Books to Understand Economics - <AUTHOR> https://filmlifestyle.com/best-economics-books/ <comment><USER2> Wow. I am really stunned by this list. I took a look expecting the usual chorus of contrarian populist hardbacks, but this list is very conclusive and and covers a wide range of opinions and subjects. I have read about a quarter of them and can attest they are all excellent (although with varying degree of readability). This is the exact sort of list if you want to see multiple perspectives and challenge yourself.

I also want to shout out to Hidden Order, which I was really surprised to see here, but is really quite the gem. More than any other econ book, I have pulled off the shelf and gone through the much dog-eared pages. It does an amazing job of taking off-the-shelf economic ideas and framing them in such excellently written parables or examples. Disagree or whatever, but it's an excellent and often trite way to understand classic principles.

A couple books _I_ would add to the list:

Why Nations Fail

Red Plenty

Who Gets What and Why

<comment><USER3> Yeah seconded, this really is an excellent list. Very pleasantly surprised to see "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" as first on the list, it should be required reading as a guide to what we're seeing playing out in American politics currently (after it is rewritten into a more coherent and concise/accessible book, in its current form it's clearly the work of multiple undergrads/grad students stitched together by Prof. Gordon) - but the ideas in it are really powerful.

Also really pleased to see The Road to Serfdom by Hayek on the list. Eager to check out the book on Climate vs. Capitalism as I haven't seen this topic given full treatment in a book yet beyond questioning the sustainability of growth economics and efficacy of carbon taxes in broad terms.

The Mankiw textbook is used in intro undergrad classes everywhere.

I would also love to read a book by a contemporary Chinese economists on their thoughts of the Chinese market, although something tells me a good academic/unbiased book on this topic is impossible to find.

Only two books I would add would be:

The Age of Diminished Expectations (Krugman)

Dune (Herbert)

<comment><USER4> Please don't read Climate vs. Capitalism, the author has no formal economics training and her analysis makes this clear. Rather than realistic and thought out solutions towards decarbonisation - like those suggested by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - we are treated to yet another exhausted critique of neoliberalism accompanied by the usual quixotic calls to action.

Yes, activism has a role to play in convincing governments to act, but when it perpetrates the myth of individuals vs. corporations it does nothing but help individuals relinquish themselves from blame. Look at the gilet jaune movement in France after it tried to impose a fuel tax. Some of these people are the same individuals who if asked would declare unwavering support for climate action. In practice however few are willing to shoulder the associated cost, even in the rich world. They mistakenly believe that taxes on corporation wont eventually filter down to consumers. There are also vast misconceptions about our existing ability to substitute away from fossil fuels even if we had the renewable capacity (for example, over 80% of UK households only have infrastructure for gas heating). The public debate needs to make these trade- offs clear rather being inundated by people like Naomi Klein who are more interested in finger pointing and sensationalism.

If you really want to want to understand the issues we face and how we might actually confront them then read the IPCC report [1], the Club of Rome Climate Emergency Plan [2], or even this blog post by Bill Gates [3].

[1] [https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/](https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/)

[2] [https://www.clubofrome.org/project/the-club-of-rome- climate-...](https://www.clubofrome.org/project/the-club-of-rome-climate- emergency-plan/)

[3] [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting- clima...](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-climate- change)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the recommendations, and for saving me some time/money picking up Klein's book.

I'll check out the reports you've linked, and Gates' blog post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I vote for this collection of Claude Frédéric Bastiat: [https://mises.org/library/bastiat- collection](https://mises.org/library/bastiat-collection). In particular the leading essay, "That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen." It may be the quintessential statement of how to think like an economist. The article includes a popularization of it as "Economics in One Easy Lesson" but here's the original source, free, clear and timeless.

<comment><USER6> Also worth reading are Marx's critiques of Basiat and Say in his _Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844_. Marx is even critical of him in the _Grundrisse_ where he contrasts Bastait and Carey, in which he derides both as bourgeois political economists. Far from seeing what is "not seen", they are obsessed with price and external appearances:

>Bastiat, by contrast, presents fantasy history, his abstractions sometimes in the form of arguments, another time in the form of supposed events, which however have never and nowhere happened, just as a theologian treats sin sometimes as the law of human existence, then at other times as the story of the fall from grace. Hence both are equally unhistorical and anti-historical. But the unhistoric moment in Carey is the contemporary historic principle of North America, while the unhistoric element in Bastiat is a mere reminiscence of the French eighteenth-century manner of generalizing.

<comment><USER2> Marx calling out someone for playing fast and loose with history and generalizing concepts is richly ironic.

This criticism also does nothing to attack the merits of the argument or even the existence of opportunity cost. Does he deny that such a concept exists?

<comment><USER6> That's not the main criticism, it's a bit of polemic following on from the rest of the analysis; I quoted it here only to mention that Marx does engage with these thinkers. The criticism is too long to reproduce here but you can check it out on sites that host Marx's collected works. I can't remember if opportunity cost is discussed.

I'm curious what criticism of Marx's historiography you're mentioning though. While controversial, his theory of historical materialism is not discounted in contemporary history academic literature.

<comment><USER2> So I looked into Marx's writings on Bastiat, and the example he used is this, (I am trying to summarize Marx's very convoluted writing style).

Marx doesn't really care or understand the argument about opportunity cost, but he focuses on Bastiat's use of wages as an example in the argument (wages are fixed, as opposed to the volatile nature of capital).

But Bastiat doesn't actually understand history! Wages come out of slavery and serfdom. Wages can only come about from the destruction of resources or the breaking up of guilds. (No citation or historical evidence provided). So actually fixed wages over the long run _of all human history_ are not actually fixed.

"No economist denies the fluctuations, the rise and fall of wages. Or are wages independent of crises? Or of machines which make wage labour redundant? Or of divisions of labour, which displace it? To assert any of this would be heterodox, and it is not asserted."

This is clearly misunderstanding the point that Bastiat was making, wages were an example provided of trade-offs. Marx is steering the conversation off-topic to rant about how awful wages are. And furthermore, he is throwing out a historical argument to combat a philosophical one. But he doesn't show his work - he proposes his own view but provides no real evidence.

In the chapter, the whole thing is dismissed as a product of Bastiat's "French-ness". As if to say, _Of course he would see things this way, he is just a mouthpiece for the French Bourgeois._

While interesting in its own right, I don't really think Marx's criticism of Bastiat is of much merit in this case. Bastiat's essay is truly a beautiful piece of writing and philosophy, and eloquently describes a universal truth. Marx is being nit-picky in order to prove his point about wages.

<comment><USER6> >Marx is steering the conversation off-topic to rant about how awful wages are.

The topic isn't at all a normative discussion on wages; Marx is tracing wages as a social-historical phenomenon, one of "natural history"[0], one which _occurred_ rather than being merely a philosophical abstract concept. Hegel, at the very least, merged these - "what is rational is real, and what is real is rational" \- but Bastiat, just like Proudhon, did not. Marx's point is that it's a folly to discuss the world as it really exists when you abstract away from the social formations that determine consciousness - including, of course, the consciousness of such abstraction. Economics is not merely thought experiments and philosophy, it's supposed to be real, and when you start from an anti-historical point you will arrive at an anti-historical conclusion. See, for example, Marx's (and other's before and after him) criticisms of the "economic" theory of Robinson Crusoe.

I am curious how Bastiat can claim to describe a universal truth without reference to real, historical social formations which produce these truths. By what mechanism does Bastiat have the "view from nowhere"?

[0] "To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose [i.e., seen through rose-tinted glasses]. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class- relations and class-interests. _My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains_ , however much he may subjectively raise himself above them." (Preface to the German edition of _Capital_ , 1867)

<comment><USER2> Assuming I understand you correctly, we must throw out the conclusion because they do not understand the full historical context of the conclusion? I don't understand how that works in real life. Understanding the full history of software isn't required to understand the difference between good or bad software.

I understand that Marx has a grand unified theory of history and economics. But it is folly to point to anyone else that does not have a grand unified theory and blame them for not fitting into _his_. I wish he would spend more time defending his view and showing the merit of it, rather than attacking people for essentially not seeing the whole picture like _he_ does.

<comment><USER6> >Understanding the full history of software isn't required to understand the difference between good or bad software.

No. We cannot talk about software in the same way we talk about other phenomena - it is obvious that various sciences have their different objects (e.g physics is the study of the physical world, biology the study of life etc.) - the point Marx was making is that economics (or rather, political economy) is a science which has an object strikingly similar to the science of history or the science of biology - it is a study in which one must engage the emergence and passing away of various forms of society, and of course to make any predictions or analyze trends. When detached from this view, the science that's left has no explanatory power. _Why_ are wages the value that they are? _Why_ does value appear as the objectification of labour? _Why_ is it that the majority of large-scale productive capacity is owned by few? What can change given these parameters already determined? What can't change?

Marx was a great admirer of Darwin and they corresponded on at least one occasion. Like Darwin, Marx viewed man as a necessarily historical being: "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the higher forms themselves are already known.", and similarly, "While focusing on political economy, Marx took the opportunity to criticize Hegel's phenomenology. Specifically, he attacks its idealist premises that take the real starting point as the product of the thinking mind rather than as having an existence «outside the mind and independent of it»"[1] Marx is not only attacking Bastiat for his method, he's attacking it for the fact it is completely unscientific, unlike (he claims) his own[2].

But even granting your point, I'm highly skeptical one would find a software engineer who outright denies the value of history for software development, for instance to know what's been tried before and to know where things can go.

Marx's argument would say that the necessary and experienced development of things the way they are today is due to the premises already set in motion. If Bastiat claims that he has discovered universal human truths, this is to some extent a historical, social and empirical claim. You can't abstract away from that and still maintain the relevance of your theory to real world phenomena. To take this further, Marx's fuller critique was that economists were obsessed with appearance and in being ignorant of economic activity resulting from people acting in their interest (again, these interests transmitted from the past[0]) they miss the "whole picture" as you say.

[0] "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before,[...]" (Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852)

[1] [http://www.consecutio.org/2018/11/every-beginning-is- difficu...](http://www.consecutio.org/2018/11/every-beginning-is-difficult- holds-in-all-sciences-marx-on-the-economic-cell-form-of-the-capitalist-mode- of-production/)

[2] "Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell is a book that changed my views a decade ago. I have skimmed through it a few times in the years since, through a full market cycle, and he continues to be spot on.

<comment><USER8> Thomas Sowell, like so many conservative thinkers, is a stupid person's idea of what a smart person sounds like. If that's too harsh for you, sorry, but that's what happens when angry Austrians go through the thread systematically downvoting anyone who doesn't agree with them.

<comment><USER7> I could debate Austrian vs Keynesian economics all day and wipe the floor with you but the fact you had to resort to an ad hominem attack lets me know I already won the debate.

FWIW I've never downvoted anyone on HN so it appears as though your assumptions, just like your emotions, are out of control :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This book changed my life: The Future of Money

From Goodreads

"Today's financial system is seen by the most as having a fixed size. Bernard A. Litaer challenges this perspective by showing that there were different economic systems in history and that our present system has arisen from a tacit and problematic collective acceptance. He sees the future in the development of complementary currencies. He explains which money is necessary for which needs and how we can commonly create it. Money only exists because of trust — where trust has been destroyed, money is loosing its value; chaos and poverty are sad consequences. Lietaer has written an exciting and informative book for anyone who is aware of economic problems, from interested laymen to bankers."

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984314.The_Future_of_Mon...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/984314.The_Future_of_Money)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the recommendation. In which way it changed your life specifically?

<comment><USER9> Understanding that money is a human creation, and that we can evolve it.

Bernard Lietaer: "My conclusion is that greed and the competitive drive are not inherent human qualities. They are continuously stimulated by the kind of money we use. There is more than enough food and work for everyone. There is merely a scarcity of money."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" contains the most important and fundamental insight about markets. It's an essay worth a read every couple years.

<comment><USER12> If you're reading this and seeing "Hayek" and thinking "nah, that's conservative/libertarian propaganda," reconsider for your own sake. This essay isn't political, and some of the insights have been largely accepted by virtually all economists. The essay also inspired Wikipedia and is constantly cited by innovators as having been massively influential on their thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really enjoyed Tim Harford's books "The Undercover Economist" and "The Undercover Economist Strikes Back".

Maybe they are too far in the "popular economics" category to be included in a list like this (although there are some on the list that look similar) but he explains things clearly and argues well and I feel like I understand economics far better after reading them.

</comment><comment><USER14> A lot of people online swear by the Hazlitt book - has anyone here read it and would like to share their thoughts?

<comment><USER12> It's a bit dated in 2019, and he's obviously coming to come conclusions with political implications, but the basic framework of thought the book presents is not only educational, but fantastically _useful_. I read it at the end of undergrad and had my mind completely blown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Missing is the most comprehensive treatise on economics in the 20th century, perhaps ever: "Man, Economy & State" by Murray N. Rothbard.

[https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and- ma...](https://mises.org/library/man-economy-and-state-power-and-market)

Another is Rothbard's little book, "What Has Government Done to Our Money?" which provides a wonderfully accessible introduction to the theory and history of money.

[https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our- money](https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-money)

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems like a good thread to ask: Does anyone know any good economics book focusing on regional differences in inflation, and the effects of that on economic growth in each region? I'm specifically interested in cases where the regions all share a common currency.

I remember reading a book about this many years ago (Bastiat maybe?) which I'm pretty sure was French, since it focused on differences between the metropole and the colonies, but I'm hoping to find something a little more modern. I would be interested in a book from any time period, however, so please respond if you know of one.

</comment><comment> maxime-levesque Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy - Warren Mosler

Available here in PDF: [https://moslereconomics.com/wp- content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf](https://moslereconomics.com/wp- content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf)

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has a convincing answer to the question: "What gives fiat currencies their purchasing power"

Mainstream economists simply say that purchasing power of money commes from "confidence", but they don't explain where the confidence comes from. It is a circular logic: one has confidence in a currency if one beleives that others have confidence in it, ... whoever whas the first the "have confidence" must have been duped, ... or more likely the theory is flawed...

MMTs explanation of purchasing power is simply that in an economy there are mandatory transactions: taxes, and taxes have to be paid in the currency mandated by the state. Money is not a commodity, it does not arise out of barter, it is (and always has) been imposed by states that required taxes be payed with their currency.

This has many consequences:

1\. Taxes serve to generate and maintain demand for the currency (reduce inflation, or produce deflation).

2\. Currency has to be spent before it can be taxed (how else can currency enter the economy?)

3\. The debt of a currency issuing state is equal to the net financial assets (sum of all monetary assets, minus sum of all monetary debt)

4\. Markets are monetary in essence, they are a side effect on the enforcing of money on a population. In a market, participants all purchase money with goods and services.

MMT is primarily a descriptive theory, the mainstream academic orthodoxy doesn't like it so much because it debunks many of its claims, but MMTs predictive capacity on the macro economy makes it a valuable tool on Wall Street: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/business/economy/mmt- wall...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/business/economy/mmt-wall- street.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Why is something like this being hosted on a site named filmlifestyle.com ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Site covers quite a few topics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not sure on how to phrase this, but i would like some suggestions please;

1) What is a basic beginner book on Finance i.e. how do Normal Banks, Investment Banks and Money work? Explanation of the concepts, terminology and jargon involved.

2) What is a basic beginner book on Economics i.e. the big picture concepts of how trade, currencies (inflation) etc. work?

Basically the concepts behind what really makes our "modern world" tick.

<comment><USER4> 1) For a concise and non technical introduction to issues of monetary economics I would suggest Alan S. Blinder - Central Banking in Theory and Practice.

2) For an introduction to macroeconomic principles you can try Cores free online textbook. [1]

[1] [https://core-econ.org/the-economy/book/](https://core-econ.org/the- economy/book/)

<comment><USER18> Thank you. Will look into those.

Another thing i was looking for is a layman's book on how everything (economics+trade+debt+banks+money+etc.) comes together explaining both the concepts and jargon involved. Something which a high-school student can pickup to have an overview of "the market and the system".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's more a list of famous books written more-or-less about economics. They are famous, not necessarily good. You will understand economics less if you take "Das Kapital" seriously.

You'd do much better with "ECONOMICS: PRIVATE AND PUBLIC CHOICE" by James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, Russell Sobel, David Macpherson.

Another good choice is "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a good list. Generally pretty reasonable but they threw in some Austrians at the end for "balance" or something. People usually get more then enough Austrian economics from radio and online ranting, and they get a fair amount of behavioral from pop media.

Honestly, what most people need to get basically educated in econ is 1. Some basic national-accounting type Keynesian macro, 2. Basic forex and bond pricing, 3. Enough education in marginalism to understand comparative advantage and enough education in game theory to genuinely understand the concept of a Nash equilibrium, and 4. A smattering of folks like Adam Smith and Douglass North to understand the human or sociological side of things.

</comment><comment><USER20> Haven't Jared Diamond's theories been thoroughly debunked?

<comment><USER21> Yes. He cherry picked some ideas about history to support his theory, and ignored the couple centuries of development of geographic determinism in history that went over all his ideas in detail and showed they didn't work before he was born.

I have never examined his ornithology, but I'm willing to extend him professional courtesy that it's solid, but his popular books should be categorized with Gavin Menzies.

<comment><USER22> Could you list a few books and main criticisms? Like do the critics claim Diamond is mistaken about the need for plants and animals that can be profitably domesticated, and how few there are? Or that infections diseases played a key role in the success of Western imperialism?

<comment><USER23> [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jared+diamond+site%3Areddit.com%2F...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=jared+diamond+site%3Areddit.com%2Fr%2Faskhistorians&kp=1&ia=web)

for example:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/thoug...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8nr7xd/thoughts_on_guns_germs_and_steel_by_jared_diamond/)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/a_det...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/a_detailed_rebuttalalternative_to_the_one_that/dk6htc0/)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/how_d...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mkcc3/how_do_modern_historians_and_history/)

<comment><USER22> Well I skimmed over the links, and like all the other critiques of GGS I have seen, they don't really address his argument.

For one thing, he was not arguing why Europeans conquered the world, but rather why a Eurasian civilization did so. Also he was not a determinist who was arguing that it was inevitable that this happen, rather that it was possible that it could, and that a civilization from another continent couldn't, or at least it was much less likely.

And indeed, when you look at the civilizations on other continents, they had much less developed military technologies, and much lower agricultural production per capita than the advanced Eurasian ones. None of the critiques I have seen address Diamond's argument that Eurasia prevailed because it had the plants and animals needed to develop more powerful civilizations than did the other continents. I mean, do you think the Mayans could have conquered Europe, China, India and the Middle East, even though they lacked grains and beasts of burden? And what about a civilization whose territory lacked the coal and iron ore needed to produce iron and steel, could it have won militarily against those that did and were making use of them?

<comment><USER23> > like all the other critiques of GGS I have seen

If you've already familiar with a lot of Diamond critiques but have decided he's right all along then why say "Could you list a few books and main criticisms?". You come off as not engaging in good faith.

<comment><USER22> I asked because it has been a number of years since I looked into criticisms of Diamond, and I thought there might be some new ones worth looking at.

And as far as my point goes that Diamond's critics don't really address his main points, you are continuing the pattern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 49 goddamn books and not a single one that integrates environmental destruction and survival of the human race as the foundation of its theme.

The list basically incorporates everything that frustrates me about the field of economics.

It pretends it is key to everything in the world (and there are many applications under certain circumstances), but it has pretended like capitalism and various policies enacted under economic (especially laissez- faire) recommendations have led to a fundamentally unsustainable world order and economic system.

I remember the first time I read about externalities. It was the perfect term. A tack-on to economics. A minor side concern to the primary task of making money for the rich while the world steams toward oblivion.

<comment><USER24> My third sentence is very poorly constructed. I'm basically annoyed that economics acts like it understands everything that occurs in the world via game theory, efficiency of energy, as if their study is as fundamental as physics, but at the same time pretends the consequences of its implementation in the political and practical spheres don't exist because their study can't quantify them.

How does economics quantify the extinction of a species? In the nihilistic sense if humanity goes extinct, what is the economic impact of that? What is the value of a human life lost in mass displacements of global warming? What is the value of humanity?

It doesn't answer these questions. It can't. The real answer is that economics is a means for the powerful to rationalize their positions, and ignore their devastation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Read Steve Keen

</comment><comment><USER4> This is just a broad list of econ type books with no discernible curation. I certainly wouldn't call it a list of the 'best' econ books even though there are some great reads in there.

It ranges from very specific works on central banking, finance and behavioural economics to an undergrad textbook covering most of Econ 101.

Some of these entries are only tangentially related to economic theory (Thinking Strategically, Capitalism vs. the Climate). There are also some glaring omissions (e.g. Radical Markets by Posner and Weyl).

<comment><USER26> Yes. A good list might start with some general, fairly neutral books. A lot of the books here are fairly biased or are trying to drive home some point or agenda.

Tim Harford's books are pretty good, in general in that he promotes "thinking like an economist" without going overboard in any direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> cannot open the link.

</comment><comment><USER28> Freakonomics

</comment><comment><USER29> They need to add Varoufakis' Foundation of Economics.

</comment><comment><USER30> Economics is basically numerology. A true _science_ of economics could be described as "ecology + psychology", and would be based in physics.

The closest thing I've ever seen to a proper economics is the "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars" document. (It's chapter one of Bill Cooper's infamous book "Behold a Pale Horse". I want to make it clear, FWIW, that I never read the rest of the book. I have less-than-zero to say about the content of the rest of the book.)

Oh look, it's online and with diagrams now: [https://lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml](https://lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml) Bitchin'.

It's pretty creepy: it's a combination of an exposition on a simple electrical model of economics with a nightmarish _gloss_ of crypto-fascism (or something, I'm not sure what you'd call it.)

Anyhow, the "electro-economics" is what I want to call HN readers' attentions to: something like that is what I would expect economics to look like. (Without the creep Dr. Evil vibe.)

<comment><USER31> Why Stock Markets Crash by Didier Sornette is the book which most rigorously applies physics to economics that I have ever read.</comment></comment>


Steve Bannon Suggests There Are Too Many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/16/13653490/steve-bannon-trump-presidency-chief-strategist-breitbart-tech-visa <comment><USER2> Xenophobic shit head says xenophobic things. News at 11.

<comment><AUTHOR> He is the chief strategist of the president-elect of the most powerful economy of the world. IMHO, should feature on News at 9.

<comment><USER2> My point was, how is anyone surprised by this?

Everyone always complains when politicians break their campaign promises once elected.

Trump had a fucking train wreck of a campaign, you name it, he was found to have done/said it. He _still_ won.

But _now_ people are so surprised that him/his staff act exactly the same way him/his staff acted for the last 20 years.

Congratulations America, he isn't the president you need, but he's the president you fucking deserve.

<comment><USER3> >Trump had a fucking train wreck of a campaign, you name it, he was found to have done/said it. He still won.

No, he got an Electoral College victory on the technicalities of the Electoral College, while Clinton won a larger popular-vote majority than Nixon or Johnson did.

>Congratulations America, he isn't the president you need, but he's the president you fucking deserve.

The world will never deserve another Hitler. The Trump administration must be resisted at every turn.

<comment><USER4> > No, he got an Electoral College victory on the technicalities of the > Electoral College, while Clinton won a larger popular-vote majority than > Nixon or Johnson did.

So he won. Don't change the definition of winning after the game.

<comment><USER3> This is not a game. This is whether the human race lives or dies.

<comment><USER4> If it's that serious then don't get bogged down in semantics about whether he won or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So does hacker news support reverse discrimination against privilege or not today?

Assuming this is true of course.</comment>


Amazon filed a patent to de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions, sell data to police - <AUTHOR> http://darkcitycrypto.com/index.php/2018/04/19/amazon-filed-a-patent-to-de-anonymize-bitcoin-transactions-and-sell-the-data-to-law-enforcement/ <comment><USER2> No patent number or link to patent?</comment>


Today's kids need end-to-end encryption - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nucypher.com/todays-kids-need-end-to-end-encryption/ <comment><USER2> While true, I would augment the title to suggest that _everyone_ needs e2e encryption.

I find it disheartening to think that almost all communication I see and engage in on a daily basis is owned by various for-profit companies, whether it is Twitter or Discord or Reddit or Google. Having actual 'private' conversions with everyday people (that use everyday software) seems almost impossible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely agree. And I generally find "think of the children!" arguments to be nauseating.

In this case, though, I'm responding directly to the case being made both in the Department of Justice and in Congress, which is ostensibly about protecting kids from online predators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Finally someone who turns the "think of the kids" argument around and uses it for good!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I mean I tried to make it a very moderate "think of the kids" argument - it's mostly "think of the future", rather than about any specific scenario involving kids.

But yeah, I think we need to push back on the narrative in Washington that law enforcement, rather than genuine privacy tech, is what's good for kids.</comment></comment>


Back to the Future: Hooking Retro Machines Up to the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://mobilejazz.com/blog/back-to-the-future-hooking-retro-machines-up-to-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating. If I had more spare time, I would want to set up a couple of computers, from the early days of the internet, install a modified browser on each, and have the modified browser only access websites (from web.archive.org) from the year that computer existed. If anyone wants to take on this project, feel free to do so</comment>


The Principia Discordia (1963) - <AUTHOR> https://principiadiscordia.com/book/1.php <comment><USER2> Can I recommend here John Higgs' excellent book 'The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds' [0]

It's ostensibly a bio of the band The KLF (or the justified ancients of Mu), who somehow had a successful music career by taking discordianism as far as it could go. However, the book widens to Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, the Illuminatus and most of the second half of the 20th century.

If you haven't heard of the KLF, they're well worth looking into: after having a load of hits in the early 90s, they retired by machine-gunning the BRIT Award audience (with blanks), deleting their entire back catalogue and setting fire to all the money they'd earned.

[0] [https://www.amazon.co.uk/KLF-Chaos-Burned-Million- Pounds/dp/...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/KLF-Chaos-Burned-Million- Pounds/dp/1780226551/)

<comment><USER3> Seconded. The book is a joy.

Also, the current UK discordian undercurrent is producing some fnord wonderful things. Daisy Eris' Cosmic Trigger play has opened some excellent locks (perhaps not flood gates yet).

And the KLF have recently gone into businesses as undertakers [0].

[0]: [https://www.mumufication.com/](https://www.mumufication.com/)

<comment><USER2> I dunno, pretty sure the last few years with fake news, antivax, birthers, preppers, qanon, deepfakes, troll armies, bot farms and the like is proof that Operation Mindfuck has been more successful than the wildest dreams of the acid-soaked hippies that thought it'd be a lark in the 60s.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We had copies of this and the Book of The Subgenius laying around my high school. Obviously Principia Discordia was from much earlier but the new wave/punk scene around the 80s-90s cusp in (of all places, Anchorage, Alaska) was all about this particular brand of weirdness.

We had all read Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy as well and contented ourselves making obscure jokes having to do with Eris, the number 23, and Slack, and intricate collage flyers with the assistance of the copy machines at Kinko's. Good times.

Fuck 'em, even if they can take a joke. <3

<comment><USER5> Can you fnord see the fnords?

<comment><USER6> [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/)

<comment><USER5> "The movie's plot is based on the true story of a group of young computer hackers from Hannover, Germany. In the late 1980s the orphaned Karl Koch invests his inheritance in a flat and a home computer. At first he dials up to bulletin boards to discuss conspiracy theories inspired by his favorite novel, R.A. Wilson's "Illuminatus", but soon he and his friend David start breaking into government and military computers. Pepe, one of Karl's rather criminal acquaintances senses that there is money in computer cracking - he travels to east Berlin and tries to contact the KGB."

A bunch of dorks get online and talk about fandom stuff and it's all just playing around until Pepe contacts the KGB. So... uhh... that like... actually happened.

Reality generally requires surrealist fiction to capture. It's too weird for conventional narratives.

<comment><USER7> William Gibson put it nicely: every time one of these things happens, the job of sci-fi writers gets harder.

And now Psychedlic Warlord of the Cult of Dead Cow is running for President - but people are worried he's too mainstream and boring to elect. No wonder Gibson is writing recent-past stories these days.

<comment><USER8> >And now Psychedlic Warlord of the Cult of Dead Cow is running for President

Me, two minutes ago: "Oh, I bet he's some oddball fringe candidate who'll never get any press attention."

Me, after a quick google search: "Oh my god."

<comment><USER7> _Right?_ Thirty years ago, Bill Clinton smoking pot was still a major moral question and Beto was a teenager writing weird short stories on forums. Now he's a bland mainstream candidate, his drugs-and-crime teen handle was about a three-day news story, and a former federal prosecutor candidate is making up stories about smoking pot to sound cool. "This makes my job harder" indeed...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A SERMON ON ETHICS AND LOVE has always stuck with me:

      "I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain.
      Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with
      injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers
      imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."

         WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?

      "But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it."

         OH. WELL, THEN STOP.

<comment><USER10> I like that one as well as I think it's a great example of the intractability of coordination problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a big fan of [https://principiadiscordia.com/book/78.php](https://principiadiscordia.com/book/78.php) -

DISCORDIAN SOCIETY SUPER SECRET CRYPTOGRAPHIC CYPHER CODE

Of possible interest to all Discordians, this information is herewith released from the vaults of A.I.S.B., under the auspices of Episkopos Dr. Mordecai Malignatius, KNS.

SAMPLE MESSAGE: ("HAIL ERIS")

CONVERSATION:

      A B C D E F G H I J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z
      1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

STEP 1. Write out the message (HAIL ERIS) and put all the vowels at the end (HLRSAIEI)

STEP 2. Reverse order (IEIASRLH)

STEP 3. Convert to numbers (9-5-9-1-19-18-12-8)

STEP 4. Put into numerical order (1-5-8-9-9-12-18-19)

STEP 5. Convert back to letters (AEHIILRS)

This cryptographic cypher code is GUARANTEED TO BE 100% UNBREAKABLE.

</comment><comment><USER12>
        BOBoBoBoBoBoBOBoBoBoBoBoBOBoBoBoBoBoBOBoBfNoRdBoBOBoBoBoBoBoBOBoBoBoBoBoBOB
        !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
        !::::'___`:::::::'___`:::::::'___`:::::::'___`:::::::'___`:::::::'___`::::!
        !:::'/_ _\`:::::'/_ _\`:::::'/_ _\`:::::'/_ _\`:::::'/_ _\`:::::'/_ _\`:::!
        !:::|/ ~ \|`::::|/ ~ \|  `::|/ ~ \|'   `|/ ~ \|::'  |/ ~ \|::::'|/ ~ \|:::!
        !:::|'-.-`|  :::|'-.-`|    :|'-.-`|     |'-.-`|:    |'-.-`|:::  |'-.-`|:::!
        !:: (|e|e|?   ::(|e|e|? '   (|e|e|? ` ' (|e|e|?   ` (|e|e|?.:   (|e|e|? ::!
        !.  `._^_,''   :`._^_,'..'  `._^_,'`...'`._^_,'  `..`._^_,'.   ``._^_,'  .!
        !.   \\=//       \\=//       \\=//       \\=//       \\=//       \\=//   .!
        :    U/_/        U/_/        U/_/        U/_/        U/_/        U/_/     :
        @/      \&~  @/      \&~  @/      \&~  @/      \&~  @/      \&~  @/      \&
        Y/\.::./\S\ /Y/\.::./\S\ /Y/\.::./\S\ /Y/\.::./\S\ /Y/\.::./\S\ /Y/\.::./\S
        E$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$E
        %%%%XX%%%%%%%%%%%XX%%%%%%%%%%%XX%%%%%%%%%%%XX%%%%%%%%%%%XX%%%%%%%%%%%XX%WiZ

"JITTLOV'S 3-D DOBBS" [http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/eyes/Jittlov3-D-Dobbs.html](http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/eyes/Jittlov3-D-Dobbs.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> R.A.W. had some great books and I always felt he was very underappreciated. Quantum Psychology in particular really changed my outlook, and I've always felt it should be talked about more.

<comment><USER12> Ya, he basically showed that quantum phenomenon happen all the time at macro- scale and nobody noticed. Weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

<comment><USER15> Sounds like a passage of Buddhist literature..

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna#Sunyata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna#Sunyata)

<comment><USER16> ...or a tutorial on Javascript

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I notice that this was posted by emptath75.

7 + 5 + 11 (yesterday's date) = 23

It's so obvious!

</comment><comment><USER18> Contains the most profound written wisdom:

A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.

</comment><comment><USER19> This page and the next one are surprisingly lucid: [https://principiadiscordia.com/book/56.php](https://principiadiscordia.com/book/56.php)

</comment><comment><USER20> For a second, I was excited to see someone created a discord about Principia Mathematica :-/

</comment><comment><USER21> "I have come to tell you that you are free. Many ages ago, My consciousness left humanity, that they might develop themselves. I return to find this development approaching completion, but hindered by fear and by misunderstanding. You have built for yourselves psychic suits of armor, and clad in them, your vision is restricted, your movements are clumsy and painful, your skin is bruised, and your spirit is broiled in the sun. I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free."

\--Eris Nancy Discordia

</comment><comment><USER22> Hail Eris.

<comment><USER23> All hail Discordia.

<comment><USER24> Kallisti!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Discordianism has nothing on the Church of the Subgenius. I've read the pamplet and the Wikipedia page several times each, and still have no half coherent idea of what the church is about—except the chaos, of course.

<comment><USER26> If you do start to see anything coherent, begin to doubt your sanity.

Rule #1: we must all stick apart

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> 'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.

</comment><comment><USER28> Reading this over coffee and flicking through "Behold the Pale Horse" while William Gibson "strange cargo" plays in the background .. I can still smell the sage of the Bay Area bookshops where this was a staple.

I just checked however, and do already have a .PDF. How can one not have bumped into FNORD in this day and age ..

</comment><comment><USER29> Earlier this year at SXSW a documentary about Subgenius was was screened. I supported its kickstarter, but I haven't watched it myself.

[https://laughingsquid.com/jr-bob-dobbs-church-of-the- subgeni...](https://laughingsquid.com/jr-bob-dobbs-church-of-the-subgenius- documentary/)

</comment><comment><USER30> The Hell Law says that Hell is reserved exclusively for them that believe in it. Further, the lowest Rung in Hell is reserved for them that believe in it on the supposition that they'll go there if they don't.

(helped me out of a jam as someone raised christian...)

</comment><comment><USER31> Happy Zaraday [0]

[0] [https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Zaraday](https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Zaraday)

<comment><USER32> to my disappointment my distro doesn't provide `ddate` any longer :(

<comment><USER10> You can find code for several different implementations of ddate here:

[https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Discordian_date](https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Discordian_date)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> my only fully uv tattoo simply says fnord.

</comment><comment><USER34> Once upon a time I had a corporation named Golden Apple Research Group. Discordianism inspired the name.

</comment><comment><USER35> My first tattoo was (still is, I guess) of the Sacred Chao!

Hail Eris, all hail Discordia!

<comment><USER33> mine was also the sacred chao, followed by the uv fnord and later by the eye in the pyramid in flame, where the flames also light up in uv.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hail Eris Discordia!

</comment><comment><USER37> hail eris</comment>


Ask HN: Any biomolecular/bio-lab hackers working on DIY RT-PCR tests? - <AUTHOR> From a layperson's perspective, it looks like purchasing Covid-19 primers, setting up my own thermocycler and gel electrophoresis chamber would let me test my community myself. If I could run 16 tests per person (8 nasal, 8 pharyngeal) to manage false negatives in this time of high viral activity, as long as the equipment was calibrated and validated, then I'd rather do that than wait for a bumbling administration to trickle down tests to my locality (despite the flowery words in the Rose Garden just now), if they even show up in time at all to flatten the R0 curve.<p>But I'm just a layperson. Where are bimolecular hackers gathering to talk about the concrete steps it takes to not only set this up, but calibrate it (for example, where do I source the calibration dyes and buffers I need to use), and validate its accuracy and precision, etc.? I've found there are a number of primer suppliers, but I'm also interested in whether or not hackers are assembling their own primers, or even those looking into CRISPR-based detection [1].<p>[1] https://www.broadinstitute.org/files/publications/special/COVID-19%20detection%20(updated).pdf <comment><USER2> Uh, sorry to be that guy, but if you have no experience with lab techniques, microbiology, lab instrumentation, or analytical method validation, this isn't the sort of thing you can reasonably expect to accomplish without dedicating several years of your life to getting the necessary technical skills, to say nothing of the huge sums of money it would take to set up your own lab.

It's kind of like deciding you want to build your own 3 story house by hand. You can do it, but buying a bunch of lumber and tools is a far cry from having the necessary skill to actually build it. Science is _hard_.

There's also a major ethical issue about the medical implications of testing someone for a stigmatized disease if you're not clear on the validity of the test. False positives and false negatives have a major impact on your community. And hand-waving away the implications of reporting a false positive or negative with the statistical caveats of the results doesn't cut it.

Patients tend to take test results at face value, so the responsibility to of weighing the ethical ramifications of when it's strictly necessary and when it's irresponsible to administer an unreliable test for a given patient fall squarely on your shoulders. (Not that that excuses the current administration's policy of negatively biasing reporting by not testing anyone.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the input.

Ethical issues: I'm thinking in terms of underserved communities where tests are simply unavailable. A 60% false negative rate test is better than no information whatsoever. After all, it was good enough for China to use (along with authoritarian powers to quarantine) to help get a handle on containment, or what am I missing?

Considering the abysmal US track record serving the healthcare needs of lower socioeconomic strata, I'm not sanguine on them receiving the tests we need to even get an approximate handle on the public health situation.

So if we narrow the scope to just testing for Covid-19, are you saying it still takes several years to get to the point of just administering and evaluating the test, right?

If so, then that means testing is staffing constrained, and you're implying it is impossible in a situation like we face now to dramatically expand the testing scale/volume, and the entire US Federal plan to test orders of magnitude more is complete bullshit.

So is this one of the few areas of human endeavor that is absolutely non- automatable, or can we break down what is/is not within the realm of automation, and possibly leverage the few staff we have relative to the current need?

Or can we relax quality constraints in an emergency like this to favor false positives over false negatives to focus on flattening R0 (although everything I've read so far seems to indicate false negatives are the bigger concern)?

So please give some pointers, where do you see specific, concrete problems for starters that others with domain expertise can look into to evaluate?

<comment><USER2> _A 60% false negative rate test is better than no information whatsoever._

No! It's decidedly _not_ better! This isn't web-scraping where any little bit of information you extract is good, even with a low signal-to-noise ratio. These are human beings. Being wrong here has serious consequences, to the point that you need to weigh the usefulness of the test against the risk of harm of misdiagnosis. You can't just go around diagnosing people willy-nilly if you're not sure about the results!

A false negative means someone will go out with a false sense of security, potentially interacting with vulnerable community members thinking they'll be fine. They may develop further complications due to writing off their symptoms as the flu, and not seek out medical intervention if the situation goes South. A false positive means someone is going into quarantine for two weeks at a major economic and housing consequences (particularly if you want to help poor communities). False positives and false negatives mean more lives will be lost. The stakes are higher, and so too is the need for ethical rigor.

 _So if we narrow the scope to just testing for Covid-19, are you saying it still takes several years to get to the point of just administering and evaluating the test, right?_

I'm not saying the test will take several years to develop, I'm saying it would take you, a self-described layperson, several years to gain the technical skill and know-how to know how to correctly research, design and validate the test.

Specifically, labs are carefully controlled environments. Just getting into the grunt work mechanics of the technique, at bare minimum you need to learn aseptic technique, pipetting, sterilization, reagent prep, handling hazardous chemicals, biohazardous waste disposal, and establishing appropriate environmental controls for your lab. Starting from nothing, those will take at least a year of full-time experience to develop for any semblance of competence. Otherwise you'll be a bull in a china shop; your results will be too tainted by bad technique and inadequate environmental controls to get anywhere.

 _So is this one of the few areas of human endeavor that is absolutely non- automatable, or can we break down what is /is not within the realm of automation, and possibly leverage the few staff we have relative to the current need?_

It's perfectly automatable, but that doesn't mean it's trivial. For one, someone needs to... actually automate it. Someone else needs to implement, maintain and troubleshoot the robotic lab equipment doing the automation. Still require highly specialized skills to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> heres some reading to get started.

you dont need the electrophoresis unless you want to do something like restriction analysis across the different samples.

mainly its a test for presence of sars-cov2.

very often this involves annealing a molecular reporter such as a dye florescence probe, to the mRNA with specificity to regions characteristic of the strain your looking for.

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Idania_Gonzalez- Perez/p...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Idania_Gonzalez- Perez/publication/6684862_Homemade_viral_RNA_isolation_protocol_using_silica_columns_A_comparison_of_four_protocols/links/5a82eeeda6fdcc6f3eae496c/Homemade- viral-RNA-isolation-protocol-using-silica-columns-A-comparison-of-four- protocols.pdf)

[https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download](https://www.fda.gov/media/134922/download)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

[https://hackaday.com/?s=PCR](https://hackaday.com/?s=PCR)

[https://hackaday.com/2016/05/03/dna-extraction- with-a-3d-pri...](https://hackaday.com/2016/05/03/dna-extraction- with-a-3d-printed-centrifuge/)

[https://hackaday.com/2013/09/23/openfuge-an-open-source- cent...](https://hackaday.com/2013/09/23/openfuge-an-open-source-centrifuge/)

[https://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/vcr- centrifuge/](https://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/vcr-centrifuge/)

[https://hackaday.com/2020/03/10/open-source-collaboration- ta...](https://hackaday.com/2020/03/10/open-source-collaboration-tackles- covid-19-testing/)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22552391)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Your last link is exactly what I was seeking, greatly appreciate it.

See omar_a1's feedback, sounds like he's pretty certain it's impossible.

Meanwhile, I'm wondering what Bento Lab or other synbio kits can do for self- testing if a complete from-scratch DIY option is time-constraint infeasible. Thanks again.

<comment><USER3> bento lab is an interesting idea for a field test in remote regions, especialy for surveillance work.

it would have to be acceptable to be expendable, and it is better in the long term to have these instruments in separate form.

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

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

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

the big issue would be continuity of reagents, and perhaps forming some just in time method for preparing wet solutions from dry stock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just some thoughts

Even if you develop a perfect test, it's unlikely to help the people you're testing. People who are feeling sick (and those who aren't) should be staying home and minimizing contact with others, and going to a hospital if they are sick enough to require doing so. A positive or negative test data point doesn't change that.

The data could be useful epidemiologically, but only if you can convince others to use your data. That will likely be difficult to do.

Most importantly, you're very likely to get sick yourself handling 10s or 100s of samples without training and appropriate facilities.

Totally appreciate your drive, but your time might be better spent contacting your representatives and making it clear we expect better from them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Other than for statistics and tracking the spread are tests really needed at this point? Is there an advantage to seeing a positive/negative test result for a patient.

As there isn't a treatment plan and it seems like recommendations are for anyone with cold symptoms to self quarantine for 2 weeks+.

I feel like it's so wide spread now we just have to ride it out, use social distancing, avoiding events/meetings to try to minimize/stretch out the peak number of cases.

Maybe save the test kits for when we do have a reliable treatment. Or better yet if the treatment is safe and inexpensive hand it out like candy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm wondering if decentralized DIY testing can arise from centralized, vetted plans giving skilled tradespeople enough information to construct, calibrate and validate their own tests. And if enough can be made to reasonably rule out false negatives before positives are sent onwards to "official" testing, and lessening the inevitable load on hospitals, and in these early days of testing, the testing facilities.

Everything I've read so far doesn't seem to say "first, you need a <fission- reactor-scale-dooodad>". So I'm wondering how feasible it is, and the deeper I dig into this, the more I'm wondering just how low the bar goes.</comment></comment>


The amazing technology behind Google+ Hangouts - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/video/google-hangouts-technology

<comment><USER2> Article didn't mention it, but Justin's blog post did:

"Standards-based: XMPP, Jingle, RTP"...

We're working on publishing the spec, which should be available soon. In fact, it's already implemented in libjingle:

<http://code.google.com/p/libjingle>

<comment><USER3> Could you link us? If they're opening up the technology behind it, it really will be amazing.

I have to wonder if it's based on Muji or if it was built from scratch.

EDIT: Never mind, found it in the article. [http://juberti.blogspot.com/2011/06/announcing-google- hangou...](http://juberti.blogspot.com/2011/06/announcing-google- hangouts.html)

EDIT 2: Oh, you're a Googler. Good to see that you'll be opening it up. :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> HN Feature Request: a filter that strips the word "amazing" out of all headlines.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds interesting and all, but how is this "amazing"?

</comment><comment><USER6> _P2P can introduce latency_

Can someone explain this to me? I guess if your video has to go via multiple hops, that would be laggy, but if you connect directly to each peer in the conversation surely that would be _less_ laggy than a client-server architecture?

<comment><USER7> It's because of limited upload bandwidth when sending multiple copies of a stream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think "the hint" of the amazing technology behind Google+ Hangouts would be more appropriate.

Could one of the people involved please publish a more detailed blog posts as how all these pieces are linked together. The tweaker in me wants to start fiddling with it ASAP:

Fully browser-based/cloud-based

Client-server: leverages the power of Google's infrastructure

Designed for low latency (< 100 ms) and high performance (multicore + hardware acceleration)

Standards-based: XMPP, Jingle, RTP, ICE, STUN, SRTP

Fully encrypted (HTTPS + SRTP)

</comment><comment><USER9> "WebRTC is supported by Mozilla and Opera" -- hmm, someone is absent from that list

<comment><USER9> Actually, to be fair, Microsoft isn't the only one missing.

<comment><USER10> Chome is moments away from getting this it seems:

[http://peter.sh/2011/06/flexbox-web-sockets-inclusion-of- web...](http://peter.sh/2011/06/flexbox-web-sockets-inclusion-of-webrtc-and- smooth-scrolling/)

Great blog btw, I check it each week to see what's cooking under the hood of Chrome :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome? Umm it doesn't work on my Google supplied Cr-48.

<comment><USER12> Worked on my Samsung Series 5, but when trying to do a youtube watch with a friend and the tab crashed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Flash has had peer-to-peer video support for 3 years now and it's available to 90%+ users on the web. Chatroulette was built in 2 days around this technology. Whenever "standards" catch up to Flash, it's being touted as "amazing".

<comment><USER14> The article clearly states that whats interesting is the client-server infrastructure behind it and the fact that it _isn't_ P2P.</comment></comment>


Don't build your house on someone else's platform.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdistortion.com/2012/06/11/dont-build-your-house-on-someone-elses-platform/

<comment><USER2> In a sense articles like this are useful because making a bold sweeping statement and trying to back it up is a good way of getting strong arguments. On their other hand they're treacherous because they encourage us to think in these kinds of terms. You don't want to be thinking of something as high level as "building on someone else's platform" in terms of good or bad.

The (boring) truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle. Like any big decision there are pros and cons. Opportunities and risks.

Zynga's Facebook strategy opened up a huge market to them. There are other ways to catch fish of course, they could have built their own social network for example, but you can't say they're not risky. The Facebook bet paid off (so far). Zynga got huge. They still carry a lot of that risk. But now that they're huge they can like the blog mentions try to mitigate it. Maybe they can even turn the tables.

Microsoft is the ultimate counter-example. In the first few years, they built on IBM's platform and IBM could have ditched them. But they turned the table.

There are no rules. There is no risk free path. It's good to know the risks, but riks are not rules.

<comment><USER2> The counter-counter example is Apple. No dependencies on anything (relatively speaking). More control over design & production of hardware than hardware companies. Software runs on their own hardware. iOS & OSX devices are complete & useful products out of the box without a need for 3rd party applications. Application markets are controlled and no one application (except maybe MS office) can really affect them. They prefer the internet to the web. Anything else.

The examples people are going to think of are mostly going to be building businesses on/in app markets and/or social networks. These are both young spaces. in 5-10 years we're going to have seen spectacular successes & failures. Every one of their stories is going to have the "somebody else's platform" parading as a main character. Sometimes it'll be the hero. Sometimes the villain.

<comment><USER3> > The counter-counter example is Apple.

I disagree that Apple is a good counter-counter example. They started on the CP/M platform, which was proprietary. They were eventually able to develop their own operating system, thanks to the resources that success had given them.

<comment><USER4> > They started on the CP/M platform

Uh? Aren't you confusing Apple and Microsoft? Apple started with the Apple I, a fully wired circuit board custom-built by Woz. The Apple II was much the same, although it _could_ run CP/M via a dedicated Z-80 expansion card _from third parties_.

On the other hand, Microsoft got started when Allen and Gates wrote a BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800 (not CP/M) then built MS-DOS on top of a CP/M clone (again not CP/M) for the IBM PC contract.

<comment><USER3> I should have quoted the parent more fully:

> No dependencies on anything (relatively speaking). More control over design > & production of hardware than hardware companies. Software runs on their own > hardware.

It's the argument that Apple (in the beginning) had full control of their hardware when they had few/no resources that makes Apple (today) a poor example of how to "do it right" when you're starting a new product. Apple, too, had to navigate in a high-risk market full of established players.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know the owner of a Facebook application development firm here in Poland. Based on the brand-new Maserati and Ferrari sitting on his driveway, he's done pretty well from developing for FB's platform. His house isn't bad either.

It might not last forever, but why not make hay whilst the sun shines? Frankly, I'm just jealous of the guy's ability to do business!

<comment><USER6> A Facebook _development firm_ isn't necessarily as tied to Facebook as its clients are. It has long been the case that the winners of the gold rush are the ones selling the shovels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So my company is providing a Platform-as-a-service for mainly Flash game developers, where we provide storage, hosting, multiplayer, and payment services.

We have lots of customers who are happily building games on top of our platform, because they do not have the skills required to make their own. They're small companies who can't afford to hire a bunch of guys to make scalable storage services or payment integrations or whatever they need. So if not for us, the games they've made and are making quite a lot of money on, would never have been made in the first place. They make money, we make money, everyone's happy!

Of course, if we fail, our customers will fail. They're tied to us, but that's the risk that comes with the benefit of getting our services cheap.

And on the flipside, we in turn use other PaaS solutions, we use Amazon S3 for a lot of things, we use a bunch of different CDN providers, and we rent dedicated hardware instead of buying and running our own datacenter. We stand on the shoulders of others, our service could not exist without them. And our customers stand on our shoulders, their products could not exist without us. And that's ok. There are risks, but there's also opportunity. Building your own platform and owning the entire stack is _also_ risky.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is easier said and done, but there are huge, closed vertical platform stacks appearing, and those same vendors are making it really hard or forbidding it to get "portable" apps (in the widest sense of the word) working on their platforms.

You can make your house outside these stacks, but your business isn't going to run far without any passerby's.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is more than just advocacy to develop a healthy NIH syndrome (not invented here), but a call to arms that you have to organically develop your own user-base from the ground up.

I think balancing these three things successfully (your code/design, your platform, your potential user pool) is probably something that's going to be written about in some depth over the coming years.

The key thing to remember is that short-term gains don't always translate into long-term gains with any of those three things -- Zynga is a particularly useful example: not really their design, not their platform, and not their user pool. Yet during their meteoric rise, we were virtually swimming in articles talking about how they used psychology and reward feedback loops blah blah to hook users onto their software. This translated into lots of users and therefore lots of revenue. Missing from all of the writeup at the time was the inevitable fact that _users get used to your gimmicks/novelty wears off_.

This translated into a general loss of players, loss of revenue and investors who were itching to move to the actual owners of the platform and user pool rather than the derivative company working with hand-me-downs.

So relying on all three things from somebody else doesn't appear to be a good path to go down.

It's easy to criticize, but practically speaking, startups can't really develop all three things on their own. We have to leverage previous work where we can to get started. Ideally that's your code/design, IP _is_ valuable stuff. But for efficiency we all leverage other libraries, open source projects, etc. That's just modern coding practice these days anyways. We're basically just finding neat ways to put the legos together to get a spaceship or a race car. Finding a balance between your code and your leveraged components, in a way that builds value for your company is not trivial. Sometimes the glue between components really is worth a hell of a lot.

Platforms are tricky, again, if you are small, you end up running on somebody else's platform. Infrastructure is hard, expensive and often requires specific skill sets to get running smoothly at scale. EC2 may be the closest thing there is to a good balance that would let companies migrate to their own infrastructure if they wanted to. But infrastructure is also commoditized at this point, and an acquiring company may look at all that hardware sitting in a rack as a liability more than a value. However, there have been some successful infrastructure startups (Heroku). But if you are using somebody else's, be careful that you can move off onto your own eventually (or between, or back and forth). Regardless, the more of somebody else's platform you are using the less value you've developed for your company on the code side which leaves...

Users. This is what it's really about right? Companies really buy other companies for their users. The code/design is a nice to have in most cases, but it's really just a vehicle to get eyeballs to engage with your product. Sure there's some high-end particularly valuable code out there that's patented and doing something special that's worth millions. But users are really where it's at. Some questions to ask, are you sharecropping somebody else's user pool? Zynga is. It's up for debate if that's a successful strategy. Short term is appears to work, long term it appears not to. You need to at least rent-to-own, and Zynga simply didn't have a way of dipping into Facebook's pool, engaging the users, and then migrating out of FB and into Zynga's own pool. At the end of the day, by simply stopping using Zynga's products, the users fell back into their default state which was to be FB's users, not Zynga's.

</comment><comment><USER10> So should I design my own hardware, write my own compiler, design my own programming language and distribute my own version of HTML to the world, which requires my particular browser?

<comment><USER11> Continuing your sarcasm... What? And expect the _world_ to build its houses our _your_ platform?

I agreed that the sweeping generalization backed up by a single example and barely any data is absurd. You have you build your "house" on _something_ so build it wherever is profitable, not always where the plain is wide, the weather is perfect (for you), and the neighbors are easy to please. If anything, such places are lightly tread and you're not likely to get much business in them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this misses the point. You build on someone else's platform because they provide _distribution_. Without their platform, you don't get their distribution. So what does that get you?

This is akin to saying, "don't sell at Walmart." Yeah, I risk Walmart taking my profits away and risking my business - the very profits and business that Walmart's distribution has provided.

Distribution is king. Live with it.

</comment><comment><USER13> I partly agree in the sense that if you are using Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, etc. for login/authentication then you stand a chance of losing users. You can encourage users to setup multiple login mechanisms, but I bet not many people would take the trouble.

However I thought that Facebook apps can also be standalone web apps with some extra work. Also, It seems safe to use web services for things like MongoDB (mongohq.com), CouchDB (cloudant.com, iriscouch.com), RDF (dydra.com), etc. to power backend services because you can always switch to running this stuff yourself. So, data store platform services seem safe enough, assuming that you trust the vendor.

I am not an entrepreneur (just a happy consultant) but if I did want to start my own business I might use the FB platform, but try to allow alternative access to my business.

</comment><comment><USER14> I totally agree. Build your own app/platform based on good and well tested frameworks. Use the big companies's API's to add value and content to your app/platform. And if your idea is good, business model is good and you believe in what you do, you will succeed.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think Shayan Zadeh (co-founder Zoosk) gave a great presentation on this topic a while ago:

Part 1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPLtR38-xVY>

Part 2: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbhmvXGQehg>

Part 3: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbLpbzWsi4U>

TLDR; Leverage platform, take advantage of what you're given, but don't become dependent on it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Summary: don't build on shaky platforms. Instead, use them as scaffolding to build out your own platform.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does this theory apply to platforms such as Parse?

</comment><comment><USER18> Soon we will be talking about "exit strategies" in the platform sense, not in the buyout sense.

</comment><comment><USER19> "You'll notice striking similarities between the peaks and troughs in the graph below."

Correlation does not imply causation. On the micro level most stocks go up and down together simply because overall market sentiment is a factor on all stock prices. It would have helped if the chart had included the S&P 500 Index.

</comment><comment><USER20> isn't the basic question here how much money it takes to build your own and whether you have that expertise and time and appetite for risk in that market, desire to play in that market?

for a lot of people who made money in the iOS garden, for example, it was do that or not play, they weren't even developers before, some of them, and certainly weren't releasing apps. Same for some Facebook games.

Basically, it's like web hosting: if you run your own servers (when you're small), then whatever business you're 'really' in, you're now also in the IT business. Per the article, whatever business you're really in, you're now also trying to make it in the social networking business. Which is hard.

Not everyone wants to do that. For others, who do, the business they enter incidentally turns out to be their big cash cow. (example: large companies that build distribution systems and then monetize them or spin off a division; amazon monetizing what must have originally been its own cloud.)

Basically, it's not so easy to say: for anything you do, roll your own with a division that could be a company in its own right.

Not everyone should or can make a nationwide distribution network, or get a physical hardware device into millions of people's pockets or... (list goes on and on.)

Often it makes sense to what you're good at and can be competitive in, even if this was made possible by a bigger fish letting you play in their pond. You can get your own when you're bigger. (if it makes sense and you feel you'll be successful doing it, even though it's outside your core competency.)</comment>


Sony lawyers now targeting anyone who posts on PS3 hack - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/02/sony-lawyers-now-targeting-anyone-who-posts-playstation-3-hack.ars

<comment><AUTHOR>
      > What's more, the company is demanding that a federal judge order
      > Google to surrender the IP addresses and other identifying
      > information (PDF) of those who have viewed or commented about the
      > jailbreak video on a private YouTube page

That's exactly why forcing users to link YouTube and gmail accounts is a terrible idea, Google.</comment>


MongoDB 1.4 Production Release - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mongodb.org/post/472835820/mongodb-1-4-ready-for-production

<comment><USER2> I am incredibly excited about the inclusion of geospatial indexing and searching (<http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Geospatial+Indexing>), especially with the impending release of full-text search next quarter (<http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-380>).

<comment><USER3> full-text search would be amazing.

<comment><USER4> I wrote about how easy it is to do some form of index and search: [http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/11/mongodb-has-good- support-...](http://markwatson.com/blog/2009/11/mongodb-has-good-support-for- indexing.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just a question: mongo uses some kind of memory cache like memcached? or I need to implement it aside to get faster-faster performance? I'm thinking on a small app (10K visitors a day).

<comment><USER5> Mongo should be fast enough that you don't need to use memcached. It uses memory mapped files (which is also important to know since by default it only flushes data to disk every 60 seconds)

<comment><USER6> Memory mapped files are nice, but once the mapped file starts to get much bigger than the physical memory pages the operating system can allocate, it starts to be asymptotically the same as accessing the filesystem from the point of view of latency, so indeed for datasets considerably bigger than RAM it is not possible to be as fast as memcached. Not a MongoDB limit, but a nature-imposed limit :)

<comment><USER7> I have had some bad experiences with memory mapped databases (particularly Berkeley DB and Tokyo Tyrant) - both these seem to be very greedy with IO writes when one starts to have lots of data and lots of updates. I think Reddit experienced a similar problem (as memcachedb is based on Berkeley DB).

Does anybody know what Cassandra does?

<comment><USER8> Take a look at <http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/MemtableThresholds> and [http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/ArchitectureOverview#Write_...](http://wiki.apache.org/cassandra/ArchitectureOverview#Write_path) for the specifics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sweet, I am installing it right now on my MacBook (I always have it running) and if everything looks good I'll also install it on my 2 MongoDB servers. I really like MongoDB for its ease of use with Ruby and its rich query support. I am unlikely to ever need the scalability of Cassandra, and MongoDB's features fit my needs. The new geo location support looks good.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone found some simple steps to upgrade?

Surprised they didn't include it in the post.

I installed the previous version using these instructions: [http://shiftcommathree.com/articles/how-to-install- mongodb-o...](http://shiftcommathree.com/articles/how-to-install-mongodb-on- os-x)

EDIT: Figured it out.

The release notes provide a few more details. <http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/1.4+Release+Notes>

I pasted the steps I used here: <http://www.pastie.org/887556>

</comment><comment><USER10> Where would one use MongoDB? Without durability I'm not really sure I see much applications using it.

<comment><USER10> Replying to myself (since I found out about this just now): Once MongoDB solves <http://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-467> durability won't be an issue any more

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one a little disturbed by the "name" of this product?

At least in german speaking countries "mongo" is usually only used as insulting calling for people with Down-Syndrom...

<comment><USER12> According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongo>, there are a wide variety of uses of the word "Mongo".

<comment><USER11> Yes, I completly understand that (which is as well true for many other words like "ass" and "behind" f.e.)...

Just wanted to point out this little maybe unknown "fact".

cheers</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Music Background to Work? - <AUTHOR> What's your favourite music when you code,design or work in general? <comment><USER2> I sometimes listen to tracks from musicForProgramming[0] website, and I usually download the ones which I like and then play them off the offline music player.

Other than that, I have some Spotify playlists saved (not from me, some links I found on Twitter and other sites) [1,2]

[0] [https://musicforprogramming.net](https://musicforprogramming.net)

[1] [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6dlwJYNRdkTfZMALZclyIx?si=...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6dlwJYNRdkTfZMALZclyIx?si=XUhjP1S1T5aphW- qtolZfA)

[2] [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2u5h5ZloqSXRuDMTrRincp?si=...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2u5h5ZloqSXRuDMTrRincp?si=2U7xFZlqTMOre_hlRWpjYQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> I suspect this is a deeply personal question, like asking people "C++ coders what fiction do you read at home?"

Regardless I'm currently listening to Rammstein, I often listen to Queen, Depeche Mode, and soundracks from films such as LotR, 300, Blade, Resident Evil. I've spent a lot of time listening to the soundtracks to the various Fast&Furious films over the last month. Maybe next month I'll have more classical-music.

</comment><comment><USER4> I usually have the Lo-fi beats playlist[1] on Spotify playing.

[1] [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWWQRwui0ExPn?si=...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWWQRwui0ExPn?si=4ogiJDYBR8y_VdGrmx1e4w)

<comment><USER5> Yes ... I'm actually flexible with music but quite often use the "Focus" genre on Spotify for work that requires more thought. I like the "Deep Focus" Playlist too ([https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWZeKCadgRdKQ?si=...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWZeKCadgRdKQ?si=-BbLZUF6SHKHE2tr42ZiQA))

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ketapop, chillrave[0] - I find they have the right amount of ambience and novelty to not be too boring to make you drowsy or too interesting to be distracting so they can peacefully sit in the background all day long giving you a bit of rhythm but also letting you focus.

[0]: [https://soundcloud.com/gina-sabatini/kitti- mimizan-b2b-gina-...](https://soundcloud.com/gina-sabatini/kitti- mimizan-b2b-gina-sabatini-love-meier-11012019)

</comment><comment><USER7> Usually classical, jazz, or Celtic/ambient. Words are only allowed when I'm doing something mindless and rote - anything that requires real thinking, especially writing, will have the lyrics take the quality down a couple of notches - not a lot, but enough to be noticeable. The only exception is pure non-verbal creative work (CAD, graphic design, etc.) where relaxation is key - there, Jimmy Buffett, or old country or pop music can be quite useful.

</comment><comment><USER8> Silence.

(I've been a musician and programmed all my life too, but never have music playing when concentration is needed, i.e. when programming. When music is on, I concentrate on the music! It seems so weird to me that people would attempt some complex programming task with music playing! Hmm and mostly when I do want music these days it comes out of me: I imagine/remember it–hear my favourite stuff in my head, or imagine playing it, or tap rhythms, or play an instrument..)

<comment><USER9> I've found this to be the right thing to do for several reasons.

1\. Music does not improve my concentration in the long term. It will help for a few hours and then make it harder to focus after that.

2\. Headphones make me less approachable at work, and I want to contribute to a positive team culture by being easy to chat to. If I need to buckle down I will work from home.

3\. Headphones make it much more tempting to watch youtube, or listen to podcasts in the background. Without headphones I find it much easier to keep myself on track.

4\. Most importantly, silence at work makes me appreciate music a whole lot more when I do listen to it, because it is no longer simply background noise, it feels worthy of attention. On top of that, I am more capable of listening to more demanding and more rewarding music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> When trying to get into flow, I prefer fast paced music, with a lot of rapid beats. Metal is a natural pick, but even things like K-Pop works.

When in flow, I want things that maintain the same beat. I'll often play the same song in loop. Lately I've been looping Dance Monkey/Toss a Coin to Your Witcher for hours. Basically it's the songs that go 1234 1234 1234 123 123 123 1234 1234 1234.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am a big fan of N'to and the sets from artist from the label Hungry Music. I believe the genre is deep house. This set is my go to at work

[Link] [https://m.soundcloud.com/zubkow-ilya/nto-live-tour-saint- jac...](https://m.soundcloud.com/zubkow-ilya/nto-live-tour-saint-jacques-for- cercle)

</comment><comment><USER12> I love hear felix music [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RUzfOff5q0&list=PLDsQg9WjiO...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RUzfOff5q0&list=PLDsQg9WjiOwt6HbI7dhp_Thjh454fda4H)

</comment><comment><USER13> My absolute favourites are Abul Mogard's Works album and most albums by Alessandro Cortini. If I want something more high energy, I just find a techno or psytrance playlist from Spotify without paying much attention to which artist is playing.

</comment><comment><USER14> I vary between Classical, usually when designing, to something upbeat when coding.

</comment><comment><USER15> Similar discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19579216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19579216)

</comment><comment><USER16> Kimbra - Vows and Marina and the Diamonds - Family Jewels

</comment><comment><USER17> Nothing with words or I get really distracted. Well, unless I really know the music, but even then it's a bit distracting.

</comment><comment><USER18> It doesn't really matter. Once you are concentrating and "in the flow" you don't hear it.

<comment><USER10> I think the question is more, "What do you not hear? What puts you in the flow fastest?"

My roommate used to play Jack Johnston, The White Stripes, and Muse, and these felt terrible for my concentration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Basic Channel, Maurizio, Quadrant

</comment><comment><USER20> some ambient music, usually whatever comes up on spotify. i do like listening to my soundcloud stream whenever i get the chance, but that tends to have less focus-friendly tracks.

</comment><comment><USER21> The soundtrack from The Social Network

</comment><comment><USER22> I usually have no music.

</comment><comment><USER23> Foreign rock/pop</comment>