My Life Offline - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/offline2 <comment><USER2> A few months ago I spent 2 weeks in Costa Rica - a lot of hiking, beaching, surfing, etc. About halfway through I stopped at an internet cafe to transfer some pictures from my camera to a USB stick. While this was happening, I opened firefox... then drew a blank. I could not think of anything to type in the address bar. I could have gone to some regular sites... reddit, globeandmail, news.yc, facebook but they all seemed so foreign, weird and terribly disconnected from real life. I had absolutely no desire to see memes on reddit, news on the globe or what others were up to on facebook.

An important lesson that one can draw from time away (whether it be aaron's month or my 2 weeks) is that you can't let tech/web overwhelm your life. People have a wide range of interests (whether you've discovered that or not) and devoting so much time to 1 thing seems like the easy way out.

This is also why I refuse to believe that online socializing can come even remotely close to the real thing.

<comment><USER3> "An important lesson that one can draw from time away (whether it be aaron's month or my 2 weeks) is that you can't let tech/web overwhelm your life. People have a wide range of interests (whether you've discovered that or not) and devoting so much time to 1 thing seems like the easy way out."

I really disagree with that, if applied to _all_ people.

I've always been completely obsessive about whatever it was I was interested in. Whether it was planes at age 6-7, ships at 8-9, cars somewhere in there, WW2 naval history at 9-10, computers at 10, Star Trek at 11, Gemstone 3 at 12-13, Magic: The Gathering at 14, MUDs & computers at 14-16, guitar from 16-18, physics at 18, Java at 19, Harry Potter fanfiction from 20-22, programming language design from 23-25, my startup from 25-27, and now Google's internals at 28.

When I was little, my parents would worry about my one-track mind and rather obsessive interests. They had the same concern you do: people have a wide range of interests, and they were worried that I'd shut myself into being a narrow person.

But by the time I graduated college, they realized that even though I had a totally one-track mind, that track changed every couple years, and so I'd had a dozen or so different interests. All pursued with a lot more passion than the person who just picks 2-3 hobbies and sticks with them for life.

I think the real evil is continuous partial attention. Whatever you're doing - whether it's socializing, relationships, reading, hacking, research, etc. - give it your full attention. I try to check news.YC/Reddit/various social networks once a day, before I go into work. Then once I'm there, I concentrate on what I'm doing. Similarly, I try to read a book or hack a program when I get home, something that'll draw all my attention. I don't always succeed, but when I do it feels much more fulfilling than wasting 2-3 hours online refreshing news.YC.

<comment><USER4> > I think the real evil is continuous partial attention.

Yeah. Agreed, it's my main enemy ATM. I may have to admit defeat and block reddit/news.yc/twitter/facebook on all my computers.

<comment><USER5> fail? ;-)

<comment><USER3> Fail for me at least. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a _very_ strong believer in a balanced life. I simply don't think it's possible to be happy without it. That being said, when I read all this "The real world _rocks_ ; the Internet makes me sad!" stuff, all I see is the context it is written in: from the perspective of a person who spends all of their time online.

When somebody who lives online suddenly finds the real world, of _course_ it is going to be awesome! It's like finding a whole new world you didn't know existed, with pretty girls and ice cream cones and other fun stuff. I love the real world, too. I've visited many countries, met all sorts of people and done all sorts of things. There's still so much more that I want to see and do, and each month I spend piddling around this one piece of the globe makes me a little more anxious.

But that doesn't mean the Internet doesn't have its place -- an incredibly important place, at that. The Internet allows instantaneous, worldwide distribution of knowledge! That's completely unheard of. And _fucking incredible_. I love the real world as much as the next guy, but I certainly love the Internet, too. There's a place in life for both of them and one isn't intrinsically better than the other.

<comment><USER7> Man I was with you right up until the last sentence, where you said

"There's a place in life for both of them and one isn't intrinsically better than the other."

But one of the thems is life itself, so I would argue that yes, it is intrinsically better ;)

The internet is a great way to learn, communicate, and share information. It's also a great way to waste time, make yourself dumber, and develop a chronic lack of attention span. It should be used as a tool to help you live your life. But the phrase "life online" should never have existed.

<comment><USER6> It's all subjective, though. What is intrinsically better about the "real world"? It's full of its share of dumb people (just walk outside). Working a 9-5 job filing paper is an awesome way to turn somebody into a lifeless moron. TV will help kill that annoying attention span.

I have no desire to live completely online, but I think people have a tendency to argue that the "real world" is more important since it has a pretty basic thing in common with us: we're both corporeal. But, imagine if you could truly _live_ in The Internet: you'd have instant access to most of the world's collective knowledge and the ability to interact with millions of people simultaneously. That'd be pretty impressive!

<comment><USER8> You couldn't _kiss_ any of those people, though.

<comment><USER9> That's by far the best comment in this whole thread.

Interaction online is purely cerebral, even the more kinky versions of it. The ultimate in platonic contemplation, just you, your computer and your internet connection.

It makes you wonder what the long term effects of the www are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if the novelty of a "life offline" would wear off if Aaron were to do it for longer than a month... I'm around the same age as Aaron, with a similar personality, but try to balance a pretty active social/family life with my online life (I have a daughter, go to the gym, sometimes even go out dancing), and have to say that decisively, I've find the news.YC community more intellectually stimulating than the vast majority of my "offline life" community.

Maybe I'm too involved in the wrong offline social circles, but I'm just a lot more fullfilled with the speed and variety of ideas I get online than I do offline anyday.

<comment><USER11> I didn't spend the month with my "offline life" community. I agree, they're far less intellectually stimulating than the people I find online. I spent the month reading books, which I found even _more_ intellectually stimulating than the people I find online.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how much of that is novelty, though. I spent all my elementary and teenage years reading books, and still read anywhere from 50-150/year (more on the 50 side now that I'm working at Google, but in college I hit 150 one year). As a result, when I walk into a library I've found I've already read most of the books that seem interesting to me. A lot of my interests are narrow enough that the Internet's the only place to go for more information on the topic.

<comment><USER12> I hit the same wall the library. If you want a new injection of novel intellectual thought, I highly recommend the blog Unqualified Reservations ( <http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/> ). Read the entire archive, plus all the books he recommends. That should keep you intellectually stimulated for two to three years at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's my age. Mabye I'm not self-reflexive enough. Maybe I never give it enough of an actual, honest try. Maybe my life is more balanced than I think. But I've _never_ been able to identify with articles like this.

I often don't have enough hours in the day to even get what I want done. I _love_ software. I'd rather be coding than doing most other things. I code for my startup 10-12 hours a day, then go home and work on my OS. Or learning Haskell. Or thinking about writing a compiler. Or the "living imageboard" idea I've been tossing around. Or whatever. And I've been doing this for years. Through school, I was coding projects all day, rather than doing it in my startup. I've been coding over 2/3rds of my life at this point, and I don't really want to stop.

Now, I do have other interests, and I persue other things. It's entirely possible that I just feel like I'm on the computer as much as these authors say they are, and I'm really not. I usually have a female companion. I love mountain biking. I paint Warhammer armies. I'm involved in the local hackerspace. I'm just a busy dude. But I still need (close to) unlimited texting for Twitter. I still was all about Facebook when it first came out. I still have almost 300 feeds in my reader (which I only tend to skim, admittedly.) And yet I never feel like this.

I grew up on a farm. When I was younger, my computing resources were quite limited, so I did that. I played outside. I was in the boy scouts. But I've never really held the opinion that the "real world" is more important or of inherently better quality than the virtual one. I feel terrible when I _don't_ have my phone. Or when I can't check my email. Or when I haven't caught up on my reading for a few days.

I'm not sure. Maybe I'll feel differently in the future. Only time will tell, I guess.

<comment><USER10> As someone who is shocked by the group think that's hit news.YC lately, thank you for such an insightful post.

<comment><USER13> Thanks. I try not to post unless I actually have something to say.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if the age of "first online" has an impact. I'm 30 now. I got into local BBSes in high school (mostly with other high schoolers, so there was still a strong real-life social component), and only got on the internet in a big way in college.

I don't recognize myself in very much of what Aaron wrote. Oh, a little with the distraction thing, but at least for me it's just the easy availability of distractions. TV, video games, even books can still do that to me too.

I also wonder is just how much people are different. I sometimes describe myself as asocial; _not_ antisocial, _a_ social, in that I need very little social contact to survive or be happy, and I top out pretty fast.

(BTW, I'm not fishing for pity and you might get the wrong impression from "asocial"; I'm happily married, have a kid with another coming up, and so on. I need more than 0 and I know that, it's just I have _lower_ needs than most people seem to.)

Guess I don't really have a point, except: This sort of thing should be taken seriously. The internet is a truly new social phenomenon, and while I believe the positive outweighs the negatives (at least for most people), the negatives are real, and we should figure out, both personally and collectively, how to ameliorate the very-real negatives.

(andreyf's post highlights one thing I get from the internet: I am interested in tech and politics, but I _vastly prefer_ online discussion, with its tools, over real-life discussion of those topics. It also keeps my wife and friends happy since they have little interest. On the other hand, I don't smear wife- and-friends all over the Internet; I eschew Facebook, and still haven't mentioned my soon-to-be-1-year-old son on my blog yet. I also wonder if perhaps this sort of strong partition is a good idea.)

<comment><USER15> Your comment about being asocial reminds me of a well known essay that was posted on HN a few months ago, "Caring for Your Introvert."

<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch>

For myself, I definitely fall into the introvert category - I get fatigued fairly quickly after fairly common social interactions.

The problem is I think for a lot of us, our default mode of "chilling out" is spending time online browsing sites, checking email, reading the latest news. All of those activities provide the illusion of taking a break from the "real world" but I don't think they provide the respite we believe.

It's really easy to get agitated online about some silly flame war, techcrunch linkbait, or some offhand comment someone made about your project on twitter.

So I can see how a life offline, or the compromise of spending less time online, can certainly be beneficial.

<comment><USER14> I must have missed that one. Yeah, that's me. I coined "asocial" because "introverted" picked up a lot of wrong connotations (I'm not socially awkward, misanthropic, etc.), but that is definitely it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Online, I feel like my brain wants to run off in a million different directions, even when I try to point it forward."

I've experienced this while in conversation, I'm thinking of 10 other solutions or options or something.

</comment><comment><USER17> One month??? I went to South East Asia for the entire summer a year go. This was not hitting all the major cities, this was going through the jungles and back roads and woods. Where you slept in nets and used candles and flash lights.

A month to a few months is nothing. Espeically if you have things planned out to do. Try living somewhere isolated and completely without technology for a year or longer, because to be honest, when you start getting into a day to day routine that's when you miss technology, because there are periods where you got shit to do but sit and scratch all the mosquito bites.

</comment><comment><USER18> I just kept saying "yup! yup!" after each sentence. I've achieved such states during my vacations to India where I would go 2-3 days without touching the computer and I'd absolutely hate it when something came up that required me going online.

I am currently experiencing a super light version of what Aaron did by blocking all of the sites that I automatically type in my browser every few minutes without even realizing. In the past week, I've felt my anxiety drop incredibly. I've followed that up with slowing down my body movements(ie. drinking a glass of water in slow motion).

I have a couple of friends that achieved breakout success in things they struggled with all their lives by leaving the computer/tv for a month.

Also have a friend that did something where you just sit naked in a room for few days. You have enough supply of food/water. He came out visibly transformed at the end of it.

</comment><comment><USER19> A week of karate camp does this for me. Just one week, but it is intensely focused on my body and my immediate physical surroundings. I think what makes it so... refreshing? is that it is a new and different obsession. (It's been new and different every year for 7 years, now.)

I come back from my week at karate camp and don't know what to do with myself. During the summer I live at my computer, but after a week-long break, I can't think of anything I want to do.

What I really don't get is how I can be so easily addicted to either state - constant flow of information, or no flow of information.

I guess it's a matter of self-obsession versus world-obsession. This year especially, I came back from karate camp thinking I could become a recluse, doing nothing but physical training and soul searching for the rest of my life. I wouldn't even mind if my soul searching returned zero relevant results, because no results would be meaningful (for once).

At this point (in my thought process), it seems like it's a matter of obsessions. I don't think I could live successfully in a state of balance between these two polar ideas - I would hate it. Maybe it ties into the human need to be the best at whatever is occurring at any particular moment, which expects specialization, and thereby obsession.

That still doesn't explain why it's so refreshing to change obsessions occasionally. (But I know I'd get bored being at karate camp year round, too.)

Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER20> This article raises the question of how to balance one's life as a technologist or someone immersed in technology. I thought I'd share one tip of something I do. I only own a prepaid cell phone, and I keep it off most of the time unless I'm expecting a phone call. This allows me to have it for emergencies and to sync up when meeting people at bars and whatnot on weekends. But I can avoid the downsides of being constantly interrupted or getting involved in the obsessive culture many people seem to have with their cell phones (constantly texting or talking when they're on the bus or in lines).

I use computers and the internet most hours of most days, and I have plenty of offline activities and social groups I am involved in. If taking a weekend day off away from your email to go hiking is something you know you'll be "punished" for when you return (in terms of email load or friends'/employers' expectations), then it may be time to work out a plan to reduce your online commitments.

</comment><comment><USER21> I hate being disconnected. it gets under my skin until I'm itching to code, game or read a blog, Do something to bring me back to a familiar constant.

But take me away for a week? I come back and end up deleting all my bookmarks, dis enthused about news.yc and cleaning out my inbox of all non personals. And I'm totally happy to go back to my original and probably greatest love, Literature, preferably in some shady, but warm green place.

Over the following weeks I always manage to reconnect myself, a youtube or blog link... There's always something, and I find myself once again forgetting how nice it can be.

</comment><comment><USER22> My life online made me find people with the same interests as me, no matter how rare. Chances of finding another person interested in say, synthesizers or ocaml letting 'fleshspace' serendipity do the work are negligible.

One other thing: Having an active social life can be costly, both online and offline. It's just that offline more people actually do it.

The equivalent of following hundreds of people on twitter and facebook in 'fleshspace' is to live in a house with guests (and flatmates) changing constantly. There are other situations in which one is forced to be hypersocial (maybe working at a bar? but that doesn't lead to intimacy), but this one I know first-hand. As anyone who has done the house thing can attest, it can be draining. You spread your attention to others very thin. And even so, the chances of meeting people you really like are not very high.

</comment><comment><USER23> >A friend asked me if I knew I was privileged to be able to take such a break.

This is probably the issue for most. Without spending a lot of time online every day, I'm not sure that I'd be valuable enough to earn enough money to do all the pleasant things commenters here have written about (cottages, exotic travel, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER24> I just spent a week offline. I had a good time on vacation, but no net connection was sheer torture. Reducing usage to the essentials is one thing, but going cold turkey was not to my liking.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm at a point where I notice how much time waste on the internet but I don't yet have the discipline to resist distractions. Other than turning the router off every second day. But I grew up without the internet. It makes me sad to read about someone who couldn't even imagine his life without internet distractions.

Suddenly the idea of one laptop per child seems much less attractive.

</comment><comment><USER26> I love and depend on the web for learning and for communication, but my most useful creative times are away from the keyboard, either mulling over ideas while walking, or scribbling notes on paper. You've got to learn what works for you and make sure you can step back from the always-on addiction.

</comment><comment><USER27> A comment I left on Aaron's site as well.

I found the link to Pomodoro technique on some website. I was really glad I saw it. Google for 'pomodoro technique' if you are interested. If you liked Aaron's post, you'll definitely like this technique.

</comment><comment><USER28> "My offline that I have to rush back online to tell you about." Why not try something totally different like living off the land for more than a month? That is incredibly difficult and will really change your perspective.

<comment><USER29> Been there, done that - for 3 months. It was an eye opener for sure.

I think a lot of people are detached from the reality of the world. Getting back to basics reinforces that fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The last paragraph oddly jumped out at me. Why do so many people confuse arrogance with confidence? Or more precisely, why do so few arrogant people fail to see the benefits of confidence without arrogance?

<comment><USER31> It's usually self-deprecation when someone claims arrogance. They'd directly claim confidence, you see, but then they'd be written off as arrogant.</comment></comment>


What Can Virtual-World Economists Tell Us about Real-World Economies? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-world-economists-on-real-economies&print=true <comment><USER2> a very interesting allegory/model that explains it in simple terms and builds in complexity until it helps explain real world economic policies:

[http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2008/01/straigh...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2008/01/straightforward-explanation-of-present.html)</comment>


Key parts of Ubuntu 13.04 will be developed in secret - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138200-key-parts-of-ubuntu-13-04-will-be-developed-in-secret-to-escape-the-critics-ire <comment><USER2> Rewrite of <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1200> written and submitted by one of five Ziff Davis (ExtremeTech.com, Geek.com and PCMag.com) employees that spam HN.

Their other employees/accounts include:

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82> (their social media manager)

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly>

Then there's also maxko87 and evo_9 but I haven't figured out what their connection is yet, maxko87 autosubmits extremetech articles and evo_9's usage mirrors ukdm's who submits ~50% geek.com + ~50% a small group of other sites, but for extremetech.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, wow. Just checked his submission history. Gotta love these blogspambots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Shuttleworth is sick of Ubuntu features being torn apart by critics before they're ready._

      <snark>

Well maybe if Shuttleworth didn't require a crap interface and built in ads on the desktop and making smartass comments when challenged about it, they wouldn't be torn apart by critics.

      </snark>

<comment><USER5> <nosnark>

Maybe if we didn't have "critics" like you that are quick to rant and diss other people work while not doing anything themselves, highly-visible projects wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't require such steps.

I lead a fairly successful open-source project and I'm on the receiving end of this attitude of entitlement as well.

People don't realize how much work goes into developing of software and when you give it away for free, with source-code, it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" ?).

I'm sure Ubuntu, being vastly more popular and visible, receives vastly more "constructive criticism".

</nosnark>

<comment><USER4> >it's very demoralizing to have non-constructive, abusive comments like the above ("crap interface" )?

I'm sorry, compared to standard GNOME (v2, v3 can join Unity on the junkpile IMAO) or KDE, Unity is _crap_ , and I am hardly alone in that opinion.

Perhaps certain open source developers just suck at taking any kind of criticism? That's sure what these moves feel like.

I would bet large sums of money we're going to see something distasteful come of this, along the lines of further intrusive desktop advertising ala Amazon Lens.

Maybe if you would start listening to the community more when there's a large outcry (amazon lens, unity, gnome 3, etc etc etc) there would be fewer people who feel they are "entitled" to a desktop experience that doesn't suck!

<comment><USER6> Can you explain in great details questioning the design choices made by Unity and how it is crap. I like both Unity and Gnome 3.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/unity.html>

<http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3.html>

Same guy, takes the words out of my mouth in both cases.

Worth mentioning is that they have, admittedly, made a great deal of progress. Unity isn't the buggy mess that it was back a couple of major releases ago, which renders moot a good deal of the author's complaints.

I could still do without the mandatory 3d acceleration (which wouldn't be so bad if they would leave Unity 2D alone but nope, they're killing that off.....) and the full screen , space wasting interface. I am on a desktop, not a netbook. Optimize accordingly, please.

Unity is a fine interface for smaller screens and mobile devices. Not so much for the desktop.

<comment><USER7> Oh, right the guy who said: "Unity 3D behaves spectacularly on all tested hardware, including old and new graphics cards. The performance is quite good, the responsiveness is great, and you even get reduced power consumption."

<comment><USER4> Yet it somehow causes 10fps+ drops in virtualization, and is nigh unusable on older hardware (yes yes anecdotal and meaningless i'm sure).

Again, I wouldn't care if they would have just left 2d alone.

I for one am getting very tired of being told how I should be using my computer.

<comment><USER7> See, right there, that's perfect. Concrete examples of stuff that's wrong and what they could do better. Great comment.

When you say thinks like Unity is a pile of crap, i look at the pile of crap a neighbor dog left on the lawn and think that would never display emacs.

Also, no gun to your head. run whatever you like man. I'm only engaging you because you're kind of being a jackass. I think you have something useful contribute, because you're clearly passionate about Unity. It's just hard to get you to say _exactly_ what you mean.

<comment><USER4> >Also, no gun to your head. run whatever you like man. I'm only engaging you because you're kind of being a jackass.

I'm being a jackass because frankly I am tired of Canonical's shit. I can sort of forgive unity, okay, fine, ignoring what your users want in a UI seems to be the in thing nowadays (c.f. Microsoft, Gnome).

The Amazon lens was a bridge too far. I don't care if it's opt out - any form of advertising in a core OS component should be optin, not the other way around!

What put the final nail in the coffin for me was Shuttleworth's flippant response to those concerns.

And now with this whole "developed in secret" thing, the coffin reaches 5 feet under. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu's only real asset now is popularity. (And even that's declining, if the Distrowatch numbers mean anything...)

      Rank	Distribution	H.P.D*
      1	Mint	        3403
      2	Mageia	        2462
      3	Ubuntu	        2042
      4	Fedora	        1522
      5	openSUSE	1311

If they keep going out of their way to make their users feel like they don't matter, that final advantage will also disappear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Canonical has gone mad. More and more it seems like this company is the worst thing that could happen to linux. Seems like embrace and extinguish to me. Make a distro the best among others, so novices can tentatively take their first steps in it. Now botch it, kill it and burn them so badly they would never come back to linux again.Sigh!

<comment><USER9> Are you nuts?

Ubuntu 12.04 is the best distribution of a Linux-based OS by such a huge margin that it's, as they say, not even funny. Even if I take into account the fact that many users seem to nurse a rather passionate dislike of Unity, I don't see how anyone can claim that Canonical is "botching, killing and burning" anything. Ubuntu is in the long term most definitely on a steady path of continuous improvement, and is currently at a level where the "it just works" factor is present in surprisingly huge amounts. (I am saying this from the perspective of both the desktop and the server versions - the server version is ridiculously hassle-free to run compared to what I am used to with supposedly superior "enterprise" distros the likes of RHEL and SLES.)

To be honest, your comment is so bizarre that I now wonder if it was supposed to be a wind-up.

<comment><USER10> Agreed 100%. I recently picked up a little thinkpad laptop as a take- everywhere-don't-mind-too-much-if-it-dies machine. Ubuntu 12.04 supported absolutely every bit of hardware on it out of the box, with the exception of the fingerprint reader, which needed a single package install, and nary a cfg file edit in sight (fingerprint auth for login and sudo is awesome!). This includes:

* Hardware accelerated graphics

* Suspend and resume when closing/opening lid

* All the non-standard thinkpad buttons - external monitor, volume etc

* USB bluetooth adaptor

* External bluetooth trackpad (Apple)

* 3G dongle - this was not only autodetected, but popped up a wizard that asked me to identify my carrier, and then proceeded to configure everything and just magically brought up the internets

Anyone who doesn't think this is a big deal has not been running linux for very long :-P

Personally, I still replace Unity with Gnome3, but that's a single add-repo and package install, taking about 2 minutes. Unity is significantly better with each release, if that continues I'll probably go back to it in a few versions.

I don't get the vitriol either. Slackware and Debian are still around if Ubuntu is too n00bish for you; personally I'm old and I want shit to just work. Haters gonna hate I suppose.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. How do i know. I upgraded my work machine to ubuntu 12, and here is what happened. Unity flat-out does not get rendered. Dual monitor setup wont work. So i had to switch to fluxbox and use xrndr to make the screen visible on both the desktops. I have been using linux for almost 12 years now, and somehow it does not seem like an improvement. So much for it just works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IMO, Mr. Shuttleworth is a douche.

This is the person that forced his user base into living with interface and design decisions they did not want. The decisions made by Shuttleworth have nothing to do with FOSS or the users. His decisions were made solely with personal goals in mind. Mr. Shuttleworth desired a single code base for Ubuntu. That meant merging the desktop version of Ubuntu and his proposed baby, the portable device version of Ubuntu. Mouse and keyboard do not function well on portable devices so...enter Unity.

All of these things would be fine, if Mr. Shuttleworth did not claim that all of this was to provide his users with a superior experience. We already had a wonderful experience. Now, not so much.

I will now be replacing all of my machines', and our corporate machines' Ubuntu installs with an alternate flavor of Linux. I was willing to live with the Unity change, I was willing to live with the Grub change. I am not willing to live with this.

FOSS is not built upon secret sauce Mr. Shuttleworth. For shame!

<comment><USER12> Hyperbole and drama. Ubuntu was the same as all other versions of Linux. All other versions of Linux are still the same as Ubuntu has been changing. The answer to your problem? Just use some other flavor of Linux. They're exactly the same as they've always been.

This is the entitlement that Shuttleworth hates. It's his project. People contribute because they want to contribute, but it's still his project. He owes you nothing, and you owe him nothing. You're mad because... you don't have any other choice? I know that's not true.

How about, you're mad because you want to be mad about something and this is what you've picked? That's about the only reason to be this emotionally involved in your operating system of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can see how Shuttleworth is drawing inspiration from Apple and MS Surface, but normally, you don't announce that X will be developed in secret, you develop X in secret, and then announce it!!

<comment><USER14> That works well with unannounced features or unexpected patches. What do you say when you just developed version 12 in the full public eye, and mysteriously all public activity on version 13 stops?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Blame Ubuntu or Shuttleworth but Ubuntu is the only Linux distro with any direction and actively expressing itself. You can never satisfy 100% of your customers.

</comment><comment><USER15> (Honest question) Is there any user-friendly alternative to Ubuntu?

I switched from Win7 to 12.04 a few weeks ago, but it's full of tiny-yet- annoying bugs. EG: sometimes a program disapears from ALT-TAB and I need to minimize everything else to find it. Or the resize-window border that is barely half a pixel thin.

<comment><USER16> It really depends on what you consider user friendly. If you want fast access to the top ten applications you will normally use and an OS that is almost entirely hidden go for crunchbang (<http://crunchbang.org/>) (video demo [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBuqWPcsTig&feature=related)) . CB has been my distro of choice for several years now.

<comment><USER17> Crunchbang is pretty awesome on low-end systems, too.

I recently tried about 10 different "lightweight" distros on an old P3 with ~128 MB of RAM, and Crunchbang was the only one that ran ok and felt polished. (IIRC puppy linux was the only other one that ran fine, and it's just hideously ugly.)

My favorite distro was one that prominently mentioned that it could run on low end systems like mine. It turned out that the installer needed more RAM than the distro... I suggested to the developer that this be mentioned on the download page, and he seemed confused/offended! :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That seems awfully thin-skinned. Having written a couple books for programmers, hate mail is just part of the landscape, and the more your own tastes and opinions come into play, the more there is for people to disagree about. Sticks and stones, etc.

Ultimately it's not crucially important. But it's also unnecessary. And if you don't have Google's resources behind your behind-closed-doors development, you could be missing out on community contributions.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't think they should _develop_ in secret, but they most definitely shouldn't _release_ until things are polished.

Much of the criticism Unity and various other features received was well- deserved, because Canonical released essentially alpha software. Then when the criticism comes in, the defense is, "hey take it easy guys, we weren't done yet!" Well if you're not done--don't release!

There's a middle ground here: develop and design in public, but don't release until you're truly ready. Everyone says that sticking to LTS is the only way to guarantee a stable system, but that's just not practical in the milestone- distro world, where an important update to one piece of software you find critical requires an update to the entire system.

</comment><comment><USER20> If they code some "secret" features and then release the code... why does it matter it was coded in secret? This seems to be such a non-issue. In fact, Shuttleworth's mistake here was talking about it at all.

He is paying to have code developed to help improve Ubuntu and he happens to want to get somewhat polished versions of it before they release to public. Why is this bad? Sometimes people release early/often and that works for them. In this case Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical believe that releasing at the polished stage is beneficial.

Plus its not like there is some uber-secret group in a dark chamber coding this stuff up -- you just have to be an ubuntu developer with a little bit of traction to be part of it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Marketing-wise this would absolutely be an effective strategy, but you have to take a page from Apple's book and spin your motivation to be positive. You can't say "I'm sick of critics dissing features before they're ready" because that sounds _whiny_.

Instead, you have to express that you are working on some really kick-ass features and you want them to really "pop" when they debut. You have to focus on the positives and pretend that the critics don't exist. (Publicly, that is; internally, you had better listen to the critics).

</comment><comment><USER14> Is developing from within a "glass house" a stressful downside to FOSS?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that Mozilla struggles with this -- that it's a whole different PR ball game, when tech writers have access to the nightly FTP server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not exactly sure how can you develop a popular and polished interface without a lot of user testing. From the bugs I reported it seems like they don't have enough testers in Canonical itself, or maybe their qa its just not going deep enough. Either way... I don't think that cutting off early beta testers will be good for the project.

</comment><comment><USER23> I predict the secret whiz-bang features will be even more half-baked than normal for new Ubuntu features - on their six-month release schedule, new stuff generally isn't stable and full-featured for about three releases (which is a bit of a pain).

</comment><comment><USER24> "[...] and you get your name in lights." ...and the prize for the greatest attention whore of the OS BDFLs club goes to...</comment>


CA Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes to Profit from Endorsements - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/09/30/765700141/california-governor-signs-bill-allowing-college-athletes-to-profit-from-endorsem <comment><USER2> The NCAA has an interesting choice to make here.

Option 1, they remove the California teams from the NCAA. The Power 5 have been talking about a "division 0" league for a long time. Chances are that would push them all to leave the NCAA and create their own organization.

Option 2, allow California to be the exception. This would be great for California, because if you're a top high school athlete, would you rather play in California where you could potentially make millions, or anywhere else? Presumably a bunch of other states would pass similar laws and demand the same exception, until the NCAA was forced to allow paid players everywhere.

Or Option 3, just change the NCAA rules to match California, and let players get paid.

If sounds like the only winning move here is for the NCAA to allow paying players. I think California just forced their hand.

<comment><USER3> Option 4: you're a member of a voluntary organization, and your state can't change our bylaws.

Which is what's probably gonna happen.

<comment><USER4> I think the state _can_ change the bylaws of a voluntary organization, or at least make them illegal.

From the official digest of the bill at [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB206) :

 _The bill also would prohibit an athletic association, conference, or other group or organization with authority over intercollegiate athletics from preventing a postsecondary educational institution other than a community college from participating in intercollegiate athletics as a result of the compensation of a student athlete for the use of the student's name, image, or likeness._

AFAICT this law would make the current NCAA bylaws illegal in California. Any California player who accepted an endorsement and was subsequently prevented from playing would be able to sue.

<comment><USER5> That only applies to the NCAA if the NCAA continues to operate in California. If they decide that their current rules are more important than the participation of California schools, they can leave the state and prevent their member schools from playing in California or with teams from California and avoid California's legal jurisdiction.

<comment><USER6> Correct, which is option 1 from the parent post. MisterBastahrd seems to believe that the NCAA can just say "you have to follow these rules if you join us even if you're from CA", which is not true because the bill outlaws those rules.

The 4th option that they're suggesting only serves to open them up to lawsuits should they ever try to enforce the rule for CA players.

<comment><USER3> This is why the bill is unconstitutional.

From Miller vs. NCAA, P 28:

'Under Brown-Forman, 476 U.S. at 579, 106 S.Ct. at 2084, when a state law directly regulates interstate commerce, it can generally be struck down without further inquiry. The Statute directly regulates interstate commerce and runs afoul of the Commerce Clause both because it regulates a product in interstate commerce beyond Nevada's state boundaries, and because it puts the NCAA, and whatever other national collegiate athletic associations may exist, in jeopardy of being subjected to inconsistent legislation arising from the injection of Nevada's regulatory scheme into the jurisdiction of other states. Because the Statute violates the Commerce Clause per se, we need not balance the burden on interstate commerce against the local benefit derived from the Statute.'

Replace Nevada with California and you've got the same issue. A state is not allowed to unilaterally make special statutory carve-out demands on a national organization.

They can say "hey universities, your student-athletes must be allowed to profit from their own likenesses." Totally within the state's power.

They can't say "hey, NCAA, screw your rules, we decided to make up our own for you and you have to deal with it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Southpark_ nailed why this needed to happen in their episode "Crack Baby Athletic Association" [1], where Cartman essentially poses as a Slavery-era plantation owner, and wants to ask the University of Colorado for "business advice" on how to make people work without paying them - like their college athletes ("slavery"):

>> _" Now when we sell their likeness for video games, how do we get around paying our slaves…erm - student-athletes then?"_ \- Cartman

 __NSFW / Trigger warning etc: I realize Southpark isn't for everyone. But on this issue I feel like they nailed it by showing just how ludicrous the NCAA really is.

[1] - [https://www.businessinsider.com/the-crack-baby-athletic- asso...](https://www.businessinsider.com/the-crack-baby-athletic-association- cbaa-2011-6)

<comment><USER8> >Southpark nailed why this needed to happen in their episode

Yes and no. The problem is that the NBA and NFL had an implicit requirement of college before making to the league. This meant that players with no interest in college were nevertheless funneled through the college system. That's not fair to the players that wanted to start earning money from their profession.

The NBA has lifted the restriction on high-school players graduating to the NBA - so at this point young athletes can move directly to the NBA, or G League, or play overseas. Under these conditions I think it's fine to leave NCAA as is, since college is no longer mandatory.

Professionally-oriented football players don't really have that option, and NFL careers are much shorter as well. It's not a great look that those guys can't make any money in their college career.

<comment><USER7> > _It 's not a great look that those guys can't make any money in their > college career._

... And especially when the ones that don't make it to the NFL are basically left broken for the remainder of their lives (position specific of course). Once you are a valuable player on an NCAAF team - particularly offensive line - your body and academics pretty much go out the window in favor of your performance. These guys are broken and have no long-term healthcare, no financial incentive, etc. [1,2,3]

To top it off - we have entered a bizarro world where the NCAA now SELLS INSURANCE [4] to student athletes so they can protect against future earnings losses as a result of injury in college.... It's just crazy to me, but hey they have this going for them:

>> _Student-athletes approved for this program are automatically eligible for a loan... The interest rate is very competitive, and a co-signer is not required._

... which is nice.

1 - [https://kdvr.com/2015/05/13/masking-the-pain-toradol-in- coll...](https://kdvr.com/2015/05/13/masking-the-pain-toradol-in-college- sports/)

2 - [https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/i-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/05/i-trusted- em-when-ncaa-schools-abandon-their-injured-athletes/275407/)

3 - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4628259/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4628259/)

3 - [http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/insurance/exceptional- st...](http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/insurance/exceptional-student- athlete-disability-insurance-program)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This was long overdue. Thank you. College coaches get paid millions of dollars a year, yet when a poor athlete gets rent money for his dad, all hell breaks loose. Let's stop pretending that college sports is anything but a glamorized professional sporting franchise, and pay the people who make it happen. Actually, this bill doesn't even ask the colleges to pay the athletes their fair market value. It simply allows athletes to make money from their own brand. Not sure how anyone can be against this. If someone is making money off me, in a free society, I sure should be able to make money off myself as well.

<comment><USER10> NCAA literally has the slave model and most likely has origins in that mentality. Just like a race horse can't ask for money because it is a property of its owner, student athletes are not any different from NCAA perspective. It is strange to think that such rule existed for so long in the "free" society.

<comment><USER11> The history of how we got here is very odd. The NCAA's worship of amateurism has it's roots in Ivy League gentleman amateurs, and for many, many years was explicitly racially segregated.

<comment><USER12> The roots were very much more in the public's insistence that college students had to stop dying while playing football. Lots of players were paid in the old Ivy League days. Those like Theodore Roosevelt who "saved" the game did so mostly by not letting students handle the payments. Only much later (1940s and '50s) did NCAA take on the form it has today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The players should be paid a salary, full stop. If you're an athlete at a D1 school in the primary money making sports of men's basketball or football you're hardly a student -- most days are spent training or preparing for a game, the athletes notoriously take cupcake classes and majors; and we've seen enough academic scandals to know that 'student-athlete' is a misnomer. The NCAA is another case of cartel like behavior in the American economy and I'll be glad when this phony amateurism is put to rest.

<comment><USER14> Anyone on a full scholarship at a D1 school already gets a monthly stipend, basically a small salary that covers miscellaneous expenses. It's not much but most student athletes simply don't provide any value to their school beyond that. However, there is the 1% of top athletes who are worth millions of dollars of marketing value and this bill will hopefully allow them to capitalize on that.

<comment> crooked-v While most of these student athletes are unlikely to make millions, this bill allows that bottom 99% to make money in other ways that were previously prohibited, such as providing private coaching to younger athletes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it's definitely a distortion of the market that college athletics bring in significant revenue and none of it beyond scholarships accrues to the athletes themselves. On the other hand, this is essentially the legalization of paying college athletes because wealthy college alumni/boosters can easily guarantee promising athletic prospects a certain amount of money in endorsements even if those endorsements don't make financial sense. E.g., a $1MM endorsement for Alumni Bob's Radiology Practice. That's certainly not going to improve the broken state of post-secondary education in the US.

Edit: It's going to have lots of interstate ramifications, too. If this goes through, why would you ever go to Notre Dame if you could also go to USC?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I agree. This basically means paid college players. It will be far too easy for the boosters to funnel money in via "endorsements".

But I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

<comment><USER16> > But I'm not convinced that's a bad thing.

It's hard to predict, but one could expect larger disparity than even exists today amongst schools (arguably the disparity today is based on coach and facility costs, and will grow when it includes players). That disparity is not only one school compared to another, it's also the programs within a school itself and the ability for NCAA and conference funds to be redistributed. So much legislation was focused on equality of services across sports programs and universities, this is clearly a step towards inequality (even if it is a good step).

<comment><USER17> At the same time - there are a lot of wealthy alumni from schools without a noteworthy program that would be more than happy to directly play some players to come put their alma matter on TV for a couple seasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems fair. Non-athlete college students are allowed to earn money and profit from endorsements. There shouldn't be special rules just for athletes.

<comment><USER19> I mean they're allowed to earn money from endorsements already, they just aren't allowed to compete in future NCAA competitions if they do so. Even if this law prevents CA universities from punishing students who accept endorsements, they still won't be able to compete in NCAA competitions so what is the actual point?

<comment><USER4> They will be able to complete in NCAA competitions, or at least they will be able to sue the NCAA in California if they are prevented from doing so. The law applies to both universities and athletic associations.

<comment><USER19> > The law applies to both universities and athletic associations.

So they made the Olympics illegal even though they are set to host it in 2028?

<comment><USER20> The IOC removed the requirement to be an amateur in 1971. The requirement of the USOC for US athletes to be amateurs was eliminated in 1978. Individual sport associations still prevented professionals participating in some sports until 1986. Since 1986 all Olympic sport have allowed professionals.

<comment><USER19> Fair. But the IOC still bans many forms of athletes using their likeness to earn money, which is what this bill addresses. Even under this bill, students still wouldn't be allowed to earn money by coaching HS students or whatever.

<comment><USER20> The IOC only banned using their likeness to earn money while the games were ongoing. They could do so before and after the games. I use the past tense because the IOC forwarded an amendment to 40.3 to the national olympic committees this summer to be implemented which greatly relaxes that ban.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good, that was pure exploitation. Student athletes should be able to profit off of their talents, just like any other student could profit off of their own talents.

It is like when a software engineer working at a tech company comes up with an idea at work, they could develop, release a product, and then make a fortune ... right? ... ... uh oh!

<comment><USER22> I think that one is a little bit on the software engineer for not negotiating that out of their contract. There are plenty of shops who won't try to own your brain at work and at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hopefully this works out the same way to how California sets clean car standards just for themselves. California is a big enough market and it's not worth making different cars just for California. So all cars sold in the U.S. are manufactured to that standard.

</comment><comment><USER24> My preference would be for a world where college athletes were genuinely student-athletes: held to the same academic standards as other students while genuinely acting as amateur athletes.

But that's not the world we live in (particularly for football and basketball.) The quasi-professional setup we have now, where athletes generate tremendous revenue for schools and and capture very little of that, is untenable. I don't necessarily think athletes should get paid by schools, but it's hard to articulate why they shouldn't be able to benefit from endorsements.

<comment><USER25> Tremendous _revenue_ but not really any profit. College sports overall are not "profitable" except at a very few elite programs. (Schools hope knock-on effects, like increased alumni interest, make them pay off).

<comment><USER26> If that's accurate, and college sports in aggregate have no net positive value to the schools (through alumni donation, local economic stimulus, etc.) that's all the more reason to not support the status quo. That would mean these kids are making lots of money that's not benefiting anyone except the NCAA and others able to siphon value off.

<comment><USER25> Oh, I totally agree.

I don't know how to fix it, but I don't like how education and competition teams are tangled up in the US. In lots of Europe, schools don't do that, and there are a greater number of local recreation centers that have quality competition teams both for kids, college students, and adults for very reasonable, low fees.

It seems like a better model, but we're used to doing it the current way _and_ have built up large facilities at high schools and colleges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seen from Europe, the whole concept of college sports is just strange. What do the two have to do with each other? One is a place of study, the other is sport. Here if you want to be an athlete, you join a sports club. If you want to be a computer scientist or historian, you go to university. You can also do both but they have no interactions. Apparently one of the ways to get a scholarship in the US to pay the high tuition fees is through good sport results. But what does swimming really fast have to do with someone's aptitude for studying biology or astronomy or finance?

<comment><USER28> As is the answer with almost anything in the US, the answer is: "There are some who stand to make money from it at the expense of others."

US is fundamentally different from most other countries. In most countries, govt designs (or tries to design) laws and systems for the public good. Not so in the US.

<comment><USER27> > US is fundamentally different from most other countries. In most countries, > govt designs (or tries to design) laws and systems for the public good. Not > so in the US.

I think this is overly simplistic. There's plenty of corruption in many European countries as well, it's just in a different form.

It seems also deeply cultural. What would count as greedy and offputting behavior here, is seen as laudable and ambitious in the US. People are supposed to be pushing for more and more money and they are considered successful to the extent they can make it.

This results in good and bad things alike. Most of the other parts of the world suffer from some form of the tall poppy syndrome: if you want to be socially accepted, you aren't supposed to be deviating too much from those around you. Meaning that entrepreneurship is much smaller and also that many things are just not considered to be for sale in good taste (private prisons, expensive private schools, expensive hospitals).

<comment><USER28> > I think this is overly simplistic. There's plenty of corruption in many > European countries as well, it's just in a different form.

Not denying corruption doesn't exist in other countries, including EU.

However, if you look at it closely from a 3rd person perspective, you'll see that the laws in US are designed to snatch rights away from citizens vs laws in most other countries are designed to give rights to its citizens.

One may ask where it comes from? It seems comes from a place of profit for a lobby.

No payment for student athletes? NCAA and others suck in value of labor of young kids by denying right to earn money for their labor

No universal healthcare or clean competition in healthcare? Private insurance and healthcare institutions suck in value of humans by denying right to get basic healthcare as a service.

No cheap education? Lenders racketing on student's worth by denying students access to low cost capitalistic education.

No rights for private prisoners? Immigrants? Civil forfeiture? Every thing is designed as a system to take away rights for the benefit of a few.

The US govt and private industry are a nexus of money making for large lobbying groups.

This won't fly in another non-corrupt democracy, let alone in EU.

> It seems also deeply cultural. What would count as greedy and offputting > behavior here, is seen as laudable and ambitious in the US

Yep, there's another way of looking at the fundamental difference. The govt exists to make money for a few at the expense of others.

<comment><USER27> Part of the reason could be that the stakes are just much higher in a single country of the size of the US and the lobbying takes less effort. Even with the EU, Europe is just much more fragmented and there's less chance for some business oligarch or parasite corporation to have good relations with all the different governments across all ~50 countries of Europe, each with their own slightly different systems.

<comment><USER28> But even then, you would think lobbying inside Germany would be crazy.

But it isn't. Why? Because people (rich people included) see society as something to be shared. Not something to be taken from others by hook or crook.

US used to be more sharing, like under FDR. But it is more and more like flawed democracies.

<comment><USER27> Arguably the car industry gets away with a lot in Germany. But that lobbying isn't as open and overt as in the US for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Low quality reporting. Two things that should go in the top few sentences:

* Name of the Bill: SB 206

* Link to bill text: [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB206)

Instead the bill is only accidentally named in the embedded tweet.

</comment><comment><USER30> California from the contractor law to this has made it habit to muscle large organization to doing the progressive and right thing. Pretty interesting to see one state change so much nationally.

</comment><comment><USER31> Honestly I dont understand what College Sports is there for. If they're going to get paid its really stupid to have the athletes paid more than the professors.

I've heard the justification that the sports brings in money to the school, but if they athletes get paid that wont be much.

<comment><USER32> Colleges put an ABSURDLY high price on the value of athletics and the "school pride" they bring.

Does it actually improve the common student's education? Probably not.

I assume the teams actually make money, since people would not run them if they were run at a loss. I've heard that the "sports teams pay for themselves." I assume this is bullshit and colleges like to have their vanity projects in the form of big stadiums and athletic teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> California has been on an absolute tear with progressive legislation recently. Love it or hate it (I happen to be the former) it's definitely an experiment in how efficacious modern progressive policies will be.

</comment><comment><USER14> The NCAA's main argument against paying college players is completely bogus, which is that there is an uneven playing field between "amateur" and paid players. In reality, some players already claim that advantage by coming from rich families, which according to NCAA logic is unfair.

The real separation between college and professional athletics is being a student. Rich and poor students both only have 24 hours in a day and as long as a significant portion of that is dedicated to classes, then that's fair enough for me. 12 units / semester is the current minimum.

<comment><USER17> There's a lot to family background. I went to a division 1 school and while I didn't personally know any of the "big name" players, it was obvious life was a lot less comfortable for many of them (even with a certain future in the NBA) than the walk-on with no professional ambition but a surgeon for a parent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> No doubt we aren't doing enough to compensate our college athletes. We treat college Football like the AAA farm system for Baseball, and these kids have incentives to go out and hit hard and stand out so they can advance to the NFL. All without much of a safety net.

I have a friend who was on an athletic scholarship, but he blew out his knee and was cut from the team. Luckily his parents found a way to cover the cost for his final year, but overnight he went from having access to tutors, trainers, and special classes, to being tossed in with everyone else and having to cover his own knee surgery and rehab costs.

Now I'm not saying this is good that athletes got special treatment, but it really drives the point home that they are given special treatment when you deprive them of it right before the graduation finish line... My friend struggled; this is actually where I met him, as he was seeking tutoring.

He was trying, like really trying. Putting his all into academics to try and get caught up. There's only so much you can do, and he had been given such an easy pass to that point he simply wasn't able to do any of the work. He was depressed, felt like his whole life had been taken away, felt like his parents had sold everything they had to help him at least come out with a degree... and he didn't want to let people down.

This was all in the early 2000s, so I don't know if it's changed... what I think would be good:

* Make scholarships irrevocable due to injuries. If you get football scholarship, you get to stay no matter what. With full access to team tutors. A school can't offer someone a life-changing education, and then rip it away just because that person got hurt trying to help entertain the school's athletic audience.

* Make health funds available. Any injury you get while at work, work is liable for. You get hurt playing football, the team has to pay your insurance premiums and provide trainers for your rehab. Like a pension fund. Not like these programs don't have the money...

But paying athletes... slippery slope. It feels like then we really should split sports out into their own AAA systems, rather than relying on schools. I recognize that the drive to be a top athlete can permeate into other areas of a person's life, and sports built team mentality and promote physical fitness... It's just such a sketch gray area when you think about the NFL (and sure, others) diverting risk and responsibility for these kids to the NCAA.

<comment><USER26> The school isn't paying the athletes. Yes, there might only be a whisker separating an "alumni sponsorship" and the school itself paying, but that's the alumni's choice. You can't spin out an NFL or NBA minor league at this point, because you'd just have to rip sports out of college entirely.

The issue is that the NCAA's amateur rule prevents players from capitalizing on their likeness. There's no reason for that rule to stay in place. If you're working in any other field, like say Comp Sci, you can go out and get work in that field while going to school. Why shouldn't athletes? You're a QB, you can sell your likeness to NCAA 2K19 or whatever and make some money. You can sell merch or do jersey signings. That all seems extremely reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> To me athletes should be able to go pro (NBA, NFL) straight when they're in high school. College is a waste of time for these guys. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER35> This strikes me as somewhat dystopian. It is going to enhance the incentive to become a student athlete without helping students that are currently having difficulty affording education without loans, thereby potentially enhancing an already not insignificant sense of discord between athlete and non-athlete students on college campuses.

</comment><comment><USER36> Amazing how much the TV series "Ballers" seems to reflect what's going on behind the scenes in sports. I've felt for years that NCAA rules has treated the athletes like a virtual slave class, while everyone, other than them, makes huge amounts of money.

</comment><comment><USER37> The sooner we can separate sports and education and allow the market play itself out, the better.

</comment><comment><USER38> Can someone share some light on why NCAA doesn't want the college athletes to be paid?

<comment><USER39> Because it's really odd to associate a university with a professional sports team and not paying the athletes was the last straw after stadiums in the hundreds of millions, coaches salaries in the millions, television deals, etc. etc. already all made it seem like a joke.

There's nothing wrong with being a sports fan or being a player, or competing while at university, but the levels that football and basketball have gotten to are plainly ridiculous. Those games and how much money is sunk into them are just ridiculous to have at a university.

There is no reason they should enjoy any tax benefits and their presence distracts and overshadows the purpose of a university.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> College athletes already were getting paid with free tuition, room, board, meal plans, expenses, etc.

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting that no one has raised the implications of this on the taxable income in the state. Given budget shortfalls in the state, and 50-some NCAA institutions with several power programs, this would surely be a welcomed source of revenue for the State government. It begs the question of intent behind the law.

<comment><USER42> This is precisely what I just thought about. CA has some of the highest income tax rates in the US with 10.3% for income over $275k -> 13.3% for income over $1million. From a tax revenue standpoint, this is a no brainer. If other states end up adopting this rule successfully and I were an athlete, I'd probably consider playing in a state that has a more favorable income tax or none at all like NV, WA, WY, FL.

<comment><USER9> CA has a $200bn budget. The tax gains from this will be barely noticeable

<comment><USER42> I mean, they could have proposed this at any time in the last X decades, why now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> In case you're lacking context (not all readers here are US basketball fans) - John Oliver has an excellent take on NCAA salaries issue [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0)

</comment><comment><USER44> America likes its markets free, but it's sports socialist (unpaid college, revenue sharing, salary caps, drafts, etc). Funny how it's progressive CA is going to cause college athletics to a whole lot more market oriented....

<comment><USER26> If you somehow think that "unpaid laborers" in college sports is a socialist ideal, I think you need to do literally any reading at all about what socialism is.

How do the workers have any control over the "means of productions" in that situation? How is that a confederation of laborers setting the market collectively for their efforts? You do realize that markets exist in a socialist paradigm right?

Progressive California is going forward for the right for laborers to make money off of their labor, which is an extremely socialist ideal (as opposed to being paid in "exposure", sorry, "college education" as if that's a real commodity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Good.

</comment><comment><USER46> Good for liberty. Now all we need is a way for college atheletes to sell some of their income in a securitized way on the blockchain. Anyone have an example of a startup trying to do this?

</comment><comment><USER47> So is this just for people engaged in the rapid movement of balls, or does it apply to all athletes?

It would also be interesting to see this expanded to other scholastic competitions, like the chess club, or the debating team.

"Scotts, the official pre-moistened hinge of the Shippensburg University Philatelist Team."

<comment><USER48> > It would also be interesting to see this expanded to other scholastic > competitions, like the chess club, or the debating team.

When I did intercollegiate speech and debate, no one prohibited me from (or threatened my continued eligibility for) getting paid endorsements, or from engaging in paid professional speaking or argument.

Now, there weren't exactly piles of opportunities, either, but I was free to take any I found.</comment></comment>


The Higgs-Boson field (re)-explained - <AUTHOR> http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1684

<comment><USER2> Nice try, but it's very difficult to explain the Higgs boson. A few years ago I played the game "explain the Higgs boson to a math mayor" a few times and I always lost.

Some problems with the comic:

* In the frame (8,1) there is a W particle over a balance. The Higgs boson is useful to "explain" the inertial mass, not the gravitational mass. This is nickpicking, but it's also shows that we don't have the correct words in the common language to talk about the Higgs boson.

* In the frame (9,3) says that all the particles should interact with the Higgs field. Really, the massless particles like photon and gluons don't interact with the Higgs field. And the details of the interactions of the others particles are very different. The W, Z particles interact in a different way than the quarks and electron/muou/tau. And the neutrinos probably interact in a different way. To fix the frame, it's enough to change "had to" to "may".

* In frame (11,1) it use the "molasses" word. The problem is that the canonical property of molasses is viscosity, and the Higgs fields don't create a viscosity equivalent. An electron can travel forward as long as it wants, but a ball in molasses stops soon. I think that it's impossible to give a correct explanation of the Higgs boson using the word "molasses".

* In frames (11,1)-(11,2) it apparently shows that without the Higgs boson, all the particles would not interact. But really the other interactions are independent of the Higgs boson.

EDIT: (10,1) -> (11,1) and (10,2) -> (11,2)

<comment><USER3> Good points. However, I will be meta-nitpicking.

You are right, originally Higgs boson is about the inertial mass — gravitational mass may not be the only other. Nevertheless, I find frame (8,1) very appropriate: Higgs boson is actually about the mass of some specific particles. As explained in the comics, the weak force does not have infinite range, so W and Z bosons must have a mass, and the Higgs boson provides just that. I agree with you, though, the drawing is not an accurate illustration, since a bathroom scale does not measure inertial mass — but the idea is there.

Also, frame (10,1) is saying _" massless"_, not _" molasses"_.

<comment><USER2> You are right, "molasses" is in (11,1) and not in (10,1). I just fixed my original comment, and marked the editions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> When a newbie developer faces a coding problem they often just keep adding more and more special cases to cope. And then after a long time someone very clever comes along and refactors the whole mess in to a much more simple, beautiful, and structured block of code...

I think physics is going to turn out the same way, only with unified fields instead of nested if statements.</comment>


Clojure Conj talk: Clojure Zippers - <AUTHOR> http://clojure.blip.tv/file/4503162/

<comment><USER2> I couldn't get through this -- the "um's" are just too distracting :(</comment>


In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other over strips of land - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/19/the-murderers-next-door-romania <comment><USER2> > In the poor and remote province of Maramureş in the northern Carpathians, > cut off by bad mountain roads from the rest of Romania to the south...

Sadly, even from the first sentence, this article is full of sensationalist, incorrect and exaggerated information.

I lived 20 years of my life in Maramureș - albeit in the city - and it is neither a poor region, nor remote, nor cut off by mountain roads from anything [1]. It's very hard to take anything in this article seriously.

It was a very sad and disappointing thing to read this morning about a beautiful region with friendly people and old traditions...

[1] [http://tinyurl.com/q98g9g5](http://tinyurl.com/q98g9g5) (google maps)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like how the article start with making fun of ancient body measures, but then uses feet to compare.

<comment><USER4> I'm currently working on a (very very basic) knitting app. Proof reading text is awful. Patterns use skeins, yards, metres, mm, cm, inches, gauge (arbitrary units) etc all interchangeably. It is kind of impressive how the units coexists. It pains me.

<comment><USER5> Orwell would love the more rustic and humanistic imperial measures over the sterile metric system.

[http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml](http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml)

<comment><USER6> He might have a point with other units, but when it comes to temperature, Celsius strikes me as more humanistic and intuitive. Zero as the freezing point of water, and 100 as the boiling point is easy for any human to relate to since we interact with water every day.

<comment><USER7> Fahrenheit is fairly humanistic as well: 0 is very roughly as cold as you'll ever see, and 100 is about as hot as you'll ever see.

<comment><USER4> I'm not generally interested in the temperature when it is 'normal'. However when it is unusually hot or cold I might check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest thief of land in that region (and in most of the rest of Romania) is the Romanian state itself. Land that was confiscated under communist rule is only given back or compensated for after many years of lawsuits against the state (in some cases decades), which drags her heels in an attempt to outlive the bringers of these suits.

The state has enormous resources compared to the people involved and so they tend to either lose or fail to collect if and when there finally is a judgment. During my time there I learned of two families in this situation and it is not as if I know a whole lot of Romanians.

Quite possibly the land-grab under the communists is yet another (direct or indirect) factor in driving land-scarcity for extremely poor, small-time farmers like this. Unfortunately they are so poor that if that's the case they are not going to be able to get the state to give back any land. That's mostly reserved to those that are wealthy enough to see that whole process through _and_ then wealthy enough to force the state to pay up or give back their possession.

Quite a few people simply die waiting for a resolution of these cases.

<comment><USER9> Well but palinca that was mentioned in passing doesn't help either... with killing, anger and then regret later next day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the village I grew up, in a forested and mountainous area of western Europe, there were a pair of farmers who lived quite apart from the main part of the town. They were house-to-house neighbors, and were the only humans who lived in several km around. One of them had a vegetable garden as secondary means of sustenance, while the other had a herd of goats.

A single month would not go by without the people of the town talking about their last argument, sometimes involving gunshots, maybe a dead goat and, in the right time of the year, viciously defended mushrooms. I regret not knowing what finally happened to them, but the point is that little towns will be little towns, everywhere. When the only human contact you have is the neighbor you don't get along with, and you are not precisely in the top percentile of cultural and social graces, the results are consistent in every small town I have ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER11> >He had been sitting on the river bank across from his house, just at the spot where a favourite cousin of his had died years before, accidentally electrocuted when illegally electrofishing in the river.

That sounds like something out of Borat.

<comment><USER12> All the ghetto stuff the first world scoffs at is pretty commonplace.

here's a summary of a conversation about fishing my friend had with a group of school children when he went to India

friend: so how do you guys catch fish?

kid: (indicating order of preference) explosives, electricity, bleaching powder and nets

friend: beaching powder?!?!

kid: yup

At face value it sounds like bleaching powder would contaminate the meat but my friend and I figure that the bleaching powder chemically burns their gills causing them to suffocate.

He said he saw some fish markets disturbingly far from water considering the lack of refrigeration. The electrical grid was beyond horrible and there was tons of smog in the city.

He saw two guys welding hand rails in a stairwell by jumper cabling the welder to the railing at the bottom and attaching the leads to the railing at the top. To change between which rail they were working on they'd yell down and have someone flip the cables. Technically safe but not OSHA approved.

Now that I think about it, I really gotta try fishing with my stick welder...

<comment><USER11> I know but it's still (morbidly) hilarious.

Also are you sure bleaching powder is used for burning gills ? When I was a kid my grandfather took me fishing for eels after tides were high enough that they could get from sea to small ponds on the shore. We would drop this plant that secreted white liquid and supposedly blind them then they would swim a shore and you could just pick them up in the morning - I'm thinking maybe bleaching powder is for the same purpose ?

IIRC it was illegal because it killed tadpoles and tiny fish that would eat mosquitoes eggs (the entire village used to do it regularly before).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really don't like the Hollywood-style of describing the work on the fields: "But then, in another light, you see the tools of violence being carried into the fields: the steel crowbar, the ranga, for making holes in the earth, the axe with its bright and burnished edge, the cleft oak posts, the hoes, the hedge slashers – all the instruments with which management can be imposed. Cutting, controlling, slicing, hacking, killing: these are aspects of everyday existence". This is hardly a "Texas chainsaw massacre" pre/sequel.

Most of the people lack proper education. Everything "higher" as 4 school years is a "gift". The majority were children when WW2 broke out and saw their parents being striped of possession, such as lands. After the war came the communists, which did the same thing, again. These are people which have a deeply rooted passion for their ancestral land. The have, unfortunately, never learned to solve their problems in a civilized manner, because they haven't seen that in practice. They've mostly seen abuse and react the same way...

<comment><USER14> > never learned to solve their problems in a civilized manner, because they > haven't seen that in practice

Oh they have. They've observed that the people with the most power (legal or otherwise), force, or money get what they want.

They've observed that the only way to not lose their land is to stand on it with weapons and physically confront those who would take it away from them.

<comment><USER13> It really depends on how far the physical confrontation goes. You can't farm the land from prison. That's the "best case", when they go to prison. If they're wounded, for example, and can't move, they become a burden for the remaining family members.

I do agree that they are filled with hopelessness with regards to the legal process of solving problems. This falls into the same abuse category of loosing their lands, with the exception that it's not by force, but by law...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the Denver suburbs about 35 years ago, two neighbors had a dispute about a small strip of property. These were not subsistence farmers. They were not unschooled; one had a Ph.D. in the sciences. It got to the point that the Ph.D. was mowing his lawn with a firearm strapped to his hip. The local police were called repeatedly. I don't think that I ever heard how it was resolved, but it must have been.

</comment><comment><USER16> _All over the world, neighbours kill each other over strips of land_

</comment><comment><USER17> Wouldn't be the first time a different land made a different people in modern times. The Pirahã in the Amazon killed a sick infant with alcohol. Why? I'd let Daniel Everett explain... [http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are- Snakes/dp/0307386...](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are- Snakes/dp/0307386120)

</comment><comment><USER18> The real cause is geometry. They have narrow strips of land because they were divided this way when inherited.

In Poland, the government has been joining farmland since 1919: they give you the same area you had scattered into strips or even a bit larger one, but in one squarish piece. Win-win.

<comment><USER19> I wonder how this plays out when the consolidated land you get sits on less farmable earth than the fragmented one you had.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So in the West we have kids shooting each other over the colours of the clothes they wear but in Romania you have adults killing each other over land rights.

</comment><comment><USER21> so hn is just reddit now?</comment>


Diablo III's Digital Rights Management System Isn't So Bad - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/diablo-iiis-digital-rights-management-system-isnt-so-bad-2012-05-29

<comment><USER3> The gaming industry is increasingly making games more social. People are now getting more and more used to playing with strangers online. The whole idea of achievements and badges definitely enable this. Yes it's great to beat a game, but now you can beat a game and then boast about it publicly - <USER2> his/her's ego and that is immensely addicting.

Diablo 3's DRM is practically invisible, because you need to be online anyways, how else would you boast to your friends about that new legendary item that you just got.</comment>


A webpack boilerplate for a production-ready marketing website - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/geniuscarrier/webpack-boilerplate <comment><USER2> Well, I just gave it a try and this is how it looks like in my browser: [http://postimg.org/image/kazxyotab/](http://postimg.org/image/kazxyotab/)

<comment><USER3> The page looks about right. The interesting part here is the module bundling, not the UI.

edit: this is the markup on the demo <body> Webpack Boilerplate </body>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Webpack is such a useful tool. These boilerplates are a nice way to get started.

P.S. I found a little typo in the config code and sent you a pull request with the fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Merged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks, we need more of these.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks cool. I've never used webpack, but this seems like a good place to start.

I'm a bit confused about the choice of package inclusions though. Waypoints.js and scrollTo.js both feel like pretty opinionated choices. That is, it seems like you have a particular idea in mind for the UI based on the inclusion of those packages, but the UI is empty.

I think the inclusion of a (not overly complex) UI that makes interesting use of the packages you included would help this project get a lot of traction, in that it would more viscerally demonstrate that the user can go from nothing to a pretty decent website in ~10 seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since a lot of people asking for production/demo page/screenshot, I've added an example page as the default dev environment: [https://github.com/geniuscarrier/webpack- boilerplate](https://github.com/geniuscarrier/webpack-boilerplate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems cool, if you have this in production it would be awesome to have a link in the readme. A screenshot is the next best thing.

On mobile, supet tough to get a sense for what it is. I am familiar with the toolset, but a "production" website push to start would be pretty helpful if it was well done. I have no idea what this looks like on mobile, and even downloading the repo and running it without a screenshot might be a barrier.

cheers

<comment><AUTHOR> Added a gif screenshot: [https://github.com/geniuscarrier/webpack- boilerplate](https://github.com/geniuscarrier/webpack-boilerplate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The minified bundle.js for the boilerplate is 600kb. I would recommend gzipping, and packing fonts to a separate bundle.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice. Was looking for something like this.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you need an easy place to host your static html marketing website, check out [http://www.statichosting.co/](http://www.statichosting.co/). It's $5 a month and you can upload your site via zip file or command line.

Disclaimer: it's my service. I'd love to answer any questions you have.

<comment><USER11> I'm really curious about the niche you're targeting.

Let me try to figure it out: people that can code a static page and use a static generator (know markup languages, maybe tempting languages, can use the command line) and people who can't use an FTP app and haven't heard of Git/Github pages.

How big is the intersection of these sets of people? I would be surprised if it's more than a handful.

I'm not trying to sound pessimistic ... I would be happy, in fact, to know that I'm wrong. So, if I may ask ... do you have more than 0 customers?

<comment><USER12> > people who can't use an FTP app and haven't heard of Git/Github pages.

I would also add S3 to that list. I host my (admittedly low-traffic) blog on S3 with CloudFront as a CDN for <$2/month.

<comment><USER13> why wouldn't you do it free on github pages?

<comment><USER12> I prefer S3 and CloudFront for various reasons, and <$2/month is so close to free that it doesn't matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone got a screenshot for the lazy?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://camo.githubusercontent.com/dcc4f80ba22343f81873d94c4...](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/dcc4f80ba22343f81873d94c407cffa13c8e875a/687474703a2f2f67656e697573636172726965722e6d652f696d616765732f7765627061636b2d626f696c6572706c6174652e676966)</comment></comment>


Device Configuration Overlay (Hard Drive) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_configuration_overlay <comment><USER2> What about SSDs? I think they put fewer chips on the same PCB boards instead of "deactivating" some of them to sell lower cost versions of the same disc.</comment>


Ask HN: What market verticals are benefiting from Coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> The world is changing around us. There will be new winners and new losers created by this change. Which market verticals do you think are poised to benefit from this? To start off here are a few:<p>- Online marketplaces like Amazon<p>- Remote work tools like Zoom and Slack<p>- Food delivery like Instacart <comment><USER2> don't forget entertainment - netflix, youtube, tiktok disney+ etc...</comment>


The End of Business Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://outlier.ai/2017/04/04/the-end-of-business-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> Did we reach The End of ETL which would enable such a thing and I somehow missed it?

<comment><USER3> Ha, no, until we can have universal standards for data collection and storage I think ETL will always exist. Segment and mParticle are making it easier, but there is little industry incentive to remove the ETL friction as there is so much money to be made.</comment></comment>


Tackling Age Discrimination in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-world?mobile <comment><USER2> When I was on the other side of the coin, I was working for a particular company. A significantly older guy, like really freaking old, showed up in the cubicle one day, a contractor. I was pretty much the gang leader and instigator of any crimes in the nearby vicinity. So when we were going out to lunch, I dropped by and asked if he wanted to tag along. He thought for a second and said sure.

He had the best stories. He was a sailor and had raced the Boston Bermuda race. He had a lifetime winning streak over William F Buckley. He taught celestial navigation. He'd been a dresser for Rudolph Nureyev. Absolutely the best stories.

He was dead 6 months later from prostate cancer he already had. One of the most outstanding characters I've ever met in the Valley.</comment>


Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes - <AUTHOR> http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/20461267965/learn-to-read-korean-in-15-minutes?resubmit=hn <comment><USER2> If you want to actually learn Korean, check out this site. [1] An American knowing no Korean moved to Korea and meticulously documented everything he learned, and this website was the result. It's an incredibly thorough study into Korean.

[1] [http://www.howtostudykorean.com/](http://www.howtostudykorean.com/)

<comment><USER3> Anything similar for Japanese or Chinese?

<comment><USER4> Tae Kim's work is probably the equivalent for Japanese [0]. I think his "complete guide" is still a work in progress, but his grammar guide is pretty much the defacto free resource.

[0]: [http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/](http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/)

<comment><USER5> I actually suggest imabi.net over Tae Kim depending on how you want to define "learning the language".

Tae Kim is a great introductory guide to Japanese and is something I often hand to beginners. But for anyone who wants to _seriously_ study the language, imabi.net is on an entirely different level.

[0] [http://imabi.net](http://imabi.net)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, Korea (Hangul) really is about this easy to learn. It takes about a week of an hour a day to remember everything well enough to be able to sound out Korean words easily (and it's especially fun when you find English loan words).

Depending where you live, you might not use it very often, but it's a neat skill to pick up.

It also does that weird hack to your brain where you start looking at signs and instead of just seeing a picture of the sign, your brain almost starts involuntarily looking for things to read (almost like in some kind of unkillable background thread). Since it'll be a new writing system, your brain won't do it as quickly, but you'll never be able to look at ㄱ and not immediately have your brain turn that into a 'g/k' sound, but it'll happen kind of slowly compared to your native script and you can "feel" the thread working.

<comment><USER7> Yes this!

Like many Indians, I was raised bilingual on completely different scripts (Latin alphabet and Malayalam) and learned the Hindi (Sanskrit) script when I was really young too. I learned to read Hangul in the first 2-3 days of wandering the streets of Seoul aimlessly when I stayed there for a month, just trying to read every neon sign, advert and train/bus stop I came across.

The thread works at slightly different paces for each of them because of how much I use each one, really feeling like it's all about cache hits and memory bus limitations. It's pretty interesting to meta-think about.

<comment><USER6> It's so weird because of how involuntary it is. I notice that on signs in languages I can sound out, my gaze will stick on the sign until I can "read" it, without me wanting it to happen.

The first few days in a new country can be kind of exhausting simply because of this effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He did the same with Russian a while back.

[http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/97607943779/learn-t...](http://ryanestradadotcom.tumblr.com/post/97607943779/learn- to-read-russian-in-15-minutes-i-did-this)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fastest decomplexification I ever felt. Before that Korean was like Chinese, and now it's as easy as Korean.

</comment><comment><USER10> Free PDF for learning Korean: [http://www.koreanfromzero.com/](http://www.koreanfromzero.com/)

I've heard a lot of good things for the author's other series Japanese From Zero.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a great start. But there is more to it, if you wanna learn. Eg. Double final consonants 닭, and all the "Consonant assimilation" stuff.

The Korean Wiki Project has a more indepth look. [http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Learn_hangeul](http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Learn_hangeul)

</comment><comment><USER12> The Korean script is fantastic, yes, one of the few designed to effectively promote popular literacy. But you're only going to learn to read Korean in 15 minutes if you already speak Korean ;) Otherwise, you'll have to learn to speak Korean (at least, learn the phonology of Korean) as you learn to read it, which will take more than 15 minutes.

<comment><USER13> This was still a fantastic little primer - in the tech field, I think we all know a few people that know katakana and hiragana well enough to impress their friends by mentally sounding out an english cognate - "hey friends, this is a pharmacy up here" \- the first 1% looks like magic to the rest of us.

<comment><USER14> Well... Taking Japanese in high school will do that to you. Hiragana and katakana are the first things you go over and it took a good part of the first year.

Korean is simpler by far. Just a couple weekends of looking at the rules and what they do. My problem is that I can't actually form the sounds in my head fast enough in order to know what the words mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Excellent work condensing the alphabet into a single fun-to-read comic. Shameless self-promotion: [http://langintro.com/kintro](http://langintro.com/kintro) ; much slower paced, with exercises and other stuff.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've got a site that has some basic Spanish grammar.

[http://thespanishsite.com/spanish/grammar](http://thespanishsite.com/spanish/grammar)

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

I'd like to repurpose it to cover the basics for several languages. With all the localization, it's handy to have a quick reference.

</comment><comment><USER17> Plug: If you're learning Korean and have questions or just want to chat with other people in Korean and are familiar with IRC, #korean and #learnkorean on snoonet (irc.snoonet.org) always have people around who are also learning and/or willing to help others.

</comment><comment><USER18> Too bad Korean is not written in mixed script (hanja + hangul) anymore. It is incredibly easy to understand texts and to focus on learning grammar rules once you have a signifiant Chinese character knowledge.

<comment><USER17> Not regularly but it is still mixed, particularly in literature. People still learn Hanja for benefit, albeit relatively minor.

<comment><USER19> I thought those were only used for street/place names, and sometimes business cards for family names?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Awesome. My name in Korean ( sort of ) [http://imgur.com/BelRtBC](http://imgur.com/BelRtBC)

Ryan is a genius. This really works!

<comment><USER21> Should be 오 at the end there

<comment><USER20> Nice! Cool. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've developed a beloved app to learn Korean

[http://get.egg-convo.com](http://get.egg-convo.com)

</comment><comment><USER23> I lived in Korea for awhile, I still seem to remember the sounds of the letters, this was a good refresher.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is really great! Thanks for posting</comment>


How Apple Used Product Placement To Mess With Your Subconscious - <AUTHOR> http://lureofmac.com/11-ways-apple-ads-messed-with-you/

<comment><USER2> Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. -Steve Jobs

</comment><comment><USER3> Apple brands itself like no other tech company. It's appeal to the massive is incredible.</comment>


Star Trek and the kiss that changed TV - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160707-star-trek-turns-50-why-it-was-subversive-and-groundbreaking <comment><USER2> Not only did Star Trek TOS feature the first interracial kiss on national television, but DS9 featured the first same-sex kiss a generation later. It also had some very prescient pre-9/11 warnings about the dark side of a war on terrorism.

The series has always been as much about social progress as technology.</comment>


Popular RTS StarCraft running in browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gloomyson/StarCraft

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks really cool if he completely migrate StarCraft to HTML5+js</comment>