Show HN: Habit List - my first iOS app - <AUTHOR> http://habitlistapp.com <comment><USER2> I have been using <https://chains.cc/> which is as far as I know the best web UI for "Don't break the chain" idea. However the lack of mobile app makes it harder to use and therefore I'm giving Habit List a try. Looks great!

btw. for me, week starts on Monday.

<comment><USER3> It slightly terrifies me that all the most popular groups are variants of "No fap"

<comment><USER4> <http://www.reddit.com/r/nofap>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You've done an awesome job with this. The UI is gorgeous and it looks like you didn't lose any functionality with it. I really can't think of anything to critique you on. It seems like most of the criticism on this thread is very minor nitpick-y things. Especially this business about the battery percentage and the alarm icon and not having a favicon for your website... Seriously guys, he's asking for some comments on the app, not the way that it's mocked up on the website. Keep on hacking kid.

<comment><USER6> He's hardly a kid: <http://receivebacon.org/resume.html>

<comment><USER5> I didn't actually mean kid, it was just colloquial

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is very nearly exactly what I was looking for, couple of things:

Small UI crit:

When adding a Habit, the cancel button is in the top left position on the Add a Habit screen - everywhere else in the app this position is a non-destructive navigation button so I accidentally cancelled events I was in the middle of creating a couple of times.

It would probably be better to make this navigate back to the Today screen & auto-create the event and put the cancel button somewhere else.

Couple of feature requests:

* ability to make the reminder an modal alert view rather than a message - too easy to miss a non-intrusive alert

* ability to snooze a reminder - if I'm busy sometimes I can't do the thing I'm being reminded right now but don't want to forget to do it, if I could 'snooze' the reminder in the alert view that would make me more likely to remember to do it

</comment><comment><USER8> I've actually been using this for several days now. I tried several similar apps before it and think this is by far the most usable. I like it a lot, but have one suggestion: there should be a way to go to a previous day's list view. I often don't get into the app until I'm in bed, which is sometimes after midnight, meaning I've now lost the current day's list and am actually looking at "tomorrow's" list instead. It's then a bit of a pain to go to the calendar view for each item I wanted to cross off an put an x for the previous day.

<comment><USER9> I completely agree with this. This is essential for us night owls who consider 2AM today! I think the easiest way to fix this would be to give the ability to set the te when the day begins. For me, it's not 12 midnight, it's 10AM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The visual design looks great. I'm a fan of such "streak" based tracking (aka Seinfeld Calendar). Looking at it can mentally transport you back to the last time things went wrong and remind you that it wasn't worth it (because you went back on track).

Do you have a way to export the recorded data? That's something that bothers me about this kind of iOS app: the data might still be useful after you eventually stop using the app or even iOS. It could be as simple as sending XML or CSV via the on-device email.

<comment><USER11> This! Offering data export functionality (API or otherwise) is what allows data portability nuts like me to use things like Read It later/Evernote/whatever without cringing a bit in fear of losing the data for any number of reasons. The probability of needing it doesn't factor into my gut feelings, just the (miniscule?) risk of it. ;o) Have already started using your app though, it looks very nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are enough comment on here, so I'm going to give some critiques.

I think you should change the calendar mockup.

From the Xs on the calendar, I was reminded of Jerry Seinfeld's: "Don't break the chain"[0], an anecedote about how making a chain of Xs on a calendar is the best way to form a productive habit. Someone else mentioned it in the comments as well.

However, the chain on the calendar is broken! Those users with the impression that this app will help them form a habit will be confused. If I'm making a big change in my life, I want to do something _every day_ , not a piddling three times a week.

The calendar mockup should change to at least one week with a full chain of Xs, so users won't get the subconscious impression that this app is incapable of helping them build a habit.

Besides repairing the subliminal messages of failure, adding a full chain of Xs opens another avenue for 'gamification'. What if when you completed a full week of an unbroken chain, you received some type of bonus points or prize? Of course, these prizes would be in the form of a cool UI animation.

Also, it's 2012: have you ever heard of a favicon?

[0]: [http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity- se...](http://lifehacker.com/281626/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret)

<comment><USER13> I wrote an app called Commit (<http://thinklegend.com/commit>) that is based around the "don't break the chain idea". It only allows you to do things on a daily basis (rather than M W F or something similar). This is probably the most common request I get from users, though in keeping with the original methodology I don't plan to add the feature.

Now I think this Habit List looks fantastic and could be a great alternative for users that want that functionality. Well done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great app! There's far too many to do list apps that I've used for something like this and Streaks was just okay. This is what I've been wanting. Great job on a great 1.0!

My only question or suggestion, the reminder setup seems odd. If I choose every 3-5 days with a reminder at 6pm, does it remind me randomly, on the 5th day, on the 3rd? Making that a bit clearer or giving the option for choosing which day the reminder will be on would help there.

Other than that, I hope others see the value in building habits like this as I think it's a well implemented way of helping people like me who are quite forgetful.

<comment><USER15> If a habit shows up on your today list, it will send a reminder. So for a 3-5 frequency, it will send it on the third day (and fourth/fifth if you don't complete it). I think that's the most intuitive approach, but maybe we'll find a spot on the website to make it more apparent.

Appreciate the the kind words!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very useful (and beautiful) app!

One thing I've noticed is that it shows me an alert/reminder even if I've already crossed off that habit for the day - would be nice if it detected that a reminder is no longer needed.

<comment><USER17> +1, I have a daily habit that I do in the morning, and the alarm is set for later than I usually finish it incase I forget, however after complete for the day I still get the alarm.

* really liking the app so-far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Beautiful. May I ask what resources you used to learn iOS hacking?

Also: What's that font?

<comment><USER19> For learning iOS I'd definitely recommend the free Stanford lectures on iTunes U: [http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application- dev...](http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application- development/id473757255)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really like the app, when i searched in the app store i noticed there was another similar - "Habits pro" i think? Luckily for you that one is pretty ugly and more expensive!

Feature suggestion: It would be nice to be able to keep track of things that need doing multiple times per day - the example featured on your website of "drink 8 glasses of water" would be more useful if i could come back into the app and log each one so i don't lose count throughout the day!

Also love the streak tracking, I have my habits logged and look forward to using it :)

<comment><USER21> Well… <http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp>

<comment><USER20> Well ok maybe that was a bad example (taken from the product site), but i still think there could be a use for "do this thing X times per day"

<comment><USER21>
      > but i still think there could be a use for
      > "do this thing X times per day"

Absolutely. I am not arguing with this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Bought. Love the interface! It fixes most of the issues I had with Wonderful Day App (Review: [http://woikr.com/iphone/wonderful-day-for-iphone-stay- motiva...](http://woikr.com/iphone/wonderful-day-for-iphone-stay-motivated- every-single-day-review/)).

Question: What happens if I go through a day without opening the app. Is the activity marked not done automatically?

Suggestion:

Tiny suggestion: Allow swiping in both directions. After using Sparrow I'm used to swipe left for most actions. Doesn't work here though.

</comment><comment><USER23> Genius. I've been looking for something like this so will buy shortly! Make it universal so that I can use it on my iPad, the device that I use for apps like this.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just bought the app and I really like it. The interface is gorgeous, it's as plain and minimal as you could hope for, but with enough style to make it enjoyable to use.

I think that you really nailed the "Frequency" settings, especially the "x times per week" section. It makes it so flexible.

I've tried, but I can't think of anything I'd like added or changed. It's also very refreshing to use an app that doesn't have a "Settings" section.

Looking forward to starting to use it!

</comment><comment><USER25> Liking it a lot so far - but one suggestion: frequency options are good, but there is nothing available for >daily. Workaround is multiple items, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER26> Love the app, congrats! I will start using it this week and see how it goes.

My only gripe with it is related with responsiveness to touch: if I tap on '+' or on 'View all habits', the button doesn't highlight. This can feel frustrating if the next screen takes a while to load and you don't know if your touch was valid or not. This problem happens with almost every button in the app.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hey I bought the app and I really like it. One suggestion would be some way to track daily partials of a habit. For example the drink 8 glasses of water a day. I would like to be able to click somewhere on the app each time i drink a glass of water and have it increase so I can track that and see that on tuesday i met 75% of the particular goal.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wish it were on Android! This is a great idea that I already use on my physical calendar (a la Seinfeld). I can only see screenshots, but it looks like the font you chose wasn't meant to show statistics, evident in the "Completion Rate" percentage. The relative heights of the numbers and % sign don't parse very well, just a nitpick on my part.

</comment><comment><USER29> I just began using this today and I really enjoy. I wonder if you've considered the negation of a habit? i.e. I love eating donuts but need to cut back on them so I would only like to eat one a week. I've set this up as "Didn't eat a donut today" with this repeating 6 times a week. What about keeping track of "bad habits" and set maximums?

</comment><comment><USER30> Very similar to the first app I released for iOS called ChainCal ( <http://chaincalapp.com> ). That said, competition is healthy and important to keeping an ecosystem moving.

Well done execution on Habit List.

ChainCal has a new version pending review right now for those interested in comparing the two approaches.

<comment><USER31> I've been using ChainCal for a few weeks and it's great. Beautiful and intuitive interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Congrats! I have been using this Streaks (iOS) for a while since I like the functionality of this and it has options where you can skip weekends: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/streaks-motivational- calendar...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/streaks-motivational- calendar/id345184462?mt=8)

I will try this app now!

</comment><comment><USER33> Lots of gold in this thread. The Chain app I use is not worth mentioning, but for habits I use this:

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

I actually prefer its cheerful design and it has an iPad version. But the integrated Chain counting might convince me.

</comment><comment><USER34> Here's an Android app that looks kind of similar (but not half as pretty): [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.amimetic.ha...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.amimetic.habitspro&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER35> Very nice looking app dude. One question, what sets this apart from the Reminders app that comes with iOS already? Not trying to put you out, genuinely interested to see the advantage of your app so that maybe I can switch.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've used streaks before, but I never liked how the interface didn't tell me what I had to do /today/ to maintain my streaks. Your app seems to solve this, so you've got a customer.

Also, great design! Are you tracking conversions?

</comment><comment><USER37> The app seems to have lost my data, all my streaks reset to zero. Now that's a bit of motivational catastrophe - something I don't think you EVER want to have happen. Anybody else experience something similar?

<comment><USER38> Not quite, just negative numbers when the task is set to 3 or 5 days as week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Bought it, use it, enjoy it.

Wishlist - some habits may require several tasks during the day. For example "Drink 5 glasses of water" - would be great to schedule 5 micro-events during the day with possibility to cross those.

</comment><comment><USER40> Beautiful interface design - how do you go about designing and implementing a look like that?

When I make iOS apps they all use the default controls suppled in XCode. I'd like to learn to make nice looking interfaces.

</comment><comment><USER41> Bought. Looking forward to using it.

Edit: Some thoughts:

\- Reminder probably doesn't need minute-by-minute granularity... 10 minute increments are probably fine and easier to scroll through.

\- How about a "random time during the day" reminder?

<comment><USER42> > How about a "random time during the day" reminder?

I'd really like that. In the past, I've set up manual recurring reminders to go off at the same time during the day. When I got used to the reminder schedule, I started ignoring them.

<comment><USER41> I'd also like it to start giving stronger and more annoying reminders the longer I've ignored a "habit".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I was searching for something like this app.

So far I like everything about it except the font, which makes it harder to read the tasks.

As I use it I'll give you feedback, but for now, I like to be able to color code tasks.

<comment><USER43> Also my week starts at Saturday. I don't like it this way with no options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Loving the app, but all of a sudden today one of my streaks went to -4 and another -2 even though I've only been using it for 48 hours... I'll send in an email with details.

</comment><comment><USER44> Does Habit List use iCloud to sync it's data across my devices?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, but we're looking into that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Very nice.. Well done. Any tips on the best ways to get into the market? For example could you discuss your design and development process

</comment><comment><USER46> Slick. Been using <http://bud.ge/> a lot lately and this looks like a nice complement. Purchased!

</comment><comment><USER47> Very nice start, I might start using this over my Streaks calendar app. One suggestion would be to add a passcode lock like Streaks has.

</comment><comment><USER48> A similar app iDoneThis (<https://idonethis.com/>).

Requires a paid subscription though. -_-

<comment><USER49> No subscription needed for personal use:

<https://idonethis.com/accounts/register/personal/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Bought. This is something I've been wanting since electronic personal organizers became a product category. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER51> I wish I could enter a value along with a tick.. to record how much I did something (say to track how much I slept).

<comment><USER52> I think there's a free app called GoalMaster that will let you enter a value. It's pretty slick too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Love the website design. Who designed it?

<comment><USER6> Looks like this fella designed the app: <http://dribbble.com/scottdunlap>

No idea if he did the website though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Scott and I worked on all of this together. He designed the site too.

<comment><USER54> What sort of agreement did you have with him? Did you pay him or are you guys sharing profits?

<comment><USER15> We are partners in crime. You could say he handles code and I handle design, but that's simplifying things. We worked closely throughout the whole process.

<comment><USER54> You guys are lucky. I wish I could be working with an entrepreneurial designer. It would step up the quality of my apps (ex: <http://weekplan.net>).

Where did you guys meet? Online? Offline?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Great job! I typically use JoesGoals.com, but it doesn't have an iPhone app. Your app looks perfect for this.

</comment><comment><USER55> Android next? I'd love an app like this.

</comment><comment><USER56> Very nice! I have a similar app for the iPhone and your UX/UI is much nicer and more intuitive.

</comment><comment><USER57> Brilliant. Thanks for making this app. Downloading now and I will tell my friends about it.

</comment><comment><USER58> I can't try it, 'cause I'm on Android but it's a really nice idea! Good work and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER59> This looks great. I'd buy it if I weren't so already tied to workflowy though.

</comment><comment><USER60> I love the design factor and simplicity to get 1 thing done right. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER61> Congrats! Very sleek design and intuitive interface. However, I do think that $2 is a bit on the expensive side for a simple app like this. I would suggest that you find some way to figure out where the ideal price point would be for your customers.

(price * sales) - (cost * sales)

</comment><comment><USER62> I like your website and pictures of your app but I have Android.

</comment><comment><USER63> This is a great idea. Would love to see it on Android.

<comment><USER64> I made something similar for android for my needs - although it is not as pretty :)

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsmithy....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appsmithy.activitylog&hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Looks great. I was seeking for something like this

</comment><comment><USER66> the icon looks a lot like visual studio's if fact I thought it was a link to the windows phone marketplace or something :-p

</comment><comment><USER67> Great concept and execution. Love the icon!

</comment><comment><USER68> Nice work. Very cool Product

</comment><comment><USER69> Love the logo/app icon.

</comment><comment><USER70> Congrats! Building this has long been on my list of "rainy day projects". You've done a much better job of it, though, than I intended.

One suggestion- I'd make a setting for letting you change the "Today" font from the handwriting one to a sans-serif one, like the rest of the app uses. I think the handwriting is very pretty and adds good production value, and so I'd keep it in the app, and certainly in the screenshots, etc, but for day to day use, wanting to turn that off would be an irritant every time I opened the app.

You're kinda mixing skeuomorphism with modernism in your design, which is a natural result of making real world analogs on iPhones, but the one place it hasn't seemed to blend well is that font.

Great looking app, and especially the icon is really well done.

Good luck!

<comment><USER71> I'd love to know what is this handwriting font. Anyone knows ?

<comment><USER63> dearJoe 2 - <http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/joebob/dear-joe-2/regular/>

:-)

<comment><USER71> Thx :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Minor thing: The iPhone on the site with the app shown on the screen - the low battery percentage, the alarm icon, the odd time and the AT&T icon are all kind of distracting to me. I know it has nothing to do with the actual app, but 11:53 is not a pretty number to look at, nor is 23%. The battery icon is over 3/4 empty which instantly causes me a little bit of anxiety - I'm worried that my phone is dying, not looking at the pretty app interface.

Everything else seems really polished, but those were the first things I noticed, and they distracted me enough to post something here.

Other than that, the app and the features look great.

<comment><USER73> Serious question..do those factors affect your buying decision?

<comment><USER74> Have you ever noticed when you buy a new analog clock or are walking down an aisle that sells clocks, that the hands point to 10 and 2? It's because the clock is smiling at you.

Yes, this affects a lot of people.

<comment> k-mcgrady In all of Apple's iPhone promotional images the time is always set to around 9:40 (sometimes I've seen 9:41/42). I'm not sure the reason behind it, but obviously in this case it doesn't look like it's smiling. Does anyone know the explanation for this?

<comment><USER75> The explanation I've heard is that they were trying to hit the time the iPhone was introduced on the Keynote screenshots. Not sure if they still do that or if it's mostly tradition now.

<comment> k-mcgrady Thanks, that's right. I did a bit of searching a found an explanation from Scott Forstall.

Why the iPhone is 9:42:

"We design the (product launch) keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation. When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience's watches. But we know we won't hit 40 minutes exactly."

And the iPad is 9:41:

Yeah! And for the iPhone, we made it 42 minutes. It turned out we were pretty accurate with that estimate, so for the iPad, we made it 41 minutes. And there you are – the secret of the magic time.

Source: [http://cydiahelp.com/heres-why-apples-iphone-ads-always- show...](http://cydiahelp.com/heres-why-apples-iphone-ads-always-show-the- time-set-to-942/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Looks really nice, the website looks awesome, and the App also does. Though, I can't try it because I'm an Android guy.

Just two things:

1) 1.99$ ? Are you sure a "free app" isn't best ? 2) Post to blog is bad ? Uh ? :P

<comment><USER41> How would he make money from a free app?

<comment><USER77> Volume, man! Volume!

<comment><USER78> 0 * 1,000,000,000 is still 0

<comment><USER41> I think he knows that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Work or Stay at Home?  Save Money By Not Having a Job - <AUTHOR> http://feeds.fool.com/~r/usmf/foolwatch/~3/153831520/work-or-stay-at-home.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> If you don't have a job, you don't have a Starbucks habit, gas expenses, ATM withdrawals, fare, car, car insurance, parking, eating out, convenience foods, housekeeping, lawn maintenance, mortgage, house, children, child care, dry cleaning, professional clothing, commuting times, high tax brackets.</comment>


My online free book search engine. Hope it helps. - <AUTHOR> http://search.boocu.com/ I think it's a good idea. <comment><USER2> I used to have a "Free books in the net" page that I didn't update much nor anything. It contained a list of technical books I liked, that were legally free to download from the net. People loved it, linked it, and published it on sites here and there. It was somewhat popular even if it was ugly, not updated often. I think if you do it well, you might have an interested audience.

A recommendation: look for other places where people look for books and try to interact with that people. Ie: configure a bot for the very popular irc Usenet #bookz channel, so that it serves only legal books and is 24/7 sending those books, but also advertising about your site. (First check with the channel owners if you can do that, but I've seen bots post url and messages on the chat room every x minutes).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. IRC is a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's just a Google custom search. You could make money with it if you SEO'd the hell out of it, probably, but if you're posting the link here you're probably not good enough at SEO to actually make serious money doing this. I don't think that this is a particularly profitable niche either. You want to find something where Google pays you $1 per click.

Keep on trying though. For this type of marketing discussion, I'd recommend digitalpoint.com. The most commonly said marketing idea here is "Make something people want and they will tell their friends about it."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I think Google custom search will be more popular because it really gives the users value.</comment></comment>


Hyper for Hyper PHP - <AUTHOR>

Ok, I am searching the net looking for more information about this.  Figured a few others may also be doing the same.<p>If you find out anything new, drop this thread a comment, I will do the same. <comment><AUTHOR> So far, this is all I have seen today:

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_gets_faster_de...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_gets_faster_debuts_homegrown_php_compiler.php)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=5753></comment>


Entrepreneurs, you shouldn't hate Qwiki and Mahalo. Here's why. - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartlyedu.com/blog/posts/21-the-tech-community-is-quick-to-hate

<comment><USER2> Not really. This is partly a reaction piece to what I posted yesterday, but it is not "hate" or "envy" to analyze a company's product, its technical basis (or lack thereof), and discuss it logically. Qwiki has no defensible business model, no compelling technology, yet gets massively funded anyway. We can all learn from exploring this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that we can learn from this, but then again Twitter doesn't really have a defensible business model, yet it is a wonderful product. I do find the technology to be potentially compelling, as there are many audio-favoring learners in the world who would much prefer a visual representation. With work, it could become something more than a picture aggregator and Wikipedia regurgitator.</comment></comment>


Why Facebook Will Die In 3/4 Years Even With These Acquisitions? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pensqr.com/topic/93/Why-Facebook-will-die-in-just-3-4-years-even-with-these-acquisitions/

<comment><USER2> There doesn't seem to be any content here.</comment>


We Owe It All to the Hippies (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://members.aye.net/~hippie/hippie/special_.htm
<comment><USER3> If there's one thing I enjoy from music (and music videos) from the 1980s, it is the unbounded optimism and bubbly nature. We were going to change the world, "with _science_!" And I often think of the early-to-mid 1990s Internet as a hangover of this mentality. We laughed off the Clinton Administration's Clipper chip, even as rumors abounded of the NSA peering at every NAP. We were, after all, unstoppable. We were going to change the world with science.

I don't want to sound too negative, because it's never too late for a comeback, but for the moment at least, this thing has been turned against us by corporate interests and the NSA. Were I a pessimist, I'd quote Easy Rider and say, "You know, man, we blew it."

That is, if I were a pessimist. I'm still pretty sure we can put this thing together like it was supposed to be.

<comment><USER4> Looking back at media from that time, there was what looks like a quaint optimism now. But from what I remember from living in the '80s, there was also a darkness that is just not really a thing anymore.

I graduated from high school in 1989, so this is biased by the fact that I was a kid or a teenager throughout the '80s, so I'm not sure to what degree this was just me. But I remember just taking the inevitability of nuclear war almost as a given. It felt like for my whole life the world was trapped in a Mexican standoff, and the inevitable result was the annihilation of all life on the planet. It's still a possibility, of course, but I just remembered spending a lot of time in the '80s thinking it was inevitable.

When I remember the goofy '80s stuff, it was always in stark contrast to the apocalyptic stuff. The goofiness and bubbliness of '80s media felt like a reaction to the darkness of the reality.

I don't know how much of that undertone of darkness was a shared sentiment vs. my own bias because I was a moody dramatic teenager at the time. The '80s were also the heyday of the global disaster movies, that were about the extinction of the human race. I just remember a steady stream of movies about human extinction from nuclear war, disease, climate change, comets, zombies (of course), aliens, apes, etc. People still make apocalyptic movies, of course, but it just felt like fear of extinction was more in the collective subconscious then than it is now. Or maybe that was just the kind of kid that I was? I'd be interested to hear how others experienced the same years.

<comment><USER5> >I remember just taking the inevitability of nuclear war almost as a given.

It was damn closer than most people realize. That nutball Reagan nearly killed all of us:

[http://www.alternet.org/story/149821/how_reagan_brought_the_...](http://www.alternet.org/story/149821/how_reagan_brought_the_world_to_the_brink_of_nuclear_destruction)

And, we're not out of the woods yet.

If we end up with another madman Republican perhaps like McCain, we'll probably get sent over the edge with Russia since we already know that Putin is also a nut.

Not to mention Russia was perhaps (arguably) on its way to launching nukes on a false alarm if it wasn't for one guy who didn't follow orders:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#The_incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#The_incident)

Maybe if he hadn't disobeyed orders someone else would've stopped the launch, maybe not. But, considering the incredible stakes, I think it was all just a bit too close for comfort either way.

Moral of the story? Live every day like it's your last day on Earth, because someday it'll be true.

<comment><USER6> It's funny how people who kept warning that Reagan was going to start a nuclear war have never gotten over being completely wrong. They really seem disappointed that it never happened.

<comment><USER7> I think we can excuse humanity from wanting to "learn from our mistakes" so to say, but to keep in mind that nuclear war isn't really a mistake we'd have much option to learn from post-factum. If there's any chance we were close to the brink (and Reagan or not, we were), we need to do as much as we can to focus on what brought us there and how; but unfortunately, this is in contrast to the main learning mechanism for many humans, where without the _actual_ disaster, there will be as much "well clearly there was nothing to fear" ignorance as there is "the sky is falling", and which is more dangerous is in my opinion debatable.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. It reminds me of people that say the TSA's security theatre has kept us all safe because there hasn't been another major attack on the scale of 911 again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _Just as personal computers transformed the '80s, this latest generation > knows that the Net is going to transform the '90s. With the same ethic that > has guided previous generations, today's users are leading the way with > tools created initially as "freeware" or "shareware," available to anyone > who wants them._

So, did that generation die? I think it died back with Justin Frankel and Shawn Fanning. 'Writing shareware' hasn't really been an acceptable job description since about then.

And if that wave from '95 died, what wave are we in now?

EDIT: PS I just remembered Bram Cohen's name so I'm trying to rethink the generations..

<comment><USER9> Everything's been professionalised as there are far more people able to write software and far more competition. "Shareware" has been replaced with IAPs, "free to play", and advertising-supported software. Everything is now always connected; there's no advantage to distributing software by mailing out floppy disks and persuading people to hand those disks to others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> See also [http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600...](http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's weird how the children of those hippies are in a frantic pursuit to turn those ideas back into silo'ed, patented and monetized startups, while still claiming to be open. There lurks a deep incompatibility between the two, but still so far the system is working. Money seems to be one of the things the hippie revolution did not change, and while there is brand new technology for money, we 'll never see a "couchsurfing for money".

In the end, here we are talking about it in the forums of a private startup incubator...

</comment><comment><USER12> Gen X had a lot more to do with the useful parts of the Internet, along with pre-Baby Boomer scientists, than the boomers (and thus hippies).

<comment><USER13> Hard to say, it's been a lot of development all the way through.

Without the work of Ritchie and Thompson and Joy, et al, all Boomers, Unix wouldn't have developed as it had. Dennis Ritche was born in 1941. Richard Stallman (1953) brought about GNU and the Free Software revolution, Larry Wall (1954) Perl. The Internet (and Arpanet before it) were both built by Boomers.

Linus Torvalds (1969, Gen X), Linux, Brian Behlendorf (1973, Gen X) Apache. Those two were probably responsible for more of the Linux revolution than anyone else.

Google was created by Gen Xers (Page and Brin, 1973). Yes, they were creating new and useful stuff, but on a base created mostly by Boomers.

<comment><USER12> Ah -- I forgot most of the people in the early Arpanet/Internet in the 70s were grad students or otherwise fairly early-career, so they were Boomers, vs. mid/late career at the time, so Greatest or Silent Generation.

<comment><USER13> Some older ones may have been in academic positions. I suspect they'd mostly have been with IBM or the big corporate computer companies (Burroughs, Sperry- Rand, Honeywell, etc.).

Unix and Internet were pretty non-commercial at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So hippies wrestled technology away from centralized control (mainframes), started their own businesses, and slowly rebuilt centralized control (the cloud).

You know what I hate about hippes? How self congratulatory they are.

</comment><comment><USER15> See also the same author's (Stewart Brand) Rolling Stone article about SAIL, Xerox Parc, and ARPA -- written during the hippie era, in 1972!

[http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html](http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html)

It has been discussed previously in HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548719)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1697569)

</comment><comment><USER16> Nah. The people who really made it happen weren't hippies.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think I already said it on HN, but I really, really recommend reading "DO IT!: Scenarios of the Revolution" by Jerry Rubin.

In my opinion, you can't get the right version of the history of hackers without considering the relationships between the hackers/phreakers movement and the Yippies / Freedom of Speech / Hippies movements.

</comment><comment><USER18> >communalism and libertarian politics

Aren't these two things completely mutually exclusive?

(NB: Obviously, being able to _choose_ communalism or individualism as you prefer makes the two semi-compatible, but not the aforementioned as a public policy...)

<comment><USER19> Libertarian socialists would often argue that you can't have a genuinely right wing libertarianism.

The starting point for libertarianism is to maximise individual freedom and minimise restrictions on that freedom. The big white elephant in the room for right wing libertarians is that they want a _huge_ carve out from that: Private property rights are pretty much holy for them.

While for left wing libertarians, private property right is often seen as a central contribution to restrictions on individual freedom. This goes all the way back to Proudhons famous "property is theft".

My personal favourite example is the property right carve-out that is most extensive in the Nordic countries: the Freedom to Roam. To me, who grew up in Norway, it seems ludicrous that property owners should be able to prevent me from walking in a forest. Allowing them to restrict that would be an immense limitation of personal freedom, and the ability to restrict it would not confer any additional freedoms to speak of for those few property owners.

Yet in most places in the world property owners can impose such rights. In Norway they can't (this is mostly true with various exceptions in the different Nordic countries; and to a much lesser extent in the UK and a few other places), though this isn't a result of some modern socialist ideal - <USER2> freedom to roam is so ingrained in Nordic culture that the right predates written laws (in Norway it was first codified relatively recently, as it was considered so obvious that it didn't seem to need to be made explicit previously).

Left wing libertarian ideologies tends to take this principle much further: Except for cases where property rights confers a clear increase in individual freedoms, it is suspect. Thus most left-wing libertarian ideologies would allow personal property, including possibly limited land ownership, but would tend to see extensive land ownership, or ownership of extensive capital resources, as threat to the freedom of others.

<comment><USER20> Thank you, that makes clear why Libertarianism is so impractical and essentially doomed. Property rights are central to the functioning of a modern society. Extreme views would cripple a nations economic and social growth. Any country that adopted draconian property views would be marginalized in the world community.

<comment><USER19> > Any country that adopted draconian property views would be marginalized in > the world community.

Almost every country in the world has adopted "draconian property views", so clearly that is not true.

A small subset have substantially less draconian property views (the Nordic countries freedom to roam as I mentioned), and are seeing no economic hardship that can be traced to not being as enthusiastic about harsh property rights.

<comment><USER20> Misinterpret draconian: no property laws, or absolute sanctity of property would be Libertarian extremes. They can't work as well as something in between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> No.

      hippie != libertarian
      hippie != hipster

<comment><USER22> hippie == live and let live, fuck the man, and peace love and harmony, oh, and lots of drugs and sex, music and drum circles.

Sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities.

<comment><USER23> > _Sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities._

The whole idea is that it isn't something just for 20-year olds. So the "sounds like fun, until you hit real adulthood and real responsibilities" part is a total misunderstanding of the thing.

What did hippie-ism in is mostly human relations and psychology (feuds, jealoushy, power plays, etc) than people reaching some imaginary "real adulthood" that prevents it, and the fact that for a lot of people it was a temporary fad.

There have been very active hippies well into their forties and even seventies, and of course there have been older people, and people who spent their whole lives, in lots of similar "outsider" movements who didn't give up.</comment></comment></comment>


Umberto Eco on Macintosh vs. DOS - <AUTHOR> https://jowett.web.cern.ch/EcoMACDOS.htm <comment><USER3> > Macintosh is Catholic and DOS is Protestant.

So typical of Umberto Eco. A true genius of language. I feel lucky some of his more complex work was originally written in Italian - it's easier for me (native Italian, but living in the US since 2012) to read certain things in the original language, rather than in English.

I bet you would need to be quite literate to fully appreciate his works - <USER2> you read the translated English version.</comment>


Creating Languages in Racket: Sometimes you just have to make a better mousetrap - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2068896 <comment><USER3> Great article! I have been using Lisp languages for much of my work since the early 1980s, and this article is inspiring because instead of just building a "language" up towards the application domain by adding functions and a few macros, Racket supports more general creation of new languages.

I just read the article quickly because today is a busy day, but I'm going to play with this material more this weekend.

</comment><comment><USER4> This game example... I think Racket would have been a much better starting environment than Common Lisp for the book Land of Lisp. You can download the IDE and get started within a few clicks.

<comment><USER5> You're not the only one to think _exactly_ this. Just wait for Realm of Racket[1,2], as the rest of us :-).

[1] <http://www.realmofracket.com/> [2] <http://twitter.com/realmofracket>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Arc is currently living within Racket/MrScheme.

<comment><USER7> Has it moved to Racket, then? As I recall (but I could easily be misremembering) Arc required some old version of PLT Scheme that still came with old fashioned mutable pairs. (And I think they switched to immutable pairs before they switched to the name Racket.)

<comment><USER8> Last I heard it was still on an old version. Arc really should update. For example, Racket has just changed it's IO system to support epoll/kqueue out of the box. I expect Hacker News would greatly benefit from this.

<comment><USER9> Arc can run on the latest version of Racket. You have to use Arc 3.1 - <USER2> build is a bit buried on the site: <http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10254></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My first iOS game, Hungry Henri - <AUTHOR> http://www.hungryhenri.com

<comment><USER2> I liked the videos, but it think it would be even better to show someone actually playing it, ie. actually see the players fingers interact with game. Without this, it's sort of hard to get a handle on what the actual game mechanics are (unless that's the point and you want people to go and download to find out for themselves??)

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciated and remembered this comment. Here's a new video showing what the gameplay looks like. No fingers, strictly speaking, but you can clearly see what the player is doing.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUWbkzC6nI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUWbkzC6nI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> What were your thoughts on the pricing model? I'm developing a game myself now and the way it seems things are going is freemium with IAP purchases. Why did you choose the 0.99/2.99? It's a tough choice to make

<comment><USER3> Not the author but I thought I should chime in here. The app store is a difficult beast these days... being free means you get a lot more downloads, but you need 100's of thousands (if not millions) of users to make any decent amount of money. And you have to be very careful with your freemium plan. You don't want to end up like [http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/going- broke-with-...](http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/going-broke-with- success-how-an-app-with-200000-downloads-led-to-devel)

If you're a paid game, you're going to have a very hard time getting sales, because you can't acquire users. The 99 cent 'race to the bottom' also means you need a lot of sales, but it's tough to achieve that today without a brand or big-name. Even Apple featuring you doesn't add up to as much as it used to.

So, you might have noticed a pattern amongst the more successful freemium titles. Lots of wait timers, short gameplay bursts, unlimited purchasables, etc... what hardcore gamers deem as evil, is actually what these companies have determined is the most optimal way to make money. I'm not trying to be depressing here lol, but before you make the decision to go free, make sure you understand what you're up against. I personally hope we can head to a more League of Legends type model where you make $5 on a lot of people rather than the Farmville route of making $5000 on a few 'whales'. I personally much prefer a great game that lets me pay when I'm ready to invest, than a game that is trying to milk me the whole time.

Just an FYI, me and a friend built Stratosphere: Multiplayer Defense for iPad and have gone through much of this dilemma lol. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> We had a similar thought process. The games that make money through IAPs (Candy Crush is the obvious example) tend to be play-forevers with complex in- game economies of bonuses and powerups, plus all those timers and limits to get you to pay up, etc.

The more traditional games — games with more genuine depth behind them, from the point of view of the "hardcore gamers" you mention — when they make money, they tend to be pay-up-front. They're charging more for a significantly more personal and higher-quality engagement, and can partially make up for lower quantity that way.

But even then it's been really hard to know how to approach these questions. My advice is to release something small quickly, because being in the situation is the only way to learn what works and what doesn't. That's not exactly what we did here, and though I'm really happy with how the game has turned out, we sometimes felt like we were fumbling in the dark on the way to this point.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I totally get what you mean. The hilarious thing is making something small ends up always taking longer lol =P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wonderful game - the music and artwork are really great! I'm looking forward to playing my way through the whole game. What game engine did your friend use to code it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It was Cocos2D for graphics with Box2D for the physics engine. The hard part with Box2D (as with any physics engine, I assume) was tweaking the coarseness of the simulation to balance performance against visual quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the originality in using light/absence of light as being part of the game mechanics.

What have you found challenging during the whole process?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Learning to code (not me, but guy who started the project)

2\. Making sense of feedback from playtesters who were not always in our target audience

3\. Importance of having beautiful art

4\. Making natural-sounding effects

5\. Writing music to go along with an existing theme

Long version:

Well, my friend learned to code by starting this project, so that was the first big obstacle. That meant that the development cycle of the game was much longer than lean-startup, rapid-iteration ideas floating around here would have it.

Related to that was the difficulty of making sense of the feedback we got from playtesters. It would have been easier if we were still in college, but we had a hard time getting feedback from people who were in our target audience, namely people who play mobile games at all. We asked everyone we knew to play the game, and it was psychologically difficult to separate out feedback that was probably not relevant because it came from someone who would never buy the game in the first place. For example, many people thought it was too hard, but they were often not really people who play games in the first place. This was made doubly hard by the fact that we've played the game so much, so we couldn't trust ourselves to know what was too hard or too easy. We didn't do anything special to solve this — no "7 Ways To Get Out of Your Own Way" blog post is coming out of this. Essentially we did the best we could.

Another interesting thing was just how central it is to have beautiful art. It sounds obvious but it's one of those things you don't completely grok until it happens to you. Before the artist came on board, we had a well-designed protoype, and we retained the majority of the original design (enormously to the founder's credit). But perfect execution by a talented artist makes for an incredible difference in emotional appeal. I wouldn't call this a difficulty, since the art came out so well. But it was a lesson.

I was in charge of the sound and music, and that ended up being surprisingly difficult too. You would never know without trying to do it yourself how hard it is to come up with sounds that feel natural in context and aren't distracting or annoying. I'd say we ended up with fewer sound effects than I would have liked for that reason.

The music was hard too. I had experience with rock music, but I had never written any piece of music to go along with a pre-existing theme and mood. So writing the main theme to have a French feel but with the right amount of levity took a lot of iteration. And the level background music has to be catchy enough to be fun and motivating, but not so catchy that it prevents the player from concentrating on the game. Furthermore, I'm not a great keyboard player, but I used a keyboard to record all the tracks and in order to get the timing right I had to do literally hundreds of takes and slice and dice the music pretty finely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice idea and lovely music</comment>


Twitter mind control - <AUTHOR> http://codeclimber.blogspot.com/2008/04/community-mind-control.html

<comment><USER2> The first time I tried twitter:

<fumbling around/> What's this thing? _hmmmmm_ doesn't seem very useful... <type/><type/><type/><type/>

5 mins later. OMG I can't delete the obscenities I just wrote!</comment>


Apple Maps Updated with Giant Black Lives Matter DC Mural - tech-historian https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283744/black-lives-matter-satelliite-apple-maps <comment><AUTHOR> "Black Lives Matter!" proclaim the megacorporations, some of whom recently had a significant judgement against them for colluding to suppress the salaries of their own staff in the US.

"Black Lives Matter!", they splash across their homescreens with a beat of the chest, while their supply chains are intentionally filled to the brim with people, sometimes _children_ , working in terrible, often physically dangerous, conditions for terrible pay under authoritarian rulers.

These same megacorporations, apparently now fighting for equality, while sheltering hundreds of billions, if not trillions, in tax havens or offshore to prevent their profits from impacting the societies they operate in. They who pay their CEOs in the hundreds of millions per year while offering only cheap, temporary contracts to a vast amount of their workforce, often minorities.

Pardon me, but I think my cynicism with this industry is peaking. Wake me up when the same entities do something meaningful beyond shallow, populist pandering.

<comment><USER2> I think you missed a few words and pictures when you read the article. I'm sure you read the article and accidentally missed a word or picture.

</comment></comment><comment> tech-historian If you're not using an Apple device and want to see the updated imagery, DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps:

1) Go to: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=888+16th+st+nw+washington+dc&t=hk&...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=888+16th+st+nw+washington+dc&t=hk&ia=maps)

2) Click "Open Map"

3) Click the "Satellite" icon in the lower left and zoom in.

(Couldn't get a direct link to work. Perhaps due to some SPA silliness)

<comment><USER3> >(Couldn't get a direct link to work. Perhaps due to some SPA silliness)

works for me (tested in private window): [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=888+16th+st+nw+washington+dc&t=hk&...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=888+16th+st+nw+washington+dc&t=hk&ia=maps&natb=v224-6rk&cp=atbsc&iaxm=maps)

still have to switch to satellite view manually, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One can look at this as an expression of support for BLM, and perhaps Apple actually does, but the reality is that the mural does exist on the road today and anyone using Apple Maps to get around benefits from the maps reflecting the current reality. Same goes for the street renaming. The only way I can see this being controversial is if the mural is removed or the street name is reverted and Apple Maps isn't updated to reflect those changes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yet they can't keep Taiwan separate from China?

</comment><comment><USER6> I see they used the photo from before the addition of "= Defund the Police"

</comment><comment><USER7> Seems to me to be a mistake for Apple beause they've now opened themselves up to the liability of editing any part of the world imagery to the benefit of various aggrieved parties including foreign governments because they can no longer use the defense "we can't do that, system doesn't work that way, it's automatic, etc etc"

<comment><USER8> > they can no longer use the defense "we can't do that, system doesn't work > that way, it's automatic, etc etc"

Have they ever used that defense for Apple Maps?

<comment><USER7> you are not parsing my sentence the way I constructed it. I could say "after your recent psychological testing, you can no longer use an insanity defence". You could say, "I've never used an insanity defence" and I could say "yes but you have had these [incidents] and you might have more, but now you can't use an insanity defence [which might have come in handy]"

I was making the point that search engines and social media companies have come under a lot of pressure from different quarters to censor, ban, modify, etc. in the past, and I expect them to in the future, and "mapping" is a database search, and I would think that companies would like to preserve their "hands off" facade rather than throw it away on PR.

I was making a good and reasonable point, but HN is neither good, nor reasonable, it is a hypersensitive groupthink mob which [anticipating those who leap to its defense] has an overweening prideful sense of itself.

<comment><USER8> You aren't parsing my sentence in the way I constructed it. I could say "has there been any incident in the past in which Apple Maps has used that defense?".

<comment><USER7> my sentence was about the future, not the past. I could say "it is going to rain tomorrow" and you could ask me about the past and ... you would be moving off topic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New in RubyMotion: Blocks Rewrite, Retain Cycle Detection, Better Crash Reports - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rubymotion.com/post/56232015979/new-in-rubymotion-blocks-rewrite-retain-cycle

<comment><USER2> Looks like a huge step forward for RM - it shows that the team is ready to drop everything to address pressing issues and reassure everyone.

Not too happy about the way the change came about, though: when the blocks bug was first reported, the HipByte team all but dismissed it saying it was a well known and understood problem with a clear workaround. It's only after the public caused a ruckus that they stopped developing new features and got around to fixing it.

This may have been the right choice - delay fixing things until there was an explosion of public pressure - but it also worries me. Why wait so long to fix something that was so fundamental? Not properly supporting blocks broke a fundamental contract; that you could write Ruby and it would Just Work(TM). The lack of support was undocumented and ignored until HN got all riled up and swore to boycott RubyMotion because of it. Then HipByte put their hero helmets on and got to work.

What happened to fixing bugs before you develop new features?

<comment><USER2> Just to be clear, I think RubyMotion is awesome. I use a license at work and I'm about buy a personal one (here in India it's a very significant cost - I'm decently paid and I make only USD 1100 a month). But I do dislike the way they've handled issues with the platform.

<comment><USER3> Save your money, checkout phonegap, IMO. I think RubyMotion still has stability issues.

<comment><USER4> There is no comparison to the two though. RubyMotion is about writing native apps where PhoneGap is not.

<comment><USER3> There is absolutely a comparison here. Both allow you to build mobile applications for IOS.

A single feature like native or not native does not dictate the quality of an application.

Also, I was trying to help some guy who only makes 1100/mo.

<comment><USER4> I'm just responding with my thoughts on this... I don't think native vs. a browser based is a 'single feature'. It's huge. Without access to the SDK's real power you lose a LOT of functionality and performance. I would never deliver a PG app to anyone other than an in-house enterprise app that just gets the job done. Sorry, it's just the way I feel about it. I loath those applications. I won't take shortcuts that save me a little time but at the cost of all my customers being pissed off at a sub-standard application. Again, this is my opinion but I do have empirical evidence in my career that supports my assertions.

<comment><USER3> Performance we can debate till the end of days. As for functionality cordova/phonegap has a great plugin framework.

Sure you don't get native ui components, but I look at that as an advantage, because if you use web views you can create a uniform approach.

The onus of performance is always on the developer, and most likely not the tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do the GC changes address the problems outlined here?: [http://joshsymonds.com/blog/2013/06/26/why-im-not-using- ruby...](http://joshsymonds.com/blog/2013/06/26/why-im-not-using-rubymotion- in-production/)

EDIT: Looks like it, great! :D (Also: it was the block changes, not GC changes).

<comment><USER6> There is no GC in RubyMotion. It uses the Obj-C ARC method to manage memory.

Correction: RubyMotion uses an ARC-like method to manage memory.

<comment><USER5> I would consider reference counting a form of garbage collection—python is certainly considered to have garbage collection and shares many of the same properties as the objective-c version. In fact, I would consider ARC far more powerful than Python's system because it allows deterministic destruction and more powerful weak references. What would you consider GC—reference rooting, or simply automatic memory management that doesn't use reference counting?

That said, duly noted, and I'll make sure to refer to it as reference counting in the future.

<comment><USER4> I would just like to politely argue that reference counting cannot be considered a form of garbage collection, at all. The discriminating factor is that in a GC world there is, well to put it bluntly, a garbage collector. A garbage collector is a basically a process itself which determines reachability of objects/memory and reclaims that memory if it can determine it is no longer in use. In manual reference counting (ARC also), there is not necessarily such a process. In Objective-C, as soon as an object's reference count gets to zero it's memory is immediately deallocated. There is no process which searches and marks an object's memory to be reclaimed. It would be like calling any other type of manual programatic memory management garbage collection because the programmer handled the garbage. Now, reference counting in Python may use a garbage collector to clean up zero count references, but they are mutually exclusive, IMHO.

<comment><USER5> > A garbage collector is a basically a process itself which determines > reachability of objects/memory and reclaims that memory if it can determine > it is no longer in use

That's a very.... narrow definition, to say the least. I've never seen this outside of the objective-c world. In my mind, garbage collection is automatic memory management, of which objective-c provides an arguably better solution than imprecise collectors. To distinguish between them at all strikes me as pedantic and counterproductive.

Anyway, the only real difference between python and objective-c is that yes, python has a garbage collection routine that bulk frees objects with refcounts of 0... functionality conveniently provided by @autorelease. This would make ARC a superset of python's GC.

<comment><USER4> I'm not here to argue, other than intellectual arguments... You call my definition narrow. Not sure why. Can you describe what a GC does in a single sentence? I'm just going for a simple description. It also doesn't matter if you haven't seen this outside of Obj-C. I am almost lost at the point that is being made. ARC is in no way, at all, a garbage collection technology. @autoreleasepool is in no way a garbage collection concept. All it does is provide a scope for the compiler to inject a 'release' call on all the instances in the block that were sent the autorelease message in said block.

ARC is purely a compile time feature. And an awesome one at that. There is no ARC runtime process/thread. There is no ARC memory manager.

Anyway. Feel free to respond. I have said all I am going to.

On another note, is there any way to be informed/notified that someone responded to a post? Or do you have to keep coming back and checking? I feel that I drop out of conversations because I lose track.

<comment><USER5> Garbage Collection: A system wherein memory is automatically allocated when referenced and freed for another allocation when not referenced.

It sounds like you believe a garbage collection system must achieve a certain level of complexity beyond reference counting, and I can't help with that—however, it's a fairly pointless distinction if we switch from saying "GC" to "GC and reference counting" to talk about automatic memory management. What does that give us? And why WOULDN'T you want this simplicity? I don't much care how trivial you consider ARC to be, it certainly collects garbage effectively. No memory scans to worry about interrupting your real time application. If you really need to not deallocate in a tight loop you can autorelease (I never claimed it was a garbage collection mechanism).

And I am not aware of a way to be notified by HN itself but a lot of apps and sites provide that. (I don't use one myself, I just check threads I am still interested in.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ettore Majorana was alive and living in Venezuela? - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ilfattoquotidiano.it%2F2015%2F02%2F04%2Fettore-majorana-vivo-residente-in-venezuela-negli-anni-50%2F1396809%2F&sandbox=1

<comment><USER2> Bio from Wikipedia:

 _Ettore Majorana (Italian: [ˈɛttore majoˈraːna]; born 1906;) was an Italian theoretical physicist who worked on neutrino masses. He disappeared suddenly under mysterious circumstances while going by ship from Palermo to Naples. The Majorana equation and Majorana fermions are named after him. In 2006, the Majorana Prize was established in his memory._

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

<comment><USER3> if you can find it "I Ragazzi di via Panisperna"[0] is a good movie about the "Via Panisperna Boys", the group of physicist led by Fermi of which Majorana was a member (the movie is mostly focused on the relation between Fermi and Majorana).

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [Biographical note: In 1937 he proposed that the neutrinos have mass and are their own antiparticles. This make them slightly different from the other particles, like the electrons. This theory is still not confirmed, but the particle-physicists really like it. More info: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana) ]

<comment><USER5> Although the nature of neutrinos is still to be uncovered, my alma mater announced the discovered for a "meta" Majorana particle a couple of years ago [1]

[1] [http://www.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest- news/article/detail/...](http://www.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest- news/article/detail/nanowetenschappers-vinden-langgezocht-majorana-deeltje/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I definitely read a long and interesting article about Majorana, and I was pretty sure I had found it from HN. Some searching finally dredged it up:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7870344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7870344)

<comment><USER7> I think you meant to paste this link: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7870344](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7870344)

(Yours goes to a comment replying to the post about Majorana, rather than to the HN top-level post with the article).

<comment><USER6> Yep, edited, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He didn't want to participate in the building of the atom bomb.

Hero.

<comment><USER9> _" Because another factor which invalidates the suicide theory is that Ettore Majorana had taken his passport and a sum of money with him."_ [1]

Majorana left with the entire contents of his and his brother's joint savings account and _five months_ salary cheques (previously uncashed). Sounds like he had plans, monastic or otherwise. Sciascia's essay was produced as a radio play by the BBC years ago (possibly decades ago) and struck me as plausible then. The possibility of a fission weapon was inherent in a lot of the detailed work on the nucleus in the late 30s. The Bohr-Wheeler semi-empirical model is just that: fit a polynomial to the known properties of the radioactive materials available and you have your yield...

Is there an Italian speaker with access to the original here who can render a slightly more idiomatic translation?

[1] Leonardo Sciascia _The Mystery of Majorana_ , Tr Sacha Rabinovich, New York Review of Books Classics, 2004

<comment><USER10> Italian here, but translation of what? If you refer to the "Il fatto quotidiano" article linked here, the story so far is:

\- (if the story is true) Majorana was alive and lived in Valencia, Venezuela, between 1955 and 1959

\- Italian police is investigating

\- An Italian TV Show "Chi l'ha visto?" (it's a very dramatic show where they try to find missing people...) found a guy who lived in Valencia those years and claims he was friend with Majorana, but he didn't know his real identity

\- The supposed Majorana called himself Mr."Bini", but one day they convinced Bini to take a photo, the photo traveled back to Italy to the witnes' family

\- Police examined this photo and they say Bini's face is compatible with Majorana's one and Bini looks very similar to Majorana's father

\- If the story is true, this means Majorana didn't suicide and was not forced by anyone to leave Italy, he just left.

\- Police is trying to confirm, finding out the driving license/identity of this Mr. Bini, but they also say that Venezuelan police is kind of lazy..

Didn't want to translate it all, I'm also lazy. There are many stories on Majorana, and a lot of people claimed and still claim to have seen him. There are many many stories, really, another recent one is that he ended up as an homeless guy.

Hope this was helpful.

<comment><USER9> Yes, very helpful - better job than the original page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

He is the most famous "missing physicist" and people have been speculating a lot about various possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER12> more on this in another article wrote on Friday: [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=it&tl=en&u=ht...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=it&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ansa.it%2Fsito%2Fnotizie%2Fcronaca%2F2015%2F02%2F05%2Fgiallo- majorana-testimone-era-clochard-a- roma_814bf27d-e893-413c-a813-6939079466db.html&sandbox=1)

<comment><USER10> Oh here it is. Here there is a guy that says "Majorana was surely alive in 1981 and he was in Rome. I've seen him." He says that Majorana was in Rome with a priest Luigi Di Liegro, founder of Roman Caritas (a catolic institution to help poor people). (still according to the witness) Majorana was a homeless, he was hosted in a monastery. "I was one among the closer assistants of Luidi di Liegro and with him we met Majorana probably the 17 March 1981. It was not the only time, I met him in three-four occasions. " This witness is a "director programmer"(??) from Calabria, he lived in Rome when he was young, but he wants to remain anonymous. "Majorana was in Pilotta Square, on the Università Gregoriana's stair, near Fontana di Trevi. He looked like more than 70 years old", the guy was helping homeless people during those years, he was puzzled by one other homeless saying that guy (Majorana) had the solution to 'Fermat Theorem'", which was solved only in 2000. "Then I said that I wanted to meet him with Di Liegro", the meeting happened and the priest drove Majorana back home. "After one hour and half he came back and said to me: 'you know who that man is? He is the physicist Ettore Majorana, the one missing. I phoned the monastery where he was hosted and they told me he left. Now I brought him back.'" The director of the monastery said "Majorana had the feeling his studies could precede the atomic bomb and he had a conscience crisis and he wanted to be forgotten." It seems Majorana was in another monastery in Napoli before the one in Rome. They were sure he was him for a scar in his right hand. The witness says "I asked priest Luigi to tell Majorana's family, but he said we must not. I tried to speak about the subject several times during the years, but Di Liegro, who never told anyone, not even his most close assistants, he didn't want to speak about it and he told me to shut up. He told me to not say anything to anybody until 15 years until his dead, happened the 12 October 1997. Now the time has passed."

Fuck Google Translate is way better than this crap. I'm scared. Anyway it seems to me that all the people involved are dead, and the this story is carried by an anonymous guy. So it might be 100% imagination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Joao Magueijo ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Magueijo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Magueijo)) has written a biography of Ettore Majorana "A brilliant darkness". An interesting read!

</comment><comment><USER14> Dedication to physics and mathematics may be unhealthy.

<comment><USER15> Compared to what? Dedication to football and motorcycles?

<comment><USER16> Exactly, it's not the dedication, it's the level of dedication. If you immerse yourself in anything to the point that you ignore the rest of your life, the rest of your life will suffer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Malcolm Gladwell's famous 10k hour rule isn't holding up in new research - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwell-anders-ericsson-10000-hour-rule-isnt-replicating-2019-8 <comment><USER2> Gladwell's most famous book, 'The Tipping Point', suffered a similar fate. It was largely predicated on the 'broken window theory' [1] which too was proven not to be valid [2].

After his book 'David and Goliath' received numerous bad reviews for oversimplifying things and pinning causes on things that don't make sense, Gladwell lashed out at his critics and basically said that his books are not written for experts. [3]

Almost all of Gladwell's books are written in a style that categorically states that the subjects of his writing have a predetermined cause and effect. He doesn't leave much to chance, uncertainty or some other unknown cause. Everything is certain. His stories and narrations always imply a cause. That's the real secret of his writing.

[1] [https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/11/14/the-tipping- po...](https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/11/14/the-tipping-point-broken- window-theory/)

[2] [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sorry-malcolm- glad...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sorry-malcolm-gladwell- nycs-drop-in-crime-not-due-to-broken-window-theory-12636297/)

[3] [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/29/malcolm- gladwe...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/29/malcolm-gladwell- david-and-goliath-interview)

<comment><USER3> All of this is unsurprising, given Gladwell's process:

1\. Take research findings in psychology, sociology, etc., all fields which are having big replication problems.

2\. Pick out findings that are surprising enough to write a pop-science book about. These are less likely to be true -- that's why they're surprising.

3\. Oversimplify for popular consumption, sound very confident, and omit things that don't fit the story. (This makes for a much better read, as epistemically sinful as it may be.)

Each step makes good commercial sense, and I can't hate him for it, but the resulting books are unlikely to be Actually True.

<comment><USER4> I think I read somewhere that he took speaking fees from tobacco and amphetamine companies and wrote positively about them.

<comment><USER5> That's a pretty serious accusation to make with zero attribution or sourcing.

<comment><USER4> Looks like someone found a link above, I think that is what I read in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couple of points here:

1) HN is supposed to link to the original report about the research, which is done by the Guardian (linked in the first sentence!) here [1]

2) "Anders Ericsson [original study author] said the new paper actually replicated most of their findings."

3) Gladwell pushed the 10k rule to the point of breaking, by that I mean he extrapolated way beyond the original research. Gladwell's point may not hold up (as the title reads) because he pushed it too far, he drew his own imaginary conclusions that make for a nice story.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/21/practice- doe...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/21/practice-does-not- always-make-perfect-violinists-10000-hour-rule)

<comment><USER7> Point (1) might be because we already had the Guardian article on HN last month, discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20753311)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Serious question: which of Gladwell's various truisms and rules _have_ actually held up to research? I've seen a lot of criticism of his pop science books over the years without much talk about what he actually gets right.

<comment><USER9> Well, to play devil's advocate here, this article's reason the 10,000 Rule is not true is because it doesn't make experts.

However, he never said the 10,000 rule would create experts. He said it would create proficiency.

It's become a major theme in society (especially online at places like Reddit) where someone misunderstands a statement, and then promptly attacks or disproves it, instead of asking the person for clarification first.

If there is one thing I've learned over the years is people tend to be well intended, and by asking for clarification, one has more of an opportunity to learn than shutting it down immediately. At worse you've learned where they're coming from, which imho is more valuable than the initial statement itself.

<comment><USER10> Proficiency? What? He says

"Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours"

 _True expertise_ is not mere proficiency.

<comment><USER9> There are also statements of him saying he never said it makes an expert. Maybe he's lying?

<comment><USER11> He has put words on paper that confirm. He garners attention and speaking fees. He has no incentive to speak the truth or actually help people gain expertise. He is almost a fraud. I can't believe I paid for his crappy book. I feel like an idiot. His "story" about the Korean airlines and the general conclusions he draws borders on the racist and superfluous.

<comment><USER12> I think you are taking it too far. I read his book Outliers and enjoyed it. And while he may have used the word expert, the overall message of the book that o got was that practice and experience is more important than talent. And there are very few cases I think where that doesn't hold up. And the "outliers" tend to be those that not only practiced a lot, but also had raw talent and lucked out to be in a position to be able to practice a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of my favorite outcomes from this was Dan Mclaughlin's attempt at becoming a pro-golfer[1] which he called "The Dan Plan".

What I found really interesting was that _how_ you practice is so important and how we often get it wrong. When I think about things I've picked up mastery in over the years and things which eluded me, I see a lot of similarities. Mastery for me comes from varying the activities, not from rote repetition and "muscle memory."

[1] [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NH2YUq...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NH2YUq2AJEgJ:https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/08/the- dan-plan/536592/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d)

<comment><USER14> On how to practice, I read once about the difference in the ways good amateur pianists practice and how top professionals typically practice. The amateurs will practice all their scales and pieces from start to finish by rote every day.

The Pros identify the specific scales and short sections of pieces they hit problems with, and focus almost all their practice on those tricky parts. As a result they get as much as 10x or 20x or more utility from the time they spend on it.

<comment><USER15> I have to wonder if the difference is because the latter is the better practice, or because they have already done the basic practice and don't need to do it anymore.

In other words, is it necessary to go through the rote work of practicing basics before becoming a pro? I would guess the answer is yes.

It would be far more telling to track many people, from beginner through their musical (in this case) careers, and determine who became pro and who didn't, and what their practice was like throughout.

<comment><USER12> Ya, it seems like practicing the difficult parts would just be a natural progression for anyone who is good enough that the easier parts are simple to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ericsson has gone so far as to dedicate an entire six-page section in his 2017 book [Peak] to a discussion of [Outliers]'s popularization of the catch phrase "the ten thousand hour rule". In the section he lists three reasons why this phrase is misleading, and one way in which it is accurate.

The central theme of [Peak] is to review what things all experts have in common, irrespective of their varied fields: these being a habit of deliberate, purposeful practice and mental maps.

[Peak] Peak: Secrets from the new science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

[Outliers] Outliers by Malcom Gladwell

</comment><comment><USER17> People trained in the "hard sciences" seem to place a lot more rigour on numbers than the social sciences can really accommodate. Much of the scientific method can't really be applied to humans in a longitudinal study so there's going to be some leeway and larger scope for variation than when performing tests on inanimate objects or lab rats for example.

We all know this at some level. Nobody expects to be a mediocre violinist at the 59th minute of the 9,999th hour and to be a master one minute later. To me the book read like an extended musing on folk wisdom such as "practice makes perfect" and that famous Coolidge quote about persistence. Obviously talent, genius and education are factors, but persistence and determination are huge.

</comment><comment><USER18> The title is incorrect as it is Anders Ericsson's research, Ericsson did not find that time necessarily led to mastery (that is a popular misunderstanding) the study quantified practice, not deliberate practice, and despite all that did find a correlation between unqualified practice time and mastery, among other factors.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, but you're wrong about the deliberate practice part. The study's name even reveals it and a cursory reading of the text will clarify it: "The Role of _Deliberate Practice_ in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" [emphasis mine].

<comment><USER18> No need to apologize. I was referring to the new study, not Ericsson's, and mangled my comment. It should read: "The title is incorrect as it is Anders Ericsson's research, Ericsson did not find that time spent necessarily led to mastery (that is a popular misunderstanding). The new study quantified practice, not deliberate practice, and despite all that did find a correlation between unqualified practice time and mastery, among other factors."

Thanks for catching it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of the _other_ key papers in the book in which the original finding was published ("The Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise") was the role of increasingly skillful _teachers_. If you don't have a series of progressively competent teachers who are all good at providing motivation you also won't see the kind of performance increases that lead to professional status.

</comment><comment><USER20> The funny thing is that Guardian got the central idea totally wrong: "the related idea of "deliberate practice" — or pushing your skills over long hours " No, deliberate practice is not just long hours practice. Deliberate practice is deliberately finding your weakness and practice to fix it, to improve it then move on. Merely more practice will not improve one's skill much after a certain threshold. What matters is not how long or how many times did you do a certain thing but how often did you do it correctly and what you learned from the experience. Thus comes the second important part of effective training: a great teacher.

</comment><comment><USER21> If this doesn't educate people on how important sales and communication is, then nothing will help you see the light. ;)

Honestly, those who are excellent communicators will be able to persuade people in masses to follow what they preach. I find this extremely interesting.

Now is the 10k hour rule flawed or not? I have no idea. I tend to focus on what works for me vs. the masses. We're all different.

<comment><USER22> If Gladwell is communicating false or misleading information, then we need to know about it rather than give a collective shrug. People will believe whatever Gladwell wrote, and that wastes everyone's time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The adage was given a scientific basis when journalist and author Malcolm > Gladwell wrote about the 10,000-hour rule in his 2008 bestseller, > "Outliers."

Malcolm Gladwell declaring something based on cherry-picked anecdotes does not give anything a "scientific basis".

While Gladwell (very) often drives me crazy (he's a walking, talking Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect machine), I find Outliers to be his best book. You just have to reframe it mentally as "mastery generally involves a whole lot of practice, here are some stories illustrating that". Even when I vehemently disagree with his conclusions, he really is an excellent storyteller.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wait this study is from 1993?

Anyways it seems obvious that the relationship between hours in and performance starts to get skewed at top percentages of human performance. Doing well in the NBA requires a lucky draw of genetic height / strength as well as practice. But a lot of deliberate practice will probably make you better than your neighbors at pickup games.

</comment><comment><USER25> Here's the paper itself, freely available for once, if anyone else wants to take a deeper dive:

[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190327](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190327)

</comment><comment><USER26> While they are talking about quantity of practice, they aren't discussing the quality of it. I can certainly imagine that there are better and worse ways to practice and am curious if anyone has seen some studies on its effects?

</comment><comment><USER27> This quote is the best explanation for Malcolm Gladwell:

"We're obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things" - Malcolm Gladwell

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm skeptical if some mastery of skills need an order of events in life that's fundamentally important. I assume youth is another important factor in the equation. The 10k hour rule is too hopeful for everything but I can see it working for many skills.

</comment><comment><USER29> The point Gladwell was trying to make is that the more you practice, the better you will get. The degree how the practice affects each individual will differ and there are no guarantees, but you will better off practicing than not.

<comment><USER30> That's actually not the point, according to the man himself in his interview on freakonomics. He said that the point was more about the support needed to become an expert.

Separately, the research he based this on is about deliberate practice. If you're not going to practice deliberately, you might in fact be better off not practicing at all.

"""MALCOLM GLADWELL: The 10,000-hour stuff that I put in Outliers was really only intended to perform a very specific narrative function — or not narrative function, but argumentative function. To me the point of 10,000 hours is: if it takes that long to be good, you can't do it by yourself. If you have to play chess for 10 years in order to be a great chess player, then that means that you can't have a job, or maybe if you have a job it can't be a job that takes most of your time..."""

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Because people in this thread are (as usually) unable to read the article before commenting, here the relevant excerpt:

> But according to a new study published in Royal Society: Open Science that > attempted to replicate the findings of the original, practice alone doesn't > account for mastery. In the study, deliberate practice only accounted for a > quarter percentage of the skills difference, which doesn't account for what > makes someone an expert.

> Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, and > researcher Megha Maitra interviewed three groups of 13 violinists, each > rated as less accomplished, good, and best. The violinists were told to keep > a diary to log practice hours, and those hours were then tallied. While the > less accomplished violinists had logged an estimated 6,000 hours by age 20, > the good and best had both logged around 11,000 hours.

> That is to say: The good and best violinists saw no huge difference, as > opposed to the not so good violinists, who didn't practice as much. The > implication: practice didn't account for all the differences in performance.

And the abstract:

> We sought to replicate Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer's (Ericsson, Krampe & > Tesch-Römer 1993 Psychol. Rev.100, 363–406) seminal study on deliberate > practice. Ericsson et al. found that differences in retrospective estimates > of accumulated amounts of deliberate practice corresponded to each skill > level of student violinists. They concluded, 'individual differences in > ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of > past and current levels of practice' (p. 392). We reproduced the methodology > with notable exceptions, namely (i) employing a double-blind procedure, (ii) > conducting analyses better suited to the study design, and (iii) testing > previously unanswered questions about teacher-designed practice—that is, we > examined the way Ericsson et al. operationalized deliberate practice > (practice alone), and their theoretical but previously unmeasured definition > of deliberate practice (teacher-designed practice), and compared them. We > did not replicate the core finding that accumulated amounts of deliberate > practice corresponded to each skill level. Overall, the size of the effect > was substantial, but considerably smaller than the original study's effect > size. Teacher-designed practice was perceived as less relevant to improving > performance on the violin than practice alone. Further, amount of teacher- > designed practice did not account for more variance in performance than > amount of practice alone. Implications for the deliberate practice theory > are discussed.

</comment><comment><USER32> I feel like there is a Dunning-Kruger homomorphism with the Gladwell 10k "rule". There are mastery inflection points at 20, 100, 500, 1000, etc. hour marks (ish). It really seems like the Gladwell conjecture is that people that do a thing for love|money, do a thing a lot.

</comment><comment><USER11> He is a hack. Full stop. He is nearly a fraud.

</comment><comment><USER33> This study only interviewed 13 violinists. That's not a large number to invalidate.

<comment><USER34> And Gladwell interviewed how many?

<comment><USER33> My comment is not meant to be a defense of Gladwell. Just that this title is link bait, and this study is not conclusive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> No shit, Gladwell knows one thing, how to sell a hokey idea to the credulous.

</comment><comment><USER36> Gladwell had a chapter in his book Outliers called "Rice Paddies and Math Tests" where he claims that "Asians are good at math" because rice is hard to grow. The man is obviously an intellectual sham.

<comment><USER37> What I took away from that chapter was two things.

First was that Asian children, at least those who speak languages that function this way, grok the concept of addition faster than their Western counterparts because the counting systems are extremely regular, so they pick up on the patterns easier because 11 isn't the arbitrary "eleven" instead it's simply "ten one".

Second was success in math is in part a function of perseverance. Impossible problems were given to groups of kids and something like the American kids gave up after 9 minutes on average and the Japanese kids gave up after 14 minutes on average. My memory is fuzzy on the details but that particular metric correlated really well iirc. Been a long time since I read it.

<comment><USER36> Implicit in the premise of the chapter is that categories such as "Asian" and attributes like "better at math" exist objectively.

Gladwell never defines Asian, instead shifting between definitions that rely on nationality (cherrypicked test scores from a number of well-off Northeast Asian countries), language (where he brings up the Chinese counting system used only in some but not all Asian Languages), and ethnicity (where he compares Asian-American children to other American children, many of whom share little to no commonalities with the former two groups). He uses the classic tactic of generalizing these three groups as one through the nefarious concept of "culture", which is poorly defined and can not objectively measured.

He then makes the claim that "Asians" are "better at math" without backing up the point with anything other than cherrypicked standardized test scores.

Aside from that, he only shows vague correlations without ever proving causation in any rigorous way. Even if the Chinese counting system leads to a faster understanding of arithmetic, Gladwell does not prove that this leads to significantly better math performance. Likewise, he simply claims without any solid proof that growing rice is more difficult than wheat (what units do you measure that in?), or that this increased difficulty would actually provide enough pressure to create a "culture of perseverance" (again, what objective units do you measure that in?).

Individual claims in Gladwell's writing may be true, but they never connect together in any rigorous way to prove the claims he tries to make.

<comment><USER37> Well it's a pop-sci book that reads as such. I don't take it to be rigorous, I take it with a "I guess I could see how those dots might connect" food for thought type way.

<comment><USER36> Popularizing a bunch of disingenuous arguments and presenting it as science isn't excusable no matter the genre.

<comment><USER37> I don't find the arguments themselves entirely disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So I shouldn't bother with anything. Good to know. Thanks for that info. If practice doesn't mean anything what even is the point of anything?

<comment><USER39> One of the debates I'm surprised to have with my friends is: some of them will parrot Gladwell-style advice (truisms that claim to come from science). I will say, "That didn't replicate." They'll say, "Well it's a good idea anyway."

And then I'll say some long thing about how _when you 're giving someone advice, you should hold yourself to a higher standard, not a lower one_. Especially if you're an institution.

<comment><USER40> If you're competing in an area where other competitors spend 10k hours before they compete, you better practice. We didn't really need a study to tell us that, but people feel it adds something to say that science has "proved it". That's why if you point out the study was BS, it doesn't matter, because it was just a supporting detail for the point they wanted to make anyway. Practice.

<comment><USER39> Not quite to disagree with your main point:

> because it was just a supporting detail for the point they wanted to make > anyway.

The people who make arguments whose evidence is just a supporting detail for the point they wanted to make anyway are common--some are some of my friends, family and coworkers, but I take what they say a lot less seriously than I do people who have high standards for evidence.

>We didn't really need a study to tell us that

Perhaps not, but we can ask for studies on what kind of practice, how much and how old you are when you practice et cetera. Yes you "have to practice." But you can be interested in how to practice well, and one way to know that is good studies (i.e. not dubious ones).

<comment><USER40> Most of the best advice is simply telling people what is already obvious to everyone but them. There's not a lot of evidence needed, and adding more won't help if the person isn't ready to hear it. In "reasons why people misallocate practice time", akrasia ranks above the lack of research studies by about a mile.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>