Ask HN: How do you find time to learn new skills having family? - <AUTHOR> I'm a hungry for knowledge dev, but have a family with 2 kids, one being 4 months old. How do other devs in similar situation find time to work on personal projects or just find time to learn? <comment><USER2> Stop feeling guilty for setting aside time to learn skills during regular working hours. It took me a while to adjust, but it's utterly logical and correct that technical people should explore technologies as part of their work. When I became a manager I encouraged all my teams to set aside time like this. I basically said: if the topic you want to learn more about is very relevant to your current task, that's great, if not, that's fine too, if it turns out to be interesting, put on a lunchtime seminar for the group so we can all learn something.

I think as devs we all know that we will sometimes go yak-shaving just as an excuse to dig into something we're interested in (or at least not return from the rabbit-hole with any urgency), so I'd rather my teams do this consciously and think about what might be useful or just fun and interesting to other people on the team as they explore.

Family time should be family time, and if you're waiting for it to end so you can get to your hobby project you're not going to be as present as you should be. Also, it might work a little for the first kid, but when the second arrives forget about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like it! I actually feel guilty when I spend time on my own interests at work when in between sprints. Lucky guys who have you as manager, I do believe that there are more managers like you, would agree for a dev to work on own projects, but they do not tell their devs about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great question, and a situation I've been through/still going through myself. I have a 2.5 year old son, and another due at the end of this year. We're not fortunate enough to have parents nearby, so all care is 100% on us or nursery.

When they're really young it _is_ tough to have time for anything, especially when there's no nap regime instilled into them. I was in such a daze from learning so many new things about being a parent, that projects/hacking/downtime in general seem to take a back seat for a while.

In writing (and rewriting) this reply I've realised that in the past few years things have changed a lot for me, and when I can squeeze in "my" time has changed too. I don't think there's any right or wrong answer of "when", but my number one piece of advice would be to not be selfish. You'll kick yourself later if you miss time with your children because you wanted to learn a programming language, or that you're so tired from killing yourself with long hours or sleep deprivation that you're rubbish to be around.

Communicate with your partner too - agree when they're ok with you taking your time, and vice versa - insist that they time their own time too.

I have no idea what'll happen for me when number two comes along...but I'm looking forward to it :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly I don't want to in couple years time regret that I've missed time with my kids!

Looks like I need to wait a bit and in the meantime focus on my kids :-)

<comment><USER3> Yep, it took me a little while to realise and appreciate it, but you're right. Now my son is a little older he wants to do things with me too, and that would be horrible to miss because I'm stuck in front of a computer instead.

I don't know where you work but as others have said - if you have a commute that's also valuable time you can use. I used to burn all of it on Netflix, but have recently started reading about stuff I want to learn/get better at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you first need to give yourself permission to find equilibrium with your current situation. When I first became a family man I tried to keep up with my old habits. The frustration and sleep deprivation that ensued caused damage to my relationships with my wife and daughter that I regret to this day. It wasn't until I decided to take a break and find my "new normal" that I could then start to identify gaps where I could fit things like study etc back in.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a wise advise! I do not want to cause damage to our relationship as well and struggling with my interests and hobbies as most times choose wife and kids than my own interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Family doesn't get in the way for me.

You need a non-tech hobby. Family is perfect for that. Whatever your previous hobby was, it's with family now. Travel with family. Watch horror movies with family. Play tabletop games with family. Watch YouTube in bed, with the baby under your armpit.

Then you need a tech hobby. Find something interesting to do. My kids draw, my wife cooks, sometimes the kids play with each other and daydream. That's a great time to mess around with new tech and algorithms. I've learned cheap, fast website hosting, SEO, procedural generation in my own time in the past month.

Also don't learn for the sake of advancing your career. Learn to be able to build interesting things. Find an interesting problem to tackle, something with possibly no economic benefit, then learn how to do it best. This will actually advance your career better than trying to learn the next stack. Like make CSS art, or do something like writing your own voice autotuner.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like this response and the career progression tips, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It gets better. When my kids were small, I did not do side projects or have hobbies, or learn anything new outside of work. I did start to have more free time after they no longer were toddlers. That period of time was almost 10 years from the first child until they all are were 5+ years old, but that is now past history. Now, my learning, hobbies and projects have recovered. Some day, it will be history for you, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> So it is until about 5 years of age. Good to know and thanks for sharing your experience

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is always time even with little ones around.

Nap time is a good time to get some work/learning in.

Although when they are 0 to 6 months old it can be pretty exhausting. I once was so sleep deprived I showed up to work with one black and one brown shoe when mine was a couple months old.

I would recommend getting up an hour or two before your family and settling in for some time to learn new things and work on personal projects. This can also work in the evening or both.

Ask your spouse to trade up for some free time for each of you maybe give each other a two hour block of time on Saturday and Sunday.

Do you watch TV, give up a TV show or go down to one show and use the rest of the time for personal projects if you enjoy doing that.

Everyone needs downtime, and learning working on a side project is fun for me. But take time for hobbies too.

And prioritize spending time with your family. Kids grow up fast so make the most of your time with them. Don't try to work/learn when you're supposed to be spending time with them.

I think that's why getting up an hour or two early are some of the most productive hours of the day. No one else is awake in the house, no emails, no phone calls.

Good luck carving out some time for yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will definitely try waking up earlier but when the little one is older so I do not wake up several times during the night when she cries for food. I managed to do it just before she was born and absolutely loved the quiet house and possibility to focus.

Growing kids is a concern and absolutely love spending time with them but sometimes just need time to myself.

<comment><USER7> y, the first six months you are so tired, I would just focus on survival. Any sleep is precious during that time.

Maybe try out giving your wife 1 or 2 hours for her time and she can do the same for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are no free wins here. My advice follows some of the others: during work hours try to schedule time and have articles/books/videos queued up for downtime after kids are asleep _when your SO isnt needing your presence /company and you are truly up for it_.

Trying to get up early and hack your life will just lead to burn out and family problems both. Dont do it to yourself, your SO or your kids.

Be present with your family out of work. Squeeze in 30min each morning when you get to your desk to hack on something you read on the train in or at home. Accept your situation and also realize that 30 min daily spent purposefully is enough to make real progress in one direction at a time.

It is exhausting with two small kids and an SO and a job. Please dont kill yourself trying to be super human. Accept limitations and live a better life within them!

</comment><comment><USER9> Dad of a 4 and 2 year old here. There is one effective way I have found: schedule it. Literally slot 2 hours on Thursday night to learn something you want.

There are a couple of reasons this helps. If you treat it as a serious and valuable use of your time you will be more efficient in how you approach it. Scheduling also lets you anticipate it and mentally prepare for being receptive to learning.

It is important to protect that time and get buy-in from your partner so you can fully shift gears out of parent-mode. The flip side of this is no staying up extra late to noodle around then be burnt out the next day. Accept that you are going to learn things slowly and it will stretch out much longer than you might like.

<comment><USER10> I do this with my family too, the ones that really hard to accept is to learn things slowly, it's really demotivating. So in the end i switch learning 2-3 stuff to keep it interesting

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One way for you to learn is to teach your kids new stuff. Keep in mind that you'll need lots of patience - never yell, act disappointed or rushed. Yes, it's hard but you'll be very surprised how quickly they catch on. Kids may seem like they are spacing out but they are constantly learning, even the 4 month old. You hear about the 12 year old computer geniuses. They don't just appear. The parents have had a lot to do with that in many cases. If you start now there will be a time when you won't be able to keep up with the kids. Just set some time every day. It's a win win situation. They win. You win.

</comment><comment><USER12> Choose actions to minimize future regret.

Yes, it's a Dad-ism, but it applies to Dads too.

Your kids will be grown and gone before you know it. Really.

When you spend all day working and testing what amounts to a reminition machine (see my profile), poring over images of your kids when they were little, and your role in their life was outsized, I guarantee you won't regret the time you spent with them.

I took mass transit for my commute, and that, and when the family was asleep, was my time to learn.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder, did you start your YC startup when your kids were little?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hi, first off, I have kind of the same problem and I am also strugglig with no spare time, even though I have only 1 kid and she is 1.5 years old.

If you are an employee than it's expected that you learn on the job and hours booked on education will be seen by the company as an investment that pays off in the future and it's also far cheaper than trainings, so your manager should be glad that you do that - especially if there are no urgent tasks to be done.

On the other hand, if you are self-employed / working as a contractor like I am, than you need another strategy, because anything beyond quickly looking up stuff (like any real learning on the job - videos, tutorials, etc) are a no-go as you are booked to perform. Usually if you are useful for your clients your stream of todos is neverending anyway and there is no time to lookup stuff.

What works for me is that I don't work for clients on friday - for a lot of companies it's a short day anyway and they won't miss you that much. I deliberately pass on those billable hours, because I've found that education pays more in the future and is more fun as well. So friday is usually the day when I get my learning done. Just a word of warning - you need to protect this day against your own laziness and your family as well. So put your headphones on and hack away. Breaks are okay of course, but if you treat it like spare time, everyone else will do the same and you won't get anything done.

Of course you can also work during naptime and in the late evening, but I've found that I am pretty exhausted then and I am not that productive or willing to pick up new stuff - so I usually do lighter work / light reading / watching videos in the evening and leave the tough new technology for fridays.

I've priorized what I find valuable in life and that makes making decisions easier. For me it's health, family, education, friends, other hobbies. For the time being, I've basically dropped every hobby that is not for my health or my professional education.

Take care, Martin

</comment><comment><USER14> Once they're old enough, find hobbies or projects that can include your children.

Bear in mind these hobbies/projects may not be in your area of interest--in fact, your children will probably guide what you focus on (just don't force them to be interested in what you're interested in). Regardless of the subject, you can make it interesting to yourself.

Once they're grown, you'll have plenty of time to pursue your own interests, and if you're lucky one of your children just might follow in your footsteps.

Mostly your children will grow to love the time you spent with them and you'll be grateful for it when you look back. They'll be happy memories.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the main thing to note is your young one is 4 months old, and that's probably just not the time for hobbies or learning outside of baby caring right now.

I have a 1 year-old now and I remember the time when she was 4 months old. Even right now, we have little free time outside of the 2 hours after she sleeps, before we sleep. This is after 9:30pm and by that time of the day we're so tired that I find it hard to do anything productive outside of some light reading. And on most days, those are also the 2 hours we get to discuss family and household stuff (what things have come up, what things need repairs, etc.) that we don't have time to talk about throughout the day, so actual light reading time is maybe 30 minutes a day, and during the most tired part of my day too so it's not like I can hope to write any code during it.

From what I've heard from friends, everyone is saying things get a lot easier when their kids reach 4+ years old, that's when they actually see themselves being able to have time to work on anything outside of work and kids.

So overall perhaps the advice is, life is long, and just spend time with the kids in the next 4 years, and you'll have time to learn and code for hobby projects again after that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nap time and as they get older they do their own thing and you gradually have more free time which is mostly just lonely time so enjoy what you have while it lasts

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh definitely! It is not that I do not enjoy spending time and playing with them, it is the contrary to be honest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> When my kids were about the age of yours, I did the bulk of my learning during the weekends; there was always at least half a day's worth of 'free' time distributed throughout those two days. I can't remember if it was Trello or Basecamp, but I used one of the online project/todo/card management sites to maintain a list of ideas/links/bookmarks etc., during the week (this is a lot of fun in itself, it's like filling a shopping cart!), and then worked off the board over the weekend. I found this helped me to appreciate the progress I was making -- it can feel quite slow-going in the beginning -- half a day a week amounts to 2 days over 4 weeks. Inevitably, as you progress (as you start to gain some proficiency in your new skill) you'll find yourself putting a few more hours in during the week; excitement and creativity being the greatest motivators! Good luck! It's not easy, but it's eminently do-able.

</comment><comment><USER18> For me, it was not lacking time, but lack of energy.

After the first one, it took 3 years before I had enough energy to pick up side projects again, and then the 2nd one came and we were even more exhausted.

Now 3 years later (6 years total) I'm finally starting a side project again.

Scheduling kind of works, but when you don't have the energy to do something that you scheduled, it still doesn't work.

My hobbies have changed over the last 6 years. I picked up BMX racing with our oldest, D&D/ttrpgs with new friends and reading sci-fi/fantasy instead of watching tv and playing games (you can pause it anytime).

My new side project relates to one of my hobbies (lfg site for ttrpgs).

Being picky is necessary and having "meaningless" downtime to find your focus is more important than stressing out and trying to do everything and nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I haven't thought about switching hobbies, this is something worth considering!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Im my experience, you DO have time still. It is more of a question of WHAT STATE you are in when this time is there.

After having the baby and changing job, I found it VERY hard to find time to learn new stuff or work on my side projects. The main issue was not time itself, but the fact that I was exhausted, so used this time for brainless activities like gaming or watching TV.

Reading `deep work` helped me a lot realize this and I am now doing better at it. The first step is to recognize that you still have this time :)

<comment><USER20> Yeah I find after work and then helping with the dinner / bedtime routine, I'm mentally shattered but still have the energy for a run or a bike ride - hobbies I didn't have before having children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Once our baby was 6 months old, we were able to stick to a hard bed time (7PM), hopefully the baby will be in bed by 8 (in actuality). Then you and the wife have at least 4 hours of down time.

<comment><AUTHOR> And 4 hours it is as the young one wakes up around 12 for a feed. A hard bed time is a good start but as you say it takes an hour or more sometimes

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> With a kid or kids that age it might be best to take a break. When my first born was 6 months I quit my full time job to do a startup. 12 months later my second was born. A year later we sold the startup. Focus was the job and family. Learning new stuff was out of the question. I had some catching up to do when the kids got a little older but it wasn't hard.

</comment><comment><USER23> Unpopular opinion alert. Having a family is a new skill. Embrace it! Put your other stuff on hold for a few years.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was/am in a similar situation but with one kid. The trick I use is to use my travel time efficiently. I travel by public transport. ~1.5 hours each way. I read on my Kindle and note down thoughts/points in a physical diary. When I come home, I give my undivided to my kid. Has worked pretty well :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been contemplating this question.

Fundamentally, there are never enough resources to do everything you want to do. When it comes to time management, an important part is accepting that you can not do everything you want to, and that life has different times and seasons which have different priorities.

I'd suggest your priorities right now are: \- tending your children's physical and emotional needs \- same for your wife; specifically, ensure that she gets time away from the kids to do something that makes her happy , ideally a little every day but certainly some time each week \- same for yourself; it is reasonable and likely that you are up with the baby some nights, so getting sleep when you can is a priority, for, if you miss a night of sleep, the impact is similar to coming to work drunk and you may have a net-negative quantity of productivity that day; consider having a catnap in the day; consider having some personal time, going for a walk, a workout, or hanging out with friends playing board games [but make sure your wife has had time first!]

That doesn't leave much time for learning (or for side projects). You aren't likely to be able to sit down at a keyboard and learn a new library or technique. I'd suggest learning something different -- listening to some audiobooks or maybe podcasts, while you are doing dishes, commuting, or out for a walk.

One thing you might do for your sanity is have an untouchable hour every week (or, perhaps, 20 minutes each day) and work on a project then. You'll certainly lose some time trying to build back up the mental state for the project, but may find satisfaction in moving something forward. [https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-you-need-an- untouchab...](https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-you-need-an-untouchable- day-every-week)

The other thing I want to suggest is slowing down. I understand you are under pressure to provide for your family now, and provide for growing demands in the future. It is always good to aspire to be more than you are. When a jet encounters turbulence, there is an optimal speed for getting through it, and that speed usually requires slowing down. Sometimes enjoying a minute of silence or some peace is the best way to use a chunk of time; sometimes you need to be present and fight the battles of the moment with your spouse. [I've heard good things about meditating, too.]

The seasons will come and go, and you'll be able to get more balls back into the air to juggle, but for now, you need to protect the most important ones.

</comment><comment><USER26> You should probably focus on your own health and little one for now. He will eventually grow up, then, waking up an hour earlier than your family will make up 7 hours per week for you to train.

</comment><comment> em-bee similar topics with additional inspiring comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20363297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20363297) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10546797)

</comment><comment><USER27> i spent time at work to learn new skill. felt guilty at first but think of it this way: you finish your work already and it benefits the employer as well. it's win win

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm in exactly same situation and I'm gonna shamelessly share my blog post about it here ;)

[https://lukaszkups.net/notes/organize- yourself/](https://lukaszkups.net/notes/organize-yourself/)

&tldr; Organize yourself, and prepare that you'll want to sleep less (a bit)</comment>


Birds and bats have strange gut microbiomes - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-01-birds-strange-gut-microbiomesprobably.html <comment><USER2> I think they're mixing up cause and correlation. My theory is flying animals evolved shorter guts to save weight, and it's the shorter guts that cause a lack in biome diversity. The weight of the gut bacteria is irrelevant, it's just a side-effect of gut reduction which probably constitutes a larger % of bodyweight.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope its the opposite.

<comment><USER4> They can fly because of their strange gut microbiomes o_O

<comment><USER5> I'm gonna go apply to YC for Fizzy Lifting Probiotics...

<comment><USER6> Well maybe all you need to do is survive the Avian flu from the bird poop transplant...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So what's the quid pro quo? What do birds and bats loose (apart from weight) by having reduced gut microbiomes?

<comment><USER8> Why does there need to be a loss other than weight? Weight loss is a serious negative effect.

<comment><USER9> If you fly by your own muscles, weight loss is a serious positive effect!

<comment><USER8> Sure, it's a positive effect on your ability to fly. But if you do anything other than flying, it will affect those things too. It's _terrible_ for your ability to recover from injuries.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please, screw up (on European corporate culture) - <AUTHOR> http://rodpetrovic.com/2010/11/please-screw-up/ <comment><USER3> Wow. I'm amazed. You're tarring the whole of European culture with the same brush based on experiences in Slovenia. The experience may or may not be typical of _your part of Europe_ but Europe has no 'countrymen', we're all very different from each other with different corporate cultures.

I find your post insulting on two levels - one the idea that Europe is a monoculture, and two that somehow 'being more like the USA' means that we'd be more dynamic risk takers. There are risk takers all over Europe. The main man behind Ycombinator is English for crying out loud!

<comment><USER4> While it's interesting to note pg is English, for some reason he chose CA to set up in. I'm English too, but based in NYC. As I told everyone when I started my humble startup :

If I tried hard and succeeded in the US people would want to emulate me, in the UK they would wonder who I had to screw over to get there. If I tried hard but failed in the UK people would remember me as a failure, in the US people recognize someone who tried...

<comment><USER3> You go where the best chance for what you're trying to achieve is. For pg it was silicon valley, for you it's NYC, for investment funds in Europe it's going to be London, for engineering in Europe it's going to be Germany.

I don't think your analogy is that accurate, we have plenty of successes here (James Dyson, Theo Paphitis, Alan Sugar, Richard Branson) as well as the many smaller ones noone knows about. Also, failure is relative. In the industry I work in, there are people that I know well who have exited on good terms, my main business makes a fraction of what they made, but I enjoy the freedom more and (to the best of my knowledge) so do the guys that work for me.

I do agree about the difference in the cost of failure though. Personally I blame Del Boy Trotter for a lot of that.

<comment><USER4> Actually, I didn't come up with my 'upside vs downside analysis' here on HN : it's how I've been explaining why I'm in the US to anyone who asks. I've had far more nods of understanding from the people back home (in the UK) than anywhere else.

<comment><USER3> More than anything it gives me hope to here that. I've been relying on last.fm to count as the defacto startup of choice for too long. I hope it all works out for you, whatever you're doing. If you need an upvote somewhere or a celebration of what you're trying to achieve, please send me an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I were to peel back the blog post to the relevant point (ie US culture is more risk accepting), I would agree. As someone who just completed 'cultural' training last week, risk profiles for various countries have the USA as very risk tolerant whilst other countries are very risk adverse (some of Europe, India etc). And I think most would agree that risk-acceptance is necessary for innovation/startups.

But wow, the rest of the material wrapped in that blog post ... stereotypes based on a couple of anecdotes, tarring an entire continent as a single monoculture, and inflammatory text such as 'Her cowardly behavior is the eventual result ...' says to me that this post was more about about someone's lack of understanding of culture (and dare I say attempt to appear superior) rather than any 'informative insight'.

Edit: I felt I should explain my objection to this post a bit more. In many cultures (particularly asian ones), communal harmony is valued more than individual success. This can often lead to decision by consensus (an extreme version being the one Rod saw). Is decision by consensus bad for innovation - quite possibly so (I believe it is myself). Is it cowardly? Absolutely not. Did it occur because mistakes were stigmatized? Again no - it's simply that shared decision making is valued for the community harmony. Different cultures, different values.

Edit 2: One of the tools we used on my course was Country Navigator (www.countrynavigator.com). You answer a short quiz which gives you your individual 'cultural' profile and you can then compare how closely you match other country culture profiles. It compares things like risk-taking/avoiding, do you relate as an individual or group etc. It was quite an interesting tool especially comparing how different countries related to me.

<comment><USER6> I didn't seem to get the impression that this was a rant based on his superiority, nor did I get the feeling this person doesn't understand the culture. I actually got this feeling that he does understand the differences in culture and the purpose of the blog is to make a social commentary about how this behavior stifles innovation and in most cases increase cost.

You're right, some countries value 'communal harmony', but that is not what this is about. It's not about having to meet 6 different people to get a sign- off because they have important input and will be directly involved with the product, it's about having to deal with _one_ person who could easily make most of the decisions herself and having her take managers from everywhere because she just doesn't want to be responsible for any future disagreements.

This wasn't a brainstorming session. The manager's decision costed the time of 16 extra people and probably made the meeting go for a lot longer than needed, and at the end, instead of responding to the last question, they pass the torch to legal. To me this doesn't seem like avoiding responsibility, to me it's being irresponsible (at least towards other people's time, not even taking into account other people's sanity).

<comment><USER5> Shared decision making is all about everyone having a say - it doesn't matter if the boss/manager is there and could make the decision on their own - <USER2> boss will engage his entire team to share a decision so that everyone feels part of the team. That's my point that it's a cultural difference/value - it's not seen as time wasting, it's seen as an investment in good teaming/community harmony.

<comment><USER7> I believe you are blending two different things together. Working together as a team, and making a decision.

I agree that it's good team building to work together in a large group, but do you have to carry around 16 managers for every decision? Why is one person so afraid of standing up and saying I made the decision because I feel it benefits the company, and then go into your data and facts. Then have anyone who objects come forwarded. Instead of having to cross reference every member or other departments for trivial decisions.

<comment><USER5> No I'm not. That's the whole point of cultural differences. What you see as inefficiency, can quite often be cultural behavior. Let me illustrate with a different example: If you ever deal with Indians (particular in India), you will find that whenever you ask them a question, they will often say yes (even when you think the answer should be no). The reason is that when an Indian says 'yes', they mean 'yes I heard you', not 'Yes I agree' or 'Yes I have completed that task'.

In the same way, you judge that team as being ineffectual in making a decision, but unless you have the cultural understanding of that country, you could be misunderstanding shared decision making as something else. Your explanation, whilst completely logical, is from your 'lens' of the world and may or may not have any accuracy in explaining another person's behavior.

(I will point out here that I can't comment if the situation in the article is a cultural difference or incompetence. I don't know enough about the country nor the situation to comment. My only point is that I suspect Rod doesn't know either - he's judging them based on his world view without really understanding the cultural issues. However quite possibly, it's simply an incompetence issue).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _As the European economy tries to stand up straight, while the American risk- taking, innovation-powered economy runs forward..._

What?! "Running forward" is not a term I would use to describe the American economy at the moment. And not all of Europe is struggling to stand up straight.

</comment><comment><USER9> Dysfunctional working environments are found everywhere, but they are not alike. You'd find quite different approaches in US, Japan, Italy and Sweden, for example. In all these countries, the operating environments of corporations are essentially similar on paper, but the praxis is totally different due to local factors and history (e.g. the state of the society when modernization began).

I agree with other commenters that "Europe" is not such a culturally homogenous region that this generalization would be warranted, though.

</comment><comment><USER10> Petrovic,

Your experience isn't that far-fetched. While your observation about risk taking and entrepreneurial spirit may be true in the US, the culture of risk avoidance exists in the US too. Unlike what we see on TV, there is a whole other side to America that people outside America do not see. (I say this as an immigrant myself).

However, I do agree that having 16 managers preview a site pre-launch and having to resort to "getting-back" on the answer to yes/no question appears lethargic. It appears that the organization's legal folks had not been engaged at the right juncture to comment on the content.

<comment><USER4> There's selection bias in the fact that they were pitching the US company on the phone. The non-risk-takers in the US wouldn't have taken the call.

<comment><AUTHOR> The company I work for is US-based.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we ought to cut him some slack. A lot of folks responding don't seem to take too kindly to the way Europe was represented in the post. I guess the tone of the post is evident in the title itself, "please screw up." It is an exaggeration of sorts, hyperbole if you will. Lighten up, please.

</comment><comment><USER11> Refugees viz Albert Einstein & H1Bs viz Linus Torvalds contributed to the prosperity of America.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't understand the implicit assumption of this article that risk taking is a good thing. Unnecessary bureaucracy and CYA behaviour is damaging, but taking excessive risks without adequate oversight/safeguards is the main reason the global economy got into its current precarious state. This is not a black and white issue, and the most successful businesses will be those that balance each risk against the expected reward if it pays off to decide which risks are acceptable.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what that "cowardly" manager would say when she sees that article? While we cannot identify her from the article, she can recognize herself.

</comment><comment><USER14> Agree, clumsy post, still the main point it wants to change is that Failure is very frown upon in Europe.</comment>


San Francisco's (In)Visible Class War - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/editors-picks/b83327c3371c

<comment><USER2> When I first moved to SF, the number of homeless people shocked me. I was initially sympathetic toward them, but I soon became indifferent for one reason: Many of them are insane and violent.

In the past month, two homeless people have raised improvised weapons at me and threatened to kill me. Both of these incidents happened in broad daylight not one block from the Phillip Burton Federal Building. Thankfully, I'm fit enough to get away from them. Still, it's quite frightening and I've started carrying pepper spray in case of another attack.

There are 7,000-10,000 homeless in San Francisco, of which 3,000-5,000 avoid shelters.[1] The city spends over $200 million per year on them. That's at least $20,000 per person per year.

So if you're going to get angry about anything, get angry at the criminally mismanaged city government.

1\. [http://www.sfgate.com/homeless/](http://www.sfgate.com/homeless/)</comment>


How Do You Grade Yourself? - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5947251/how-do-you-grade-yourself

<comment><USER2> Good article. I was surprised to see they left out Clayton Christensen and his work on the topic, "How Will You Measure Your Life?" A little more reaching in it's content probably, but still a very influential and thought-provoking book and philosophy.</comment>


How serious are people about their business data? - <AUTHOR> http://wizdee.com/home/quiz-business-data/ <comment><USER2> Great work...</comment>


Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2/ <comment><USER3> Can we stop comparing business to war? In war, you destroy the enemy, and pay in blood and gold. It's a matter of life and death, and the strategic objectives are black and white.

Business is not really like this. First, if everyone doesn't go home, you're going to have a major problem with OSHA. Next, there is rarely a singularity of purpose around a strategy and viable, co-operative alternatives are possible. Next, crushing all your competition would lead to an un-beneficial monopoly, so it's not really a worthwhile fight. Finally, war, and specifically combat are high stress and traumatic experiences that are not sustainable for more than a few months at a time. Humans can act in this way, and maybe the CEO is in this pure fight/ flight/freeze/posture mode, but it's not great to lead a major company there.

That said, there is a lot we can learn from the military, but this "business as war" analogy is pretty absurd. Does it mean the workers are mercenaries? If a worker leaves the company, are they a traitor? Maybe I'm reading too far into it, but let's leave war to the military!

<comment><USER4> _> Can we stop comparing business to war? In war, [...]_

No, we can't because talking about _any topic_ with war metaphors seems to be deeply ingrained in human _linguistics_.

In games like football, we talk about the the quarterback being the "field general" and the offensive tackles and defensive tackles "battling in the trenches".

When husbands & wives argue or fight in divorce cases, we talk about them "drawing their battle lines".

Historians or politicians often talk of "class warfare" or "war on poverty". The "Occupy Wall Street" protest is another borrowing of words from war.

Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer".

Wikipedia's most controversial articles have "edit wars" which results in pages getting locked.

In computer science, we have the _" Byzantine Generals Problem"_ which is war metaphor.

If you want to jump into every thread <topic X> to plead with people to "stop comparing X to war", you're not going to get anywhere. (E.g. "can we please stop comparing distributed computing fault detection to Byzantium generals and war?")

Even the linguistics field which studied our propensity to always compare topics to "war" also went meta on itself with "linguistic wars": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars)

<comment><USER5> > ingrained in human linguistics

Or maybe more accurately it's deeply ingrained in Anglo-American culture?

<comment><USER4> _> Or maybe more accurately it's deeply ingrained in Anglo-American culture?_

I don't know about all languages but French, German, and Chinese all have military and war metaphors that are commonly used in everyday speech. It's not unique to American English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think Schmidt was the real wartime CEO here, when the war could have extinguished Google. e,g. Microsoft changing the default search engine on IE when it had > 80% share could have hurt google a lot more than Facebook or social ever could. Chrome was probably Google's "Manhattan Project" in that regard.

By contrast, when Larry came to power, Google was more like the USA today. Rich, with very good resources, and playing the role of world superpower.

<comment><USER7> But at the time search wasn't really Microsoft's wheelhouse. That became immediately apparent to everyone who then immediately made the deliberate switch to Google. Essentially giftwrapping public trust in Microsoft and handing it to Google. Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot was the best thing for Google at that time.

Microsoft was prioritizing an unscalable revenue stream: advertising. Google was expanding the search market, and later came back for the advertising and browser markets once it had resources. Up until about the Google plus days Google never engaged in an endeavor with serious competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was published in 2011, and refers to Larry Page and Google+. It turns out that Google would have been better off if they had been less single-minded about pushing their new product. So take it all with a grain of salt.

<comment><USER9> Beyond that, has anyone else noticed how executive types LOVE to quote movies like the god father, wolf of wall street, and similar types of media, as if they themselves are the protagonist and/or "hero" of the story? Its a "Rah- rah" strongman ideal chalk full of projection and other bullshit mechanisms.

To quote M.A.S.H. " War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse." What is business? Cupcakes.

<comment><USER10> Yes. And what's worse, they misinterpret movies like the Wolf of Wall Street as something to admire (even if being aware of the excesses), when they are really descriptions of broken, corrupt, hateful individuals and criminals. Quoting the Wolf of Wall Street shouldn't serve as an endorsement of _anything_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think a lot of CEOs don't recognize when the war is over. What worked for a while may not work forever.

Stack ranking is a classical example. Firing the bottom 10% once or twice may actually be a good thing. But then you have to realize that this was a one off and you should stop or things get weird. Same with crunch time projects. My company recently has had a few high urgency projects with a lot of overtime and stress. Instead of calming down things it seems management has got addicted to permanent panic and not surprisingly people are burning out.

<comment><USER6> This applies not just to CEOs, but political leaders too.

Even Churchil, considered a hero in Britain after WWII, lost the next election badly to Atlee, as people were looking for a peacetime leader.

The good thing is Atlee setup the NHS. So I guess peacetime leaders are important after war.

<comment><USER12> Its easy to forget that Attlee was Churchill's deputy during the ww2 and that the various labour leaders who led govt departments (Morrison, Gaitskell etc) or in opposition (e.g. Bevan) in ww2 established their legitimacy to govern post-war. Similarly When Churchil was re-elected back to power in 1951 he recognised that Attlee's government key achievements like the National Health service (whch Churchill had originally fiercly opposed) were for the benefit of the country and did not dismantle them. Attlee and Churchill in some respects had combination of both war and peace time leaders that isnt always recognised.

(Edit: clarity and spelling)

<comment><USER13> I am glad you mentioned Churchill here. I recently read a few biographies about him, and he appears to have had just the leadership capabilities needed to win the war, but those same leadership capabilities didn't make him as successful a leader during peacetime.

<comment><USER11> I often think that war leadership is much easier than peacetime. You have a clearly defined goal and not too many competing priorities. Peace is much more complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a serial startup engineer, I've only been in wartime situations since leaving my last big-co job 12 years ago.

I agree with the large paintbrush aim of the article. Singular focus and knowing how to load your gun and fire those 1-3 shots you've got. You don't get 6, or 18 - that's peacetime. You have lots of data, customer feedback etc to show you how to point those few those shots, but that's all you've really got.

The one sentiment I didn't fully agree with was:

> Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war > define the culture.

This makes it feel like during war time the CEO doesn't have control of the culture, which counter to the entire post, is exactly what the CEO has control of. It's just that the culture is different in peace vs war, just like the CEOs are. Arguably the whole company is different all the way to an individual person level.

To speak to the other threads, I don't think the co-founders of Google were ever good peace or wartime CEOs. I think they rightfully gave up that seat multiple times because it's just not them. And to be explicit, there's nothing wrong with that.

<comment><USER15> Both the culture point and:

"Peacetime CEO strives for broad based buy in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus-building nor tolerates disagreements."

Feel off to me. You're always creating culture, and if you've got good people and a strong culture, consensus flows naturally from single-minded mission focus. No matter how dire the straights, you need buy in from your team. In a crisis, that buy in stems from the mission and trust you've built over the years. Dictatorial decrees without a team that trusts you and a strong culture will cause the company to fail regardless of how urgent the battle. They'll just quit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone."

"Peacetime CEO strives for broad based buy in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus-building nor tolerates disagreements."

Oh good just what we need. More permission to be a jerk at work to try and communicate urgency. This is one of those things where a smart accomplished person says a thing and we're supposed to listen but even in 9 years this behavior is outmoded. If we framed all of this up as ruthless prioritization and clear understanding of urgency, then that tells you what you need to know. Figure out what works for you in a way that doesn't violate your teams' principles and values.

<comment><USER17> >Figure out what works for you in a way that doesn't violate your teams' principles and values.

What works for me is to be a jerk

and if it violates my teams' principles and values, I replace those individuals until it doesn't

;)

<comment><USER18> Looks like we've got a badass on our hands!

Seriously though, looking at your linkedin profile, you have been out of school for less than 2 years. There's a lot more to learn about other people.

<comment><USER17> The winking smiley was meant to give it away as a joke.. because the parent's final statement doesn't actually mean anything (because it still justifies any behavior... including the one being attacked)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Anybody can do peacetime CEO, you just sit and do nothing. I, on the other hand, am a Warrior CEO of great success!"

</comment><comment><USER20> >Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

Such a good point. Most of the famous management books fall into this category.

<comment><USER21> A good CEO seems to be able to separate the theories that bring value. Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs with Jim Collins for example. Maybe management science is still in its early days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm indifferent towards the content of this article, but a meta-point: it is interesting how our civilian society has militarized so thoroughly. There are the obvious things like the militarization of the police forces, but it has trickled down to seemingly frivolous things like "Cupcake Wars" and "Cutthroat Kitchen".

I wonder if this is organic or not.

<comment><USER23> It might be because members of developed societies are so unlikely to come into contact with actual war that they can call even the most minor conflicts a war. Lack of stimulus accentuates what little you can get.

<comment><USER24> Or just more broadly people trying to market their things as being a higher level than their competitors. This escalates the language used and we end up with things like cupcake wars and every other article claiming someone "slammed" or "destroyed" another by just making a comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Odd. I've always interpreted these tropes as caricatures of people who act _as if_ they're at war or at peace, not as binary exemplars. The world's a lot more complex than war/peace, surely?

</comment><comment><USER26> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450669](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2450669)

<comment><USER27> What a treasure the long life of the HN archives has become.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is much more entertaining if you replace wartime CEO with Goofus, and peacetime CEO with Gallant.

</comment><comment><USER29> Even if you take the analogy literally, the distinction between peacetime and wartime has itself blurred as a result of nonlinear warfare and "forever" wars. I think it's clear that Ben Horowitz has not been an operator in far too long and anyone who takes this advice seriously deserves the failure that's coming to them. If we're going to match thinkpiece VCs against other thinkpiece VCs, Peter Thiel is probably much more sanguine and closer to reality than he is.

Thiel argues that the opposite of the competition emerges (which is a monopoly), and that these monopolies tend to operate much more ruthlessly and efficiently in the present day and are much harder, if not impossible, to dismantle. I disagree with him on whether that's a good thing or not, but I think his understanding of corporate mechanisms is much closer to reality than Ben Horowitz. The truth is that war theater is expensive -- too expensive these days for anyone to afford. Those characteristics of the "wartime CEO" he demonstrates (as well as some of the "Peacetime CEO") -- besides more focus on the present than the future, how many of them truly are proactively solving the crisis rather than reactively panicking?

</comment><comment><USER30> For any sufficiently large organisation, they will have parts of the business that are in "wartime" and parts that are in "peacetime".

The great CEO is able to manage their organisation to handle both. But odd are, you won't see this. Because they know to do that effectively, their "all hands" messaging has to be bland, tending towards peacetime messaging - <USER2> risk spooking the peacetime parts of the business. But then when talking to the wartime parts of the business, typically much smaller audiences, they are aggressive, and encourage the single minded focus of the leader of that part of the business.

Simon Wardley has many many good articles on this topic, often with the military angle - because war is the ultimate expression of conflict, and business are always in conflict with something.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just fyi, this is not an article about being a CEO during an actual war, to anyone in the audience scrolling through the comments trying to figure that out. It's just about being a CEO when the competition is far behind, versus being a CEO when the competition is very close.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think this is applicable to not just CEOs, but project managers and engineers too. Some PMs and Devs just cant function when things cool down.

</comment><comment><USER33> Oh the bloated self importance.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some companies (e.g. Netflix) seem to operate as if there's always a war going on. Its probably good for a lot of companies to adopt a wartime mentality every once in a while.

<comment><USER35> The day it became obvious that streaming was the future, Netflix was immediately at war, because at some point, in a streaming world, there is no reason not for d2c streaming, and Netflix owned zero content.

<comment><USER36> Except that d2c streaming implies fragmentation, and as more streaming services emerge it seems that piracy is back on the rise.

Perhaps Netflix offered something unique, or perhaps paying one provider and using one app is more of a benefit than it's given credit for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> War is not a great comparison to running a business. It's definitely not a great premise for enabling what seems like a hostile work environment.

</comment><comment><USER38> this assumes that fighting with competitors for the same market is undoubtedly the way to go rather than seaching for new opportunities.

<comment><USER39> A tactical retreat certainly slots into the wartime metaphor, I think the assumption is more that the CEO finds themselves fighting with competitors.</comment></comment>


How to Get Your Apartment Off the Grid - <AUTHOR> http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid-in-your-apartment.html <comment><USER2> A bit of context: In Spain, one of the European countries with better sunlight for solar production, some laws were passed recently that make it basically impossible for individuals to resell excess energy to the grid, so selling/buying from the grid on demand instead of using batteries is not really an option.

That's why when we see countries like Germany (not so much sun) going strong for solar Spanish people complain and try to change a corrupt government that passes laws that strongly favors utility companies. Not to say that some of this government relatives _work_ in these utilities.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't it be possible to create micro grids? E.g. tenants of one house or small town. They could sell electricity to each other then.

<comment><USER2> > _Y se añade "en ningún caso un generador se podrá conectar a la red interior > de varios consumidores". Esta medida habría beneficiado a las comunidades de > vecinos._

And it adds "under no circumstance a generator will be connected to the inner network of several consumers." This rule would have helped neighborhood communities.

<comment><USER4> Seems like you are quoting an article from El Páis and not directly the law itself.

[http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2015/10/09/actualidad/14...](http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2015/10/09/actualidad/1444388935_118022.html)

<comment><USER5> [https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2015/10/10/pdfs/BOE-A-2015-10927...](https://www.boe.es/boe/dias/2015/10/10/pdfs/BOE-A-2015-10927.pdf)

5.2.B - En el caso de que existan varias instalaciones de producción, el titular de todas y cada una de ellas deberá ser la misma persona física o jurídica.

(In case there are several production facilities, the owner of all of them must be the same natural or legal person)

<comment><USER4> "Y se añade "en ningún caso un generador se podrá conectar a la red interior de varios consumidores". Esta medida habría beneficiado a las comunidades de vecinos."

Baterías y trabas burocráticas (right column):

[http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2015/10/09/actualidad/14...](http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2015/10/09/actualidad/1444388935_118022.html)

<comment><USER5> I'm not arguing it's not quoted from the article, just providing a source to the original in case someone is interested.

<comment><USER4> I thought that was the purpose, but I think it is always important to quote the source of one's comment. :-)

The quoted part within the article, seems actually to be from, Artículo 4.3 (yes, very pedantic :-)

Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its incredibly satisfying going off-grid. We have an off-grid cabin and its awesome turning up and finding the batteries fully charged and ready to dispense free electricity.

During the summer, rain water, solar power, cooking over a wood fire and walking or cycling to the beach means you can actually live at entirely carbon zero. One of the kids was fascinated by the idea that his iphone had been powered up using on energy from the sun.

Kudos to OP for doing all this in a city apartment!

<comment><USER7> Is burning wood carbon zero? My in-law/relatives in Alaska say it can pollute quite a bit. Though I don't know how that relates to any carbon zero metric.

<comment><USER8> Burning wood is not carbon zero. It is the reverse of carbon sequestration in the sense that atmospheric CO2 was once converted to wood by the tree, and now the wood is being burned and the captured carbon release back into the atmosphere.

That could be nearly carbon zero (I don't know the contributions from soil and what mass remains as ashes, etc..), except when you consider the opportunity cost.

That burned tree, presumably healthy just prior, loses the ability to sequester any more carbon. A burned tree puts carbon in the atmosphere AND removes a carbon sequesterer simultaneously. That act is removing X amount of future sequestration until the tree would have naturally died and turned to soil. At that point most of that carbon would still be in solid form and not in the atmosphere.

I'm nitpicking at this point, but I lean toward burning wood as not carbon zero for the sake of opportunity cost.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't that exactly describe a carbon-neutral lifecycle?

<comment><USER8> Good point, I really didn't complete my thought. Updating my comment to explain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice project, but I disagree on one point:

> For lighting, it's impossible to fall back on grid power because I had to > cut the power cords of all lamps to make them compatible with the 12V DC > grid

Why not get a cheap-ass car battery charger? He's using lead-acid batteries anyway, and a charger for these is approx. 50 €.

Or bypass the battery entirely and use a 12V 200W power supply instead of the battery voltage (to avoid overloading your PSU with powering the equipment AND simultaneously charging the battery).

</comment><comment><USER11> >Some important challenges remain, most notably the washing machine, the bathroom and the laser printer. The problem with washing machine and bathroom is that they're on the north side of the building, far from the solar panels. We could go to a laundromat but there are none in town. A pedal powered washing machine requires space that we don't have.

You could try washing your laundry by hand. It isn't as much work as it might seem if you have never tried it. There must be something magical in the detergent because I can get clothes cleaner than I ever had with a washer back home with little work.

For example, to wash a shirt I just put the water / detergent mix in a basin and agitate the shirt with my hands for a couple minutes. Leave the shirt in the basin for 15 minutes for the detergent to do it's work. Agitate for another few minutes and then hang. First hang in the bathroom or outside for 20 for the shirt to quit dripping and then I put in front of a fan. The shirt is dry within a couple of hours.

Pants can be a bit more work depending on the material. Denim is heavy and eats up the dirt. I do the same as with the shirt but I use a tide bar to spot soap areas which get more dirt (bottoms of the pant legs) and brush those areas.

This does take longer than using a washing machine. But the clothes last longer and get cleaner. You aren't using electricity, buying an appliance and birthing a hung of metal and plastic that you may one day have to dispose of.

One weird effect that doing laundry by hand has for me is that it sort of puts me closer to my stuff. It's too easy to get something dirty, throw it in the washer and forget about it. Hand washing makes me more aware of how what I own also owns me and the energy it takes to maintain and carry this stuff around with me.

<comment><USER12> Sadly, giving up on the washing machine is giving up one on of the great labour saving inventions, and going back towards the time when washing took at least one woman-day per week.

[http://johnquiggin.com/2012/05/03/housework-in- utopia/](http://johnquiggin.com/2012/05/03/housework-in-utopia/)

[http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_machine)

<comment><USER11> Back in the day when men were out working and families were larger, women had to do a lot of work do to laundry because they would do laundry for the entire family. Doing your own laundry doesn't take long. Still more work than using a washing machine, but not too bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Could people with houses use legacy PSTN wiring to distribute 12V throughout the house?

<comment><USER14> POTS wires are 24 gauge [0] which can handle 3.5 amps [1] so you'd be able to transmit 12V * 3.5A = 42 Watts.

POTS often had 36V on it to power the ringer on phones so you could potentially up the power transmission by running your system at 14V. Some devices which consume a fixed amount of power would use less current, other devices would just use more power at higher voltage.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service) [1] [http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm](http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm)

<comment><USER13> 42 watts seems ok for a very small installation, right? I'm thinking enough to charge a phone and maybe a laptop. And, that would be driveable with a small 12V battery and a small solar panel.

<comment><USER14> As others have pointed out voltage drop is a significant problem with low voltage systems. #24 is 84 ohms per km, or 0.084 ohms per metre. Say the system is running at 13.4 V and the loads will work on as little as 11.5V before they brown out, that means we can have 13.4-11.5V voltage drop = 1.9V voltage drop. ohms law V=IR so for 3.5A and 1.9V R=0.54 ohms total resistance, and at .084 ohms per metre we can transmit 3.5A 6.46 metres before the voltage drop will be unacceptable.

You could charge a phone, but even my small laptop chargers are over 60W. The big ones are 90W.

Also don't try this in your house! pushing 3.5A through that little pinner wire it could get hot and start a fire.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't there be 4 conductors, so resistance would be half when you pair them together?

<comment><USER14> Yes.

But i forgot about the resistance from the load back to the source so above where I said 6m should actually be 3m. Or if two wires are parallel both from source to load and load back to source then we're back to 6m.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why is it a good idea to get off the grid? Genuinely curious. I would think that a networked connection of energy input/output nodes that is globally optimized would be a good thing. Not sure why it's better for anyone to have every node (home) operate independently.

<comment><USER17> 1 reason is you don't have to deal with the red tape of the ILEC. I've read a few stories of people installing solar onto their house. Then, when it's time to tie into the grid the electric company won't certify the install or drags their feet for months.

Even if you do get it tied in any new changes require recertification. I can understand the position of the ILEC. The homeowner just wants to get up and running quickly. The electric company wants to ensure the stability of the grid.

<comment><USER18> In places with net metering, the electric company often seems more interested in the profitability of the grid, which tends to delay approvals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice, but a lot of apartment managers would freak out over those kinds of installations being visible, at least for any halfway decent apartments.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, I've lived at probably 8 different complexes in my life and none of them would have allowed this. I've had managers bitch at me for taking down vertical blinds and only having curtains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sad that we don't have a 12V power socket standard that is better than the lighter socket.

<comment><USER22> In the US at least, and other countries have adopted it, the Anderson power pole is becoming the standard. Anderson power poles are genderless and keyed. In other words, you can connect any similar amp connector to any other, and you can't plug them in wrong (almost). You can put power pole pigtails on all your 12V sources, and power pole pigtails on all your 12V devices, then make any (reasonable) length of extension cable with power poles at either end.

The most common amperages (15, 30, 45) use the same plastic housing, so you can connect a 15A device into a 45A rated power source. The higher amp rated power poles are are 75A, 120A, 175A, and 350A. These are more commonly seen on trucks and commony used to attach things like a winch. I have a set of 175A power poles attached to my Prius to run an inverter, and I have a long set of heavy duty jumper cables that I split near one end put a 175A powerpole set inline (so I can connect my inverter (or my prius) to almost any external source.

[https://powerwerx.com/anderson-powerpole-connectors-15amp- bo...](https://powerwerx.com/anderson-powerpole-connectors-15amp-bonded) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_Powerpole#De_facto_st...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anderson_Powerpole#De_facto_standards)

It takes a bit of money to get into using them (you need a set of crimpers, and the insertion/extraction tool is a lifesaver here as well). Unless you buy in a lot of bulk, you can expect $1/end you make. If you're in an a club (amateur radio/model trains/rc), someone might be able to lend you a crimp tool or make up some adapters for you. But once you start replacing ends and seeing the usefulness of it, you'll probably want to put ends on everything 12V. I've got pretty much everything 12V of mine switched over, and a handful of adapters to go from power to: alligator clips, ring terminal, bare wire, car DC socket (cigarette lighter), bananna clips, trailer connector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Grid actually is good (easier to balance etc). "Utility grid" is what causes most inconveniences.

</comment><comment><USER23> What is this, Hacker News or something? :) (Just nice to see this kind of thing on here)

</comment><comment><USER24> It's great that the author wrote up their approach, but one thing I don't see is how this was managed with the landlord. There is some clue in that the landlord installed the solar water heater. My interest comes from my belief that my landlord (or more likely the condo association that our apartment is in) would never allow this sort of installation. Aside from "aesthetic concerns", solar panels can potentially cause insurance rates to go up (firefighters don't like to douse electricity generators with water).

<comment><USER25> Solar hot water panels do not generate electricity. They heat up a fluid (glycol) which is used to heat up your water.

<comment><USER24> I'm referring to the PV panels the author mentioned putting on his window sill. Agreed that the hot water system isn't a fire concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I recently built a flat roof 35m2 home office/gym at the back of my garden. I'm currently using an electrical convection heater and a 9kw instant water heater for shower/basin.

What would be the most cost effective way to use solar instead for heating/shower? I was thinking about putting a 100-200 litre insulated tank either inside or outside, and heat that with solar to about 70c, to use for both heating in the winter, and showers. I don't need cooling in the summer.

Has anyone done this?

</comment><comment><USER27> It is great to be knowledgeable about energy consumption and conservation methods and to try to spread that knowledge. Realistically however, any _action_ is negligible unless it is done by industries that will have a _huge_ effect on the environment (airlines, for instance).

If you want to achieve X, it is ultimately best to spend your time convincing a certain number of local _businesses_ to do X, or petitioning governments, etc.

<comment><USER28> Lobbying private or public interests is definitely important if you want to have an impact. The other half of that is that people have to actually do the things you're lobbying for.

Implementing these ideas personally is more than just collecting knowledge -- it's contributing to the desired effect.

To boot, in a conversation where you'll subsequently advocate for energy consumption, one of the easiest ways to build trust will be to speak from a position of experience -- to know what probing questions to ask about your audience's life experiences that will help them build a future story in which they're enjoying conserving energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You might also want to check the batteries you are using for your system. Due to the nature of the small space and high use, I remember from my armature radio license exam that some batteries vent gas when under operation. If I remember correctly, one such battery is NiMH.

You should really read into your batteries and your charge controller specifications before doing anything like this.

Other than that, this looks great!

</comment><comment><USER30> Laser printers need much power for heating. Would it be possible to switch to a ink printer? They should work fine on 10 to 20 Watts. They even have external Poweradapters like a Laptop.

It depends on the usagepattern. Not printing enough would dry up the ink. Printing to much could be to expensive or to slow.

But heating dust up with a laser to melt it down on paper seems to be very inefficient in terms of energyefficiency.

<comment><USER31> This is veering offtopic but laser printers don't actually use the laser for heating the toner, they use it to create charges on an image drum which picks up the toner electrostatically. The fuser assembly is a very simple resistive heater.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice use of an in house microgrid. To me the striking thing was how the LED bulbs designed to be plugged into 220VAC 'just work' when plugged into 12VDC; I know this is because of their switchmode power supplies, it's still surprising.

You could consider doing this with "19.5V" (popular with laptops), although many will work just fine from 12V, or power-over-ethernet's 48V.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why not place two 250 watt solar panels vertically in the windows. They are big enough.

</comment><comment><USER33> All that work to get 150Wh per day? That's what, 20 cents worth of grid electricity?</comment>


The Y Combinator - <AUTHOR> https://mvanier.livejournal.com/2897.html <comment><USER2> This remind of the best material in my opinion to understand the Y combinator, "(Y Y) Works! by Matthias Felleisen and Dan Friedman"[1]. Its very light read IMO, and highly recommended.

[1] [https://xivilization.net/~marek/binaries/Y.pdf](https://xivilization.net/~marek/binaries/Y.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, the Y Combinator does __not __work for Actor programs, which can implement non-deterministic procedures that cannot be implemented in the non-deterministic lambda calculus. For further information, see the following:

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3418003](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3418003)

<comment><USER4> @ProfHewitt, I have to say I think you did a lot of people (including myself) a disservice by polluting Wikipedia with promotions of your original research on the Actor model of computation.

Modelling concurrent computation is not the place for an intellectual "land grab"; if your work has value, I think it's time to let other people promote it for you.

<comment><USER3> Personal attacks have _no_ place on Hacker News!

Please confine your remarks to substantive issues.

Hacker News is _not_ a popularity contest.

BTW. Wikipedia suffers many of the same bugs as other Internet Social Media. I started the Wikipedia article on the Actor Model. Unfortunately, the article is now _extremely_ obsolete because of Wikipedia censorship. See the following for current information:

[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3418003](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3418003)

PS. It is invalid to criticize a scientist for publishing original research. Instead, publishing original research is a primary activity of scientists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This gets posted at least once a year now :D [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mvanier.livejournal.c...](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mvanier.livejournal.com)

<comment><USER6> Somewhat tangential: I just clicked the "past" link assuming it would show similar results to the page you linked and man was I ever wrong! It doesn't search for the exact phrase, so many unrelated stories flood the results. But this does mean that low-hanging fruit are within reach: all our tireless admins would have to do is add double-quotation marks around the search query! :)

<comment><USER7> This particular title matches a lot of stories for obvious reasons. I'm not sure exact-querying would be better in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mike taught the intro CS course at Caltech using SICP (at least when I took it). It's cool to see his name pop up here and there still.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone happen to know where is there an article on the (non)existence of the Y combinator typed using recursive parameterized types?

</comment><comment><USER9> I really didn't expect this sort of Y Combinator, especially on this page. Still very interesting read, because I didn't know it before and at the same time it shed a bit of light on naming of this company.

</comment><comment><USER10> But... Y?

<comment><USER11> because f Y f.

<comment><USER12> f (Y f), surely ….

<comment><USER13> To quote the article:

> _(I 'm using a function notation without parentheses here, so factorial 3 is > the same as what is usually written as factorial(3). Humor me.)_

<comment><USER12> Sure, I am fine with that (else I would have proposed the abysmal `f(Y(f))`); but `f Y f` suffers from the ambiguity of `f (Y f)` versus `(f Y) f`, and, at least from my familiarity with Haskell, I automatically parse it as the latter (which I am guessing was not what proc0 intended).

<comment><USER13> I just thought it would be funny to quote the article there, I'm not too hung up on which representation is used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >I think we can similarly use knowledge of the Y combinator as a dividing line between programmers who are "functionally literate" (i.e. have a reasonably deep knowledge of functional programming) and those who aren't. There are other topics that could serve just as well as Y (notably monads), but Y will do nicely. So if you aspire to have the True Lambda-Nature, read on.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, the article leaves out types, which are an even more important topic for a "literate" programmer.

The recursive definition of Y can easily be adapted to be strongly typed. However, there is _no_ strongly typed Y combinator without self-applicable recursively defined types. Consequently, the Y combinator is not something that needs to concern a competent programmer, who will of course be using strong types ;-)

<comment><USER13> > _Consequently, the Y combinator is not something that needs to concern a > competent programmer, who will of course be using strong types ;-)_

A competent programmer selects their tools based on multiple metrics, which can include meta metrics like popularity (size of hiring pool) as well as external constraints such as a predetermined platform or interoperability with an existing system.

<comment><USER3> Competent programmers compensate as best they can when using weaker tool chains, such as those lacking strong types.

<comment><USER13> I don't disagree.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node v7.7.4 Released - <AUTHOR> https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v7.7.4/ <comment><AUTHOR> Notable changes

\- deps: Upgraded internal node-inspect version to 1.10.6, containing several fixes.

\- inspector: Use proper WebSockets URLs when bound to 0.0.0.0.

\- tls: Fixed a segfault when the handle was destroyed after a partial read.</comment>


Celebrity-Endorsed Startups That Bombed - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/gallery/7-celebrity-endorsed-startups-that-totally-bombed/

<comment><USER2> I'm suprised Ashton Kutcher's Ooma wasn't on this list. Pay once for lifetime calling was somehow thought to be a sustainable business by the HN crowd when it launched, but was plagued by outages and an "end of life" policy that hit you with a new hardware purchase to continue lifetime calling.</comment>


Google: Increasing transparency through advertiser identity verification - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/products/ads/advertiser-identity-verification-for-transparency/ <comment><USER2> This is like ten years too late, but _whoa_. This is huge. Malicious search ads are the top threat vector I see, and with things like the URL line being dishonest, it's been impossible to verify an ad came from a given company or entity. The only solution to securely clicking on ads has been to never ever click on ads.

Hopefully this will make it much easier to prosecute malicious actors that do business via ad networks.

EDIT: "scale the program while continuing to ensure we are surfacing helpful information to our users, we expect that this process will take a few years to complete"

I love how Google pretends the slow rollout is to ensure they are "surfacing helpful information", not "making fistfuls of cash from ads". The dishonesty in that line is a bit overbearing. Taking a few years to complete is unfortunate, but hopefully they will make it very clear which ads are verified and which are not in the interim, and ensure that advertisers are pushed to implement verification to improve visibility.

</comment><comment><USER3> This a dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955606)</comment>


Kite raises $17M for its ML-powered IDE - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/28/kite-raises-17-million-for-its-ai-powered-developer-environment/ <comment><USER2> The demo looks neat, but the idea is not new. How does it compare to competition.</comment>


NoSQL Data Modeling Techniques - <AUTHOR> http://highlyscalable.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/nosql-data-modeling-techniques

<comment><USER2> First off I find the NoSQL term in itself very strange. How can you say anything intelligent about "everything that is not using SQL as a query language"? Its like talking about NoJava, instead of talking about Ruby.

Props for a well written article with lots of nice graphs but I dont agree with much of its content.

A few examples:

"software applications are not so often interested in in-database aggregation"

In my experience this is what 99% of business support apps are doing. Doing this aggregation in procedural application code will only give you more code to maintain and more bugs.

"joins are often handled at design time as opposed to relational model where joins are handled at query execution time"

Im glad you know beforehand about your changing requirements over the next 10 years and can "design" your joins for every eventuality right now. It feels like the exact oppisite of agile.

I also agree with the very insightful comment by Voice in the wind (comment #4 below the article)

<comment><USER3> "software applications are not so often interested in in-database aggregation"

Applications that used to be desktops apps are now moving to the web, and these "cloud applications" are prime use-cases for NoSQL. Apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox are cases where a NoSQL might be a better fit than SQL, the same way Word.exe doesn't use SQL internally, instead it uses linked lists and hashmaps [1].

"In my experience this is what 99% of business support apps are doing."

Business apps are the original, killer use-case for SQL, and here NoSQL makes less sense, I agree.

[1] Some apps like Firefox started using SQLite for local storage, a technical decision I don't agree with.

<comment><USER4> _Applications that used to be desktops apps are now moving to the web, and these "cloud applications" are prime use-cases for NoSQL. Apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Dropbox are cases where a NoSQL might be a better fit than SQL_

I don't see anything in Gmail and Google Docs data usage needs that make NoSQL a better fit for them --only the need to scale with no sharing etc.

(OTOH Dropbox might fit the case, they only need some hierarchical store a la filesystem, with versioning).

 _the same way Word.exe doesn't use SQL internally, instead it uses linked lists and hashmaps_

Yes, but Word.exe internally deals with just ONE document and it's data structures, does not manage metadata for many documents and does not have to provide aggregated info on them. That would be Windows Explorer, that manages many .docs. And that one, MS did have a plan to make more SQL-like.

<comment><USER3> NoSQL is a better fit for Gmail because you wouldn't want one gigantic 'emails' or 'contacts' table, which is how you would model it in SQL. You also want to cache the hell out of it, which is easier done in a NoSQL model (e.g. if the cache layer is integrated and hence uses the same API as the persistent stuff).

<comment><USER5> Huh, why wouldn't you want those tables? You seem to be confusing the need to scale with how you would design the system.

Somewhere I worked before we used to import 100,000s of a companies email into the project system to display them against the system. They were all in an Emails table which just stored the body, I think there was an email header table and an email contacts table which was relationally linked directly to the Person table.

Worked fantastically, used to run an IMAP server off those tables for outlook integration.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't talking about "email" as a use-case, I was talking about "Gmail". Obviously you can serve 1000s of email users using an SQL and IMAP database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an interesting article.

I am primarily a PostgreSQL guy who does all sorts of things like hierarchical data representation in SQL. While these things have come a long way in the past few years. This being said, the more I read about NoSQL data modelling techniques, the more it occurs to me that some of these techniques may work well in relational data environments where data is read-frequent/write-seldom.

In LedgerSMB (<http://www.ledgersmb.org>) we already use key-value modelling in cases where it makes sense (system settings, and a few other things).

Currently what hierarchical stuff we are doing wouldn't benefit from the ideas in this paper, but I wouldn't rule it out for some other things in the future.

I guess what this is reinforcing for me is that NoSQL and SQL models are not entirely mutually exclusive.....

<comment><USER7> NoSQL is about the interface, not the implementation. NoSQL databases provide a better impedance match out of the box for some applications.

What is often lost in the conversation is that you can do the same thing using a competent SQL database engine if you can deal with the complexity. But you have to use SQL, which for some applications is a poor interface, and you have to configure the engine for your application and workload. This adds complexity to the process. If you have great database architects and DBAs, NoSQL does nothing that you can't do on a really good SQL engine. Most startups have neither the people nor money for that.

The vast majority of databases, whether labeled SQL or NoSQL, implement the same relational operator algorithms under the hood. They are not intrinsically different in that regard. Even graph databases, which in theory cannot be expressed in a simple relational algebra, can be and are expressed in practice as recursive relational algebras. As long as databases are using the same algorithms and representations they will have the same limitations.

<comment><USER8> Most startups also don't have complicated data models or a high enough traffic to justify having a DBA and commit premature optimization by denormalizing data right off the bat to speed up retrieval in your NoSQL DB.

As many have said before, NoSQL is a premature optimization in that all it does is to remove some restrictions in your technology stack to let you move come complexity such as data validation and the ability to easily aggregate data up the stack.

The need for NoSQL is a rich man's problem. When you organize your data like that using the article's techniques, you are going to have to write a lot of very odd looking code and tightly coupled code to do even some basic reporting. E.g when you try to query from the many-to-one direction.

If you are following the Lean Startup methodology at all, you should be aware that being able to measure things is crucial early on when you are trying to reach a business goal. Writing bunch of crazy for loops and map reduce stuff in the application layer isn't exactly easy to write, look at or maintain.

<comment><USER6> The impedance mismatch is real which anyone who has seen stored procs written by app developers can verify....

What NoSQL does is give you a light-weight object store which could have some very cool uses. Those uses are also pretty narrow for the reasons the article mentions (assuming the questions you have now are all the questions that are important for example).

However, I think some of the solutions may help in relational environments with the edge cases.

<comment><USER8> That's a little weak as an argument isn't it. SQL and the relational model has nothing to do with stored procedures and you certainly don't have to, or need to use stored procedures for reporting. In fact, prior to 2005, MySQL didn't support stored precedures for the longest time. How do you think those people did reporting? I don't know how you do reporting, but mind involves just a ridiculously simple and ugly web app that essentially just generates some HTML tables from a bunch of SQLAlchemy queries.

Why do I get the sense that the real reason most people use NoSQL stems from their destain of SQL, whatever that reason maybe...

<comment><USER6> I am a total relational guy, BTW. But the fact is that there is a mismatch between how you have to think when doing SQL queries (thinking in sets) and OO programming (thinking in instructions). Anyone who has dealt with stored procedures written by app folks understands what a mess you get when you try to program one side in techniques aimed at the other.

While NoSQL is a good choice for some environments, namely ones where ad hoc reporting is not likely to be needed and where other methods of interop are preferred (LDAP being a great example of something that could benefit from a NoSQL back-end), the fact is that this actually shows that, more often than not, you lose more than you gain by getting rid of the mismatch....

IOW, I think it is a moderately weak case for NoSQL in some environments and a strong case _against_ in a much larger number of environments.....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the comparison of the design themes of relational modeling and NoSQL modeling as, respectively, "what answers do I have?" and "what questions do I have?"

<comment><USER10> To me the key point is that in relational databases you describe - declaratively - the information you want and leave it to the database to figure out to retrieve it (x); whereas in most NoSQL databases you describe how to retrieve the information.

(x) this is not the entire truth, as SQL is actually a (somewhat) unfortunate mix between the declarative relational calculus and the procedural relational algebra.

<comment><USER11> I don't know enough to understand what makes relational algebra procedural. I read the "Haskell more successful cousin" article and I thought that the relational algebra part was what made SQL and Haskell similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Party like it's 1969! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_model>

Not that many old things don't work, well in some circumstances even. I'm just having a hard time seeing how throwing away ACID and denormalizing data is "post modern" rather than "back to the future".

Denormalization? How about a materialized view to support common searches to reduce I/O from assembling data.

Aggregates? You could probably abuse and extend entity attribute values to (physically) cluster arbitrary / sparse / repeating field values around a common parent.

It's actually a pretty good article, otherwise, I should probably leave myself a marker to find it. Sooner or later, I'll end up having to maintain one of these things -- long gone contractors will build a "latest and greatest" app using a database system not unlike a 1970 mainframe. There are a number of good work-arounds in the article for dealing with systems with poor indexing capabilities -- a single key field to be filtered.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've the feeling that when talking about Data Modeling, Redis really does not fit into the key-value category.

<comment><USER14> To the extent that one could talk about data modeling using the constructs of an imperative language e.g. C then one can do the same with Redis (with the caveat that Redis lacks a reference type). K/V only stores restrict the semantics to that of maps e.g. map["foo"]=bar, but if they introduce richer operations e.g. map-reduce on the K/V containers (e.g. map.apply(func)), then it is pretty much Redis restricted to its String type.

I personally have a preference for unified views of systems so my bias is to look at the entire hierarchy of storage (image) and memory model (semantics) as a singular space, with back end disks as Ln to L1 cache on the CPU. In this light, to me Redis is a memory manager(/cache) + DSL, serving at Lx (where x is somewhere south of local Disk and north of a durable and consistent distributed FS backend e.g. HDFS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had a good talk with a potential customer two days ago and we covered non- relational databases in some detail. I blog about non-relational databases a lot so he thought it was 'religion' for me, but this is not the case at all: I default to wanting to use PostgreSQL (or another relational database) and instead choose MongoDB, CouchDB, etc. depending on special requirements.

As per the article, it is required to understand the CAP theorem and specific capabilities of different data stores.

Client library support varies a lot. Some ORM tools like Ruby's Datamapper let you design composite storage schemes using a relational database and, for example, MongoDB. For document oriented data stores I very much prefer writing client apps in languages like Ruby and CLojure that have a nice syntax for maps, etc.</comment>


Algorithmic Problems Around the Web - <AUTHOR> http://yury.name/algoweb/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also by the same instructor: A Guide to Web Research (<http://yury.name/webguide/>)

<comment><USER2> In fact, the instructor now works at Yahoo! Research!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I sort of guessed from the webpage's favico. (Call that for information contained in different parts of the page). The instructor has, BTW, done fantastic work in similarity search in web's perspective.</comment></comment></comment>


The Apple Store is down, Macbooks incoming? - <AUTHOR> http://store.apple.com

<comment><USER2> I've been hammering on Apple this past week for changes they made. Part of the reason I do this is because at home, I fight a never ending battle against Apple. You see, I'm a PC. My wife? A Mac.

And she loves her Mac. She's been waiting for these new MacBooks to come out so she can get herself a new MBP.

Since W7 and the upgrade I did on my computer, I've been reminding her ever so gently about how "my computer is so vastly superior to hers" and remarking "how slow that thing is." She bites back, explaining that when the new MBPs come out, the resell value on her laptop will more than cover a substantial portion of the cost. She then asks me "if I hate Apple so much, maybe I should sell my iPod."

She had problems connecting to the color printer attached to my computer. "If you had gotten a windows machine, it would have been easier." She bites back, "If you had gotten a Mac, it would have been better." I remind her "You got me Windows 7 as a gift, remember?"

"Oh, you didn't like MY gift for you? Are you complaining about Windows 7?"

"No..."

We both can agree, however, that both Apple and Microsoft's ability to work together sucks. But it does make for interesting Saturday mornings.</comment>