incorporate)

\- lately I've been using a mantra "Don't think about it, just do it!" It's how I got myself to the gym 5 days a week, back before the virus anyway.

\- To force myself to read a book, I'll assign myself to read _one page_ (or Kindle screen), knowing that usually I can get sucked in and read several pages.

\- fantasize a world in which I have already accomplished something. Visualize it being done. Realize that I'm perfectly capable of doing it.

They sound like somewhat childish tricks, I suppose, but it's what works for me.

<comment><USER14> not childish. They are really practical! I do the micro-steps too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am King Procrastinator. I've been off work since October 2019 and have done essentially nothing. I planned on doing a lot like getting my CCNA, practice programming, overall practice of an IT stuff.

But I deflate into a blob on a chair and argue with people on social media. It used to be gaming but now it's social media that fills hours of my day. I don't even like it.

My task to study networking to keep up my skills resulted in a single side of a page with basic subnetting practice.

I turn on all the lights to make me feel alert and it does but I always work better in the dark.

When I do start some task my head feels like it's going to explode and the only relief is a mindless task. I don't know if you call it procrastination or depression but it's resulting in zero results.

I see some common habits in the comments here only I do the opposite. Laundry? I'm going on two months wearing the same thing. Underwear? There's two sides to that coin. Exercise? Non-existent.

Procrastination seems to be the result of something that's much deeper. I don't think mopping the floor is the solution to the hole in the roof.

<comment><USER16> "My name is Yoshikage Kira. I'm 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section of Morioh , where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the Kame Yu department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don't smoke, but I occasionally drink. I'm in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of warm milk and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. I'm trying to explain that I'm a person who wishes to live a very quiet life. I take care not to trouble myself with any enemies, like winning and losing, that would cause me to lose sleep at night. That is how I deal with society, and I know that is what brings me happiness."

Sorry but I couldn't resist! Its not often that we get light hearted threads in HN. :D

<comment><USER17> "Although, if I were to fight, I wouldn't lose to anyone." :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Only one approach to procrastination has worked for me: lack of rational thought. The only conscious deliberation I allow is the decision of whether or not I should do something, after that i just _do_. No further thought required. If I catch myself thinking about it, I stop myself and just act, the decision was already made. Sometimes, rational thought is overused.

<comment><USER19> Yeah I can relate to this, I think having two mindsets is effective.

The 'architect' that's deciding long-term goals and plans to follow.

The 'implementer' that follows the guide from the architect. The implementer is not allowed to vary the plan in any way and if the implementer fails then the architect has to reevaluate the strategy.

This way you're able to consider long-term goals with feedback loops that are not immediate. The return from eating cake right now vs. being fit in 6 months for example. The reward of the cake is too extreme and too immediate to be able to easily make rational short term decisions on that kind of thing (you end up rationalizing why this exception is okay, it's one time, etc.)

I find a lot of things fall into this kind of category.

<comment><USER20> In Robert Anton Wilson's book _Prometheus Rising_ (1983) he describes a mental model of the mind as "Thinker & Prover" in Chapter One. This is a duality where one part of the mind manifests thoughts and the other one rationalizes them into a consciously comprehensible concept.

Under this model, what you describe seems to be a way to turn this duality against itself, hijacking the proving step by shutting down the thought, putting idea into action, and seeing the proof when you're done. If instead you over-rationalize the initial idea, and you're anything like me, you will add unnecessary complexity until you've turned yourself around so many times that right looks wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I started my first workday today and I prepped for tricking my procrastination skills. I can't post on how it worked out yet (I might do 2 months from now), but here is what I did to trick myself:

\- When in the shower, do one yoga stretch to get acquainted with yoga. I do this one [1], but then really really badly. I keep asking myself the question: what do I find fun about this? And relentlessly focus on that. It took a while to develop, but one answer is now: it feels relaxing. And yes, I'm still terrible at it.

\- Whenever I walk in and out the door of the living room I have to do one set of weights (8 reps). Again, I ask myself what I find fun about it. Over time, I'm noticing that I like the adrenaline rush. But I first needed to get used to the intensity part of it.

\- I'm a bit of an insomniac, so I go to bed around 22:00 (which was 20 minutes ago, hehe) and wake up at 06:00. The reason for this is to have a lot of wiggle room for my insomniac tendencies. Even going to bed a bit too late is much less of an issue ;-)

\- When I wake up around 06:00, I reward myself with a morning run (I love running), no one is out on the streets at 6 AM where I'm from.

I am now experimenting with using my positive momentum to get into full workout/stretching routines.

I really like the idea of acquainting myself with topics by having a simple place (shower, living room) and trigger response (end of shower, leaving the living room). I thought of it myself, I never heard anyone about it. And it feels quite unlike doing a "30 day experiment", because I am actively looking for the fun of it.

I hope it works. I got inspired by it by reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Everyone has their own system as the author said, so I'd encourage more of us share our systems. As having more systems to read from might be more inspiring to some procrastinators to take action and experiment.

[1] [https://www.verywellfit.com/thmb/gliK2-_bmUZk- YpGJRua9YSEtTk...](https://www.verywellfit.com/thmb/gliK2-_bmUZk- YpGJRua9YSEtTk=/1500x1000/filters:no_upscale\(\):max_bytes\(150000\):strip_icc\(\)/StandingHamstringStrethBothLegsAtOnce2-d6fde12460994b968dc65e63f5fa4dc6.jpg)

<comment><USER22> > _I can 't post on how it worked out yet (I might do 2 months from now)_

A wise choice. Over years of trying different productivity hacks, I've learned that most of them have a lifetime of about 3 weeks for me (which is about how long it takes for the novelty to wear off), after which I regress to the mean. However, the rare trick that survives longer becomes a slight but permanent improvement.

Anyway, I wish you the best of luck with your new system!

<comment><USER23> > I've learned that most of them have a lifetime of about 3 weeks for me > (which is about how long it takes for the novelty to wear off), after which > I regress to the mean.

Can relate to this extremely well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Finish every task immediately which takes less than 2 minutes to do

OK.

> Categorize tasks by project, time, and context, and store it in a tool that > you can trust

That takes more than 2 minutes :(

Occasionally I'll start a todo list, but usually I just stop using it because it gets too big and scary. My current system is calendar notifications in Outlook, it's good for hard deadlines but terrible for open-ended issues like "research new flooring for the garage". Even if I set a deadline I know it's not real.

> Yesterday, as every day in the last two weeks, I was brushing my teeth in > the morning and recognized that I have to replace my quite used toothbrush. > It is a quite simple task to buy a new toothbrush, however, every time I go > out of the bathroom, this thought and task is gone immediately and during > the day I do not think about it.

This happens to me a lot. We carry the ultimate note taking device (smart phone) yet the friction is still too high to make a quick note before the thought goes. Maybe I need to carry a pen and paper.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you have ever used the Franklin Day Planner series of tools you will see the value in this advice. Make a list every evening, prioritize it, check it off during the next day. Everything goes on the list. Rinse and repeat.

I'm not disciplined enough to do all of it but the list making has helped me stay reasonably current.

<comment><USER26> > _Make a list every evening, prioritize it, check it off during the next > day._

Some procrastination derives from a difficulty in prioritizing, and a difficulty in prioritizing can itself be a symptom of depression, where all tasks have equal (or no) importance and so can't be prioritized.

I mean, it's not like people _forget_ all that needs to be done. Often as above, it's all of the tasks bouncing off each other like balls in a bingo machine.[1]

So, a lack of prioritization means the next day might be spent in analysis paralysis where nothing is done because the person can't figure out a good place to start. John Cage said, "begin anywhere," but even that can be difficult in the moment because it also takes discipline to stop _trying_ to prioritize.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJV- vUFFvoY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJV-vUFFvoY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reading this article reminded me that I had signed up for Remember the Milk Service years ago to try to beat my procrastination habit.

I signed in and found only ONE task (buy milk, due 01/05/07)

I have yet to buy the milk...maybe later...at what point do I seek professional help?

</comment><comment><USER28> A tip for those who might buy in to the "write tasks down in a place you trust" from the "Getting things done"-system, but who feel the todo-list becomes overwhelming, I highly recommend the tool Todoist.

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

It is a todo-list, where the default view only shows tasks that are due TODAY. You can also create views (aka. filters), like a "WORK" view where you only see work tasks etc.

This means you are much less likely to be overwhelmed by the amount of tasks on your list.

So if I need to remember to pay a certain invoice next week, I will make myself a task for next week - and since I trust the system, that is now cleared from my mind - and will re-appear next week - when I need to action it. If I put it in the calendar and ot NOT action it - it is lost. If it is in Todoist, it does not disappear until I say it is done.

It means I end most days with an empty todo-list.

Todoist took my using a todo-list from not really working - to a very integrated and trusted part of how I do everything.

(I don't have any association with Todoist - I have just been a very happy user for ~4 years. I hope others will benefit as well.)

</comment><comment><USER29> Faster way is to just use Modafinil (barely addictive) or Adderall (very addictive).

<comment><USER30> Seriously. After 15 years of struggling with various self help programs, an ADHD-PI diagnosis and medication fixed 90% of my problems. I feel like that movie Limitless was inspired by someone who really needed ADHD medication and finally got it.

<comment><USER31> Other than meds, did you do anything else that was helpful?

<comment><USER30> Yes: Hydration is a little important. Sleep is very important (white noise machine, blackout curtains, melatonin when needed, regular schedule, no alcohol near bedtime on work nights.) Exercise is a little important, but too much is detrimental. Learning meditation, specifically body-scan, was really helpful for me though indirectly. It helped me better notice my internal states, which then helps me remove blockers to focusing. A low-carb diet also helped, but is rather high-effort to maintain so I don't follow it anymore. I make great use of reminders on my phone, and appointments on my calendar, because I have no faith in my ability to remember things at the right times despite having a great memory.

<comment><USER31> Is this a fair "tier list"?

Most helpful: Sleep

Somewhat helpful: Meditation

A little helpful: Low-carb diet, Hydration, Exercise

<comment><USER32> I wouldn't pay too much attention to the "tiers". Consider it a general list of things that may be helpful, and assume that the relative importance of each is likely to be different for you.

<comment><USER30> I agree with this comment, but with the addition that sleep quality is very important if you don't have it. If your sleep is pretty close to optimal already, you may not notice a slight improvement.

<comment><USER33> I agree - I think sleep is the only universal here. I find different things may help at different times, too, or become more important to counter different external stressors and anxieties.

I've never found exercise to be a particularly important part of my mental health, but in lockdown I've become utterly dependent on it. It provides routine, structure, control and a sense of progress - all of which I was getting more of in other places before but which I'm now lacking without the exercise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> seph-reed I don't understand the obsession with "fighting procrastination". It's like you have to be doing something always or else you've wasted time. There's no finish line here. You can't win.

[http://subgenius.com/](http://subgenius.com/)

Go ahead and procrastinate, then don't feel guilty. Do nothing "useful" and enjoy it. Whoever/whatever it is that's making you feel like you have to do more, it's probably just abusive manipulation of labor forces.

We have most of the technology we need for a "Fully Automated Luxury Space Communes tm", and who's fault is it that we're all still working our ass off? Someone probably.. but now is the time for pointless, meandering, meta procrastination posts on some special corner of the internet.

<comment><USER34> > Whoever/whatever it is that's making you feel like you have to do more, it's > probably just abusive manipulation of labor forces.

That's not procrastination. Procrastination is having a final exam tomorrow, knowing you need to study, being perfectly able to study, have nothing else at all you need to do, wanting above all things to study, and yet somehow despite everything being aligned towards studying, not studying.

<comment> seph-reed Maybe it's not the part of your life where you should be studying. If you don't really want to, it seems like your mind isn't going to make the positive associations with learning that information that it kind of needs to have in order to develop an actual vested interest and move the subject forward.

This world is full of people who market knowing stuff they don't care about and it might actually not be that great.

<comment><USER34> But you _do_ really want to. It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't a terrible, painful conflict between what you want to do and what you do.

<comment> seph-reed I feel like maybe you're confusing what you want to do with what you think you should do. Or with what you want to want to do.

It's pretty normal, most people are pretty oblivious to what it is they really want. That's why we have corporate jobs, and cars, and empty relationships when really our favorite things in life are community and taking naps in the shade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I used Remember The Milk for years, on and off (I live its interface, clean and up-to-the-point). However, each time I stopped because of the "wall of shame" of unfinished tasks.

Is there a way around it?

Right now (1.5 year) I use Evernote, in a Bullet Journal-like style, that is - if I don't do a task, it is gone. Only if I take a conscious effort to write it down again, it is a task again.

This 1.5 year time means a lot. As a person virtually resistant to routine (vide [https://twitter.com/tricina/status/1261690289812467712](https://twitter.com/tricina/status/1261690289812467712)), it is a single exception that works.

</comment><comment><USER36> Another possible trick is to focus on time slots, rather than the task itself. When I procrastinate, it's because the task itself appears too big, too complex (or maybe even too boring) to even start on. The trick, then, is to say to yourself that you're going to spend 4 hours working on it, rather than saying that you're going to complete it. Completing the task may seem overwhelming, for various reasons, but setting aside 4 hours to work on it is not overwhelming.

</comment><comment><USER37> one thing i have learned and helped me deal with life long procrastination was that it is about emotion regulation. procrastination is a symptom of something deeper that is going on in you emotionally. Deal with that emotion and procrastination will go away. how? Be your own student. Watch why you are procrastinating.Be brutally honest yourself. you have to be ok to admit that i am procrastination because eg. i am scared, coward, afraid, sad what ever.

</comment><comment><USER38> My approach is to start something exciting to get into the swing of it, and then gradually mix in the less exciting things that nevertheless need to be done. I consider any kind of "inbox zero" or list writing an absurd waste of time. The only list I do is a broad strokes plan for the week, which I email to self at the beginning of the week, but I don't stick super close to it.

</comment><comment><USER39> One technique that was working for me for a while was Bullet Journal. Using an actual physical notebook to write down all the tasks right away in a simple list. Review at the end of the day. Review at the beginning of the day. Having a list of tasks I haven't forgot allows me to actually get stuff done. Review and migrate tasks each month. Its like a backlog grooming for life. Sometimes tasks just linger and you have to think about why that task has been there for months. Being able to see the list, and get the satisfaction of physically marking it off is definitely beneficial for me. And if you are going to procrastinate, at least you have a list of other things on your mind that you might accomplish.

Unfortunately this whole situation of working from home threw me off and haven't used it in a while. But I think I might revive it, and put into place some of these rules, like just doing things immediately if they are under 5min in the morning. Rather than continuing to put them off.

</comment><comment><USER40> Not able to focus on tasks for long periods of time? Get distracted easily? Just use this system constantly for everything you're doing. I jest but sometimes that's how these come off.

That said, the GTD stuff has helped me a lot - I'm not great yet on doing the most important things, but I'm at least doing more.

</comment><comment><USER41> All these "integrate X in your daily rituals" kinds of advice absolutely don't work for people with ADHD. There are no daily rituals for us. Life is chaotic.

I am trying to categorize things that might work in this condition, but you know, "categorizing" anything is also quite a challenge.

</comment><comment><USER42> I have severe severe ADHD.

There is only one way out of procrastination for me.

Rules. Rituals. "OCD" like rules. These rules are born out of personal pain, trauma and disappointment with myself. Stupid Rules that I must follow even when it doesn't make any sense to follow. Inviolable rules. Unbreakable rules.

Here is how a rule is born. Be natural and live your life without any rules. Whenever you screwup and feel a deep emotional sense of failure you create a permanent rule that lasts for ever as long as you live. The beauty about this approach is that the Pareto principle kicks in. 90% of your screw-ups come from 10% of causes. As you start integrating rules into your life your life becomes dramatically better. Your mind doesn't care about intentions. It understands intentions but it bypasses them. Your mind doesn't care about rules that you import from other people. It doesn't care about rules that are not deeply connected to your personal experience. If you find yourself violating rules repeatedly you must discard them for they are not for you at this stage of your life.

There is only one key insight regarding procrastination for me.

Procrastination only occurs when there is something else more important that is in a "live" state in the background. Procrastination is like the branch of a tree. The trunk is the main task.

If you get rid of the trunk the branch cannot exist. This was the key insight for me.

The only reason you are browsing HN or Reddit or Facebook is because you have something else in the other tabs that you are not doing actively.

For example: You need to work on your PhD thesis. You have it open in one tab. This gives your mind the permission to procrastinate via HN/FB or watch motivational videos without feeling guilty.

So, if you install a tab limiter and limit yourself to one tab or two tabs where the second tab is for listening to music, you will be forced to close the "work" tab. Now you won't enjoy reading HN or FB anymore because you are consciously not "working" on anything else.

Coming back to RULES.

I frequently run out of gas and then I panic and reach the gas station just in the nick of time. I find this very annoying. I hate the feeling of the anxiety because it is self inflicted.

The rule that I created is that I must always (regardless of the circumstance) as soon as the fuel reaches below 20%. I have to get it to 100%. There are no exceptions.

After I created this rule, I never ever ever encountered a situation where I was running out of gas.

For a normal person this seems very unimportant and ridiculous. And it is. But for me I feel great joy and happiness because I know I avoided so much personal pain and anxiety just with this one simple rule.

Coming back to conquering procrastination.

The way my mind works is that it will at any moment ALWAYS choose the most interesting option of the available options automatically. And I don't really have any control over my mind. I can't tell it to focus any more than you can you tell a husky or a raccoon or a wild monkey how to behave properly. This is something you need to respect and understand.

Strangely, my mind follows rules without any issue. These rules must be formed out of personal experience and must come from deep within and must be acceptable to my mind ahead of time.

This is what I do. I create a ritual that combines two different things: This ritual is unbreakable and it can't be reasoned away. I follow this ritual even when it doesn't make any sense. Especially if it doesn't make any sense because the alternative is this: I will lose my job/friends/social support/money and will end up on the street or worse.

So, the choice is really between: a) Following the ritual and choosing life b) Self Destruction or Death.

1\. Rules + 2. Cutting off the Tree Trunk == Life.

So here is how I create my work ritual.

There are only two major sources of distraction: 1. Phone 2. Internet. 3. (minor) chatter inside my head.

Step 1. Setup constraints.

I use the Forest App/Flora App to disable my phone for 2 to 3 hours.

I use the tab limiter to limit myself to a max of 2 tabs. One for the main task and the second one to LISTEN to Youtube music.

Step 2. Rules that are acceptable to my mind.

These are the Rules. a. I can choose to work on the main task. b. I can choose to not do the main task and do nothing. c. I can choose to not do the main task and listen to music. d. I cannot browse on multiple tabs. If I do want to browse HN, I can do so but not within the 2 to 3 hour time window. e. There are no restrictions. I can read HN all day. I can watch Netflix all day. I can only not do them in this particular time window.

Because I already decided these rules in advance ahead of time and these rules are born out of personal pain my mind accepts it. Another reason it accepts it is because it is cognizant of the fact that these rules have worked well in the past and I am building a new track record of success. Past success breeds more self confidence regarding future success.

Coming back to the most interesting option theory. My mind always chooses the most interesting option out of available options.

So, lets say I want to do my taxes today. This is work. Which means it triggers ritual in my mind. I don't work without a ritual and that's the rule.

I create a 2 hour major window which contains the above mentioned rules. Because the option to browse HN/FB is not there my mind has a choice of choosing between doing nothing or doing taxes. Doing taxes is very boring but only when compared to reading HN. Once my mind realizes that the only options are doing nothing or doing taxes it will choose doing taxes delightfully.

And here is one final key: The 2 to 3 hour window seems big but 2 to 3 hours passes by quickly like a few mins. And when you realize you are getting things done you will be filled with happiness, joy and accomplishment because you KNOW how miserable you felt when you procrastinated on things and achieved nothing.

The 2 to 3 hour window is a major window. And within this major window you have minor Pomodoros. You spend 5 mins creating a precise 30 mins action plan and you start your pomodoro. Even if you are distracted it is fine but how will you get distracted and by what? Your phone is disabled and you only have 1 tab. You will be distracted by your internal chatter which is an issue but you will be massively more productive and much happier when you compare yourself to your past self.

This HN Story was posted 11 hours ago. I am only posting a response now. Why? I was working within a Time Window of 5 hours that blocked out my use of HN.

If you struggle with ADHD or procrastination I urge to try creating rules and see how your life changes for the better. I seems very stupid and obvious but it worked really well for me.

</comment><comment><USER43> Years ago Merlin Mann, on his website, recommended Niel Fiore's book.

I just reread it recently and it's a gold mine, for me anyway.

My biggest takeaways were:

1\. Recognize how I procrastinate ( more research, figure out the best place to start, another meeting, etc. ) and when

2\. Chunk things: I can't build the whole project now, but I can work on feature x, y or z right now.

</comment><comment><USER44> I used to maintain a zero inbox, until I read an article by the author of the technique (apologies for not remembering the source) that my mailbox is a TODO list that anyone can put an item on that. Since then I'm okay with with unread mail.

<comment><USER45> I wrote a tool to snooze my emails (like newsletters and payment reminders) automatically. Regarding emails from others, I snooze them manually if I am not going to address them in an hour or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> An earlier article referenced on hacker news talks about how procrastination is about managing emotions not time. It changed my perspective. I now prefer habits and rewards over tools and methods.

</comment><comment><USER47> Favorited, will read later.

</comment><comment><USER48> I want to read this article but haven't gotten to it yet.</comment>


The Man vs. The Machine - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-man-vs-the-machine-fivethirtyeight-films-signals/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how Magnus Carlsen or Fabiano Caruana would fare against the world's best chess playing computer.

Somewhat related article: [http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/09/sinq...](http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/09/sinquefield_cup_one_of_the_most_amazing_feats_in_chess_history_just_happened.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Characteristics of a larger/professional software project? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> In what environment? The environment makes a huge difference. A large project at a startup will have totally different characteristics then a large defense/government project.</comment>


Sqlite Performance - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711631/improve-insert-per-second-performance-of-sqlite <comment><USER2> > If you have indices, consider calling CREATE INDEX after doing all your > inserts. This is significantly faster than creating the index and then doing > your inserts.

That's interesting. Can anybody explain why?

<comment><USER3> Short answer: Write Amplification.

Long answer: When the index is created first, new entries have to be inserted into the index (in sorted order) as they arrive. This involves writing various individual records at arbitrary places in the b-tree. Each such write is perhaps 20 bytes in size (depending on your index, of course). But, behind the scenes, your OS is really reading an entire 4K page from your HDD/SSD, swapping out the 20 bytes that you sent to write() and the pushing the whole 4K page back to the HDD/SSD. So your 20-byte random write turned into a 4K byte write. That is "write applification". But if you insert all the records into the table first (inserting into an unindexed table is just an append) then create the index afterwards, SQLite is free to sort the columns to be indexed (using an efficient external merge sort algorithm) then write them to disk in sorted order. That way, each new 20-byte records is appended, rather than written randomly into the file. That means multiple appends can be grouped together to form a full 4K page which is then written exactly once. Much less I/O is required.

<comment><USER2> Amazing explanation. I am envious of your knowledge :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone have any thoughts on why removing the superfluous assignments had such a dramatic effect? That was a surprise to me.

<comment><USER5> Looks to me like each one was taking 10 μsec, so 100k of them shaved a second off. I am really surprised at how SQLite can insert a single record in 100 μsec, though.</comment></comment>


One in three fish caught never makes it to the plate – UN report - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/09/one-in-three-fish-caught-never-makes-it-to-the-plate-un-report <comment><USER3> One of the more depressing things to read, is how back in the early days of America, one could just reach into the river/sea and grab a fish.

E.g. lobsters were once so plentiful that native americans used them as fertilizer[0]. And there's photographic evidence of overfishing too. [1] is a nice NPR piece about how the largest catch of the year at a particular spot in Florida has been dwindling.

[0] - [http://www.gma.org/lobsters/allaboutlobsters/lobsterhistory....](http://www.gma.org/lobsters/allaboutlobsters/lobsterhistory.html)

[1] - [https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b...](https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big- fish-stories-getting-littler)

<comment><USER4> Equally terrible is the same comparison about bugs, but it's easier to make people flip because it happened in our lifetime (recent and so fast!):

When I was young, I was driving a small bike. Having mosquitoes or flies clouds was a common occurrence on the road and the best motivator to wear a helmet for a youngster not bothered by security.

Nowadays, I'm still driving a bike, although a bigger one. But I encounter a bug cloud maybe once a year.

Our garden is also quite silent, and I have to go to the country side to hear the bugs again.

Given the massive role of fishes and bugs in our ecosystem, this is more than alarming.

We already have a hard time making people aware of one single issue, such as global warming. But the reality of the scale of our fuck up is so beyond that, as we have a bleak role in:

\- global warming

\- killing most animals, including fished and bugs

\- then selectively breading the remaining life to serve our interest only, annihilating biodiversity and its balance

\- destruction of huge biomes by either exploiting it or polluting it

\- consuming resources at a rate that make even the most abundant of them seem scarce

\- polluting air and water to such a scale it's becoming a health issue

Scientists are alarmed by one topic, saying we should do something before it's too late.

However, take all those topics together and the big picture seems an impossible battle to win, which ironically we fight against ourself, that is leading us to the worst possible ending

<comment><USER5> Don't forget "solving world hunger" which means causing a human population boom, exasperating the above problems.

<comment><USER4> We never really had a technological problem about world hunger. It was political. Social. But humanity has been able to produce food for everybody for centuries.

It just happens we don't share it and we waste it.

I think energy, peace and hygiene are a better factor in baby booming. They contribute to a better food distribution as well.

<comment><USER6> Efficiently transporting food or growing it where people need it is certainly a technological/logistical problem.

<comment><USER4> Right. I meant food production technologies.

But even then, people don't need that much food to be healthy. A regular human being can live happy with one meal a day. We are just used to more.

The population was also much lower in the past.

The problem is more about:

\- war

\- people not helping each others

\- a small group of people keeping a lot of it for themself (royalty, rich cast, etc)

And of course now we face a novel problem: the fact our population is getting huge and want to eat meat 2 times a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The FAO reports that 35% of global catches are wasted. About a quarter of > these losses are bycatch or discards, mostly from trawlers, where unwanted > fish are thrown back dead because they are too small or an unwanted species. > But most of the losses are due to a lack of knowledge or equipment, such as > refrigeration or ice-makers, needed to keep fish fresh.

This is so depressing...

<comment><USER8> It get worse when one consider that wanted species is only a tiny fraction of the fish population, while invasive or overpopulated species continue to cause problems because they are so unwanted that the most economical thing a fisherman can do is to dump them back into the water.

<comment><USER9> As I understand it it's pretty controversial to promote fishing invasive species, because the concern is it could motivate people to deliberately cause the invasive species to spread.

<comment><USER8> Here in Sweden we have a invasive species called signal crayfish that carries the Crayfish plague. People do eat the signal crayfish and I have only seen encouragement to promote aggressive fishing of it. The voices of concern is against illegal implantation, but those have (to what I have heard) been mostly of a cautionary nature about people who unknowingly spread the invasive type into lakes which so far has been spared.

The European crayfish is seen as more traditional correct so the beside getting devastated from the plague it is also rather heavily fished. Getting people to stop and only go after the invasive one would be a huge win, but as the trend is currently it look like the European crayfish is going to get extinct. A very clear example where a change in what kind of species we buy would have a positive effect rather than a stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A huge amount of the plastic in the ocean is discarded fishing gear as well. [0]

[0] - [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific- ga...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-garbage- patch-plastics-environment/)

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://globalfishingwatch.org/map/](http://globalfishingwatch.org/map/)

If you're interested to see real-time data visualization of fishing around the world that have been monitored.

</comment><comment><USER12> Fish catch in East Africa is down 75% in 30 years. That's huge - <USER2> increased population, hunting effort and "fishing down the food chain", as species previously not eaten are now fished. There will undoubtedly be substitution - but we barely understand the 2nd order effects, let alone 3rd , 4rth and 5th.

</comment><comment><USER13> If news like this upsets you, there's an easy solution: just stop eating fish.

<comment><USER14> Which solves exactly nothing, until a significant chunk of the world's population does the same too. And then we'll have depressing articles about poor fishermen who found themselves unemployed and unemployable.

The problem is unfortunately very complex and in need of some large-scale, targeted effort.

<comment><USER15> This is the appeal to futility fallacy and can be used to make an argument against doing just about anything. By not eating fish you become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. And the poor fishermen are going to be unemployed soon enough at the current rate of overfishing because there won't be anything left for them to catch anyway.

The bycatch for sushi fish is even worse than the figure given in the article:

[http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/sushi-obsession- is...](http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/sushi-obsession-is- destroying-our-oceans/)

<comment><USER14> It's not an appeal to futility, it's pointing out the reality of the problem.

My marginal impact on the problem is negligible. The issue only manifests itself on a very large scale. Therefore, any solution involving "just stop eating fish" needs to explain a strategy to achieve this change of behavior _on a large scale_. Note that simply telling people on the Internet to change is not a working strategy - for each individual, again, the impact is marginal, but individual sacrifice required is great, so most people will just shrug and go on with their lives.

Want to make a change? Sure, stop eating fish if you want to signal your commitment. But _don 't stop at that_, because at this point you've achieved nothing. Work to have more impact. Some particular bottom-up and top-down areas I can outline that mesh nicely together:

\- Work to make the idea of not eating fish more popular. If you can convince a few hundred thousand people to stop eating fish, then maybe it'll actually show up somewhere on some spreadsheet in a fishing company. Be careful not to become like PETA though - if you're too hard about the topic, people will start eating _more_ fish just out of spite.

\- Make it easier for people to stop eating fish. That involves creating and popularizing new foodstuffs that are substitute to fish, but have better ecological footprint.

\- The ultimate goal: work towards making the cost of fish products correctly account for externalities. That is, making them (much) more expensive. This involves finding ways to correctly estimate the costs of ecological impact, and then convincing regulators to make fishing industry pay this cost in taxes. Also, you'll want to fight various fishing subsidies that further hide the true costs. You'll make enemies along the way. But this is something that _must_ happen, as it is _the_ real solution. The previous two examples I gave are only supportive to this one. Fish must get more expensive. That's the efficient way of achieving a mass change of behaviour.

<comment><USER15> Those are all good ideas, I agree, and I commend anyone with the dedication to pursue them. But even just not eating fish and setting a positive example to your friends and colleagues etc is still worth doing. I became vegan because of the example of a friend and several of my friends, while not vegan, have been eating less meat & fish as a consequence of my example and are more conscious in the choice of the meat & fish they do eat.

I'd love to see the animal agriculture industries forced to pay for their externalities but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. But in the meantime a lot of positive change has come just from people being made more aware of where what they eat comes from and what it costs to get it there. Non-dairy milks have become so popular, for example, that they've put a huge dent in the dairy industry's profits.

<comment><USER14> Not denying that changing your habits and setting an example for your friends has some impact. I'm only trying to frame it in the relation to the problem. Its marginal first order effects are negligible. This concept was hard for me to accept emotionally too, in the space of energy use - whether or not I reduce my usage of electricity and gas has near-zero immediate impact on anything except my wallet. Such is the problem of scale.

The irony is, that the very same thing that's individually almost meaningless, is also _the_ solution once everyone follows it. And there's a point in the middle somewhere, when the idea becomes popular - like vegetarianism today - and suddenly its impact becomes much greater than before. It gets noticed by the market, it starts flowing through feedback loops and begins affecting everything else. One person in a million refusing to eat fish is meaningless. One in a thousand starts to sound like a business opportunity, and business begets more business.

The trick is, how to get from here to there. Basically, how to start and sustain a movement.

I guess my whole point here is: if you care about a social problem then do your individual thing (here: stop eating fish). But don't stop there, try to do more. Try to speed up the change instead of just changing yourself and _hoping_ others will follow. If we know anything about society, we know this: there are two primary motivators for changing behavior - things that impact one's sense of identity/ego, and things that impact one's wallet. Popularizing fish abstinence is an ego-based solution. Taxing the fishing industry is the economics-based one. We should pursue both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Eat more oysters! It blows my mind all of the ecological (and gastronomic benefits) of oyster-culture - especially in contrast to a report like this!

Edit: Farmed oysters

<comment><USER17> Oysters themselves have been at high risk, at least where I come from (Virginia): [http://www.virginiaplaces.org/natural/oysters.html](http://www.virginiaplaces.org/natural/oysters.html)

<comment><USER16> Edited my comment - I was referring to farmed oysters hence the oyster-culture (vs aquaculture) comment

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, honest question: Why are invasive species like the gigantic asian carp so reviled, when they seem to be quite successful animals, thriving in an otherwise unforgiving environment?

I get that invasive species can stress their environment until it collapses and ruins even their own capacity to thrive or even survive, but sometimes I get the sense that asian carp are denegrated because they annoy humans by jumping out and slamming into people on boats. Are asian carp really a threat to their surroundings, or simply inconvenient from a human perspective?

<comment><USER19> They are an ecological destroyer and they don't taste good

<comment><USER20> They taste fine. No better or worse than tilapia. It's just that it's impossible to get all the bones out because a lot of them aren't connected to anything and are just floating in the meat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are also huge human health concerns, because a lot of the feed of aquaculture fish (53% of fish consumed by humans today) is made from other caught fish, which leads to toxic bioaccumulation:

> farmed fish can harm wild populations because often their feed, made from > wild fish such as sardines and anchovies, is caught at sea and they can > cause pollution

</comment><comment><USER22> Absolutely shocking statistic! But not surprising with the rate of overfishing combined with fishing quotas resulting in redundant catches being thrown back!

</comment><comment><USER23> What was the name of the recent book, which describes nature in its pristine state? Not "Paradise Lost".

<comment><USER24> Sounds interesting!

I don't think you're after The World Without Us but I guess it's on the same, ish, topic. Looking forward to hearing the correct answer.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So, catch and release is included in this number. That makes the number very believable to me.</comment>