Nice People Really Do Have More Fun - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/nice-people-really-do-have-more-fun-1476916829 <comment><USER2> I once had it explained to me there are two kinds of happiness in the world, additive and subtractive.

In subtractive, a person tries to add happiness to their life by taking it away from other people around them - putting people down, criticizing, picking on people, name calling, etc. Other people are never good enough in their eyes.

In additive, a person adds happiness to their life by giving it to other people around them - compliments, fun activities, positive attitude, etc. Making those around them happier makes the person happier.

It changed my perspective on a lot of people when I viewed their actions in this way.

<comment><USER3> You may have a very skewed perspective if you think that anyone who is giving criticism is trying to make themselves happy at others' expense.

<comment><USER4> That's .. not what that post said at all. Maybe your perspective is the skewed one?

There's a difference between constructive criticism, and people for whom criticism is the dominant mode of conversation.

<comment><USER3> That's exactly what the post said. Maybe you can provide a different interpretation?

>In subtractive, _a person tries to add happiness to their life by taking it away from other people around them - putting people down,_ _criticizing_ _, picking on people, name calling, etc._

<comment><USER5> It's clear from the "putting people down" and "name calling" part of that sentence that the criticizing is not meant in a constructive sense. The poster is clearly talking about a situation in which a person feels lifted up, happier by bringing others down. Such a person, in that capacity, is not providing constructive feedback.

<comment><USER3> You can argue that they are not providing constructive feedback, but the claim was:

> _a person tries to add happiness to their life by taking it away from other > people around them_

<comment><USER6> There's an ambiguity in the comment, but reading the comment charitably can dispel the notion that the person claimed _any_ form of criticism is a form of maliciously bringing people down.

Read it however you want, but taken in context I disagree that that's their intended claim. I think that poster meant that malicious criticism is something that can make unhappy people feel a little better about themselves.

<comment><USER3> There is little ambiguity. The space of happiness was divided into two mutually exclusive groups (subtractive & additive) with the listed qualities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In 2003, scholars from the University of South Carolina looked at the impact > of being nice on perceived male attractiveness. They recruited 194 female > volunteers to participate in a mock dating game in which they had to pick > between two men, Todd and Mike. The researchers varied Todd's levels of > handsomeness and "niceness" while keeping Mike's personality and looks > constant and neutral.

This sounds like a bullshit experiment. I seriously doubt the researchers managed to capture the effective kind of cocky/jerk behavior that works well with some women. Additionally, they're measuring self-reported opinions from women, rather than what the real-world result would be. I say this without any sort of negativity attached to it, but women often say they feel one thing while acting as though they feel another, especially as it pertains to their relationships with men. Again, I don't think this is a negative trait, it just is what it is. I see men all the time acting less than gentlemanly towards women and having the woman verbally shooting him down, but still going home to sleep with him. It's so predictable when done right.

<comment><USER8> Just want to clarify something here- I think guys too often assume that the "jerk" part of "cocky jerk" is somehow a key component of getting the girl. It's not. The confidence is the important part. A confident, nice guy has just as much of a chance with a girl as a confident, mean guy. I would argue he has a better chance.

The term "Nice Guy" describes a guy who thinks he is being "gentlemanly" when really he's just being shy. I think it's important to distinguish kindness from confidence, lest we all start treating women poorly in an effort to get them to sleep with us.

<comment><USER9> Yours and the comment you're replying to sound so reductive. People are different. They like other people for lots of different reasons that can't be reduced to a single trait or even a handful of traits. There are 7 billion people on this planet, and you are both generalizing this stuff to the moon.

<comment><USER7> I made a point to qualify everything I said.

"some women", "women often say", "all the time" (instead of every time), "predictable"

There are 7 billion people, and even if it's 7 billion unique snowflakes, they're still all snowflakes. We're more alike than we are different. This is especially true when you boil it down to young, unmarried, childless, American women who are social and go to places where they can meet men. These are the women whose opinion on a man's approach matter the most in the context of dating advice. Sure, these women are all unique in their own ways, but they are not very unique in what they find attractive in men.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "In my view, the fact that niceness beats physical beauty is evidence of the existence of God."

Wait, what? Isn't this a highly subjective and religious claim that comes out of nowhere and isn't relevant to the article? Or is that a commonly used expression I am unaware of?

<comment><USER7> To me it seemed to be written entirely as a joke. The idea being that this is an example of inherit goodness in the universe that we don't often see since the entire model is based on ever-dwindling entropy. The universe is pessimistic by nature if you think about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Selfish nastiness is all the rage, but research shows that pleasant behavior > leads to more success and happiness in life

What does the first part of the sentence mean? Where is "selfish nastiness" considered good? Even on social media the jerks are either blocked, ignored, or waste time in silly arguments. If people are rude in the media, it's because watching people be nice all day isn't very fun.

<comment><USER12> > _What does the first part of the sentence mean? Where is "selfish nastiness" > considered good?_

In political candidates with strange hairdos who attract a huge majority of the population, in fictional pop heroes like Dr. Gregory House, in actual pop heroes like Kanye West and numerous other places besides...

<comment><USER13> House is basically a modern interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, with the same unpleasant personality. Which seems to contradict the idea that jerk protagonists are a new phenomenon.

<comment><USER14> I didn't notice that House and Holmes were supposed to be unpleasant people.

<comment><USER15> Are you sure you were watching the same shows?

It's about House MD, the doctor and Sherlock, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Their unpleasantness is a key part of their respective shows, to the point of being a major plot driver in some cases.

<comment><USER16> Sherlock the Cumberbatch character and Sherlock the Arthur Conan Doyle character are quite different, and House is definitely not derived from the Cumberbatch character (simply because that would mean the scriptwriters were time-travelers).

<comment><USER12> Back to our topic though, the two modern characters, Cumberbatch's Sherlock and House are both arrogant and nasty (yeah, with a "damaged" core underneath).

The original Sherlock wasn't like House but in the more broad sense. E.g. he didn't sadistically play games with his underlings (which he didn't much have) and Watson. He also wasn't about "blunt truth" and other such things House was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Causation vs. correlation is getting old...

Maybe happier people are nicer?

<comment><USER18> Maybe people who tend to be in better situations find it easier to be nice, and to have fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can't read that, but I've thought about this subject and I'll give my two cents.

Let me preface this by saying that I always seem to regret being nice. It's the people that are mostly unaware of others that seem to be the most happy. These same people don't seem to have a problem being cruel as the feeling comes to them.

This doesn't sound good, but it's true. This doesn't have much to do with this story though.

A couple years ago I was on the bus and this kind of thing was on my mind. Over the years my best friend and I have switched between who was more dominant and a couple years ago it was him. He wasn't nice about this either. On the bus there was a woman and what I assume to be her two daughters. The daughters were kind of playing around the bus and climbing on things. One daughter was obviously more dominant; she was the one basically deciding what game they were playing and she didn't let the other forget that it was 'her game'. After the dominant one was particularly rude, the other went off and did her own thing and start playing behind a seat or something. She seemed to be pretty amused with what she was doing.

After a while the dominant one got bored and went to see what her sister was doing. After seeing that she was having fun, the dominant one joined in and her sister accepted in an obvious way, because she was still busy amusing herself. After that they seemed to have an equal understanding with eachother.

I don't know about nice people having more fun, but the moral if the story is if you have more fun people will be nicer to you.

<comment><USER20> I've worked as a Greeter in a Health Clinic for 6 years and I get paid to be "nice." Here's what's interesting: Not everyone likes when I'm nice to them - in fact, some of them get downright offended. I don't let it bother me but their reaction seems based on fear.

It's interesting because smiling is free - it literally costs nothing. However, a smile does have value, and is an emotional transaction with another person. A simple smile can sometimes have more impact than we can understand.

Having said that, a smile is also something we should never expect or demand from someone else. That's what makes them so special when they are freely given.

Kindness is the International Currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Subheader: Selfish nastiness is all the rage, but research shows that pleasant behavior leads to more success and happiness in life.

Full text:

The great comedian Mel Brooks once contrasted comedy and tragedy. "Tragedy is when I cut my finger," he said. "Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

Mr. Brooks neatly encapsulates our current public culture of selfish nastiness. From this year's ghastly presidential race, to the reality entertainment that spawned it, to the open sewer backing up from your Twitter feed, it looks like the worst behavior is being publicly rewarded, doesn't it? You could be forgiven for believing that maybe the polarities of karma have reversed, and the world now belongs to jerks. Right?

Wrong. Nice people, rejoice: Notwithstanding the prominent examples today in political and popular culture, the best available research still clearly shows that in everyday life the nice people, not the creeps, do the best at work, in love and in happiness.

Let's start with the job market. This has been another brutal year in which to graduate. Research from the Economic Policy Institute finds that young college graduates' underemployment rate is nearly a third higher today than it was in 2007. Everyone is looking for an edge.

That edge is being pleasant and friendly. In one 2015 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, a team of scholars from France and the U.S. looked at the impact of civility and warmth to colleagues on perceived leadership and job performance. In addition to being seen as natural leaders by co-workers, nice employees performed significantly better than others in performance reviews by senior supervisors. For those who make it to leadership, niceness is also a key to success. A 2015 NBC poll found that most people would take a nicer boss over a 10% pay increase.

On the other hand, some researchers believe there are salary costs to being nice. In 2012, research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that while those with high levels of "agreeableness" were less likely to be fired, they didn't make the most money.

It is important to note that these researchers' definition of agreeableness included "compliance" with the will of others. In many cases, however, compliance is not niceness; it is weakness. To be truly nice is not to comply when you disagree, but rather to disagree without being disagreeable. It isn't to please at any cost, but rather to avoid being unpleasant even while standing up for what is right.

The benefits of being nice extend to love. In 2003, scholars from the University of South Carolina looked at the impact of being nice on perceived male attractiveness. They recruited 194 female volunteers to participate in a mock dating game in which they had to pick between two men, Todd and Mike. The researchers varied Todd's levels of handsomeness and "niceness" while keeping Mike's personality and looks constant and neutral.

The results were clear and conclusive. When their looks were equivalent, "Nice Todd" outperformed Neutral Mike. "Jerk Todd" lost 85% of the time to Mike even when Todd was better looking. In my view, the fact that niceness beats physical beauty is evidence of the existence of God.

But probably the greatest benefit of being nice accrues to one's own happiness. In 2010, two British researchers looked at the effects of engaging in small daily acts of kindness. Their results, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, show clear causal evidence that kind acts, systematically deployed, raised the participants' self-judged happiness.

It's important to note that kindness and niceness are not identical. Kindness requires active generosity. But if you wonder whether the same experimental results will stand up, use yourself as a guinea pig. Deliberately set out to be nice for a week and see how it makes you feel. I'm confident you will like the result.

Can anyone learn to be nice? No doubt it is harder for some people than for others, but anyone can make progress and see benefits. One simple strategy for doing so is mimicry: Imitate the nicest person you know.

In my own case, that was my father. My dad died fairly young, at age 66. Hundreds of people who had known him over the years showed up at his funeral, and everyone I spoke to offered more or less the same observation: He was a truly nice man. Not a bad legacy, I thought. So I set out to imitate a few of his habits.

The most salient was his cheerful interaction with total strangers. He made banter with supermarket clerks, bellmen, bus drivers—everyone. "Hot enough for ya?" he'd ask, especially in winter. This mortified me as a child, especially when his friendliness so frequently went unrequited. But he didn't care—if his clichés and corny jokes didn't get a smile from one person, they might from the next. So now, to the chagrin of my own teenage children, I do the same. It has made me a happier person.

Niceness certainly is not a substitute for more active virtues like generosity and courage. But it's a good start, and perhaps the easiest way to improve our lives. These days it is also a countercultural statement. To be nice is to subvert a pop culture that celebrates tactical nastiness—and instead choose a long-term personal strategy to build a happier life in a better world.

Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute.

<comment><USER21> Thanks, I really appreciate your effort copying the article here. Could you please do this for all paywalled content from now on? Or maybe we should have a bot do it just in case you have something different planned for the rest of your life.

<comment><USER7> Give me those sweet, sweet internet points and maybe I will

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > For those who make it to leadership, niceness is also a key to success. A > 2015 NBC poll found that most people would take a nicer boss over a 10% pay > increase.

Doesn't this mean that most bosses are not nice, ergo niceness makes it less likely to get a promotion?

Of people prefer a pay increase over a nicer boss that would prove that nice people get promoted more often.

</comment><comment><USER23> Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute, so I'll leave a plug here for another AEI initiative that I work on: The Open Source Policy Center. We build open source tools for policy analysis like TaxBrain and the underlying models. One of the underlying models, Tax-Calculator, you can even use to calculate the effects of policy proposals on your own taxes.

</comment><comment><USER24> I realize there's two different sets of people involved, but it's still disappointing to see HN upvote both "psychology is trash science" articles and "what these scientists found will surprise you" clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe I'm too cynical, but this sounds too much like a just world fallacy. At any rate, I'm having a hard time distinguishing between "nice" and "sucker", and the article didn't bother differentiating between the two. I guess in my mind, they're one and the same. Most guys I would describe as nice are actually just weak guys that are respected by nobody. It's hard to imagine that they're happy, and they do not seem to be happy.

There are men I have known that technically are nice, but I never would have thought to describe them as such. "Cool" seems a more apt descriptor. And the difference between "cool" and "nice" seems to involve a certain degree of selfishness.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, some people are nice just because they think they have to in order to be close to likeable. Truth is, most of those would love to be assholes if they could get away with it. I've been like that. Probably still is, just to a lesser extent.

Being authentically nice requires a lot of deep-seated confidence. It's hard to care too much about others if you're constantly worrying about yourself.

<comment><USER27> It was easier for me to be nice to everyone once I realized that they and their loved ones are all going to die one day. Puts things in perspective.

<comment><USER28> I pretty much do the opposite. I remember that everyone was a child once and some, unfortunately, still are. Basically attributing annoyances/disagreements to ignorance/differing values rather than malice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> paywalled.

<comment><USER30> Try searching the title + site from google, you'll get there without paying :)

<comment><USER31> That doesn't actually work — I just tried it.

<comment><USER32> worked for me

<comment><USER33> In my case there are 2 conditions required:

\- Search referer, i.e. clicking in from google search or using HN "web" link

\- Clean WSJ site cookies or incognito mode

Maybe one of you read the WSJ recently, and one hadn't?

<comment><USER31> Yup, I had already clicked on the article, so the WSJ knew that I'd been there previously.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Poor Imitation of Alan Turing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/19/poor-imitation-alan-turing/ <comment><USER2> I agree with the author's criticism of the movie, but I still personally enjoyed The Imitation Game.

It's good entertainment even if it is quite exaggerated and not 100% historically accurate. If it exposes more people to some of the history of computing and one of its great early engineers then I think that is positive.

<comment><USER3> Where did you see it? Everything says it came out in November in the US but I still haven't seen it in any of the theaters in my state (even the biggest ones in all the large cities).

<comment><USER4> In the Bay Area it all but completely disappeared a week after it came out. A real shame too, I was looking forward to it.

<comment><USER5> I saw it yesterday at the Embarcadero Center Cinema and it's going to be there for at least the upcoming week.

[http://www.landmarktheatres.com/san-francisco/embarcadero- ce...](http://www.landmarktheatres.com/san-francisco/embarcadero-center- cinema)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Enigma (2001) is a better film. It, too, has a gratuitous spy plot. Actually, not only were there no leaks from Bletchley Park, the secret was kept until the early 1970s, and full details didn't come out until the 1990s. Turing was a reasonably important figure at Bletchley Park, which had about 9000 people at peak. But there were lots of other smart people working on the problem. Dilley Knox was in charge of the cryptanalysis, and Gordon Welchman did much of the design on the improvements to the Polish Bombe. Welchman went on to teach the first computer course at MIT and worked on computers until the early 1970s. He overcame his early opposition to vacuum tubes; he thought they would be too unreliable.

The real secret of US and British cryptanalytic efforts was to approach it as an industrial problem. That was new. Cryptanalysis until WWII was someone at a desk with pencil and paper. Cryptanalytic units were tens of people. The WWII effort on the Allied side involved not only Bletchly Park, but a big operation at Arlington Hall in the US and another operation in Hawaii. Bombes, the electromechanical key-testers, were built by the British Tabulating Machine Company, National Cash Register, and Western Electric. (NCR's was the most useful and was produced in large quantities.) About 60,000 people were involved at peak. It wasn't clear until long after WWII how big the operation was. Few people were allowed to see more than a small part of it. This wasn't a "one lone genius" thing.

Some of the secrecy was to make Churchill look good. There were times during WWII when Churchill sent a message to a general facing heavy opposition "Press on and you will be victorious", and took historical credit for his courage and decisiveness. Decades later we find out that Churchill had info such as "14th Panzer low on fuel and ammo, cannot fight for more than 2 hours" from intercepts. All German units sent in a strength return each day (all serious armies do this) which reads like "#1, 12000, #2, 450 ..." and is simply many effective soldiers, how much ammo, and other basic numbers. It's dull, boring, and tells which units can fight effectively and how far they can move. Much of Bletchley Park's work was decrypting and tabulating that info, which told Allied commanders where the weak spots were on the German side.

<comment><USER7> _Enigma (2001) is a better film._

I haven't seen that, but my understanding is that they cast him as straight. If so, how is it possible to get past that (rather insulting) inaccuracy?

 _All German units sent in a strength return each day (all serious armies do this) which reads like "#1, 12000, #2, 450 ..." and is simply many effective soldiers, how much ammo, and other basic numbers. It's dull, boring, and tells which units can fight effectively and how far they can move. Much of Bletchley Park's work was decrypting and tabulating that info, which told Allied commanders where the weak spots were on the German side._

Can't believe that there wasn't a glut of bogus strength reports floating around. ("No, Mr. Turing, your friends will find that the 14th Panzer is fully armed and operational.")

<comment><USER8> The point is that the Ultra secret was so well kept that the Germans didn't know their ciphers were broken. They had no reason to send fake strength reports.

<comment><USER9> The point is, they had little reason _not_ to.

<comment><USER10> Nothing particularly prevents disinformation from reaching your own side. The more obvious it is that a channel is "false", the less likely you are to fool the enemy, but the more "real" the channel is the more likely you are to fool _yourself_. A study of the history of war will show armies generally have a hard enough time inculcating themselves with cultures that will prevent them from deliberately lying to themselves as it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I had the same feeling when watching this film. Instead of giving this portrayal the depth Turing deserved, Cumberbatch instead fell back on his usual typecast genius character with minor tweaks. Very disappointing.

<comment><USER12> Cumberbatch didn't write the screenplay.

<comment><USER11> Nonetheless, he was poorly cast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree with the article on the idea that Turing didn't get jokes. Us hackers like jokes and can very well understand them. How can you do tricky crosswords and not get double meanings, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here is James Grime's (Enigma and Alan Turing expert/fanboy) comments on The Imitation Game: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCSp1RZLhkg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCSp1RZLhkg) [http://aperiodical.com/2014/11/an-alan-turing-expert- answers...](http://aperiodical.com/2014/11/an-alan-turing-expert-answers-your- the-imitation-game-questions/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand why some caricature of a gay man has to be used when the actual Turing is so much more lively, complete, and interesting. One- dimensional characters might work great in a light comedy or something, but I expect something greater from a work purporting to be a biopic of an important historical figure (and important not just to the war but also for computing, in my opinion his greater contribution to the world).

</comment><comment><USER16> Compared to Hackers (1995) and the Matrix (1999) (and countless others), I could watch this movie over and over again. I supremely enjoyed it.

<comment><USER17> Hacker's is mostly like a children's movie. Matrix on the other side is excellent IMHO.

Another good movie on the topic of computers is 'The traveling salesman' and 'Sneakers'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always been skeptical of the suicide issue. We don't know what happened to Alan Turing at the end of his life, but of all the available options suicide by far makes the most sense.

I'm having trouble finding the sources now, but I could've sworn I remembered reading that no-warning, no-note suicide is not at all uncommon. And it's especially true with men, I thought.

<comment><USER18> I agree with this. We've had this discussion on HN before (at least once) [1]. And the claim that Turing "bore the [chemical castration] with fortitude" is ludicrous, and the more likely explanation is that he had erected a facade of equanimity. I still dislike the film's portrayal of his death because it was too cowardly to point fingers and actually show his state-induced suicide – or too anxious to show it as ambiguous, just like the film couldn't even bring itself to show him kissing another man, instead resorting to a female love interest. The film makers can cry "historically accurate" all they like. In reality, it's _anything but_ accurate to put such emphasis on a non-homosexual relationship.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150781](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150781)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Quite enjoyed the film but I think it's best scene (when they realise how to speed up the machine analysis and manage to decipher the latest transmission) is immediately followed by its worst (melodramatic revelation that one of the characters relatives was about to die).

</comment><comment><USER20> TLDR; Real life doesn't make for a movie anyone wants to watch, so the director added a bit of extra drama and rearranged a few things to make for a coherent story.

<comment><USER21> From Scott Aaronson's review ([http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2096](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2096)):

> The fabrications were especially frustrating to me, because we _know_ it's > possible to bring Alan Turing's story to life in a way that fully honors the > true science and history. We know that, because Hugh Whitemore's 1986 play > _Breaking the Code_ did it. The producers of _The Imitation Game_ would've > done better just to junk their script, and remake _Breaking the Code_ into a > Hollywood blockbuster. (Note that there is a 1996 BBC adaptation of > _Breaking the Code_ , with Derek Jacobi as Turing.)

<comment><USER22> Whoa, the whole thing is on Youtube! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S23yie-779k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S23yie-779k)

<comment><USER23> Thanks, added to my watch list. My Mum directed a theatre production of this years ago, and it's still one of the most memorable plays I've seen, be interesting to see the Beeb version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems to be the summary of the article:

> _These errors are not random; there is a method to the muddle. The > filmmakers see their hero above all as a martyr of a homophobic > Establishment, and they are determined to lay emphasis on his victimhood._</comment>


A 17th-Century Japanese Artist Is Once Again Making Waves - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/renowned-forgotten-japanese-artist-making-waves-180957491/?no-ist <comment><USER2> Quite interesting. I am familiar with Hokusai who was active in the 18/19th centuries, and who is considered a direct influence on the European impressionists in the late 1800's.

Hokusai's iconic "Great Wave off Kanagawa" was a form used by some impressionists in their own work. Though the article didn't discuss it, there's definitely similarity to the "Great Wave" in the earlier work by Sōtatsu. I assume there was a flow of influence over the century between the artists' lives that emerged in Hokusai's imagery.

Goes to show that much of the time new ideas are not completely original. We all borrow from others, whether or not we realize it. Being reminded of it from time to time can help us stay grounded in reality.

<comment><USER3> From T.S. Eliot's "East Comer":

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate—but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.</comment></comment>


The Vacuum Transistor: A Device Made of Nothing - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised the IEEE editors allowed the word "Introducing" in the title. Vacuum FETs are often a target of the diamond thin-film community. (Diamond has a very interesting electronegativity: Very little energy is required to get an electron out of diamond and into the "vacuum" (usually air.))

<comment><USER3> The problem is with carbon in general is it has a band gap 5x larger then Silicon. Which overall (but not entirely) means if you want to build a transistor with Diamond (or graphene) you need to put 5x as much voltage into it.

The reason graphene is great for transistors is with its higher band energy its 5x harder for it to soft set itself. So if we pretend todays 11nm transistors have a 1% chance of electron tunneling, carbon would have a 0.2%.

The problem is that same switch would take 5x as much power to switch. Which means a modern 220w cpu would now need 1100watts of power :x

<comment><USER4> You started by saying 5x voltage, switched to 5x power, and ended with 5x energy.

Those are not the same thing. You can have 5x voltage without changing the power or the energy.

<comment><USER5> You can have 5x the voltage without changing the power consumption if you reduce the capacitance. If you keep the transistors at the same size, a computer working with 5x mode voltage will use 5x more power if operating at the same frequency. (But you can probably make it run faster...)

That said, except for very few embedded applications, computers today operate on a voltage that's much bigger than the silicon band gap. I'm not convinced it'd be a problem.

<comment><USER6> Actually, all else being constant, 5x voltage yields 25x power:

P = CV^2 * f (multiply by activity factor if pedantic; assuming all transistors toggle every cycle here.)

<comment><USER5> And, of course, you are right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm no scientographer, but it seems to me that a dependence on helium may be a stumbling point for getting cheap vacuum transistors to the market. The ongoing helium shortage[1] is driving the price of helium up which could make helium-based vacuum transistors expensive, limiting widespread adoption. It could be that high-speed helium vacuum transistors become a speciality product for those projects that feel the need justifies the additional cost.

[1] [http://www.decodedscience.com/helium-shortage-situation- upda...](http://www.decodedscience.com/helium-shortage-situation-update-one- year-later/42314)

<comment><USER8> Well, let's see, a modern chips die size is on the order of 300mm^2. Let's be generous (I think) and call it 5mm thick. A single helium canister can contain around 300 cubic feet of helium [1]. Those are nasty units to work with by hand, but [https://www.google.com/search?q=%28300+cubic+feet%29+%2F+%28...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%28300+cubic+feet%29+%2F+%28300mm^2+*+5mm%29+) suggests one such cylinder would be enough for 5.5 million new chips, assuming the entire chip was just helium. You can probably safely add at least two more entire factors of magnitude for the fact the chip will still mostly be silicon (or something), my gut suggests 3 or 4 is probably even closer.

Oh, sure, there will be losses and such, but this is still a trivial expense next to the billions of dollars of fab work that will be required. In these quantities we literally use gold without hardly a second thought for price.

[1]: [http://www.praxairdirect.com/Product2_10152_10051_14626_-1_1...](http://www.praxairdirect.com/Product2_10152_10051_14626_-1_11537___ProductDisplayErrorView)

<comment><USER9> 300mm^2 * 5mm = 1.5 milliliters

24k Gold is 42$/gram, 1 gram is 0.052 milliliters.

So, 42 / .052 * 1.5 = 1,211$.

Note: The important parts are not 5mm thick etc, but gold is rather expensive by volume.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, by "these quantities" I meant "at computer-chip quantities" in general; gold we pretty much use by _area_ , and not much of that, either. The numbers I gave were purposely quite generous for volume. After all, I did say they were probably 3 or 4 orders of magnitude too generous. Per reitzensteinm's post, looks like you can recover another 1.5 or so out of my chip-height estimate, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Regarding the opening anecdote - some have suggested the Soviets used vacuum tubes so that their planes would survive the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion.

<comment><USER11> DISCLAIMER: This is what I remember once _hearing_ in an ECE class. I was hesitant to post this comment given that it might be garbage, but perhaps someone can help confirm or disprove this.

I once heard that one of the reasons the Soviets continued to use analog systems was that they were "faster, more compact, and more power efficient" [than a digital computer]. This came at the cost of flexibility. For example, an op-amp allegedly can do integration faster and with less power than a digital computer, but the IC can't be reprogrammed. Digital computers have huge benefits, but ones that come at a cost.

Thoughts/input anyone? As I said, I might be completely off base so please nobody take that as anything more than "food for though".

<comment><USER12> At 1980s levels of integration, then I'd agree that for many sorts of signal processing it's easier to do it in analog than digital. Especially if all your engineers are trained for analog. In 2014 the situation is the other way round.

Robustness of power electronics is another consideration: tubes are mechanically fragile but not vulnerable to ESD, whereas FETs are, especially during assembly. If their factory process control was poor it would have been easier to stick with the tubes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does one speed-test a device that switches significantly faster than the available electronics?

<comment><USER14> drive a periodic waveform and sample repeatedly. Assuming you don't somehow sample the same point in the periodic waveform each time, you'll eventually get the complete waveform.

<comment><USER2> > Assuming you don't somehow sample the same point in the periodic waveform > each time, you'll eventually get the complete waveform.

To add an example of a real technique: You can use a short laser pulse and change the time-of-flight (mirrored path on a stepper motor, for instance). This technique will get you to the terahertz region, which is pretty much state of the art for where electronic devices still have gain.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_time- domain_spectrosc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_time- domain_spectroscopy#Electro-optical_sampling)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh that is pretty cool. I wonder if they have considered them as power switching devices. Something like that which had an effective Rds of nano-ohms could make electric cars more efficient.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I'm skeptical about plans to build whole integrated circuits out of them, but these high frequency, low-loss devices could be killer for a lot power electronics applications— motor controllers, DCDCs, etc.

<comment><USER17> Not sure about high power, but the physical requirement for small size scale combined with the engineering goal of high current is usually contradictory.

I do absolutely think this could be awesome for lower power ultra tiny DC-DC converters though. For instance:

[http://hexus.net/tech/news/psu/64161-finsix-laptop-power- sup...](http://hexus.net/tech/news/psu/64161-finsix-laptop-power-supply- quarter-size-traditional-models/)

is pushing to high enough frequencies so as to not need an inductor at all. Problem with high frequencies is that usually the efficiency drops, so there's a tradeoff. But if you can avoid the switching losses by moving to a transistor with higher operating frequencies, it might be quite good =)

Or the tiny size might work well for letting you do cool stuff like on-chip DC-DC conversion where you don't need an inductor because it's all so fast...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would a guitar amp built with these sound like a tube amp?

<comment><USER5> I'd bet computers will be emulating the sound of vacuum tubes way before any of those things get into market.

You can get the correct vacuum tube-like amplification from a computer today, it's just that tubes are still cheaper. A/D converters and first stage linear amplifiers are only getting cheaper (even at this, post Moore's law era), thus it's only a matter of time before computers retire valves on yet another application.

EDIT: Also, tunnel devices have a completely different behavior from macroscopic valves. They are very non-linear, what makes them great at digital applications, but horrible sound amplifiers.

<comment><USER19> They already do. Check out Line6.com

<comment><USER20> Won't prevent audiophiles from being audiophiles. I remember reading a screed against double-blind testing on some magazine (would link to, but can't find it)

<comment><USER5> Audiophiles are funny.

I had a huge problem of making an D/A converter with enough precision for instrumentation a while back, but designing some digital I/O with enough bandwidth for it was a nightmare. Then I looked at the Internet and saw an audiophile complaining that a soundcard[1] with 20dB less noise than my design was crap.

1 - A PCI express card, of course. Didn't try that bus. I'd have a really bad time manualy creating a board for it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why There Are No New Social Networks - <AUTHOR> https://theringer.com/social-media-invention-facebook-twitter-snapchat-tech-e40178df183 <comment><USER3> Twitch? Github? Lots of "social" going on over there, last I checked. I feel the definition of social is just getting laundered in the article to fit the authors size.

The beauty of the Internet has always been the way sub-nieches grows into their own communities once their parents become too diverse. For me, Facebook always felt like the last monolith that "tried to do it all". It now acquires sub-niches instead.

<comment><USER4> Right. Everything is social now. The article's argument seems to be a no true scotsman fallacy. Of course there aren't any new facebook clones right now, why create one? But we've seen instagram grow like crazy (which is why FB bought them) and snapchat and twitch and kik and medium and whatsapp and slack, and so on. Things don't have to look exactly like what the previous generation looked like to fill the same ecological niche. Just look at smartphones and tablets (once derided as toys) as people's daily communication devices versus laptops, desktops, and telephones. Times change.

Don't ask "where are the things that look exactly like X social media platform but with different details" (e.g. facebook versus google+) instead ask "where are people spending their social time these days, is it in the same places it's always been or are new places becoming more popular?".

Also, to add on to your point about "sub-niches" one thing that facebook lacks is character, even though one of the primary organizing principles for social spaces is unique character and shared interest (look at HN, for example). People organize socially _around_ interests. One easy way to take on a monolith like facebook is to take a stand, carve out a niche, have a unique character and build a sub-niche there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mastodon was 30k last week, over 200k now. At that rate it looks like it might reach critical mass.

<comment><USER6> Which social media giant do you suppose will buy/copy* them before they become too much of a threat?

* - <USER2>

<comment><USER7> This is the correct answer to OP's article title. Any social network that looks viable will be killed in its cradle* or integrated into one of the big boys.

* of course I mean acquired

<comment><USER8> This is an open source, decentralized network. It has many existential threats, but being bought out isn't one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> how can a piece like this not even mention reddit?

admittedly, its not as popular as facebook, but it seems to be a 'newer' paradigm of social network than the big ones.

more unmentioned platforms include tinder and other purpose-driven social networks like quora and meetup.

<comment><USER10> Reddit started 2005. How is it new?

<comment><USER11> It should be mentioned in these types of lists. It's not fair to say "Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat... and the rest". Reddit is huge

<comment><USER12> Not just in DAU either. Mind-share wise, it has a huge influence on the wider web and is increasingly _the_ platform for content stealers (the 9gags, buzzfeeds, and facebook pages).

<comment><USER13> 9gag has been caught time and time again using bots to just rip off whatever was trending on reddit's r/all feed (most obvious when they copy SubRedditSimulator, which is just a Markov Chain recombination of other trending posts).

This has been going on for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article is just not doing a very good job of identifying social networks. Whatsapp is BIG. There are also many non-US base social network, like WeChat, that was not on their radar screen.

EDIT: I should explain myself more.

For my mom, her social network is a paper address book and her phone. That's the technology she use to get in touch with her friends.

Whatapps has the necessary technology and feature. What makes it a "social network" in this context is the adoption. If a large number of your peers are using it as a main way to get in touch, it is their "social network". You may not think of it as such because it looks different than Facebook. But this will become more apparent if you are aware how much penetration it has in some communities.

<comment><USER15> Whatsapp isn't a social network, is it?

<comment><USER14> It is very much a social network. That's the place I go to for group chat, catching up with friends and share irrelevant stuff. It wasn't branded as such. But it is entirely social.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know Mastodon is only for super-nerds right now and probably won't become big. But if it does it'll be SUPER interesting, since it can't be bought. Sorta misleading to mention Mastodon without noting that.

<comment><USER17> > since it can't be bought

This is not precisely true. Read some of this description in the FAQ [1]:

> What is mastodon.social? _The "flagship" instance of Mastodon, aka the > server I run myself with the latest code. It's not supposed to be the only > instance in the end._

> What else is part of the federated network? _Let 's call it the "fediverse". > It has existed for a longer while, populated by GNU social servers, > Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora etc. Not every one of those servers is fully > compatible with every other. Mastodon strives to be fully standards- > compliant and compatibility with GNU social is higher in priority than the > others._

> I tried logging into a GNU social client app with Mastodon and it didn't > work, why? _While Mastodon is compatible with GNU social in terms of server > to server communication, the client to server API (aka how you access > Mastodon) is different. Therefore, client apps that were made for > specifically GNU social will not work with Mastodon. The reason for this is > half technical, half ideological._

While I applaud the ideals espoused in these paragraphs - and completely understand the technical reasons why it's not compatible with some older protocols, why there is a flagship instance, and so on - imagine for a minute that the current developers were supplemented/replaced with a group of people who wanted to "own Mastodon". They could give the flagship instance at mastodon.social proprietary add-ons, not available to other instances. They could develop "Mastodon Pro" mobile apps that don't prioritize standards compatibility, but are compatible with the flagship instance. They could get on the standards committees so that they're difficult to implement, and not followed precisely by their clients. And while they do claim to be disinterested in VC funding, monetizing, advertising, and anything of that sort, well, money can be very persuasive.

[1] [https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/e92a1cf436b99757e...](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/e92a1cf436b99757e82d0234ca54b6c41b7ddb16/docs/Using- Mastodon/FAQ.md)

<comment><USER18> If people are bothered by that, they'll set up their own instances and fork the repo. In theory, the health of the network doesn't depend on the flagship instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think what a lot of people fail to mention is that messaging platforms have almost eliminated the need for a lot of social networking functionality. Kik, imessage, facebook message, and even text.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why are there so few new car companies? Because Ford, GM, and Chrysler did a great job of building brands, distribution, and acquiring their smaller competitors. The World Wars and subsequent reinvestment in the impacted countries yielded some great international competition. Now Tesla and maybe Apple will enter.

If you look at almost every industry there is a ~50 year period where there is a huge amount of creative destruction and then a trend towards conglomeration. It's why we still use Alexander Graham Bell's phone services, Thomas Edison's industrial equipment, and watch movies from the Warner Brothers.

If you look at a list of the top 25 Pharma companies, you'll see that there are as many companies on the list founded before 1781 and after 1981. This will likely happen with tech too.

</comment><comment><USER21>
      There is also a trend that smartphone users are not
      downloading as many apps today as they did in the early
      days of mobile technology. That means any new app has a
      significant challenge to get exposure, users, and loyalty.

This and the big social media network/chat check the postings and block mentioning of and links to new social networks, to prevent early uptake. If you try to invite more than a few of your friends to try out something new, they won't receive the message, the post won't be visible in their news stream, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER22> Because it's hard to create niche networks that are simpler or easier or more compelling than Facebook. And if you do, Facebook will eventually buy someone who does the same thing and incorporate.

Now I notice that other tech giants have been emulating Cisco's model of constant acquisitions to adapt to rivals. For example, if Twitch ever threatened its market share, it could simply make or buy its own Twitch, considering it already has all the same resources.

</comment><comment><USER23> I just realized how little I know about these fringe social media apps. I'm embarrassed to say that I was lost as she referred to apps like Peach and Mastadon (am I even remembering the names correctly).

</comment><comment><USER24> not even a single mention of WeChat in the article</comment>


British divers at heart of Thai cave rescue among best in world - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/03/british-divers-at-heart-of-thai-cave-rescue-among-best-in-world <comment><USER2> Worth reading the linked page [0] about one of the diver's custom reassembled rebeather, which means they have two systems to reduce the need for backup tanks of air, but still be able to fit in the caves. Really incredible, particularly as they work as volunteers.

[0] - [http://www.therebreathersite.nl/06_Homebuilders/john_volanth...](http://www.therebreathersite.nl/06_Homebuilders/john_volanthen_c-96.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17446995)

<comment><AUTHOR> Related, but this article is more of a background-piece on the divers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can recommend the documentary film "Diving into the unknown". About Finnish cave divers that dive to return the bodies of their dead friends in Norwegian cave. [http://www.divingintotheunknown.com/en](http://www.divingintotheunknown.com/en)</comment>


The Warp 10 Platform – Geo and sensor data - <AUTHOR> http://www.warp10.io/ <comment><USER2> > Complex searches like "find all the sensors active during last Monday in the > perimeter delimited by this geo-fencing polygon"

That's like 140 characters in Postgres/postgis. It's basic stuff, nothing _remotely_ complex.

<comment><USER3> I doubt you record all positions of a sensor updated several times per second in PostGres.

And in case you do store all your time series data in PostGres, WarpScript can still be used and retrieve data from PostGres.</comment></comment>


GoT S7E6 Leaked - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/freefolk/comments/6tzpmp/episode_6_has_leaked/ <comment><USER2> Notably, not by the hacker... Accidentally aired in Spain...</comment>


Google: $100M Golden Handcuffs On Wildfire To Retain Employees After Acquisition - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/06/google-wildfire-100-million/ <comment><USER2> I was recently talking to someone who worked for a company that was acquired by google. He seemed to think the setup was bittersweet. On one hand all he had to do was stay for 1.5-3 years (I forget exactly how long) and his 500K in google stock would vest. On the other hand he was stuck there, working on a really boring project translating some API (or something similar that sounded just as boring as he made it out to be). He said he was in at 11 and out by 4 every day, and most of that time was surfing the internet. It must be nice to get paid an average of 300k a year - with awesome benefits - to do nothing, but it also kind of sucks to feel like you don't accomplish much every day.

<comment><USER3> I doubt anyone is stopping him from doing more, being promoted, and so on. It probably just seems pointless when you're getting paid so much.

<comment><USER2> The way he put it it's not possible for him to switch projects, and it's not simple to take on a second project because he's supposed to be fulltime on the transition. But I don't know the details, I'm not clear how Google's project management works.

<comment><USER4> The way I see it, there are always boring jobs that need to be done, and paying more for them is one reasonable way of convincing people to do them. Yeah, it might be boring, but on the other hand he works short hours and gets paid really well. It's up to him whether this tradeoff is worth it - personally, I would say he should use the extra time he has thanks to his short hours to do something more interesting on the side, while still doing the boring job to pay the bills.

<comment><USER5> except that anything interesting he does 'on the side' is owned by el goog?

<comment><USER6> Not likely.

YMMV depending upon where you live but in California what you do on your own time with your own equipment belongs to you, not your employer.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a lawyer, so keep in mind that I have no idea what I'm talking about, but see comments by DannyBee in this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4051635>

The way I read it is that Google has their hands in so many projects that they would have a good claim on your free-time work, even in California. Just another good reason to ignore their recruiter emails.

<comment><USER3> Google also has a rather simple process for getting your intellectual property back. It's been discussed on HN before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4051325>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For comparison, when Google acquired Slide two years ago, the acquired employees numbered fewer than 100 (vs Wildfire's 400) and retention packages summed to $46 million.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't really understand why people get so mad when being acquired by Google. For me it doesn't make any sense to sell your company, even worse if it's to Google.

</comment><comment><USER10> I want some of that golden money!</comment>


Oklahoma station drops evolution from showing of Cosmos - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/03/oklahoma-station-drops-evolution-from-showing-of-cosmos/

<comment><USER2> Congratulations! You are now part of a list of historical events in television history. It is the list of TV stations that drop things because of a worldview which, in retrospect, is totally fucked up.

I'm afraid, though, that you are not No. 1 on that list. This honor goes to the proud but narrowminded people of various TV stations that refused to broadcast the Uhura-Kirk kiss.</comment>


Founder Inner Conflict: Engineer vs. Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://bradt.ca/archives/founder-inner-conflict-engineer-vs-entrepreneur/ <comment><USER2> Great piece...the duality of man. The yin and the yang, etc.</comment>


C++React: A reactive programming library for C++11 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/schlangster/cpp.react

<comment><USER2> There's also Rx.cpp[1], which follows in the same vein as Rx.NET, RxJava, and RxJS (so may be easier to pick up if you're familiar with one of those).

[1] [https://github.com/Reactive- Extensions/RxCpp](https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/RxCpp)

<comment><USER3> Yep, speaking as part of the team, we're committed to making it cross platform where it works with GCC, Clang and MSVC. It works on Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, Android and iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not bitching but it's a tad confusing it's called React because I assumed it's a UI library similar to ReactJS (whereas it's more like Rx and friends). Still, awesome to see ideas from Rx getting traction in all languages!

<comment><AUTHOR> The name was originally inspired by scala-react ([https://github.com/ingoem/scala-react](https://github.com/ingoem/scala- react)). In terms of the API, that's where I was starting from, but I made a couple of changes along the way.

Rx (in particular the C++ implementation) is actually still something I have to look into. I've been watching Erik Meijer's videos, so I know about Rx in general, but I'm not familiar enough with it yet to understand if and where there are any fundamental differences (besides the API and features). Once I've worked that out, I'll probably add a FAQ section to the documentation.</comment></comment>


The R learning curve - <AUTHOR> http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-r-learning-curve.html <comment><USER2> I've had to learn R during my master (in statistics), and found the process very unpleasant.

There are different ways in which a language can be difficult to learn. Haskell has a steep learning curve because it has a lot of unusual concepts (for those who come from an imperative background) and requires a shift in the way we think about code. J is also difficult to learn because the syntax is crazy, and again, the language is very different from what we're used to.

I found R difficult to learn because it is seems inconsistent to me. Now one reason might be that I picked up bits of R here and there without taking the time to learn the syntax from a book (unlike what I did for other languages), but it took me quite some time to be able to make sense of the different structures (vector, list, matrix, dataframe), their differences, and in particular how functions operate differently on these structures. I also have a deep hatred for the system of attributes (why would anyone want to give attributes to a vector...), and find the indexing system (especially for lists) to be nonsensical. In fact, I think that lists themselves are terrible to work with.

The general impression that I've had learning R is the language is not coherent and systematic in its design in the way other languages are (I know python, c, common lisp, ...), and I find myself spending a lot of time in the interpreter simply trying out things because I'm not sure that it will return what I want, in the format that I want (which never happens to me in any other language).

Now don't get me wrong, I use R daily and it's a useful tool. It has lots of great libraries, including the fantastic ggplot2, and the remarkable Rcpp (best C++ interface I've ever seen.. ok I haven't seen any other, but this one is really great). But learning it was no fun, and if the statistics community decided to move to a cleaner language, I'd definitely be running ahead..

<comment><USER3> In R, I often can write a dozen line program that will do something incredible, but it might take an hour to hammer out those lines and cannot reconstruct them from memory because of inconsistencies in syntax. It sort of feels like a statistics DSL built on Lisp.

<comment><USER4> R is _exactly like_ a statistics DSL built on Lisp. The first sentences of a talk by Ihaka [1] are:

> _R began as an experiment in trying to use the methods of Lisp implementors > to build a small testbed which could be used to trial some ideas on how a > statistical environment might be built. Early on, the decision was made to > use an S-like syntax. Once that decision was made, the move toward being > more and more like S has been irresistible._

Since I find it basically impossible to remember how 'eval', 'quote', 'substitute', etc. work in R, I suspect that the Lispers are onto something when they say that the lack of syntax in Lisp is an important feature.

[1] [http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/Interface9...](http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/%7Eihaka/downloads/Interface98.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few resources that might speed the learning curve

Survival guide

<http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/09/survive-r/>

Tutorials

<http://www.statmethods.net/index.html>

<http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/r.old.html>

<http://www.twotorials.com/>

<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming>

<http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Paradis-rdebuts_en.pdf>

Docs

<http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html>

StackOverflow

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r?sort=votes&p...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r?sort=votes&pagesize=15)

Cheat sheeets

<http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf>

<http://bit.ly/VHPA3G>

R Journal <http://journal.r-project.org/>

R News (predecessor to R Journal) <http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/>

Rseek search engine <http://rseek.org/>

R could use something like the Python ecosystem intro, explaining where to find stuff, not sure if any of the tutorials are as canonical as for instance Dive Into Python or Learn Python The Hard Way.

<comment><USER4> > _R could use something like the Python ecosystem intro, explaining where to > find stuff, not sure if any of the tutorials are as canonical as for > instance Dive Into Python or Learn Python The Hard Way._

It only became popular recently; the expectation used to be that you'd learn R while enrolled in a statistics class. The canonical references are books: Modern Applied Statistics with S, R Graphics, etc. I assume that will change soon.

<comment><USER5> Would be great if the CRAN package repositories had ratings and download counts.

It can be hard to find the 'right way' to do something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> R is my mistress and my wife.

Hadley Wickham held the ceremony.

Data.Table is the glue that holds together our tenuous marriage.

cats[color="brown",summary(tooth_length),by=list(breed,age)]. This line of code will efficiently grab all the brown cats in your data and summarize their tooth length by mean, median and other quartiles then break it out by the cats breed and age.

Every time I use a language I can't lapply I despise the language and all those involved.

R is hugely inconsistent and terribly inefficient. But its also the most irresistible blend of lispy and object oriented for when you actually need to get data analysis done.

</comment><comment><USER3> I spent about a year blogging about R as I learned it (<http://www.r-chart.com/>). It is not a general purpose sort of language but is great for math / charting tasks. A couple of ways that software developer types can minimize time to get up and running:

1) Check out <http://www.r-bloggers.com/>. The site gives you a good sense of the state of R and Tal (who runs the site) has done a great job of promoting R and encouraging the community.

2) Pick one graphics package and stick with it. The standard functions are sufficient but ggplot2 has a more finished appearance.

3) Review available libraries. If you want to do something, someone else likely already has and has posted a package to CRAN.

4) One way for SQL developers to limit the need of learning the idiosyncrasies of the language is to use the sqldf package to manipulate data frames and use ggplot2 (which generally takes data frames as arguments) to display charts.

</comment><comment><USER7> This sounds like the experience of a beginning programmer learning pretty-much any popular scripting language.

> _I found that regular expressions ... are a great way to isolate the string > that one is looking for..._

Well I never!

I'm not criticising the guy who wrote this, but I don't know why this has been voted up on Hacker News.

<comment><USER8> To be honest, I found the entire coursera course on programming for data analytics to be in the same vein. So much time was spent explaining what each optional parameter to a function did that I skipped at least 50% of each lecture.

<comment><USER9> Same here, I gave up. I'd rather read about the syntax. Save the lectures for concepts that are hard to get across in text. I thought part of the problem was that the course was geared towards grad students for whom this might be their first programming language, as opposed to programmer who already know a couple languages.

<comment><USER10> I've been considering dropping the class as well. The course definitely seems like an R class for statisticians, whereas I am a programmer hoping to learn more about statistics. I'm trying to stick with it but I don't feel as though the course has been beneficial thus far.

<comment><USER8> I just skimmed through all the videos and then moved on to <https://class.coursera.org/dataanalysis-001> instead. It's from the same university, but it's much more "here are the statistical concepts, and I'll show you an implementation in R" rather than "here's the syntax for the R command that solves this particular riddle." Much better value for time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> R is probably the most frustrating language I've ever had to learn. For me, R doesn't so much have a learning "curve" as a learning "gradient". After a long, long time the rate of frustrations is not really leveling off much. Each time I have to negotiate a new library or module that I'm not familiar with I'm guaranteed hours of frustration as I try to grapple with what all the data types are, how they are subtly overridden to behave differently from the normal data types they inherit from, what things are going to be magically coerced into what other things without me realising it.

Even after 2 years of involvement with it, I regularly meet problems that frustrate me for hours, because they are hard to express in R's functional style. Even when I figure out the final solution, it often performs very poorly. In between these frustrations R behaves almost magically. It manipulates huge data sets with an ease and simplicity that defies logic. I've eventually come to the conclusion that an important aspect of R is knowing when NOT to use it. If your task is inherently stateful, involves random access to lots of sparse relational data that is associated in complex ways and with complicated logic - R is going to make your life hell. Write a quick script to pre-process your data and get things into more like a straight data table form and then proceed with R to analyse and visualize it. This is my experience, anyway!

</comment><comment><USER12> 3 packages:

plyr ggplot2 reshape

Learn those 3 and use them for everything you do in R.

<comment><USER13> plyr, while having awesome syntax, is really slow for anything beyond even the most modest dataset. Try using it with 50k rows, not to mention true "big data".

data.table is much faster. It's an extension to data.frames that adds some additional constrains/rules that allows for much faster operations including aggregating, subsetting, and merging data.

Cleaning data, however, does not have a steep learning curve or high difficulty level in R-- it has a steep learning curve and high difficulty level period. Implementing good procedures for data munging is 80% of the job.

<comment><USER3> Yeah - for the small data sets, Ruby or Python is often easier easier to use to whip a data set into a form that can be simply slurped into R as a dataframe.

<comment><USER14> With pandas / statsmodels / patsy, it's getting easier to stick with python for everything.

<comment><USER15> Don't forget Bokeh[1] - a replacement for ggplot2

[1] <https://github.com/ContinuumIO/Bokeh>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Cleaning the data - This takes time and it can be annoying.

Have you tried using Google Refine[1]? It's an excellent tool for cleaning datasets and a useful addition to your workflow. I was miffed I didn't know about it when I had to collect and analyze data from surveys awhile ago. I was using Python for cleanup (Google Refine supports Jython).

[1]: <http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/>

<comment><USER13> Google-refine does some really cool stuff, but one of the great developments in the last couple of years within the R community is a big push toward reproducible research and building a powerful toolchain to assist to that end.

The problem with Google-Refine is that it is very hard to recreate precisely the same steps to get from raw to processed data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Taking the exact same course and going the same process of learning!

</comment><comment><USER18> Is useful, and yes when something don't go in your code can be very frustrating... but not more than other languages. It is frustrating its own complex ways.

The documentation, for example. Often very abstract. Not to forget, the dificulty of the subjacent statistics for a lot of people. Some good Books can help with this.

The wow factor of R is very hight in any case. There is a lot of things currently that I can do only with R, thus... keep hammering _and_ take a look to as many R code as you can

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe it's just me, but I find it difficult not to make analogies between R and JavaScript. Both are dynamic, "script" languages with C-based syntax and with LISP-like nature that lurks underneath it. Both have functions as first class citizens. Both are inconsistent in different ways. Just to name a few ... I think that these analogies reduced frustration that I had felt about R once when I "discovered" them and helped me to adopt and learn R.

</comment><comment><USER20> My personal observation (after 6 years of using and 3 years of teaching R) is that people misunderstand R by skipping the array paradigm part. If you don't get it, others' code looks like magic and either your code is slow and ugly or you seek rescue in "more-magic" wrappers like sqldf, plyr or data.table.

It's a bit like JavaScript; if you treat JS like "Java script" or "C without types", you'll suffer. Exploit its true nature and it will flourish.

<comment><USER21> I disagree. I've used Matlab for 4 years and switched to Numpy/Scipy 2 years ago -- so I understand the array paradigm part. The problem with R is the inconsistency and verbosity in syntax and semantics of the array language underlying it -- as other comments have pointed out.

Some differences in ease of use:

[1] Construct a matrix

MATLAB: y = [1 1; 2 2; 6 6];

R: y <\- matrix(c(1, 2, 6, 1, 2, 6), 3)

[2] Insert a new row r = [3 3];

MATLAB: x = [y; r];

R: x <\- rbind(y, c(r));

Which is intuitive and concise? ;)

<comment><USER20> So you also think that

      mean(iris(iris(:,5)==2,2))

is more intuitive than

      mean(iris[iris$Species=="versicolor","Sepal.Width"])?

Or that constructing matrix by mapping f on 1:10 like

      M=[]
      for not_i=1:10
        M[:,not_i]=f(not_i)

is more concise that sapply(1:10,f)? (I know there is arrayfun, but I have never seen it used except in wow-MATLAB-is-functional blog posts)

<comment><USER22> Or, you could just write:

        M = repmat(f(1:10), n, 1);

where 'n' gives the number of rows you want in 'M' and 'f' is written in proper "Matlab" style (i.e. behaves reasonably when given an array as input). Or, to be more in the spirit of linear algebra, you could write:

        M = ones(n,1) * f(1:10);

And, if you only want one row-wise copy, you could (succinctly) write:

        M = f(1:10);

Or, as you suggested, you could write something like:

        M = repmat(arrayfun(@(x)f(x), 1:10), n, 1);

Or, getting more silly, and using the handy bsxfun, you could write:

        M = bsxfun(@times, ones(n,10), f(1:10));

If you don't feel like implementing 'f' so as to permit array inputs, you could modify this to:

        M = bsxfun(@times, ones(n,10), arrayfun(@(x)f(x), 1:10));

Anyhow, Matlab is very productive if you can effectively wield its powerful built-ins.

<comment><USER20> You didn't get my example -- it was about how to make a matrix from the results of a non-vectorised function that gets one number and returns a vector (say performs a complex simulation).

The problem you've solved has an equally simple implementations in R; f(1:10) for a single copy, matrix(f(1:10),10,n) for n columns, matrix(f(1:10),n,10,byrow=T) for n rows, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't forget the free <http://tryr.codeschool.com/> from Code School and O'Reilly.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wouldn't it be better to have a Python statistics library instead of creating a new language? When I looked at the documentation of R it looked very convoluted and it seems that my feeling is confirmed by other comments in this thread.

<comment><USER21> Of course, these days Pandas is _the_ Python library for statistics. There is also scikit-learn.

<http://pandas.pydata.org/>

<comment><USER24> I haven't used R nor Pandas. How does the two compare? Why do people use R and not Python?

<comment><USER25> > Why do people use R and not Python?

R style DataFrames was raison d'etre of Pandas in the first place. (<http://pandas.pydata.org/#why-not-r>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm currently learning R and was hoping for a more detailed blog post. I found this to be a pretty bland report that would have been made much more interesting and useful if the author had included some concrete examples.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've compiled all the resources from the comments here [http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2013/02/some-learning- resources...](http://datagrad.blogspot.com/2013/02/some-learning-resources- for-r.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> for learning more about plotting, the gplot2 book is a tad expensive, but worthwhile. <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387981403> (it helped me understand the structure behind the library, which i found confusing from cookbooks etc)

<comment><USER13> I have found this [site] (<http://www.cookbook-r.com/>) to be more helpful (plus the online documentation for ggplot2 which is really good).

Hadley's book is really good and a solid treatment (from the author of so many clear, powerful package it's not a surprise), but there have been a lot of changes to ggplot2 since 2009. I have personally found ggplot2 to be so powerful because it lends itself very well to actually learning through using Cookbook-style examples.

<comment><USER28> The cookbook is now an O'Reilly book: <http://amzn.com/1449316956>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't know why a programmer would limit them self with static data tools when d3 and processing provide beautiful, dynamic, and interactive solutions with a similar learning curve. The only difference is you can use the JavaScript chops you pick up learning d3 in any front end work you do.

<comment><USER4> Sounds great! What's the MCMC package for javascript?

<comment><USER30> I worked with a computer scientist once, and he tested out lots of languages for replacing his VB setup (I know, I was surprised too). JS turned out to be the fastest language for a lot of his tests. If the libraries ever get there, it will be lethal. Presumably there might be a way to compile java libraries to JS using Rhino, but its not something I've ever investigated.</comment></comment></comment>


Is ToyBots not thinking big enough? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/17/is-toybots-dreaming-big-enough/

<comment><AUTHOR> The article is so-so, but the comments have some interesting discussion points.</comment>


Ask HN: UML-like diagrams for Lisp? - <AUTHOR>

After some years programming in Java and OO languages, I'm looking for a change and started learning Clojure and LISP.
When designing a new application in Java or another OO language, I can sketch on a paper or imagine some UML diagrams that help me get an overview of the most important parts of the application. I find them useful, sort of a "mind map" for wrapping my mind around the whole application. These diagrams (class, component, objects) give me a high level of abstraction, allowing me to focus on the most important concepts and helping me exclude details that only cause an information overload when understanding the problem at hand.
Now, while learning Clojure, I can't find an effective way to do the same thing. In OOP, objects and classes fit nicely in an UML diagram, but Clojure/LISP functions in an application are many, smaller and so much more difficult to fit in a small, clear diagram.
How do you Clojure and LISP experts create a "mind map" diagram for the applications you are building? <comment><USER2> UML is not only about class diagrams.

If you use classes and objects in LISPs (Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure...), you can create the class diagrams and they will work. In Clojure I usually started (and I've seen others do the same) with some functions which operates over hash-maps (or a-lists in LISP). And on the end of the day, when I was creating the interface for call from java, I put the the needed hash-maps to defrecords. If I did the class diagrams, it was afterwards when the relationship between records was clear. Honestly, I don't usually create them anyway even at my work (C#) - only when the releationships between objects are complex or in some "unexpected" ways.

But other UML diagrams are perfecly applicable even in functional languages. The component diagram, use case diagram, communication diagram ... they are universal. The same for E-R diagram - if you use relational database in functional/logical language, it's sometimes good to have it.</comment>


Pebble Smartwatch Is Coming To Best Buy On July 7 For $149.95 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/02/pebble-smartwatch-is-coming-to-best-buy-july-7-for-149-95/

<comment><USER2> A year ago people were foaming at the mouth at the prospect of a watch that was a vibrating e-ink backlit display with buttons and customizable watch face options and a battery that could go a week between charges.

Now it's getting panned for being nothing but a vibrating e-ink backlit display with buttons and customizable watch face options and a battery that could go a week between charges. Go figure.

I backed them on Kickstarter and got a black watch in the mail a couple months ago. I was surprised that it doesn't show me every notification by default, but somebody made a Pebble Notifier app to fill in the gaps there. Other than that, it fulfilled every expectation I had when I backed it, and I love the convenience of checking my notifications without having to pull my phone out of my pocket. The music controls are a pretty nifty feature I use often, too.

It sucks that they don't have their color options available yet, I don't know what their excuse is for that, but if they've worked all the kinks out in producing the black model then why shouldn't they get that on retail shelves as soon as possible?

I mean, the reason Kickstarter exists is so we regular consumers can recognize a company's potential and help them succeed, and now that this company is on the road to success we're going to get out our torches and pitchforks because they're struggling to ship certain variations of the product? I am flabbergasted at the entitlement some people feel, such that they think this company should run themselves into the ground financially just because they didn't get their special-colored watch yet.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this the classic mistake of assuming "people" on the internet are a single homogeneous group? When Pebble had a kickstarter, a lot of proponents were vocal. Now its going into best-buy, those that are vocal are (a different set of) people who have the opportunity to criticize. Those who successfully funded the project and are proud users of Pebble maybe see less desire to be vocal.

There's nothing really to "go figure", its just different people being selectively vocal in their support/dismissal.

<comment><USER4> This is spot-on, and an exceedingly common flaw in human cognition. It drives me crazy when I hear things like "Google wants to _____", "France believes _____", "The government is trying to _____", etc. While sometimes it's a linguistic proxy for something concrete (a specific leader, opinion polls, cultural zeitgeist), it's usually a victim of that insidious Dunbar number, and the brain's attempt to cope by treating a large, complex, heterogeneous institution or culture as though it were a single person.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's quite the same phenomenon, although related. This is about the mental error that people do in assuming that a swing in vocalized opinion is due to people changing their minds, while it's actually just different people speaking up at different times (when it suits them). Example: "Apple fan-boys used to claim skeuomorphism is the best, but now they suddenly prefer flat design, such hypocrites!".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's the product page: [http://www.bestbuy.com/pebble](http://www.bestbuy.com/pebble)

This news makes me very disappointed in the company's handling of their KickStarter campaign.

I backed their KickStarter campaign and ordered a white Pebble in May of last year, and I still haven't received it. So if I understand correctly, someone who walks into Best Buy next week will get a Pebble before I do?

While I understand the desire to stay out in front of Apple, Sony, and any other companies who may enter the smartwatch market, as one of the people who funded and helped make the Pebble possible, I am disappointed at how this was handled. The whole experience will make me think twice about backing KS campaigns in the future.

<comment><USER7> You aren't missing anything. I got mine months ago. It is the most disappointing thing I have supported on kickstarter. I would literally send you mine but one of the buttons fell off the first (and only) day I wore it.

<comment><USER8> I'll take a free Pebble-minus-one-button.

I'd even pay S&H...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honest question: Has anyone actually found a good use for their Pebble? I wore mine once the day after it arrived, felt totally ridiculous, and it hasn't left the drawer since.

<comment><USER10> I got back to learning C so that I can make a space invaders watch face. I look forward to the satisfaction of wearing my accomplishment on my sleeve... eventually.

<comment><USER11> Not a watch face, but a Space Invaders game for Pebble: [http://www.mypebblefaces.com/view?fID=2052&aName=pocketscien...](http://www.mypebblefaces.com/view?fID=2052&aName=pocketscience&pageTitle=Space+Invaders&auID=938)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm extremely disappointed by how Pebble have handled their entire operation.

I originally backed an Artic White Pebble on Kickstarter, they had issues, I switched to Black. And they sent me a watch without a Kickstarter stamp. As an apology I'm supposedly getting a sweat band - what?

Their entire operation has been mistake after mistake. And to be honest, that's no excuse for a company who has prior experience.

<comment><USER13> Getting upset over the stamp seems pretty pointless.

<comment><USER12> It's not the stamp, it's the way they've dealt with it.

<comment><USER14> To me the stamp would be an acknowledgement of my support and a thank you for it. So to me, it would be about the stamp. Other wise, why not wait and just buy the thing? Not to ignore your other legitimate issues, I think the lack of a stamp is important.

<comment><USER13> The other reason to buy it as a pre-order was because it was cheaper. $125 for color via Kickstarter vs $150 for black from Best Buy.

<comment><USER15> There is always a chance that you won't get anything when you order on Kickstarter. The risk is higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pebble sounds like a polite, social alternative to google glass, no?

<comment><USER17> No, not at all. Have you used either device? Totally different use cases, design goals and purposes. Not comparable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In middle school I was forcibly imprisoned in my locker for wearing a calculator watch, and honestly, it was a good learning experience.

That thing is really ugly.

<comment><USER19> Hey, likewise! Unfortunately there's no kickstarter for better bullying utilities. At least this does things that they might also want to do? Calculating: still for nerds. But imagine being able to check your notifications while holding someone's head under the faucet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I couldn't find much information if it could be used like fitbit for step and sleep tracking.

</comment><comment><USER21> Let he who is without blame cast the first pebble

</comment><comment><USER22> I'll wait for a Dick Tracy watch not tethered to any phone.</comment>


How to Install Proxmox VE on a ZFS Raid Array - <AUTHOR> https://dlford.io/install-proxmox-on-zfs-raid/ <comment><USER2> Thanks! I'm currently setting up a NAS and suspect that FreeNAS might not entirely serve my use case. Proxmox seems like it might work better for me.</comment>


Get started with Cypht, an open source email client - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/19/1/productivity-tool-cypht-email <comment><USER2> The github repository shows 43 open issues.</comment>


How one man made 22 games in 22 years, mostly from his basement - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/17/the-original-indie-dev-how-one-man-made-22-games-in-22-years-mostly-from-his-basement/

<comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=22%20games&sort=byPopularity&p...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=22%20games&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)</comment>


Command line tool for blocking sites to be more productive - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/feroc1ty/workmode

<comment><USER2> Similar to others here but I thought I'd share my way as well (on OSX here, but would work on other Unixes):

Throw these somewhere in your profile:

alias zonemode='sudo mv /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.zoneback && sudo mv /etc/hosts.zonemode /etc/hosts && dscacheutil -flushcache' alias zoneoff='sudo mv /etc/hosts /etc/hosts.zonemode && sudo mv /etc/hosts.zoneback /etc/hosts && dscacheutil -flushcache'

Then fill /etc/hosts.zonemode with the sites you want to block:

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

127.0.0.1 www.reddit.com

Then make sure your user can run passwordless sudo on those commands and you are set.

</comment><comment><USER3> I prefer the /etc/hosts hack, putting in entries like `127.0.0.1 twitter.com`. That way, when I actually want to visit Twitter, I have to `sudo vim /etc/hosts`, enter my password, comment out the host entry, save, go to Twitter, and then uncomment the entry, save and quit when I'm ready to block it again.

The inconvenience of the action is what makes it work. If I only had to type `workmode stop` I'd have that committed to muscle memory by the end of a work day or two.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice project, though if you'd rather not install Node.JS and all of its dependencies, you might want to try <https://github.com/leftnode/get-shit- done>

There are a few versions of it in Python, PHP and sh so you can pick your preference :-)

<comment><USER5> My version, in Perl with Arch support:

<https://github.com/richardjharris/get-shit-done>

I've just realised I'll need to update it now Arch is using systemd...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        var hostsFile = process.platform == "linux" ? "/etc/hosts/" : "C:\\Windows\\System32\\drivers\\etc\\hosts";

Surely this won't work on anything but Windows.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's the thing with this: It's easy to find new unproductive sites and an outright ban from distractions is difficult to live with - humans crave distraction.

What if instead of blocking sites, the nonproductive internet slowed down _a lot_? Then in the 10 seconds you waited for Hacker News to load, you might think to yourself that this is a bad idea and give up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sweet. I am going to try this out!

Has anyone here used Self Control? (<http://visitsteve.com/made/selfcontrol/>). Sometimes when I block websites, like Reddit.com and this one and few others it makes other websites look weird. Like the page will still load but be broken. I think Self Control is blocking sites the same way this does. Any idea why this happens?

<comment><USER9> I've used Self Control, and I like it in principle (it makes it difficult to disable it after it's been turned on, which I like).

However, in practice it doesn't work too well for me. If you block youtube.com or plus.google.com it tends to block other parts of Google (including Search and Docs), which is a big dealbreaker. There's an Issue on Github for the bug, but it's really old and there hasn't been any progress on it. If it worked as it should, then I'd actually consider using Self Control.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, exactly. That's what I like about it too. Have you tried this one out? If it solves those problems, it wouldn't be too hard to make it work like Self Control. Maybe a GUI could be made for it. I am more familiar working in Node.

<comment><USER9> Well, this one doesn't seem to be working at the moment, it's giving me errors, though I haven't spent much time trying to figure out what's going on.

I'd like to add preset block time to this one though, and / or make it harder to disable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me, procrastination is a normal part of my routine. I've tried forcing myself not to do it, but you know what happens? Instead of reading hacker news, I just stare out the window for ten minutes, or think about what exercises I'm going to do at the gym.

Your mind is not willing to do the task you need it to do and there is nothing you can do about it. (that's my experience)

<comment><USER11> I think that time staring out the window is more important than the time you're reading HN. That gap time when I'm just letting your mind work on stuff "in the background" is when a lot of my best ideas bubble up. I think I saw a talk about this or something but that's why they say you always get new ideas in the shower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> if you're on a mac, Gas Mask is a really good tool to switch between different /etc/hosts files

<http://www.clockwise.ee/gasmask/>

here's my 'focus mode'

<https://gist.github.com/2564478>

<comment><USER13> Also, try Self Control app: <http://selfcontrolapp.com> It has a black/white list (depending on what you need) of hosts, and lets you set up a timer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It doesn't seem to work for me. After installing as per the instructions, I get the following error whenever I try to do `workmode <x>`:

        env: node\r: No such file or directory

(I'm on a Mac)

EDIT: Are you using Windows newlines? I think that's the problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> the proxy/pac file version of self-control:

      https://gist.github.com/3907633

[pac file in this gist is merely a demo, please clone it and add your sites- to-blackhole-during-work]

the advantages of using a pac file over /etc/hosts are

* you can safely version control it

* you dont need to install extra software (at least on mac/windows)

* you can gist your determination

for more details of pac file, please dig into the reference link of pacfile:

      http://findproxyforurl.com/pac-functions/

there could be fun to use weekdayRange/timeRange to specify exact hours you want to be away from any self-distraction.

</comment><comment><USER15> Concentrate does this with a nice interface (non-free, although with a very long trial period): <http://getconcentrating.com/>

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be well maintained.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's a similar script written in VBS [http://www.labnol.org/software/temporarily-block- websites/18...](http://www.labnol.org/software/temporarily-block- websites/18257/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice clean tool.

Thing is, I'd like these tools to wearing muzzle to lose weight. It's misdirection of effort into avoiding rather than addressing the demonstrated issue of self-control.

<comment><USER18> No one has infinite willpower. Making it a tad harder to browse reddit is a useful deterrent. It makes you think twice. If you're trying to lose weight, wearing a muzzle is extreme. However, it's a good idea to remove all the junk food from your house. You can always buy more, but it's that much harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Optimized version:

# turn on

sudo rm /etc/hosts

sudo ln -s /etc/hosts{.work,}

# turn off

sudo rm /etc/hosts

sudo ln -s /etc/hosts{.play,}

Optimized further (in your ~/.bashrc):

alias work="sudo rm /etc/hosts && sudo ln -s /etc/hosts{.work,}"

alias play="sudo rm /etc/hosts && sudo ln -s /etc/hosts{.play,}"

Optimization cubed (lets you define a base hosts file):

alias work="sudo rm /etc/hosts && sudo cat /etc/hosts.base >> /etc/hosts && sudo cat /etc/hosts.work >> /etc/hosts"

alias play=...

The number of upvotes, the fact that you thought this was necessary and the fact that this application exists all made me facepalm hard. I can't even see right now.

<comment><USER20> This is close to what I have, except less complex. A single line in /etc/hosts that redirects sites to 127.0.0.1, which gets commented or uncommented. The fact that I have to go through the hassle of sudoing up and removing the comment means I'm far more likely to catch myself before doing it and getting back to work.

<comment><USER19> Optimization #4:

alias play="sleep 120 && ..."

Two minutes should be enough for the craving to pass :-)</comment></comment></comment>


A French Family Dynasty Reinvents the Oyster - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/world/europe/27oyster.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> The only difference between this and Pate? Oysters aren't cute.</comment>