Luis von Ahn, co-founder and CEO of Duolingo - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51208154 <comment><USER2> I have a 2201 day streak playing Duolingo. I love Duolingo. I have taken Spanish and French that whole time and German for a few years.

I find Duolingo to be an extremely fun game. My wife and I really enjoy trying to speak other languages and even more so now that we have talking children. I can speak passable Spanish and can string together broken sentences in French to be effective (they get what I mean) and hilarious to native speakers.

Duolingo has never purely taught me a language. If my wife didn't know Spanish and learning French like me, I would have never been able to practice enough in the real world to know.

I enjoy using Duolingo immensely. For me it is a fun way to toy around with a hobby I've had for years without committing myself to dedicated training costs and time.

<comment><USER3> > I have a 2201 day streak playing Duolingo. I love Duolingo. I have taken > Spanish and French that whole time and German for a few years.

> I can speak passable Spanish and can string together broken sentences in > French to be effective

Things like this worry me. If we look at how long Spanish and French take, it is about 600hrs[0] (probably less because specifically French is really close to English and Spanish is close to French). If you only had 20 minutes a day you should be reasonably fluent. But if your wife and you are talking, I'm guessing you average more than that.

[0] [https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main- qimg-688ca4d9dd1f88f5f655be...](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main- qimg-688ca4d9dd1f88f5f655be277979a480)

<comment><USER2> "Worry"? That seems like a strong word here.

This is a game that I enjoy playing. I have never tracked how long I take. Many days, I do only a single lesson. That's less than 5 minutes, sometimes less than 3.

I'm not trying to be fluent. I'm not really _trying_ to achieve anything. The closest I have to a goal is that I enjoy having another language's vocabulary that I can use when speaking around my children.

<comment><USER4> In that case, sticking with a premade Anki deck would likely be more effective for that amount of time.

<comment><USER2> But a lot less fun!:-)

<comment><USER4> Such is the nature of language learning. It's not really sexy or fun to study vocab or shadow along to something you're watching for the 10th time. I see language learning exactly the same as working out- it's just a lot of consistent hard work over years. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I learned Mandarin and German pre-Duolingo, both to reasonable levels of proficiency.

I've messed around with Duolingo a few times, just to get a feel for how useful it is. I came away feeling that it was about the same level as flashcard vocabulary learning - useful, but only a small part of the pie.

Vocabulary is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to be able to carry on a conversation. Mandarin in particular is more difficult, since you need to grind through hours and hour writing/rote learning characters to improve your vocabulary.

The one thing that noticeably accelerated my proficiency was having an actual conversation with a native speaker (host family/tutor/etc). That's not something that Duolingo really replicates.

Self-plug - coincidentally, earlier today I just released a small tool for Mandarin learners to practise their tone recognition! I've been working on a larger app and this seemed like something that would have helped me when I first started out. App is currently live @ [https://fluent.academy](https://fluent.academy) \- I'll be introducing more functionality for Mandarin learners in the near future, so would really love to hear from students of any level.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary, but if you really want to learn a language you need to supplement this with listening to the language as well as speaking it.

I've been learning French and have been using Duolingo for vocab, but then I listen to a French-teaching podcast as well as trying to work on reading/speaking it.

<comment><USER7> I'm not at the stage where I can listen to it since it's such a fast language. I've been reading LeMonde newspaper and trying to decipher it that way. I live in Canada but the French here is quite different in each region; Quebec, Acadian, Métis. Duolingo French course is France French not Canadian French I think it's standard French aka Parisan.

<comment><USER6> There are podcasts for learning such as "Coffee Break French". Basically they start with very basic french and build up. This can be good for starting to learn to listen to french.

Regarding the differences between Canadian and France French, are there that many differences that it would make it difficult to understand someone from another region?

<comment><USER7> In addition to what others have said I can only offer anecdotal evidence.

I have friends and former coworkers some from Quebec, some from New Brunswick all fluently bilingual. We've all worked with people from France on projects and my Acadian friends remarked they couldn't understand a word the people from France said.

Although the reverse of that a friend went to northern France on vacation. When he was there he said everyone asked him where he was from he told them New Brunswick Canada. From what I understand Acadian (French dialect of New Brunswick, Canada) is older and closer to northern France than the Quebec dialect. I'm not sure if my friend meant the regional dialect or standard Parisian French, I'm pretty sure he meant the former.

And this may be totally wrong but I believe the southern France dialect (Occitan) is quite different than the north. I've had to call Monaco (I know it's not France) and I was surprised at just the accent of the French person speaking English. I've been around French all my life but southern France to me sounds like stereotypical cartoon French like Pepe LePew.

The entire history of standard French for their language is quite interesting. It's not been accepted for as long as you may think and there are many dialects.

edit: I think Canadian French has a lot of slang not used in France which makes it hard to understand. Kind of like a Cockney from England coming to the US, sure you can understand his language but not the meaning the way he uses words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Personally, I've found Duolingo to be almost universally worse than any other language product. It seems to have become successful and widely-known purely from marketing. It is the current generation's Rosetta Stone.

In general, I recommend Glossika or Pimsleur over Duolingo. Depending on the language you're learning, there are also more niche sites that do a far better job; _Turkish Tea Time_ or _RealPolish.pl_ are some good examples.

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

[https://realpolish.pl](https://realpolish.pl)

<comment><USER9> >It is the current generation's Rosetta Stone

To be fair. Rosetta Stone got it's "reputation" because of it's insane price point comparative to what you learnt. Duolingo on the other hand is completely free.

<comment><USER10> It's freemium, which I don't feel is "completely" free.

<comment><USER11> There are only marginal benefits to Duolingo plus that can't be obtained with a proper adblocker. Many people who choose to subscribe admit they only do so to support the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I learned couple of languages with the help of Duolingo. They claim t be the fastest way to learn a language.

I recently realized is only valid if you don't want to put the work in. People who are not willing to put serious effort into learning a new language will find Duolingo useful.

It's also useful if you come from similar language. E.g. you speak Italian and you want to learn Spanish (latin langauge). Or you're Czech and you want to learn Polish (slavic language, same grammar and compsition)

But if you are serious about learning a language, Duolingo will only slow you down. You learn conversational stuff and progress often with big holes in the knowledge and understanding the core principles and structures of the language.

For serious learners of a new language, keen to progress properly and fast Duolingo should be avoided.

<comment><USER13> Duolingo works by means of repetition. The user can learn as much as they want. You need to define "serious learning" and "serious effort" if you want to make a well written critique. Which alternatives do you suggest? How much do they cost? How much time per month would you spend on these? Versus Duolingo? What is/are your end goal(s). In how many months would you reach your end goal(s)?

<comment><USER12> Serious effort is when you drill the grammar and memorise tense and forms of words. You'll have a base to build on.

Take English for example, difference between past simple vs. past continuous is easier explained once than randomly coming across on Duolingo never fully comprehending the principle. Therefore it's faster.

And form someone coming from non-Germanic language this will take time to comprehend, kind of like when you first learned some math concepts as a child, some took a while to click.

Now take words and their past forms, give, gave, given.

In order to use it in a natural way, you first have to drill and memorise many words ... not possible on Duolingo as one lesson you work with a bunch of "gave" and suddenly several lessons you use "given" ...

Yes, you can learn language in way that you go China and you're able to make primitive conversations. I know a lot of people speaking French that they learned conversational way and all of them struggle with grammar and despite being able to talk and communicate fluently their language is not enough for professional level or academic level.

E.g. my girlfriend and I speak English, a language native to neither of us ... we can live a complete life together and we can talk but to a native speaker her mixing of tenses and grammar would sound like nonsense.

This is the case with many of my foreign friends who learned English in a conversational way.

Duolingo does the best what it's designed for. It's a way to learn for the lazy, so it is a game.

<comment><USER14> Could you please recommend an alternative to Duolingo?

<comment><USER4> Glossika (basically a modern pimsleur) is the best app that I've found for practicing a language.

If you actually want to learn a language?

\- find one or three good textbooks and follow them completely with exercises

\- find a language exchange, but it won't be helpful for speaking until you know 200-300 words and can speak a little. exchanges can be good for making friends, though. they're great for getting feedback on your pronunciation, speaking, etc, but always take things with a grain of salt. native speakers are not always good teachers.

\- find graded readers or native content that is catered to early, medium, advanced levels, etc. immersion is really important

\- use Anki for spaced repetition, to memorize vocabulary (that you found from native content like tv shows / books / etc)

\- make friends thru language exchanges or apps like Hello Talk / Tandem

\- in general try to get as much input and output as possible. people usually neglect speaking and listening.

\- finding a weekly tutor can help you iron out personal issues, particularly with pronunciation

Doing an app for a few mins a day is never going to teach you a language to a "fluent" degree, despite what marketing they have. Learning a language requires serious study and practice- speaking (and writing, etc) are muscles that you have to train over time by interacting with real people.

I don't consider making a few contrived sentences like "my name is X, i do y for a living, where is the bathroom" to be _fluent_. Not at all. That's called being barely functional. Real fluency depends on your native language and target language, but requires years and years of work. It's not sexy like the idea of using an app and magically becoming "fluent" in a language.

<comment><USER14> Totally, appreciate your insight. Just wanted to say thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Duolingo to restore my limited knowledge of Japanese and worked pretty well. I managed to keep a two month every-day habit, but collapsed as soon as I skipped few days — there's something to learn about too much aggressive gamification here.

Nonetheless I suggested my mother and grandmother to start using it to get better at their english and they've been using it every single day since 8 months ago — and I've seen incredible results. They start to understand basic online content and they are asking me to translate content less and less every week.

This is an incredible result IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER16> I see duolingo as a kind of modern equivalent to the language textbooks we had in school. You aren't going to seriously learn a language using it, but it gives you enough of a taste that you might be motivated to decide to pick up a language after using it.

I do think that using duolingo too long is an inefficient way to learn a language even at beginner level, I wouldn't use it for more than a few weeks before graduating to a SRS like Anki.

For intermediate to advanced I really love clozemaster. It's especially good for learning grammar, you probably want to supplement it with some pure vocabulary in an SRS.

</comment><comment><USER17> I speak English (native), French and German. I'm currently learning Dutch with Duolingo. I've only used the iPhone app for about 2 months at the free tier.

I've already learned similar languages the traditional way and I go to the netherlands at least 1-2x year for work.

Personally, I feel I get enough value from Duolingo to make it worth my time. But I admit I'm a particular use case.

IMHO it is not was way to learn language if it is one's only tool. But then again neither is only classroom instruction or only books or only tv. I think that is where people get hung up on critiquing it.

I see it as ONE valuable tool in my toolbox.

<comment><USER17> FYI recent discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702424)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm hesitant to use duolingo, after seeing the amount of funding rounds and VC capital they have taken. I would steer clear of using it.

Are there any free and open source alternatives to duolingo out there? I wouldn't want to use something that could shutdown after an 'incredible journey'.

<comment><USER19> I don't think there is anything comparable OSS wise. Creating such an alternative wouldn't only be very difficutl tech-wise, but someone would also have to create the content.

Anyway, I've been using Duolingo since ca. 2014 and it didn't shutdown... Plus, it's free - what do you have to lose? Your progress on some language learning app? You won't lose the knowledge gained.

<comment><USER20> It isn't free -- you have to watch ads, which detracts severely from the learning and enjoyment.

<comment><USER21> Plus being a betrayal of their user-base which is heavily weighted towards young and impressionable learners. And, by the way, a betrayal of their initial promise, that they would never do advertising (expressly stated in the first promo video they released, which is still on YouTube).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> has anyone used duolingo for an extensive period of time and can confirm it helps with actually speaking a new language? my experience with tools like these is that they help build vocabulary but you can't actually hold a conversation for a long time...

<comment> ainar-g I'm a linguaphile with a lot of experience with Duolingo. I've joined in the very first months of Duolingo. There are many problems with it:

* First and foremost, Duolingo isn't a product, it's a series of products, which all have different characteristics. A person using Duolingo on Android will have an experience completely different from the experience of someone who uses iOS. And the difference is even more drastic when comparing mobile with the desktop version. The desktop version is sometimes three or four time more challenging.

* Even within one platform, the A/B testing has become so large-scale that even two Android users might see a completely different product.

* Courses for "popular" languages get way more attention than the "unpopular" ones. And the quality varies greatly.

* The ads they show are sometimes loud and obnoxious, NSFW, or straight up scams. That doesn't happen that often, thankfully, but I've had my portion of loud-as-hell game ads and borderline pornographic hentai game ads. And before you say what people always say when it comes to NSFW ads, Duolingo says that ads aren't personalised, so no, my search history has nothing to do with them.

* Finally, it is indeed a good way to learn _some basics_ and acquire _some basic vocabulary,_ but there is no way you'll get fluent with it. A friend of mine has summed Duolingo up very well: it gives you a _feeling_ that you learn something, even if you don't progress at all.

That's just the stuff I could remember off the top of my head. It's still nice to have it, but we still should remember that the service has lots of issues, some of which could be eliminated, if the management wanted to do so.

<comment><USER23> I'll second this. Another problem is the subscription, which IMHO, is overpriced for what you're getting. They also seem to spend an unusual amount of time redesigning already functional UI's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Duolingo functions on the premise that "being conversational" means "cobbling together words shakily into passable sentences". I find that people in general have a low bar for "being fluent" and "being conversational".

Have you ever tracked a conversation you've had with your friends? A conversation can broach many different topics, and can go deep into those topics. Are you "conversational" if you can only say a few sentences and are completely out of your depth once the conversation switches to any other topic like politics, etc? No. Conversations can also last hours.

Doing things like duolingo will never have you reach fluency or even being fully conversational. It may be a good start, but it should always be complemented by studying with textbooks or online resources like instructors on youtube. Anki (or memrise) is necessary to start memorizing heaps of vocabulary words so you can begin to have simple conversations. Glossika is good for making yourself practice saying sentences and listening to sentences.

Native material is by far the most important aspect. That's how you find vocabulary and practice things like listening and shadowing along.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can we pause for a moment to appreciate the manifest destiny of a name like Severin Hacker?

<comment><USER24> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like Duolingo because it's easy to get going and quick to take lessons during my free time.

It's easy enough to get going and hard enough to feel like you're doing something but not so much you give up.

The points system, scoreboard, and email prompts are a good way to encourage you without being annoying. The ranked scoreboard really has me wanting to stay there and compete to stay in the top 10 each week.

One thing I miss is the speaking option. Not all languages offer it but some did and that option seems to be missing or at least on my device it is.

Another problem is some languages are hit and miss with pronunciations if there are few native speakers. I know there are computer generated voices but sometimes there is no sample of the words at all (Irish being one example).

Anything that gets people interested in languages is a good thing. Duolingo may not be perfect but it's a popular and easy to use app. We unilingual English speakers need to get to with the times and learn at least one second language, maybe even more.

<comment><USER25> I've been using the voice-to-text included with the google keyboard on android to practice speech on duo. I'd be interested to hear from a native speaker how accurate the voice-to-text model is but I find it fun getting a computer to understand me in a different language. It can be pretty unforgiving for certain sounds that aren't in my native language so I feel like I really have to nail the pronunciation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's true that it's tough to learn a language from scratch with just Duolingo - only language classes truly worked for me. But as a means of review or for giving my friends who would probably never learn the language properly a leg up, it's invaluable. Rosetta Stone used to be a $700 investment and this made it obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've done a beginners' course with a tutor but had forgotten most of it without regular practice. Duolingo is really useful for ingraining the language into my long-term memory. I would probably enrol in an intermediate course in the future when I can pass the test. I live in the UK where there is a big Spanish community and can easily go on holiday to Spain.

I can make grammatically correct sentences in the Duolingo domains and can understand the gist of unknown [written] sentences using contextual clues and words similar to English. There is a Flag question icon on the app where you can read the community's comments for an explanation on the grammar.

</comment><comment><USER28> Duolingo works reasonably well when used as a supplementary aid to learning a language. I've found that it has reasonable utility when combined with taking a physical class as a low-effort boredom filler for building familiarity with the vocabulary of a language.

What I find pressingly missing is any meaningful way of learning about the grammar of a language. When learning German there was absolutely nothing in the lessons which even hinted at the rules of tenses, cases, conjugations etc and the lack of that content stunts the possibility of building much more than a rote-learning knowledge of a language.

The app does seem to have a great gamification mechanic and is good at driving user engagement, so I guess they have that though.

<comment><USER29> The web version of Duolingo used to have detailed explanations for each lesson that explained a lot of grammar, they seems to have disappeared recently

<comment><USER30> They are still there, but they've changed the UI and removed the lesson permalinks, so it's now harder to both find and use these explanations.

Click on a lesson's circle and there is now a lightbulb icon which opens the detailed lesson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Clozemaster has been my go-to app for language study now. It uses the "sentence mining" concept advocated by Glossika to show you thousands of sentences and learn new vocabulary in context.

After I got to a certain level, Duolingo and Rosetta Stone became too easy, and I found myself grinding on things that I already knew to try to get to "the good stuff". The signal-to-noise ratio was just too low.

Anki was the next step up for me and improved my vocabulary by leaps and bounds, but it became tedious to look for example sentences and make new flashcards from them. Clozemaster does this automatically, and you can choose whatever difficulty level you like.

<comment><USER11> That's the approach I've had recently. Duolingo into Clozemaster, with generous helpings of Memrise on the side. Too bad Clozemaster is awfully limited in its free version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> sideways: reading about his sale of reCAPTCHA to Google stumbled on

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

" In 2018, Google started beta testing a completely invisible reCAPTCHA system which does not present any human verification visually. Instead, the new system actively monitors user actions across the entire property and returns a score which represents the probability if it is a human or a bot."

Once the bots successfully emulate humans ... what happens once the system concludes you're a bot? How do you prove that you aren't?

</comment><comment><USER33> I use Duolingo for Portuguese and I would highly recommend sticking as much to desktop as possible, given that it requires you to work more at the exercises than on mobile. Better for ingraining concepts in your head.

Duolingo, along with other resources, gave me a great foundation for when I added Italki and started talking to Brazilians in Portuguese for 30-60 chunks of time. I probably should have started Italki ("out loud" conversations sooner), but Duolingo's Portuguese tree definitely gave me a great start on vocab and all the different grammar types (subjunctive in Portuguese is intense!).

</comment><comment><USER34> I've used Duolingo and like it for learning grammar and vocabulary. Why would someone pay for it though?

I would have been prepared to pay but I don't see why I would. The only paid features I see are to remove ads (which you rarely see compared to how long you use the app for), offline use (which isn't an issue if you have good mobile internet) and to skip to harder stages (which seems counterproductive).

In terms of making an income, it feels they give far too much away for free. Do they make most of their money from the ads? Or so many people use it for free that it's okay if only a low percent convert?

<comment><USER35> Ultimately, I primarily opted for the paid version of DuoLingo to support their mission of free language learning for all. The ad removal and offline use (great for planes and while traveling) were secondary reasons.

<comment><USER36> I opted for the paid version for exactly the same reason, but I was sorely disappointed to learn that they don't allow the app to be installed in my home country when I went there for a visit and was hoping to introduce my young nephews to the joys of learning a foreign language. It happens that third world countries don't generate enough ad money to be part of the free language learning for all mantra. Needless to say, I didn't renew my subscription. I must admit though that the app contributed toward my goal of attaining reasonable proficiency in Portuguese in one year, though I got much more out of obstinately listening to podcasts and regular radio even though I understood little at the beginning, and also making native speaker friends online. I used [https://www.hellotalk.com/](https://www.hellotalk.com/), an app to meet language learning partners to chat with, and where Brazilians happen to be extremely active and eager to exchange with people willing to help them with their English or French.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I would love one of these vocabulary building apps if it came in the form of an Android Auto application that I could use while driving my 45 minute commute. Doesn't seem to exist, though.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm using Duolingo to learn Hindi, but not alone; I also have a couple of (Snell's) books.

I find that a good combination - I favour reading as a means of study anyway, and that gives an understanding of the grammar, tips, gotchas, etc., and then Duolingo puts it into practice, tests me on it, and instills vocabulary and recognition of sounds and characters through repetition.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does Duolingo have Spaced-repetition? Spaced-repetition tools like Anki are quite customizable too.

<comment><USER40> I used DuoLingo for quite some time before using Anki. My experience with Anki was much better.

My experience was that I was much better at recalling vocabulary from using Anki than DL. Possibly because the "yes/no" to DL is at a phrase/sentence level rather than per-word.

Without putting effort in, DL makes it easy to recall what the DuoLingo- defined accepted translation of phrases is. It's easy to fall into the habit of 'gaming' it and just remembering the answer in a very shallow sense.

With Anki, using flashcards of words, the 'effort' you need to put in is being honest about whether you recalled the word.

I felt that when I started using Anki, I was _much_ better at answering DL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Since we're recommending other language tools, I've found the Michel Thomas method to be really effective. Better than Pimsleur: [https://www.michelthomas.com/](https://www.michelthomas.com/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Still doesn't have European Portuguese.

And yes, I've dabbled enough to know that I _could_ learn Brazillian Portuguese and try to convert, but I've also dabbled enough to know that to do so would be really hard, and leave behind some undesirable remnants.

<comment><USER43> > I've also dabbled enough to know that to do so would be really hard.

No, that's not true. Learn Brazilian Portuguese and you'll be 95% there. The major differences are in the voçe vs. tu (second-person singular pronoun). There are other differences (mainly pronunciation), but the core of the language is the same.

Source: I'm from Argentina and learned Brazilian (travel often). I have a few Portuguese friends and I have 0 issues talking and understanding them.

<comment><USER42> Talking with and understanding them is not the remnant to which I refer. I'm not sure I can explain it, but I've found in generally, converting a "near enough" version to a "proper" version is something I find difficult. Experience of my own learning tells me that if I start with Brazillian PT then I will forever be labelled as a speaker of Brazillian PT, even if I try hard to leverage it across into European PT.

Understanding and being understood is not the entire point here. Having said that, I'm finding virtually no resources for learning Euro-PT, so I'm likely to have to resign myself to always being thought of as a speaker of Br-PT, despite living a few hundred kms from Portugal.

(BTW - thanks for the response, it is a useful data point)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A large thread about Duolingo from a couple months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702424)

</comment><comment><USER45> A great example of how a creative application of entrepreneurial spirit can make the world a better place.</comment>


Can you fit your Life into a Backpack? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ramen.io/post/41942914515/can-you-fit-your-life-into-a-backpack

<comment><USER2> I love this, and I hate this. I certainly see the value in simplifying, mental and financial, but I don't think it eliminates the value of physical objects. For now, we are still physical beings. I love the benefits of digital media, and I love the simplicity offered by the cloud, but when I'm home, I'm going to crack a book (preferably an old one). I might even put some vinyl on the table.

My point is that we don't need to be extremists. We can simplify our lives yet retain our grasp of reality without shunning one or the other. I like to travel, but I also like to garden, which requires all sorts of tools and clothes. I think fluidity is more important than simplicity in our current age.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely agree. Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts. I hope that leaning into a (sometimes impractical) extreme will teach me some things that I haven't seen yet :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've restarted my life a number of times, so my possessions have tended to be minimal. However, I have since developed a taste for:

* A bed

* A desk

* A table

* Places to sit and entertain guests

* Lamps & lights

* A kitchen

* Wall decorations

* An entertainment center

* A NAS

* A real computer, with a full keyboard, and powerful enough to write real programs on

* A bookshelf

* A bicycle

* Two guitars + an amp

* Sports equipment

* Camping gear

* Suitcases because I travel at least once a year

* More than 20 articles of clothing

* More than two pairs of shoes

Notice how quickly it adds up to a lot of things, but I wouldn't get rid of any of it. I've lived the minimal, one-bag life. It gets old.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know. I've moved at least 10 times in the past 5 years, so I've been forced to reduce the amount of things I own. For a long time, I would think very hard for every item I bought, whether I'd use it or not. But there comes a time when you want some nice stuff for a change. Some nice furniture, a big screen TV with a console, some equipment for your interests etc. The minimalist lifestyle is only fun in your early twenties and when you have no interests that require physical stuff. I've gone back from reading books only on my Kindle to buying dead tree books again, because there's just something about real books and a book shelf that feels good.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you get rid of all your furniture, there's really not much left. I've done the same routine as the author, and with the same two devices (MacBook Air and iPhone). If you're single, there's no reason to be confined to one place anymore. Mobile, wifi, and battery technology eliminate any need to be tethered to one location. And laptops and smartphones are so powerful now you can easily satisfy all your personal entertainment from them (music, movies, games, web browsing, etc).

Final thought: I solved the issue of having a big screen television using a projector and pair of speakers. Connect them to your laptop and just project onto a wall.

</comment><comment><USER6> I saw Up In the Air, also: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9N9OUDZM7c>

</comment><comment><USER7> De-cluttering is one thing but.. no washer and dryer, no dishes and utensils? Unless he actually doesn't use things he doesn't own, simplifying ownership is just outsourcing your material and service needs to others. How about adding some self-reliance to your simple life?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have pointed out what I understand as "personal" belongings. I can see how this is not very clear in the article. Great feedback.

Great point on self-reliance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The frequency of the first person pronoun in this piece is the most telling feature...</comment>


MongoDB fails to perform, runs out of gas - <AUTHOR> http://blog.couchbase.com/2016/june/mongodb-fails-to-perform-runs-out-of-gas <comment><USER2> I been learning MongoDB and I have a project in mind using it.

Did they test against a single MongoDB server or a cluster?

"MongoDB executes every query on every node because it relies on local indexes – every node contains just a piece of the index. As a result, query performance is limited to that of a single node. For example, if a single node can execute 7,500 queries per second, adding more nodes does not help – every node still has to execute the same 7,500 queries per second."

Well if you pick a good shard key it should be able to go to a single node. Not sure why they didn't mention that. I'd take this with a grain of salt, since they're a competitor. I'm curious if they setup indexes, etc in MongoDB. I'd read the full report but I don't want to input my phone number so I can most likely be called by salespeople.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Did they test against a single MongoDB server or cluster?"

Couchbase: 9 nodes on 9 AWS instances (1 node per instance). MongoDB: 18 nodes on 9 AWS instances (1 primary and 1 secondary per instance).

"Well if you pick a good shard key it should be able to go to a single node."

Not necessarily. From the docs: In some cases, when the shard key or a prefix of the shard key is a part of the query, the mongos can route the query to a subset of the shards. Otherwise, the mongos must direct the query to all shards that hold documents for that collection.

If you query your data in many ways, you have lots of queries not based on the shard key. Considers users. What do you shard on, email? What if you want to query by location, age, status, and/or preference?

<comment><USER2> Oh wow. More MongoDB servers and it did worse? That's really surprising and disappointing for MongoDB.

hmm and good point. It does seem like shard key would be possibly limited to just 1 common query. I haven't really got to that part yet myself, just going by what I've learned so far in the class I'm taking.

edit: oh reread. 2 servers per instance, not the same amount of actual server instances. I wonder if you ran 1 per instance if you'd get better results...

I know the MongoDB people seem to hype it up and some large companies are using it. The system does seem like a good dream if it worksout.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sort of. One of the requirements was replication. The databases had to replicate every document so that it was stored on two different nodes. This ensures availability. The only way to do that with MongoDB is to run secondary nodes too. Now, it's possible to do say 4 primary and 4 secondaries, but performance would go down because only 4 nodes could do the writing. The problem is that it rarely works out. It's fine at first, but down the road...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flaws in Cellphone Evidence Prompt Review of 10k Verdicts in Denmark - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/world/europe/denmark-cellphone-data-courts.html <comment><USER2> At least the authorities looking at them. In the states we have to rely on stuff like the Innocence Project, unfortunately.

<comment><USER3> And they're not perfect either.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reaso...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reasonable- doubt/480747/)

\- Innocence Project doesn't take on cases where DNA link was established

\- Man served four years for sexual assault after his DNA was found to be "consistent" with samples from the victim

\- Turns out the DNA testing failed to establish a match between two of his own samples

\- This evidence was not presented to the jury

\- Lab tech makes numerous errors but is cleared because their lawyer demonstrated that here errors "were a product of systemic failures that included inadequate supervision".

<comment><USER4> Are there any independent organizations which regularly audit these and other crime labs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's worth noting that the European Court of Justice has deemed this form of logging to be in violation of human rights, but the danish government continues to do it and our old minister of justice have said they need time to revise the law, there is a group that are fighting it and you can read more about it on their website : [https://ulovliglogning.dk/en/](https://ulovliglogning.dk/en/)

<comment><USER6> I thought this was really well articulated, goes for all mass surveillance:

> But why?

> You might not think that your secrets are worth keeping, but with enough > data, everyone's a suspect. Maybe you've sent a Merry Christmas text to the > suspect of an ongoing investigation? Maybe you've googled "manure" the week > before a homemade bomb is found?

> Maybe you're the only person with a mobile phone that's been near the scene > of a crime, and maybe you'd just bought binliners. Mass surveillance flips > the burden of proof. Your movements are recorded and can be used against > you, but not in your defense. You might have left your phone at home on > purpose.

<comment><USER7> > but not in your defense

why not in my defence? i mean, my smartphone already knows everything about me, so why not use it for my defence?

<comment><USER6> That's not how mass surveillance works, you don't have access to the same information, and you don't even know what information there is to even request in the first place. It's asymmetrical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A non-New York Times discussion of the issues: [https://www.enmnews.com/2019/08/20/flaws-in-cellphone- eviden...](https://www.enmnews.com/2019/08/20/flaws-in-cellphone-evidence- prompt-review-of-10000-verdicts-in-denmark/)

<comment><USER9> Is there some issue with the NYT specifically? I'm out of the loop. Edit: Oh, pay/account wall, right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "We cannot live with incorrect information sending people to prison."

Don't trust data given by third parties then.

<comment><USER11> > The authorities said that the problems stemmed partly from police I.T. > systems and partly from the phone companies' systems, although a telecom > industry representative said he could not understand how phone companies > could have caused the errors.

It appears data came from the telecom companies and straight to the police's IT department. I'm not sure what parties you're referring to?

Unless you're suggesting not to use data from telecom companies? In which case how would they get any records at all?

<comment><USER10> The telecom company is the third party.

Yes, I'm suggesting to not use data from telecom companies, unless they have a way to prove that said data is real.

<comment><USER12> The problem in this case wasn't the third party data, but an error in how that data was analysed and presented. By all accounts the raw data from the telecom companies was both complete and correct.

<comment><USER10> I'm talking about the general case.

Maybe in this specific case the telecom data was correct, but can you assure the same for every datum ever provided?

Trusting telecom data is essentially the same as trusting an eyewitness.

The eyewitness says the truth sometimes, but you can't trust them as an infallible source of truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The national police determined that the flaws applied to 10,700 court cases dating to 2012, but it is unclear whether the faulty data was a decisive factor in any verdicts."

What are their (privacy) laws like, and what types of illegalities would generate that many cases so quickly?

<comment><USER14> They're probably investigating all court cases that had phone evidence submitted, even if it wasn't crucial to the case or even used or which side used it. It might be that most of these are simply normal court cases where someone texted someone else or made a phone call, either proving their innocence or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's a _lot_ of cases involving cellphone tracking. In a country with only ~six million people.

Or am I just out of touch? Does every criminal case now involve cellphone tracking data?

<comment><USER16> It is, sadly, a lot. And it's trending upwards. As mentioned above it's a human rights violation but unfortunately we are relying on NGO's to try and stop it (they are raising money for trials against the government). The political will to stop this is sadly sorely missed

<comment><USER17> Doesn't it simply take one convicted to bring this matter before the ECHR? Or is this what the collected funds will be used for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We've been conditioned to believe that some evidence is infallible, such as technology based tracking and even DNA evidence. Whilst people might embellish, lie or simply have bad recall, we think technology is near perfect. The reality is that this can often be flawed or indicative, and not always a certain proof of guilt. A lot of this technology, or advances in it, is new and I imagine not everyone is keeping up with the full implications.

<comment><USER19> Exactly, here is the equivalent article for DNA : [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reaso...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reasonable- doubt/480747/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmm, would have the people prosecuted by evidence of inaccurate gps coordinates, been effected if they had used an iOS jailbreak and or android device to constantly fake a GPS location? Or is the gps coordinates being logged from an external point of location and that's predicting the phone's whereabouts. Basically, not being received from the phone.

<comment><USER21> It's using tower based records, which determine what sector/site the customer is in

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How many cases are there where "well the cell phone data said he was there" is what decided it?</comment>


Amazon stops accepting Flash based ads next week - <AUTHOR> http://advertising.amazon.com/ad-specs/en/policy/technical-guidelines

<comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10097020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10097020)</comment>


Microsoft's First Chip Brings Tank-Finding Design to Xbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-15/microsoft-s-first-chip-brings-tank-finding-design-to-xbox.html

<comment> z-e-r-o They seem to be quite dedicated to ToF, as they bought not one but two companies (3DV Systems, Canesta) just to have their own inhouse ToF system [1].

I found two images from the inside of Kinect One, if someone is interested: [2] [3], from the Wired article [4]

The processing system on the other hand might be in-house, or probably with the help of their amazing MS Research team. The demo in this video is absolutely state-of-the-art tracking: [5].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of- flight_camera](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera) [2] [http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2013/05/20130514...](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2013/05/20130514-XBOX- ONE-TEARDOWN-016-660x440.jpg) [3] [http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2013/05/20130514...](http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gadgetlab/2013/05/20130514-XBOX- ONE-TEARDOWN-017.jpg) [4] [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one- development-...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one-development- photos/?viewall=true) [5] [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox- one/](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one/)

</comment><comment><USER2> This does not sound right. I would genuinely like to see a source where they use time of flight, a range finding technique, to detect tanks at long range in daylight when you could instead use active radar or passive thermal technology (focal plane array/starring array [0][1] , to detect a tank.

(My experience is with infantry-level night vision and thermal scopes. I don't know anything in depth about how munitions detect tanks)

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staring_array](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staring_array) [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermographic_camera](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermographic_camera)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The Kinect chips, designed by a team mostly based in Microsoft's Silicon > Valley office, use a technology called Time of Flight

I was under the impression that the (original) Kinect didn't actually use time of flight to get it's depth data. Can anyone comment on this?

<comment><USER4> The original Kinect did not use time-of-flight technology, but projected a structured infrared light pattern and observed the displacement of the pattern to determine depth information. The Kinect that will ship with the Xbox One will use time-of-flight sensing (probably from the ZCam assets they bought with 3DV Systems).

<comment><USER5> Which is amazing since it removes the indoor constraint that the structure infrared light pattern approach had.

There are several projects out there that use kinects on robots in order to scan entire rooms, creating 3d maps of them [1][2].

There's also this [3], which isn't entirely related to TOF, but i think it's cool, and it uses a kinect. Sorry for my lapse in topicality.

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiNX- vpDhMo#at=19](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiNX-vpDhMo#at=19) [2] [http://www.cs.nuim.ie/research/vision/data/rgbd2012/](http://www.cs.nuim.ie/research/vision/data/rgbd2012/) [3] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CbiOikirrg&feature=player_em...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CbiOikirrg&feature=player_embedded)</comment></comment></comment>


Shouting CEO, changing rules: inside Tesla's Model 3-building sprint - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-factory/shouting-ceo-changing-rules-inside-teslas-model-3-building-sprint-idUSKBN1JT0CQ?il=0 <comment><USER2> I don't like Muslims for various reasons, the biggest of which is his claims about self driving which are PR which will actually hurt his customers.

But hating on him for what has little to do with regular customers makes me wonder if there is a concerted effort to bring him down. I'm old enough to have seen NY TIMES publish ads for IBM and Apple in return favourable coverage.

I'd wish somebody would shit on Musk for the safety concerns and about how his self-driving claims are hurting his stupid fanboys. But I hope people will leave him alone regarding his aggressive manufacturing claims and practises (I realize that pre-orderers were let down but that's not much of a big deal). If anything there are lessons to be learnt here and respect to be shown to a man trying to do something new</comment>


An end to implicit fall-throughs in the kernel - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/794944/ <comment><USER2> Note that this is a subscription-only link, and may be inaccessible for a large part of HN users.</comment>


Gog Galaxy 2.0 Beta – All your games and friends in one place - <AUTHOR> https://www.gogalaxy.com/en/ <comment><USER2> Does it have Linux support?

<comment><USER3> There are lots of references to "cross platform" on the page, so it seems that the answer is likely yes (without having signed up for the beta myself to fully confirm).</comment></comment>


Could the website of the bigfoot hoax have turned millions in AdSense? - <AUTHOR> http://www.timesoftheinternet.com/1173.html "Any tool with internet access and a rubber mask can now be a millionaire" <comment><USER2> No. 800,000 visitors * 2.5 page views = 2,000,000 page views. Not 2 millions dollars. At $1 CPM that would convert to a measely 2000 dollars.</comment>


Programming is awesome [Eng. subtitles, livecoding, Python, imdb] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEoiSNNkwTU <comment><AUTHOR> Gave it in front of local high school students in an attempt to make them interested in programming. Seems like it worked, got a lot of question afterward and telegram messages.</comment>


Upwork now limiting many jobs to US freelancers - <AUTHOR> https://community.upwork.com/t5/Announcements/Testing-freelancer-location-for-job-posts/td-p/334213 <comment><USER2> This title is misleading. It is still up to the client to decide.

This is a win for all parties involved. Less time wasted for clients and freelancers when an applicant isn't a fit for the needs of the position.

> Quote:

> Here's how it'll work:

> New clients who prefer the flexibility of hiring freelancers in any location > will have the option to set their hiring preference accordingly, and it will > work for them just like it does today.

> New clients who prefer to hire within their country will have the option of > setting their freelancer search and job post visibility to freelancers in > the U.S. only, with the ability to refine their search further by time zone > or state. And, only freelancers with a U.S. location in their profile > settings (verified by bank account or other means) will see these job posts > and be able to submit proposals. Keep in mind if a client changes their mind > or chooses to invite a freelancer outside of the U.S., they can do so at any > time.

This sort of selection was already happening on the platform but as a manual process by the person hiring. UpWork just added support to prevent non-US users from applying to jobs specified as US only.

Edit: formatting is hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Upwork is influencing the client's decision to seek only US freelancers in some not very subtle ways, discussed in the thread. They are planting in the client's mind the need which wasn't necessarily already there (and is quite often spurious).

To ignore the psychology of the ux and it effect on the decision making process is naive.

US freelancers may be better off. Non US freelancers will certainly not be.

<comment><USER3> I'm guessing there was big US client demand for this otherwise what would be the benefit for Upwork for doing this? Perhaps clients getting spammed by those that don't meet their basic requirements.

<comment><AUTHOR> Clients do get a ton of spam but there are better solutions than resorting to xenophobia.

From my experience as a client, 90% of the spam proposals are copy-pasted so they could simply filter them out.

They could also reduce 'connects' (freelancers have a maximum amount of points they can use to apply for jobs. You can buy more points).

<comment><USER3> Spam filter seems like it might help. If you are an user of that website you should suggest it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you're a US based freelancer this could benefit you. As a non-US person, this has already adversely affected my job feed there. I assume this will not have a big impact on the lower end of the scale but as someone who charges a premium for unique services, US jobs have basically disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have been one of those who critisized this new feature and have been banned from the community. Moreover, there are also Upwork Enterprise jobs that exclude freelancers from certain countrys (physical locations) without mentioning a reason why those freelancers/locations are excluded.

</comment><comment><USER5> nice, that's why upwork is better than freelancer.com.. too many indian companies catfishing sole developers....

<comment><USER6> Yes, but there are other platforms aside from Upwork and Freelancer that are much better for hiring freelancers and vice versa

<comment><USER7> Which ones are those?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Today Upwork announced that this feature will also be applied to some of the existing clients.</comment>


Would love feedback/comments on my new product - <AUTHOR> http://www.expertcircle.com/ Hi!
I'm new to HN & I recently launched a new site called ExpertCircle (www.expertcircle.com). We are currently in private beta mode.
I would love for the HN community to visit the site and provide ANY feedback they have. The access code to get into the site is: expertcircle2013.
Our goal is to create a recommendation engine for business owners and entrepreneur to find the best products & vendors for their business. The site might look a little 'thin' - we will be adding a lot more features as we go forward. This is as MVP as it gets :)
Thanks again for your help! <comment><USER2> I would love to but you didn't provide an access code here so that I could easily test your product.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you have a promo code to try with?</comment>


HTTP/2 Frequently Asked Questions - <AUTHOR> http://http2.github.io/faq/ <comment><USER2> Here is a question I hoped to be answered, but it wasn't: Why doesn't the HTTP/2 protocol use SRV DNS records¹? Using it would solve some real problems:

1\. The well-known resilience of mail can be largely attributed to its use of MX records to specify the use of backup servers and/or load balancing. SRV records are essentially a generalization of MX records for any service, not just mail, so using SRV records would bring this benefit to any protocol which uses them.

2\. The problem of "www" or no "www" would be entirely eliminated; no need for non-standard so-called ANAME or ALIAS "records". Just imagine – if, in an alternate universe, mail servers _hadn't_ used MX records, it would then have been necessary to have an A record on the bare domain name, and later, when the Web was created in this alternate universe, the web server would have to be the _same_ server as the mail server, since both now would use the bare domain name. In our universe, this position is now solely occupied by the HTTP protocol, which causes lots of pain in the DNS when redundant (and harder to update) A records need to be put on the bare domain name just for HTTP. Not to mention IPv6, which, for HTTP to work, requires an _additional_ AAAA record on the bare domain.

3\. The "everything is on port 80, let's reinvent everything on top of HTTP" problem could certainly have been entirely avoided, and could be slowly fixed, by using SRV records. (A server concerned about clients needing to traverse old-style restrictive firewalls could provide a low-priority port 80 server as a fallback.)

① _A DNS RR for specifying the location of services (DNS SRV)_ [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2782](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2782)

<comment><USER3> > Why doesn't the HTTP/2 protocol use SRV DNS records?

This was discussed by the WG. The best rationale is given in the thread starting from this mail[0] from Will Chan at Google, followed up by this one[1] from Amos Jeffries (Squid Proxy). The summary is: waiting for SRV lookups can be slower than just doing straight-up A records, so no client in a competitive space is going to do it.

Everyone agrees that in an ideal world this would be great, but in practice no-one is going to be the first person to move on that front. The wins aren't big enough and the cost is too high.

[0]: [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http- wg/2014JanMar/...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http- wg/2014JanMar/0788.html) [1]: [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http- wg/2014JanMar/...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http- wg/2014JanMar/0797.html)

<comment><USER4> Interesting.

Reading that I'm not sure the problem is that SRV lookups are slower, but that forcing clients to do a SRV lookup, wait, and then a A/AAAA queries is slower:

 _If I own a popular client and I switch to mandatory SRV lookup, and don 't issue A and AAAA queries until the SRV lookup fails, then for the services and paths where SRV lookup doesn't work, user experience will be vastly degraded._[1]

However,it appears that making SRV optional remains a possibility:

 _Note that none of what I 've said necessarily applies to optionally doing SRV and using it when the results are available._

[1] [http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http- wg/2014JanMar/...](http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http- wg/2014JanMar/0788.html)

<comment><USER3> Correct, but you don't need the RFC to make SRV optional. If you'd like to use it, use it.

<comment><USER2> No, on the contrary, the SRV standard specifies that clients SHOULD NOT use SRV records for protocols for which the standards do not explicitly allow for SRV records.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Under the "Why Revise HTTP" [http://http2.github.io/faq/#why-revise- http](http://http2.github.io/faq/#why-revise-http) section the summary is basically "So we don't have to be as mindful of the number of HTTP requests" Is this really a compelling reason? I would argue it is not, especially if we have to trade a human-readable and easy to troubleshoot text-based protocol with a binary one. It seems like we are solving a small problem by creating a larger one.

<comment><USER6> The correct answer is that HTTP/2 has to do this because Google is unable to show you a simple search box without making over a dozen HTTP requests.

Their more involved properties require dozens to even hundreds of requests in order to perform complex tasks like showing a list of plain text posts.

And, of course, they can't _possibly_ impose any kind of discipline on the way they do things, so instead the entire internet has to change to accommodate them.

<comment><USER7> My plaintext no animations statically generated site does 5 connections to load the content. [http://jeremy.marzhillstudios.com](http://jeremy.marzhillstudios.com)

Now I _could_ optimize that even more by inlining everything with data-inline: but that would impact caching code and be strictly worse for the network.

A property from google even websearch has fancy transitions and animations and dynamic content. And Google has every incentive to limit the number of connections to their page. When I worked there I worked on some of those technologies specifically to avoid too many connections.

Blaming Google for not being disciplined enough disregards their economic incentives to _be_ disciplined enough. They invested a lot of energy in this before SPDY came out. There comes a time where you just have to recognize that the protocol is fighting against you and either give up or evolve the protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Brad Fitzpatrick is working on a Go implementation of HTTP/2 at [https://github.com/bradfitz/http2](https://github.com/bradfitz/http2).

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm using nginx with SPDY and I've noticed that if I start downloading a file, I can no longer load pages on the website. I get an error message in Firefox saying "The connection was interrupted". If I do a ctrl+F5 then I can continue browsing the site. Does this have to do with the "one TCP connection"?

<comment><USER10> It should not. That sounds like a bug or configuration problem somewhere.

SPDY and HTTP/2 can multiplex their data streams across a single connection. That is to say, they can receive 2+ datastreams on the same TCP connection at the same time.

<comment><USER9> Which configuration parameters should I be looking at?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In my opinion HTTP/2 is too complex.

I think the better route is to investigate how HTTP/1.1 could be layered atop multiplexing transport protocols like SCTP.

It might take 10 years to reach wide deployment, but HTTP/1.1 over TCP is working just fine anyways.

<comment><USER12> We know SCTP is less deployable. What benefit does it have?

And as the FAQ says, if you don't use header compression then response headers alone will take many RTTs to transmit due to slow start.

<comment><USER11> It has the benefit of giving us separate protocols for the transport and application layers. And of already existing, though it isn't widely deployed yet.

But it would allow multiple HTTP requests to be multiplexed over a single connection.

SCTP is also using some form of slow start congestion control, but since it would multiplex the HTTP requests over a single connection there would only be one initial slow start for all the requests.

<comment><USER12> _there would only be one initial slow start for all the requests_

Which is worse than HTTP/1.1. Avoiding that problem is why HTTP/2 uses hpack.

<comment><USER11> Why worse? Wouldn't multiple HTTP/1.1 requests sharing a persistent TCP- connection also only have one initial slow start phase?

Maybe the SCTP multiplexing / parallelization of the requests and thus the initial headers affect this negatively as more headers would be transferred during the one initial slow start.

If the delay caused by slow start is a big problem one could add header compression to HTTP/1.x and run it over SCTP.

I understand that a transport protocol designed especially for and embedded in HTTP/2 will be more optimal than a generic one like SCTP. But my argument is that a multiplexing transport protocol like SCTP could be good enough. And usable for more than HTTP/2\. And the focus could be on simplifying HTTP instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Spriting, data-inlining, domain sharding, and concatenation. These hacks are > indications of underlying problems in the protocol itself.

While this is true, I don't think HTTP/2 will or should negate some of these. Precomputing things like minification and concatenation will certainly reduce load and always increase capacity. Human-readable code is only useful for humans, and during transfer, storage, parsing, etc., it's just plain inefficient. Also, with spriting and concat, fewer files means more of the information you know you need is at the same place in disk or memory, speeding access at a low level.

</comment><comment><USER14> This page appears to be Twitter branded at certain window sizes. Specifically, if the Twitter icon in the header happens to show up more or less centered, it looks just like the header on Twitter (when you're logged in). Maybe use text for that link, or have another logo in the header somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER15> Amusingly, many of the design decisions of HTTP/2 were made the same way in Macromedia Flash. Binary representation and multiplexing of streams to improve the user experience are both used in Flash.

<comment><USER16> Approximately half of Flash's design decisions and APIs were extremely well- designed and well-engineered. There are still many things that Flash does better than pure HTML and their view framework API was actually quite lovely.

That said...the other 50% was frequently so bad that it more than cancelled out the benefit on the other side. Which is why no one uses Flash anymore [1].

[1] Everyone still uses Flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Never understood why the re-use of the "[http://"](http://") protocol, why not us "http2://" instead.

<comment><USER18> Because that would break every hyperlink on the web, and would create a separate web with content that existing clients or intermediaries would be excluded from. Much more evolvable to keep the wire protocol version orthogonal to URI.

Further, technically speaking, the URL scheme has little to with the protocol used , it is merely a way of linking a hierarchical namespace to a spec (or more) that tells a developer how to resolve it. That means we have a lot of flexibility in terms of protocol (we don't even need a protocol defined in some cases - mailto: URIs for example).

<comment><USER19> > Because that would break every hyperlink on the web,

Or you just run two servers (or a single server that speaks both), you know, like you'll have to for the next 30 years anyway.

> and would create a separate web with content that existing clients or > intermediaries would be excluded from.

If you have an HTTP2-only site, aren't you doing that anyway?

> Much more evolvable to keep the wire protocol version orthogonal to URI.

> Further, the URL scheme has little to with the protocol used

That first part, before the colon, is a protocol descriptor. It would be perfectly reasonable to change the protocol descriptor.

What should have been done was use the Upgrade header (like websockets) or specify using SRV records.

<comment><USER20> The only way an upgrade this big will happen is having a single server that speaks both, one that's a drop-in replacement. In which case, there's no point in breaking reverse compatibility with every HTTP-capable device on the planet just to make some fussbudgets happy that the URL is "more correct" in some obscure technical sense.

As a counterexample, look at how long we've been working on IPv6. [1] We've been working on that for 20 years, and we're not even close.

And all that aside, URLs aren't primarily API. They're UI. You don't go messing with a UI that billions of people use without a strong reason to do so.

[1] [http://www.ipv6.com/articles/general/timeline-of- ipv6.htm](http://www.ipv6.com/articles/general/timeline-of-ipv6.htm)

<comment><USER19> > The only way an upgrade this big will happen is having a single server that > speaks both, one that's a drop-in replacement. In which case, there's no > point in breaking reverse compatibility with every HTTP-capable device on > the planet just to make some fussbudgets happy that the URL is "more > correct" in some obscure technical sense.

Why would this preclude using a different protocol in the URI?

> And all that aside, URLs aren't primarily API. They're UI. You don't go > messing with a UI that billions of people use without a strong reason to do > so.

You mean UI that hidden by most browsers by default now?

<comment><USER20> Hi! You get one round of point-sniping. After this, make a coherent point if you want a reply.

It wouldn't _preclude_ using a different protocol. It means that there's no point. If every HTTP/2 server is also an HTTP/1.1 server offering the same content then there is no practical need to distinguish the protocols.

As to URL-hiding, you know that's controversial, and for good reason. Their theory is that a lot of people don't normally look, and that could even be true. Many always will, though.

More importantly, that's not the only place that people use links. Every time they share one via email, for example. Every time they type one in from a magazine or the side of a bus or a flyer. Every time they cite one in a paper.

Forcing those people suddenly include a protocol distinction that is meaningless to them and unimportant to the server involved would be a pointless waste. HTTP/2 is purely an under-the-hood improvement. They didn't have to change the URL for SPDY, and they don't have to change it for this.

<comment><USER19> > If every HTTP/2 server is also an HTTP/1.1 server offering the same content > then there is no practical need to distinguish the protocols.

But not ever HTTP/1.1 server will be an HTTP/2 server; that's my point.

> As to URL-hiding, you know that's controversial, and for good reason.

I know; I hat it. I brought it up because obviously most people don't seem to care enough about it that we should overload a schema specifier for the sake of aestetics that don't matter.

> More importantly, that's not the only place that people use links. Every > time they share one via email, for example. Every time they type one in from > a magazine or the side of a bus or a flyer. Every time they cite one in a > paper.

OK? some people cite ftp links. I'm not seeing your point.

> Forcing those people suddenly include a protocol distinction that is > meaningless to them and unimportant to the server involved would be a > pointless waste.

So we shouldn't use ftp:// or smb:// anymore? I don't get your point, because people are already used to non-http schemas.

> HTTP/2 is purely an under-the-hood improvement.

I mean you could say the same thing if all your assets were served over ftp and the browser rendered them as it does http. HTTP/2 is _fundamentally_ different than HTTP/1.1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> there are some serious problems with current http use. it's almost gore.

<comment><USER19> And implementing TCP at Layer 7 isn't?

<comment><USER21> what do you mean ?

<comment><USER19> HTTP2 implements stream multiplexing and flow control inside itself, instead of relying on the underlying networking protocol.

<comment><USER21> why is that so bad ?

I mean multiplexing, why not, flow control is more the job of TCP, that I agree.

But if the goal is network performance and relieving stress on servers and routers and wireless internet phone equipments, I don't think it's such a bad idea. If CPUs are faster and have more cores, it might be good to let CPU do more.

What I was saying is that the current problems this link is talking about, that http would try to solve, those problems are quite gore.

<comment><USER19> To me the issue with multiplexing is that it's multiplexing "streams", not simply sending multiple files.

(There is complete support for MIME multipart in browsers already, but if that were fixed it could be useful for "pushing" content from the server).

> What I was saying is that the current problems this link is talking about, > that http would try to solve, those problems are quite gore.

I just don't think that HTTP2 (that name still kills me as this protocol is as much HTTP as clean coal is clean) really makes for a cleaner protocol. I think that it's being sold as HTTP is what really bothers me to the core -- it's not a replacement for HTTP; it's a Layer 4 protocol implemented at Layer 7. That's fine, I guess, but I don't think that it's inherently "simpler" than a Request-Response, text-based protocol (which, admittedly has been used to kludge a lot of things).

Also, I was hoping HTTP would have solved actual issues, and not just those faced by heavy-weight websites. Issues such as:

       * Better authentication
       * More secure caching
       * Better methods to find alternate downloads locations
       * Keeping the protocol simple
       * Making each request contain less information about the sender
       * Improved Metadata

(I get into those a little more here: [https://github.com/jimktrains/http_ng](https://github.com/jimktrains/http_ng))</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Could This Baker Solve the Gluten Mystery? - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2014/02/toms-kitchen-100-whole-wheat-bread-doesnt-suck-and-pretty-easy <comment><USER2> So. My girlfriend is Lithuanian, I am Dutch. We met when she was an exchange student in the Netherlands. The thing she hated the most about our country? The bread.

It's kinda like described in the article: comparatively, we got the fluffy factory stuff, they have black bread, a very dense sourdough made from rye. When I say dense I mean _dense:_ one slice of their bread equals three of ours. It stays good for a whole month instead of a week. It has flavour that takes a bit of getting used to but once you are, then the Dutch bread is indeed quite boring by comparison.

I suspect it's because they have a much more traditional (and quite delicious) kitchen in general - I'll let you guess the reasons for that.

<comment><USER3> I'm Lithuanian and I think we have the best bread.

But what are the reasons for the more traditional kitchen? I haven't thought about it.

<comment><USER4> The Baltic countries, Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asian countries are all aboriginal countries. They have preserved their traditional culture and all the lessons learned over many generations.

In contrast, Europe is mostly immigrants from the east, and people's conquered by the Goths and Romans who lived in slavery for hundreds of years and lost everything except the ability to just barely survive.

<comment><USER5> I'm afraid your knowledge of history is almost completely inaccurate.

The "Goths" were just a few dozens Germanic tribes who moved West and conquered territory which was already occupied by Germanic tribes. Now, before the latter Germans started pushing West so hard, ca. 500 BCE, there were Celts in a lot of these regions, but 1) current Celtic populations don't show any evidence of "Aboriginal Bread"; 2) Celts are very closely related genetically, culturally, and linguistically to both the Italic and Germanic peoples; 3)the Baltic peoples are Indo-European too. They aren't "aborigines," and certainly not culturally distinct and exemplary of some multi-millenial cultural continuity distinct from the Germans or Celts or Italians or Greeks or Albanians or Iranian or Indo-Aryans...etc. The non-Indo-European and non- Finno-Ugric Neolithic peoples of Europe disappeared under waves of IE and Finno-Ugric immigration everywhere (except possibly for the Basque).

The only non-immigrants are people who stayed very near the North shore of the Black Sea, but it's nonsense to claim that because they didn't move much in 5.5K years, they remembered how to make their ancestral bread, while no one else did. That area itself saw waves of immigrants (both IE and non-IE) and was basically part of the East-West highway, so the opposite scenario is much more likely.

Moreover, while the Romans enslaved people from various conquered populations, they did not enslave whole regions or tribes or clans or what have you. Prisoners were taken here and there, but large populations and their cultures were not lost to slavery. In addition, all those Germanic tribes and other conquered peoples _were_ most of the Roman Empire eventually. They didn't get enslaved or absorbed, nor did they conform much. They just took over.

One might also point out that the Northern and Western European diets never conformed to the Mediterranean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title seems to be link bait. What exactly is the gluten mystery this guy is solving? All I found in the article is that he is making whole wheat(%100) bread that has less gluten which as far as I can tell is not at all a mystery?

<comment><USER7> The fact that people without Coeliac Disease buy gluten-free bread seems pretty mysterious to me.

It might not to you, but if you can't say for sure whether it's (a) just a fad; (b) actually the secret to a great and healthy life; or (c) partly a reaction to modern mass-baking techniques (as the article posits), there's at least a little mystery.

<comment><USER8> My wife has Celiac's and all I can say is that I am very glad that gluten-free has become a bit of a fad. There is a much larger variety of gluten free foods than there were 6 years ago when she was first diagnosed, and the prices of many of them have dropped by half.

Not to mention all the foods that had no real reason to contain wheat but had it added as a filler or something and have now dropped it.

Life is much easier for us now.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. The minor change for me has been that the slightly annoying question I'm most likely to be asked on any given day has transitioned from "What's that?" to "Oh, you're one of _those_ people?"—which is, at worst, a push.

The major change is that everyone else's favorite fad diet has made my mandatory dietary restrictions _so_ much easier to manage.

I will say that prepared food is still very much a roll of the dice, as those who maintain a gluten-free diet by choice tend not to care a whit about cross- contamination. Hence most businesses catering to them often don't make it a consideration.

There are exceptions though; I can walk into any In'n'Out and order my burger "Protein style, allergy" and whoever makes it will change their gloves, cook everything in an area away from where the buns are toasted, and spread condiments with a clean knife. One of the many reasons why In'n'Out is not merely one of the best fast food restaurants in the world, but simply one of the best things in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > most industrial bakeries only allow bread to rise for a matter of > minutes—not nearly long enough to let the yeast and bacteria digest all the > gluten in the flour, let alone the extra dose in the additives

Nor will they ever. Fermentation is the digestion of carbohydrates. Gliadin and glutenin are proteins.

ETA: That's not to say that autolyse and a slow rise won't improve flavor and texture, which they certainly do.

<comment><USER11> I'm by no means an expert on this stuff, but what about this paper? [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1932817/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1932817/)

> In this work, we used a new mixture of selected sourdough lactobacilli and > fungal proteases to eliminate the toxicity of wheat flour during long-time > fermentation ... Albumins, globulins, and gliadins were completely > hydrolyzed, while ca. 20% of glutenins persisted.

<comment><USER12> Sourdough starter is a mix of yeast and lactic acid bacteria. Those bacteria will, as a side effect of their activity, break down proteins. That study looked at amplifying this action with additional proteases (which also break down protein) to eliminate enough wheat proteins to make the dough non-toxic to celiacs. Since it is driven by bacteria, this action is unique to sourdough breads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Being gluten free (wife as well) I was unfortunately very frustrated by this article. I was expecting some degree of information regarding how those of us with gluten allergies might have some hope of eating real pizza again. All I found was marketing for a wheat lab dabbling in cooking processes to make better tasting bread. Maybe _lower_ in gluten, but there is zero mystery solved here.

<comment><USER14> I agree there wasn't much information either... But Have you tried lower gluten flour before ? perhaps from France or Italy ? I know people who are gluten intolerant in the US but totally fine when they eat bread/pizza in these countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 9 years ago I went to Russia, and for the first time I had Russian white bread. Wow! What a delicious bread! They follow the same basic recipe as the French, flour, water and yeast, but they bake them in the traditional blocky loaf shape with the curved top. In North America I won't touch white bread unless it is genuine French or Italian baking. But even then it is not as delicious as Russian bread. I remember thinking that if this is what they feed people in the Gulag on bread and water, it isn't as bad as I imagined.

Kudos to these scientists and lets hope that they can grow a movement for better wheat, grown for the people who eat it, not for agribusiness interests.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've heard that the gluten content of what we eat has increased 500% over the years (they add it to everything now).

Anyways, check out Spelt, the original bread -

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelt)

I don't do well with non-white breads because the bran and germ are kind of hard on your digestive system with respect to producing an allergic reaction.

But I have not been able to find Spelt that's not whole-grain (it's white and lite variety seems to be just a reduced bran/germ mixture).

But overall, they say Spelt is allot more soluble and digestible than wheat.

<comment><USER16> But I still don't understand this part of the article:

 _While people with celiac disease genuinely can 't process the gluten in wheat, they argue, most people actually can... The result can lead to all kinds of problems in our gut._

So, most people handle gluten just fine, but the article is still asserting that it causes gut problems?

<comment><USER17> Celiacs can handle effectively zero gluten. Normal people can handle more than zero, but perhaps not as much as goes into modern bread.

With that last sentence we're coming right up on the frontier of science (perhaps surprisingly!), so it's hard to be definitive. But it's not unreasonable to think that quantity matters; it fits the known facts, even if it's not proved.

As an example of an alternate hypothesis still on the table, the possibility of an external factor that causes a side effect of increased gluten sensitivity is not something we can currently rule out either. One such specific hypothesis I've read is the sudden and large move towards formula feeding over breast milk in the 70s. And of course there's still one of the Universe's favorite choices, "a little of all of the above".

<comment><USER18> > but perhaps not as much as goes into modern bread.

People can handle food made from 100% gluten. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitan) (fried with some soy sauce it's really delicious).

<comment><USER17> Some set of people can handle 100% gluten. Since I am not in that set, it clearly is not 100% of the people on Earth. We do not know the distribution of the people in the middle; we have only begun to see that there is even a question to ask. Science is probably going to need a decade or two to work out the answer to that. (Alas, the studies can not be fast, as they must work at human speeds.)

Further, we have also established that there is a non-empty set of people who can't handle gluten, and often do not realize it for decades at a time. (Again, I am in that set, so I know it exists. For various reasons this can be a difficult reaction to work out, even when you have full-blast Celiac as I do.) This is not making it any easier to work out the distribution. Some of the people who think they can handle 100% gluten may in fact be having more of a negative reaction than they realize.

<comment><USER18> You implied that "Normal people" can not handle as much gluten as in bread. And I showed you that not only can they handle the small amount in bread, they can handle way more.

Now you are trying to back up behind "we don't really know", but actually it's only a minority that have a problem with gluten.

The slow experiment has been done: We have been eating gluten for millennia, and only a small number of people had a problem with it. Not eating gluten has become a fad now.

<comment><USER17> No, I'm saying there is a continuum of reactions, and we have a poor picture of it. Establishing that there is a non-zero population on one extreme doesn't establish very much about the distribution.

You appear to be arguing something along the line of "A: Gluten-free diets have become a fad B: I think that's silly C: Therefore gluten is safe." Yes, I'm interpolating a bit, but it seems to be your general thrust. There's substantial but non-determinative reasons to believe the picture may be much more complicated than that, particularly the rising incidence of celiac disease (which, as the article says, appears to be a real thing and not merely better detection, which was my most-likely belief until I read this article).

We've been eating non-zero amounts of gluten for millenia, but a lot of things have changed in the past few decades; how it is processed, what it is in, even perhaps things like I mentioned in my previous post, such as a generation raised on rather more baby formula than before. We have rather poor data, but _something 's_ going on.

My position has not changed one whit in this conversation.

<comment><USER18> > the rising incidence of celiac disease (which, as the article says, appears > to be a real thing and not merely better detection, which was my most-likely > belief until I read this article).

Autoimmune disorders in general are on the rise.

We aren't arguing all that much, except for your statement that gluten is a problem for everyone, but some can handle more some less. I say gluten is perfectly fine for most, and bad only for a small number.

Meaning there is no reason to try to reduce gluten in food or blame some nebulous "processing". Or claim that there is more gluten in bread now. All those things are just part of a fad.

If a person has a problem with gluten then they do. For everyone else it's a non-issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Gluten aside, the trend away from bread is a good thing. For most people, the biggest problem with calorie control is eating enough to feel full. In terms of satiation, bread had poor bang for your buck. Do an expertiment: put together a 500 calorie meal at Chipotle with and without a bread component. Maybe three soft tacos with meat, salsa, no cheese or sour cream, versus a salad bowl with meat, cheese, salsa, and guacamole. For me, the former leaves me snacky before dinner. The latter leaves me full, even uncomfortably so at first, the whole afternoon.

</comment><comment><USER20> No, but this baker can.

[http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/gluten- pani...](http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/gluten-panic- part-1-zbcz1401.aspx)

<comment><USER21> Awesome, I never thought I'd see a link to Mother Earth News on HN. I suppose plenty of us are interested in DIY homesteading to various degrees, just that the occasion to link so rarely appears.

What the original article barely touched on, and this one ignores, are the industrial wheat varieties and chemical additives in industrial breads. It seems like people have demonstrated that artificially inducing quick rising in bread increases its gluten. The solution would seem to be to shame industrial bread and encourage traditional bread.

So why is no one advocating/advertising heritage grain, no-additive, slow-rise bread? I see a lot of "artisanal" breads in natural food stores, and some of them taste great, but how are consumers supposed to know they're buying the real deal.

<comment><USER20> "Wheat kernels have contained gliadins for as long as there has been wheat. For example, two purportedly ancient wheat varieties, 'Kamut' and 'Graziella Ra', have higher gliadin concentrations than modern wheats do, and other old- time wheats are also high in gliadins. According to Graybosch, "It probably is not speculation to say we could actually be consuming less gliadin than great- grandpa did." And per-capita wheat flour consumption back in 1900, long before the rise in incidence of celiac disease, was 67 percent higher than today's average consumption.)"

[http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/great- glute...](http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/great-gluten-panic- part-2-zbcz1402.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The bit about a Dutch Oven reminds me of the time that I baked a Black Forest cake in one over a campfire in the mountains of British Columbia.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've gone back to making my own Bread. It started off as a hobby and I really got into artisan slow bread making.

And there is is Subway and it's chemical lased bread. [http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/06/health/subway-bread- chemical/](http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/06/health/subway-bread-chemical/)

<comment><USER23> Chemical laced perhaps? Baking bread with chemical lasers sounds cool, if inefficient and potentially toxic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The only gluten my family ingest is Einkorn and in very limited quantities.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am not celiac, recently I tried to stop eating gluten (for several) reasons, and when I end eating gluten, I feel like crap.

Or maybe I am a undiagnosed celiac, who knows.

</comment><comment><USER26> Allez les Cougs!

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFEh12Fm078](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFEh12Fm078)</comment>


Ask HN: How could I align a Tech Career with my values and life goals? - <AUTHOR> I've been pretty underwhelmed and kinda unhappy with my career (and it's slipping into my personal life a bit)  and looking for suggestions. I know it's still early (graduated 3 years ago) and been working as a Software Dev at standard B2B company.
After a couple of assessments and personal growth exercises I found out that my core values in life are:
- Curiosity
- Intimacy (cultivating one-to-one relationships, and allows others to confide in me)
- Connection (Being present with others, fully engaged. Like going to a concert or protesting with people)
- Adventure
- Contribution (helping others, making a positive difference to myself or others)
- Self-development
Another exercise was asking what problems I would work on if I had the opportunity and no limits. The most important problems (in my opinion) that I would work on if possible would be:
* Promoting Unions and Worker Rights
* Wealth Inequality
* Allowing equal access to voting
* Reducing the cost of college
* Promoting Equal access to Education
* Finding a Cure for Dementia/Alzheimers
* Lowering Violent Crime
* Allowing more ISP options
* Making VR more accessible
* Pushing for EV vehicles.
* Push for building modern infrastructure (bridges, mono-rails, etc).
And just some random things I would currently do in life if I didn't have the fear and all the money or the right ideas:
* Learn to Fly Planes
* Be a radio host/commentator
* Race car driving
* Battle Bot fighting
* Play more sports
* Start a business
So how do I find a career in Tech that will tackle some of the things I want above? Because I think one of my main issues at the moment is that what I do touches on none of that (or does so very little and not often enough). <comment><USER2> Good on you for asking. I'm a coach and I see a lot of successful people with your interests doing "all of the above," rather than thinking of a career in singular terms, or attempting to define all of their interests with a single role in their career like they've got an identity paintbrush but only one color.

Quite often this means using one or two roles as a stable income base while working on the other things. A lot of consultants and business owners work this way.

Some things that stood out to me:

\- You didn't mention wanting a high income anywhere, which means you may be able to work this out by identifying a minimum income level. If you can do this, IMO you get major bonus points for being able to be more measured, flexible, and open with your schedule, especially in values-oriented work.

\- Values and interests point at strengths. One can sometimes change a job in place, creatively organizing options at work and negotiating with an employer to bring those strengths to bear. This could involve everything from pitching a new project that overlaps with VR interests to starting a podcast for employees where you work.

\- You have some big-picture expressions like "push for" in there. In my experience you'll probably need to develop your own frameworks for logging and measuring your progress in these efforts. Otherwise it's too easy to lose traction fast, and maybe even feel like a failure when it could be more helpful to look at it as first moves or first experiments.

Hope that helps! Nice job here and good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the wisdom! It's encouraging to know that other people have the same thought process but are still able to achieve what they want. It also goes against the whole "one career your whole life" mantra that I hear a lot.</comment></comment>


Hate SOPA? 6 things you can do to stop it - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2011/12/23/hate-sopa-6-things-you-can-do-to-stop-it/

<comment><USER2> You can also translate Wikipedia SOPA article into your language. I started <http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act> . Weird that there was no article for so long time, until 24 December 2011. And even [[American Civil Liberties Union]] was a redlink. I also learned that {{stub}} template was voted to be removed.</comment>