RIM Changes Company Name to BlackBerry - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-30/rim-changes-company-name-to-blackberry.html <comment><USER2> This brings back many bad memories of Sun changing its ticker symbol from the venerable "SUNW" to "JAVA" -- may BBRY not share the same fate!

That said, let me take this moment to restate a prediction I have made a few times over the last two years: ORCL will, in the end, buy BBRY. After every customer that has a choice leaves, BBRY will be left with only those customers who can't actually leave. ORCL feasts on such wounded animals, and like a marine apex predator, can sense them from an ocean away...

<comment><USER3> In fairness to Sun, in the last 5-10 years of its existence, it really was The Java Company; a huge portion of all its sales went to companies deploying and scaling enterprise Java web applications.

Moreover, by the end of the '90s, Sun's original raison d'être --- Unix workstations --- was gone and buried.

<comment><USER2> Yes, workstations were gone -- and they had been replaced by server revenue. Contrary to your assertion, server revenue (and associated service revenue) was the lion's share of Sun's revenue; if you add up all Java revenue (primarily Java ME) and subtract all Java NRE, Java was -- pathetically -- net neutral to Sun. So to those of us who actually brought in revenue instead of dining out on it, the ticker change was the embodiment of the persistent delusion that we were something other than a computing systems company...

<comment><USER3> My point was that the reason people bought Sun servers was to run enterprise Java apps.

(In case this makes it clearer: what percentage of large Sun server customers used the majority of those servers to run some kind of Java container server? Do you think maybe over 75%? From working with F-500 companies as a consultant in the mid-00's, my observation is closer to 100%; if you were a bank with Sun servers, the reason you had them was that Sun provided the can't-get-fired- for-choosing platform for J2EE.)

<comment><USER4> I think thats just an observational bias of companies that went the consultant route. Java was the hot new technology that consultants could bill lots of hours for, so you started to see it everywhere with weak internal IT/systems groups.

Working in the manufacturing/CAD industry at the time, I ran a Sun and SGI shop. Business applications that ran only on Solaris were a much larger demand generator for Sun hardware than some new fancy runtime that at the time could be confused for a passing fad.

We also liked Sun hardware for internal apps because they could literally run for 10+ years in a room filled with a constant mist of machine oil and coolant.

<comment><USER3> I'm not a Java consultant. The CAD Sun buyers were workstation customers, weren't they?

I do not think Java web applications were a smaller demand generator for Sun than Motif applications were.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins is unveiling the first phones built on the BlackBerry 10 operating system this morning in New York. The new software is designed to let users multitask more effectively than on rival devices, including the iPhone. Heins is looking to grab the attention of smartphone buyers who have dumped their aging BlackBerrys in recent years for Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Google Inc.'s Android._

Seriously? Your plan to fight iPhones and Droid devices is to tout your phone's multitasking ability?

How many consumers complain about their phone's multitasking capabilities? How many consumers even understand what that means?

[edit: If they are talking about the business meaning of "multitask", as some child comments have noted, then I agree that this would be a cool feature. I also find it annoying how hard it is to do work in multiple apps at once.]

<comment><USER6> I'm tired of pogo-sticking in and out of the various apps to get one thing done. For example, if I get an email asking if I'm ok to meet at 3pm on Friday at Joey's Cafe. Today, I need to jump to my calendar app, see if I'm available at that time. I also need to check where Joey's Cafe is located via Google Maps, so I can make it over there after my 1pm meeting. I also need to jump to my task manager app to remind myself to prep notes in advance of the meeting.

The vision painted here is to move swiftly between the core things you do the most. Whether or not the execution is sufficient, it's hard to say without trying it out in person. But the BlackBerry Hub looks like a good start.

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/30/3929760/blackberry-z10-rev...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/30/3929760/blackberry-z10-review)

<comment><USER7> I find this to be an incredible annoyance on iOS, particularly iOS 5 and earlier, but I have to say that Android really nails this experience with the 'intent' model - I don't think twice before opening Google Maps directly from a Google Calendar event that was itself created directly from an email that I read in my inbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a welcome change. Ever since I worked there back in 2004 as a co-op, the incessant jokes about having a "RIM job" were funny at first, but got tiring.

Ignoring that, this makes total sense from the consumer perspective. Nobody knew who RIM was, all they knew was BlackBerry. It is going to simplify a lot of things for them in terms of marketing and communications.

I've been anticipating this launch since last April, when I first heard about the Dev Alpha prototype devices. After having used them for over 8 months, and actively developing for the platform, I can say that I was pretty happy with today's launch announcement. I didn't really expect it to be Earth-shattering, and it wasn't.

It will be a long time before BlackBerry has the impact that Apple has in the marketplace. Today's launch wasn't going to have the pomp and flair everyone expected. Sales are not going to be a huge spike. Rather, things will ramp up slowly for BlackBerry. More and more people will try it out, and be wooed by the much improved interface. Your stalwart users of legacy BlackBerry will likely move over in droves though.

I actively develop for Android as well, and I can say that BlackBerry development has done so many things right. It is really a dream to develop apps for. As a user, it's fantastic too.

In the future, I really think RIM will be competing against Android/Google, rather than Apple. Android 4.2 is a thing of beauty, and really raises the bar. I don't think BB10 is quite there, but all the pieces are in place. The next 6-12 months will see a rapid evolution of BB10, and we can better assess how things will progress.

<comment><USER9> > I actively develop for Android as well, and I can say that BlackBerry > development has done so many things right. It is really a dream to develop > apps for. As a user, it's fantastic too.

I haven't seen and tried BB's SDK, but could you elaboreate more? Didn't they still use Java ME (which sucks compared to Android's IMO)?

<comment><USER10> BB10 is nothing like the older platforms, which kinda sucked. You couldn't even run code on a test device without getting it signed by RIM, and the service crashed frequently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mark-r The phrase "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" comes to mind.

<comment><USER11> What else do you want the marketing department to do, when the flagship product they've been prepping to sell has been delayed for so long?

<comment><USER12> Ok, maybe there isn't else they can do. That doesn't mean that this rebranding is going to help.

<comment><USER11> Of course not. But it isn't the problem either. It's just a PR shrug.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pogue seems to like it: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/technology/the- blackberry-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/technology/the-blackberry- refreshed-lives-to-fight-another-day.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&smid=tw-nytimes)

</comment><comment><USER14> >A subtle light blinks above the screen to indicate that something — a text, an e-mail message, voice mail, a Facebook post — is waiting for you.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't android do the same thing? It seems to be the case for my Galaxy Nexus.

<comment><USER15> No no, on the Gnex the light is below the screen, it's completeley different.

In other news, the light on my gnex blinks white for sms, green for app notifications and blue for facebook notifications EXCEPT that the facebook messenger app (seperate from the main fb app) blinks green.... why?

<comment><USER16> >> why? Same as the 'why' for many Android apps. The API is huge, the potentials on different devices are barely countable and Google's developer advice is sadly lacking. This inevitably results in developers forgetting things like LED colours etc.

(I'm a fan of Android, I wouldn't buy a phone without it at the moment, but it really is a weak point. Especially when compared to iOS where Apple seems to really nail home how an app is supposed to behave on their platform)

<comment><USER17> No iOS devices even hae a notification LED, so how can Apple "nail home how an app is supposed to behave?" Or is your point that you'd assume Apple would accomplish that if it had the LED?

<comment><USER16> Apologies. I mustn't have made myself clear. I was referring to documentation of features in general. One could of course extrapolate this to how Apple would handle LEDs, but it wasn't really my point.

To clarify I really do like Android, I just wish documentation of recommended behaviour was brought front and centre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This [1] is the BlackBerry website on the day of their massive rebrand and the launch of BlackBerry 10. I had to hide my Chrome bookmark bar on my 13-inch screen just to see any mention of the new OS. Maybe they should tell someone in the website department that it's kind of a big deal.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/EjrIvJY.jpg>

Edit: I guess someone at BlackBerry saw my comment and changed it several minutes later ;) It's now (at 4PM EST) a lot more relevant to today's events: <http://i.imgur.com/HvGw9tF.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER19> As much as it probably is a good idea, it's a little worrying when a company amidst a crisis takes the time to work on their brand name and make room for that announcement in a webcast that literally defines whether or not the company will survive another 18 months.

<comment><USER20> It seems like a smart move to me. Unfortunately, I think it's too little, too late.

<comment><USER21> Not so sure, there are a lot of Canadians, including myself, that are hoping they create a good platform with a good touch interface. They could have done this 5-10 years ago, and been Apple - but for whatever reason they just stopped innovating. If Canadians switch back to BB, and other people around the world start picking them as their preferred brand, then could easily be 10s of millions of sales initially, and as they improve the platform offerings and devices, could be hundreads of millions of sales.

<comment><USER22> All the Canadians in the world will not save them.

If they do manage to turn around, it will be one of the biggest turnarounds since maybe Apple or IBM.

<comment><USER23> If you take all Canadians 18-65, you'd maybe have 20 million in sales. Apple sells that many iPhones in a month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> They should have done this a long time ago. Not that it would have changed much considering their flubs on the implementation side, but the BlackBerry brand was always much stronger than RIM.

</comment><comment><USER25> Now when people make snide references to "that fruity consumer electronics company" one can be deliberately obtuse about which one.

As a bonus, they're even "beleaguered".

<comment><USER26> Every time someone uses that phrase they will be referring to Apple :)

<comment><USER27> So true, I never hear consumers talk about Blackberry anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, if nothing else it will probably make the SEO for their job-site a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER28> Usually companies want to restructure their corporate initiatives away from a dying brand. This makes it all the more obvious that all of their eggs are in one basket.

</comment><comment><USER29> This move makes sense and is well overdue in my mind -- at least from a consumer perspective. The Playbook was branded as the "BlackBerry Playbook" not the RIM Playbook, which was ridiculous IMO (and still is). But they've made the decision and recognize that the RIM name is probably unrecognizable to the consumer, but BlackBerry is. I'm fairly certain the rest of their offerings to business (ie. BIS or BES) are associated or under the BlackBerry name anyways.

Dropping the "RIM" name makes sense, although the timing is distracting

<comment><USER30> I don't know if I agree with you. I felt like there was quite a clear delineation between the RIM and the Blackberry brands and I don't get the sense that consumers were confused about the two. Also I feel like RIM would have been a good name to keep if they decided down the road that they wanted to licence their software services technology to other companies and keep those efforts separate from their consumer hardware division (aka "Blackberry").

<comment><USER29> For a long time, I agreed that the RIM parent company makes sense if their software services were being licensed out.

I'm making an assumption (and I think the rebrand supports this) that RIM/BB has made a conscious decision to be a consumer hardware company, that is their priority, and any software services are a value-add or in support of their hardware. While this comparison is weak, it's almost like how Apple can be seen as a hardware company and the iCloud is in support of it.

I do think the renaming was probably made in haste, to coincide with BB10's release

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It won't help. They are as dead as a doornail.

Further proof: <http://youtube.com/watch?v=WlsahuZ_4oM>

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone I know who talks about Blackberry never says RIM or Research in Motion.

I even suggested it once over at reddit in /r/blackberry that RIM should just change its name to BlackBerry but was down voted into oblivion. Now there's a post about the naysayers who said it should happen.

I'm Canadian, proud BlackBerry are Canadian and I agree the name change makes sense I'm glad they did it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I got a BlackBerry job doesn't have the same ring to it

<comment><USER34> Unless that's what the kids are calling it these days..

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think it's a smart move, and would allow them to more effectively market their products/services on competing platforms. Now that BlackBerry does not necessarily mean a particular brand of smartphone, we can see BlackBerry for Android/iPhone/Windows Phone, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> Deja Vue in so many ways in what happened to Palm. They had a new OS and devices, they were also Canadian based.

So given that somebody will buy RIM aka Blackberry and then do an HP on them.

Hope I'm wrong, but I see a Nortels chance of it not panning out that way sadly.

</comment><comment><USER37> Here in Ottawa, the advertisements on the sides of the bus advertise jobs at QNX rather than for RIM or Blackberry.

<comment><USER38> QNX is a subsidiary of BlackBerry, but they still do all their own hiring and a fair bit of marketing. You'd be applying to work at QNX, not at BlackBerry. Not to say there isn't a ton of crossover.

<comment><USER37> Yes, but if it was fashionable to work at RIM, they would mention that in the ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Too much, too little, too late. These could be great phones (and actually look very nice), but it doesn't matter. BB is a dead company walking. It lost its market share long ago and they aren't going to suddenly magically get it back.

</comment><comment><USER40> What was "Research in Motion" supposed to mean anyway? I never got that.

<comment><USER41> It's an identity. What does Apple mean? An identity.

<comment><USER29> The problem here is all the accrued Brand Equity was for the BlackBerry brand/identity, not RIM's

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It reminds me of when Tandy Corp. changed their name to "RadioShack" (without the space).

</comment><comment><USER43> Up next: Apple changes its name to iCompany.

</comment><comment><USER44> Seems like research has stopped.

</comment><comment><USER45> Good idea: tie the identity of your company 100% to your failing phone line.

</comment><comment><USER46> Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER47> Do you think they are sad they no longer have RIM jobs?

</comment><comment><USER48> <http://rim.jobs> won't work no more, :(

</comment><comment><USER36> Oh this smells of desperation. Rebranding the company costs headed stationary, signs etc - not that cheap and RIMberry are the last who can realy afford it. I honestly don't think they have thought this thru, its like closing my eye's and going you can't see me now. Still have the shite middle managment to mess things up.

<comment><USER49> totally agree , rebranding is quite expansive and it is just one of these voodoo idea when everything else failed ... just sell the company already and you'll be better off ... or go with android and make the best hardware money can afford...

<comment><USER36> Oh they missed a great opertunity to sell rebranded hardware and move there enterprise software onto linux. That would of opened up a more rubust and profitable area they ended up giving away selling lots of copies of Microsofts exchange for others.

They then overly focused upon the consumer market at a neglect of the business area, which was the core. The upshot is they ended up alienating a lot of influential business types and that filtered down into lots of bad words about them and a share price reflected it as in they could do no right in the end.

Now QNX was a good move, but that has been a overly slow adoption to the extent that they ended up having to release newer versions of there older OS. During this phase they lost a lot of good staff and things got messy. But we now after years laetr have the product they should of had at least a year ago.

The new OS is nice, but for many it is too little too late. They have now in some ways aliented there growing market by not having a cheap device available and no OS upgrade available for there lesser handsets. They will for all appears end up alienating there growing markets in an attemt to regain there lost business customers.

Still the same opertunities being missed and whilst I wish them luck they have yet to try and cash in on Apple and Android users via a paid for application that does there email and messaging. Some would pay for that and it could even get people thinking about there phones next time they upgrade. But that is another of many missed opertunities they just seem to let slip by. The upper managment has changed, a lot of staff have changed and with that the problem really has to be in the middle.</comment></comment></comment>


ExtraKey – Secondary Input Device using NodeJS and Tablet/Smartphone - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tDu_HOdio8

<comment><USER2> Video summary: Launches ExtraKey on a Windows 7 PC which appears to run a web server, browses to it on an iPad, gets a web page with a button. Presses the button on the web page and shows it triggering the PC's Start Menu.

Edits ExtraKey a bit, reloads the page, gets buttons to control audio volume/mute and demonstrates those working as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sweet, thanks for the summary :)

The link to the repository: [https://github.com/elis/extrakey](https://github.com/elis/extrakey)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you find people who need applications built? - <AUTHOR> Starting a consulting company from scratch here and wonder where people find customers who need custom software built? <comment><USER2> To me, the real work of a consultancy in any field, not just software, is finding good clients (by which I mean those that pay and pay reasonably well and on time). Doing the actual technical work is pretty much the easier part.

This means that a full 'rollodex' might be more valuable than broad technical competence. But in any event the way to pick up good clients is to go out and do sales and marketing and lead generation and prospect qualification.

The alternative bid-for-work market tends to be bi-modal. At the end with high paying consulting gigs, all the sales process is necessary to be invited to bid (or conversely specialized paperwork for government contracts). At the low end of the bid for work market, it's a race to the bottom.

Anyway, short of good fortune, developing clients tends to be hard work.

Good luck.</comment>


The plot of a formula is the formula itself - <AUTHOR> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_s5RFgd59ao

<comment><USER2> This is one of the most fascinating things I have seen about math in a while! Exactly the sort of interaction we hope to encode into Mathbreakers (which is roughly Wolfram Alpha meets MineCraft).</comment>


Web Almanac 2019: HTTP Archive's Annual Report - <AUTHOR> https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2019/ <comment><USER2> It would be nice to see a summary (if feasible) at a section level or a summary page listing key points across sections.

Though there are several resources for making websites better (and faster), it would be good to have a complementary set of pages with recommendations based on, and linked to, these findings (while keeping in mind that this research is on a large, but limited, dataset).</comment>


Disinformation for hire: how a new breed of PR firms is selling lies online - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/disinformation-for-hire-black-pr-firms <comment><USER3> A bunch of companies took hold of a distributed system of information and centralized it under their control.

Now those companies are claiming they cannot control disinformation, adversial content and whatnot because they have too much content. At the same time they are saying they would be the best in place to currate and control it because of market dynamics.

I'm not advocating for a total ban of content unless it's "government" approved.

But what's the difference between a government setting the rules and a corporation deciding the rules? We can vote out a government, but we can't vote out a corporation.

This isn't new and we've dealt with this in the past. The technology is different but the tactics are the same.

<comment><USER4> You as an individual can stop using a corporation's products way more easily than you as an individual can vote out a government. My personal success with voting out governments is zero, but my success in boycotting corporations is pretty high. Occasionally others have stopped using them as well and they've stopped having a large effect on my life.

<comment><USER5> >> But what's the difference between a government setting the rules and a corporation deciding the rules? We can vote out a government, but we can't vote out a corporation.

> You as an individual can stop using a corporation's products way more easily > than you as an individual can vote out a government. My personal success > with voting out governments is zero, but my success in boycotting > corporations is pretty high.

That presumes your main interaction with a corporation is by the consumption of its products as a customer. However, that's so often not the case that it might as well be assumed to be false. For instance, you can't boycott Equifax or an industrial chemicals factory that's polluting the air in your city because you're not their customer, but you're still affected by their decisions and rules.

The main difference between a government and a corporation setting the rules is that, in democracies, the government is theoretically accountable to the interests of all citizens while the corporation is only accountable to the interests of its shareholders and (depending on market conditions) its customers.

<comment> blaser-waffle For example, Facebook creates accounts for people who don't even use the site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's some good reading in case anybody believes this kind of stuff is new. They had it down to a science nearly 100 years ago.

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

<comment><USER7> a very good bbc documentary based on Bernays work is "The Century of the Self":

The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04)

TL;DR: The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world.

\---

The Century of the Self - Part 2: "The Engineering of Consent" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEsPOt8MG7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEsPOt8MG7E)

TL;DR: This episode explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses. Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - <USER2> deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind. Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, and his nephew, Edward Bernays, provided the centrepiece philosophy. The US government, big business, and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in manipulation. Those in power believed that the only way to make democracy work and create a stable society was to repress the savage barbarism that lurked just under the surface of normal American life.

\---

The Century of the Self - Part 3: "There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads; He Must Be Destroyed." [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2LB2MaGoM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2LB2MaGoM)

TL;DR: In the 1960s, a radical group of psychotherapists challenged the influence of Freudian ideas in America. They were inspired by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of, who had turned against him and was hated by the Freud family. He believed that the inner self did not need to be repressed and controlled. It should be encouraged to express itself. Out of this came a political movement that sought to create new beings free of the psychological conformity that had been implanted in people's minds by business and politics. This programme shows how this rapidly developed in America through self-help movements like Werber Erhard's Erhard Seminar Training - into the irresistible rise of the expressive self: the Me Generation. But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self.

\---

The Century of the Self - Part 4: "Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VouaAz5mQAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VouaAz5mQAs)

TL;DR: This episode explains how politicians on the left, in both Britain and America, turned to the techniques developed by business to read and fulfil the inner desires of the self. Both New Labour, under Tony Blair, and the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, used the focus group, which had been invented by psychoanalysts, in order to regain power. They set out to mould their policies to people's inner desires and feelings, just as capitalism had learnt to do with products. Out of this grew a new culture of public relations and marketing in politics, business and journalism. One of its stars in Britain was Matthew Freud who followed in the footsteps of his relation, Edward Bernays, the inventor of public relations in the 1920s. The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of democracy, one that truly responded to the inner feelings of individual. But what they didn't realise was that the aim of those who had originally created these techniques had not been to liberate the people but to develop a new way of controlling them.

\---

edit: copy/pasta from youtube description

<comment><USER8> > The politicians believed they were creating a new and better form of > democracy

That's extraordinary nonsense.

> and the CIA used their ideas to develop techniques to manage and control the > minds of the American people. But this was not a cynical exercise in > manipulation

The CIA intentionally tortured Ted Kaczynski (inspiring him to become the Unabomber) when he was 17 years old, as an experiment in mind control. They were not trying to help anyone.

<comment><USER9> > That's extraordinary nonsense.

What are you basing this on?

<comment><USER10> Common sense? Does it seem likely that politicians concluded being able to manipulate people better = improvement to democracy?

Hmm, actually, you may have a point.

<comment><USER11> Wearing seatbelts?

Drinking less alcohol?

Eating well?

Not beating your wife?

Voting?

Finishing school?

Recycling?

Most of the ways our government wanted us to change in the last century were fairly positive and actually barely controversial.

It's the controversial one's we talk about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're interested in learning more about media manipulation, I highly recommend reading the book Trust Me, I'm Lying [1]. It's shocking how easy it is to sway public opinion or plant fake stories that could have a national impact.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_Me,_I%27m_Lying)

<comment><USER13> Also see Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _" I developed this for manipulating public opinion," Peng told the > Reporter, an investigative news site in Taipei, which partnered with > BuzzFeed News for this article. He added that automation and artificial > intelligence "can quickly generate traffic and publicity much faster than > people."_

It's funny that Buzzfeed is reporting this because this is exactly the model that they created and helped disseminate all over the internet. It's a semi- automated system for creating clickbait to manipulate public opinion. I would _love_ to see outlets like Buzzfeed, Huffpo... examine their own role in creating the world of clickbait, ragebait and misinformation that they so often complain about. That will never happen though.

<comment><USER14> > to manipulate public opinion

Was Buzzfeed trying to manipulate people or just get clicks?

<comment><USER15> > just get clicks

Just because you have one goal (in this case traffic) doesn't mean your actions dont have other effects.

Generate clickbait that, for example, leverages the distrust the public has in a group, or is based on the desire to see someone/some group get their comeuppance, or the desire to hear tales about how your group is being exploited, etc, and you start manipulating public opinion about those things.

Fox News, for example, started conservative but far less radical...I dont know if they were radicalized by the success of their own success by this sort of manipulation, but it is certainly an option.

Once you have success at manipulation, even if that wasn't actually your intent, a financial incentive appears to MAKE it your intention.

<comment><USER16> I think _intent_ is pretty important to the concept of "manipulation": you don't often hear the sun being accused of manipulating the weather, despite the overwhelming influence it has over it.

<comment><USER17> That's because manipulate implies active control, which the sun doesn't have. As a different example, you can manipulate the levers of a machine and, if you are not skilled or paying attention, get a result you did not plan for.

<comment><USER16> That is simply _poor_ manipulation: intent was there but understanding was lacking, and so the outcome was not as desired.

<comment><USER17> _an_ intent was there, but not the intent to create what became the eventual outcome. Buzzfeed has an intent - to create clicks. What GP was saying was that this creates an unintended effect, that of political and social manipulation, which unfortunately ends up as an incentivized loop for Buzzfeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Vernor Vinge's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End) was quite prescient on this point, describing a world where the Internet largely becomes useless due to infinite disinformation crowding out the real.

<comment><USER19> I think eventually (hopefully?) most folks realize that the only solution is smaller, highly-moderated communities (like this one), and even then it's important to be aware of the implicit underlying biases of those communities. Some really great smaller subreddits also come to mind.

<comment><USER18> Yes, the book had people form "belief circles" of that nature.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure, but that doesn't sound all that great. It's kind of the problem now, people in belief circles with little basis in reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess Cambridge Analytica's collapse with no real consequence for people working there showed both that there's a huge market for this, and high reward with low risk.

<comment><USER22> The consequences are so low that I would seriously question calling it a collapse. It's just been shuffled under a new banner as Emerdata under the same parent company with really no consequences outside of having to file some paperwork and rebrand.

[https://medium.com/@wsiegelman/cambridge-analytica- executive...](https://medium.com/@wsiegelman/cambridge-analytica-executives- created-a-company-in-2017-with-the-executive-director-deputy-b803f27f84a2)

<comment><USER18> CA was also doing all of this pretty openly.

It'll be much harder catching the smarter bad actors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Taiwan's elections are this weekend and there's been a lot of articles about disinformation campaigns there ( [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/technology/taiwan- electio...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/technology/taiwan-election- china-disinformation.html) ), and it's interesting that the guy being interviewed is from there and speaking so openly about doing it.

<comment><USER24> I believe peddlers of disinformation can afford to be completely brazen about it, because nothing will ever be done about it. Oh sure, people _love_ to complain about _specific instances_ of disinformation (outright false or even just somewhat misleading information), but there is no similar love for even considering the idea that humanity, all of it down to a person, largely runs on half-truths and semi-delusional thinking.

<comment><USER25> I'll probably get downvoted for this, but here goes...

I listened to a podcast with a guy who runs a ring of disinformation sites in the US.

I don't think it's as big of a problem as most people think.

People don't get hit with some disinformation article and then suddenly start supporting another political party. Fake news is mostly just something to make people feel better about their views -- which are already completely set in stone.

Yes, it's fueling a bit of radicalization, which isn't great.

But I think more people are focused on this because they think it's the reason one party is getting more votes than the other. It's just not how fake news works.

<comment><USER26> _I don 't think it's as big of a problem as most people think._ _Yes, it 's fueling a bit of radicalization, which isn't great._

What is the output of this radicalization? Just how big of a problem is it compared to what people are making out it? We know someone opened fire a pizza place as a direct result of this. Do you think the rise in hate crime (especially violent crime) is in some way related, too? Perps have left behind manifestos, like at El Paso, Christchurch, etc., with the same language as disinfo campaigns.

People are focused on this because it's the reason that people are being murdered because of their religion or where they were born.

<comment><USER27> > We know someone opened fire a pizza place as a direct result of this.

Pizzagate resulted in someone firing a single shot at the lock on a closet door to open it. In a discussion of disinformation, I think your characterization is misleading and exemplary of disinformation as well - in a manner quite similar to the disinformation that led that individual to decide to do a vigilante raid on the pizza parlor.

<comment><USER28> "Opened fire" and "firing a single shot" are the same thing. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

<comment><USER29> Until I read cwkoss' comment right now I had always assumed someone came to the pizza joint and started firing rounds at people. I admit I'm not American so I never cared enough to look up what "opened fire" meant here, but I think it's evident what people will think of when they read that expression. Hint: not someone shooting a closet's lock once to open it.

<comment><USER30> It was multiple shots, and he pointed the gun at employees first. See my other comment for references.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Digression here: This reminds me of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, based around a genius that predicts events and cultural paths based on a mathematical formulas for aggregated human psychology. It led me to imagine a world where societies can not only be influenced, but their actions predicted, and a system that would emerge that capitalizes on alphas in this environment much like the stock market. This would almost act as a solution to this problem we currently have, if many agents were predicting and acting on these alphas so that the alphas that do exist are very small. After all, most of the problems we currently experience are due to this potential (alphas, in my analogy) being so large and profitable.

<comment><USER32> Wow, you're prompting as little as I ever knew about the book "The I inside" by Allan Dean Foster of an artificial intelligence named Colligatarch mostly capable of, let's say, aggregation far beyond what Cambridge Analytica was capable of. It ends up leading to a high level detection of a very miniscule (an individual on a global scale) intrusion, but that's beside the point.

World peace, if achieved, has nothing to do with the eradication of free will. This is exemplified by Colligatarch's recipe for success in the book. It is not conquering the world step by step in any way, but it accurately enough predicts patterns on what the future will bring, and if the various people adhere, they automatically learn to fare better to follow these action plans. If you'd imagine the beginning of this kind of world-spanning awareness as described would start out very messy, at this point it's safe to assume that we might even be past that initial mess - which came into being through the two world wars at the beginning of the 20th century. Disclaimer: I'm treading far outside my field of expertise here, so if you know more than me, chime in, let's discuss the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Buzzfeed has a really funny idea about what cookies are required... just about everything related to tracking and add personalization in fact.

Couldn't agree to that so I couldn't read their article.

<comment><USER34> Unless it's a matter of principle to you, the article loads fine without cookies if you disable 3rd-pary and/or 1st-party Javascript. The cookie consent banner doesn't even load for me, I assume that with 3rd-pary JS enabled you get some kind of redirect or pop-up? I didn't get asked to consent to or enable anything.

I have no idea why more people on HN don't use UMatrix with at least 3rd-party JS turned off by default. It's trivial to re-enable for the sites that need it, and a nontrivial portion of news sites I visit work just fine (if not better) with JS disabled. Most popups just flat-out disappear.

<comment><USER33> It's the principle.

I do have uBlock Origin etc, but I'd rather not give them the eyeballs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This represents the _democratization_ of propaganda. Before okey large state actors (Pravda, BBC Empire Service, Voice of America, Radio France International etc).

Now it's available retail.

Spam fighting has not caught up.

<comment><USER36> "Democratization" implies "equally available to all people". That's what the "demos" is about. But when you have to _pay_ for something, what that really means is that it's available only to those with the money.

This is really the _capitalization_ of propaganda — those with capital get to control the narrative.

<comment><USER35> Those with the capital have ways controlled the narrative (newspapers, and before that hiring people to just go out and talk to the people, e.g. to be elected tribune).

The cost of these propaganda efforts has plummeted, and increased automation will simply lower the cost further. Trump pays nothing to use Twitter and it netted him a presidency (though, per your comment, he already had a TV show).

I expectthat within the next four or five years there will be middle schoolers using this tech to run for student council.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This article was disappointingly light and hand-wavey on the technical details of the system. I would be very interested in a deep dive on the specifics.

Like, scraping and spinning web content onto a Wordpress blog that then syndicates it onto social media was state of the art 10 years ago. Is it just exciting now because, politics?

</comment><comment><USER38> "We do it because there is demand"

That should not be a valid reason. Child pornography, slavery, drugs and harvested organs all have high demand.

I am sure these guys won't have any qualms about, say, defending and promoting taking homeopathic remedies instead of chemo for people with cancer. Or helping anti-vaxxers get children killed, if they decide to approach them and have deep enough pockets.

In addition to these "immediate" problems, there's also a long-term, perhaps nastier one.

As a species, what we know is what we are. Given enough time, every one of us is dead and gone, our physical and virtual wealth will dissipate. One of the few things which will perdure, and will always help our descendants, is knowledge.

Every bit of truth that we can collectively find is a hard-fought treasure for the future. Be it via scientific rigorousness or journalistic professionalism. Finding truth is one of the single most important things we can do for humanity, present and future.

What these people are doing to benefit themselves I see it as a crime against humanity as a whole.

</comment><comment> munk-a This is where the slippery slope of advertising leads, and I'm sort of amazed people can morally decide to start doing this - I imagine once you're in it's easy though as you'd get a hell of a grandiose power trip out of knowing you just controlled who was elected in Azerbaijan.

</comment><comment><USER39> One mid-future prediction I've been making for a while: eventually we will make lying in the public sphere either a crime or a civilly actionable tort. Libel and slander already can be, but I am suggesting something more broad: the criminalization of the promulgation of fiction, opinion, or propaganda not labeled as such.

We've always had tabloids and dumb mass media but smart microtargeted mass media powered by machine learning is to these what the machine gun is to the flintlock. Add deep fakes and machine generated text crafted to appeal to each reader and it's a tactical nuclear weapon.

Many religions believe in intelligent literal demons assigned to individuals to deceive them. Seems to me we are busy inventing a real version of that.

Seems to me that lying at industrial scale with AI and big data and social media is just not something society will be able to tolerate.

<comment><USER40> > Many religions believe in intelligent literal demons assigned to individuals > to deceive them. Seems to me we are busy inventing a real version of that.

The _Daemon_ -haunted World.

(In case it's not clear, I'm playing off the title of Carl Sagan's book "The Demon-Haunted World". We haven't fully exorcised "real" demons from our world yet here we are developing artificial ones, eh?)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon- Haunted_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World)

> The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a 1995 book by > astrophysicist Carl Sagan, in which the author aims to explain the > scientific method to laypeople, and to encourage people to learn critical > and skeptical thinking. He explains methods to help distinguish between > ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered > pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for > consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and > should stand up to rigorous questioning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> My 4th prediction is coming along nicely: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21943361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21943361)

> "4\. Reality as a Service will allow users to choose the facts of their > reality."

</comment><comment><USER42> How does one theoretically get around the various anti-bot measures that the social media platforms have instituted?

When I try to create a human account it asks for a phone number and Twitter seems to have a bit of an overzealous system that blocks new accounts for "suspicious" activity. YouTube has similar measures in place for registration. Most of them have captcha as well.

Do these folks use humans to complete the registration and then have bots use the accounts?

<comment><USER43> There are services that sell proxies straight from their users' machines, so the traffic looks completely normal. You can also buy a lot of phone numbers for cheap if needed, though the phone requirement is almost always circumventable if nothing else is suscpicious. As for captchas - breaking them is trivial, there are services that do it but you can also beat most/all captchas with mturk for gathering data + training an off the shelf CV model.

A social media bot army is a project that a single developer with relevant experience/time can complete on their own, providing they are willing to spend a little bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Without reading the article yet: Ronan Farrow's _Catch and Kill_ is an incredible in-depth account of efforts by The Weinstein Company, NBC, and _The National Enquirer_ to use espionage and intimidation for suppression of reports of sexual misconduct.

The Wikipedia pages of some NBC executives were completely scrubbed of any hint of this suppression, for a while.

</comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of "The Doubt Factory" by Paolo Bacigalupi (fiction)

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

</comment><comment><USER46> "use every tool and take every advantage available in order to change reality according to our client's wishes"

We all need a healthy dose of cynicism to survive.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is exactly why I stay away from things like buzzfeed.

</comment><comment><USER48> One could argue that Buzzfeed is as much of a mouthpiece for propaganda-for- pay as the PR firms described in their article.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why only mention fake news and trolls that supposedly helped Trump and his supporters? It's as if there's none of this on the other side.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is machine learning at all effective at spotting this sort of content?

</comment><comment><USER51> It is ironic that the article is on buzzfeed.

</comment><comment><USER52> Ironic story, coming from Buzzfeed.

</comment><comment><USER53> Has the author never seen madmen or thank you for smoking.

It's not a new breed. It's just an evolution

</comment><comment><USER54> For anyone who upvoted this and works for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or Google:

How do you justify your role in this? As Sacha Baron Cohen said in his ADL speech, Facebook takes money from what most people consider to be repugnant sources (e.g. white supremacists). Part of that goes into your paycheck.

The unfortunate reality is that most evil is done by organizations composed of well-intentioned people who don't see themselves as doing any harm (or having control over the harm).

</comment><comment><USER55> Isn't this just Buzzfeed?

</comment><comment><USER56> This really isn't new, alex jones with his "infowars" has been doing the same for years.

</comment><comment><USER57> This being "reported" by BuzzFeed is sadly ironic. They paved to way for manipulating influence.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm about to use the word blockchain, so stuck with me here I'm sorry.

But a web3 built on a the idea that to use a site (post, read) required even trivial thousandths of a cent would be unlikely to harm users but would at least dramatically increase the costs of this sort of thing. And moves the net to rely less on an advertising funding model.

<comment><USER59> You're describing proof of work, not blockchain. It's easy to implement it without a blockchain: make MTAs require the hash of the enveloppe of the mail (+ a nonce outside the enveloppe) to start with a certain number of 0 bits.

And make the MTAs return a parseable message when there aren't enough zeros, so the sender MTA can retry with other nonces until there are enough zeros.

And the enveloppe already contains a Message-ID which is to be unique (as it contains the hostname of the sender) and unpredictable, so there shouldn't be issues with replay attacks.</comment></comment>


The meaning of Hack (hacker folklore) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bastichlabz.org/~tigger/TechHumor/hackerfolklore.txt <comment><AUTHOR>
       !X id1

       id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack!  Pray save me!
       id1: Off (aborted)

       id2: Fear not, friend Robin!  I shall rout the Sheriff
            of Nottingham's men!

       id1: Thank you, my good fellow!

Gotta love hackers with humour.

</comment><comment><USER2> Overall a very pleasant read. I'm certainly going to check out the bibliography presented, and I'd like to read more along this line. I deeply enjoyed "The Nerd Handbook" as well. Could anyone recommend other readings in the fashion of those two?

<comment><AUTHOR> go through the hacker folklore and portrait sections of the jargon file: <http://www.outpost9.com/reference/jargon/jargon_toc.html></comment></comment>


How to Cure Deep Procrastination - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/07/15/how-to-cure-deep-procrastination/ <comment><USER3> > In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an > otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a > character flaw, but instead evidence that you don't have a believable plan > for succeeding at what you're trying to do. In this post, as promised, I > want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and > therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue.

Instead of fumbling with folk intuitions and deeply dodgy evolutionary psychology (hard for even the experts to not embarrass themselves doing), why not look at what the psychologists have actually found?

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/> covers the literature. (You will notice that the equation includes 'expectancy' as only one of the related variables. This is a simplified form; the full equation with the details can be found in all the linked PDFs. <http://lesswrong.com/tag/procrastination/> also has a lot of interesting reading which are much better than this guy.)

And heck, while I'm at it, the overview of research on how to be happy: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/>

</comment><comment><USER4> This is an _excellent_ suggestion --- though anyone who uses this method should be prepared to discover, sometimes, that they not only have no motivation to complete the given task, but also that the task does not lead in any clear way to what they have decided is a good life. The task can be happily dropped at that point iff they were totally honest in defining "a good life" and completely informed about the path from here to there.

<comment><USER5> which makes it even more excellent :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had this same issue in college, and later as an employee. I've discovered I don't perform very well when I have to ask "why" too many times to figure out the value of the work I'm doing.

"Why am I studying this material? To pass the test. Why? To pass the class. Why? To get a good GPA? Why?..." You lost me several Whys back!

As a professional, it was the same way. The worst was when my short stint in Finance, but even working for nonprofits and social-conscious startups, it's tough for me to get motivated when the end goal is too many layers of abstraction away.

(I think that's strange, because when I'm actually dealing with technology, abstraction is one of my strengths.)

This was one of the factors in my decision to start my own company. I want to get rid of the layers of Whys and let them have more weight. Why am I working on this project? To make this client happy, so I can pay the rent this month.

Another approach that has helped me in the last year or so has been phrasing my goals and aspirations in the form, "I want to be the kind of person who ___." Then do ___!

<comment><USER7> Holy crap. I thought I was the only one. I know I'm smart, I just don't put in the effort to study. I'm friends with all these people who don't have the problem I have (or they've figured out how to solve it).

At the same time though, I'm constantly working on side projects. Currently, I'm building an autonomous tricopter, because I thought it'd be cool to build. Last semester, I wrote a webapp to handle an event we were having. Previous semester, I was working on a way to control my room from my computer (still working on that, just not as intensely). These all easily answer "Why am I doing this?" (tricopter: because it's cool. Webapp: Might be able to make money from this [Note: didn't make any money from it ): ]. Computer-controlled room: It's cool, and it allows me to be incredibly lazy.)

I know that I'm not an idiot, I should be getting As, and I do get As in the classes that genuinely interest me. Unfortunately, at least 75% of the classes I take don't interest me, so I get lost in trying to answer "why am I even bothering with this?"

<comment><USER8> Similar problem here - eg. I once almost failed a course because I decided that writing a computer game for a Lisp competition is much more fun. I get A's in courses I care about, which is a suprising minority, and learn some of the rest while procrastinating, in completely different order than university would like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Had me at "procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don't have a believable plan for succeeding at what you're trying to do" but lost me again at "ancient brain" and not putting out unnecessary energy.

While I've experienced procrastination that had nothing to do with not having a good plan, I've also had the kind that does. And it's far worse.

Some procrastination occurs because we know we have time, and other things seem more important or fun.

Lack-of-plan procrastination is worse, though. You delay until you have a plan, but without a plan, you can't know if you have time to finish. That -should- push you into making a plan immediately, but the whole enormity of the situation causes a panic reaction that prevents you from thinking rationally about the plan to start with. In the end, you put it aside until you can deal with it. It doesn't matter what reason (tired, no time, need something/someone, etc) you give, it all ends up the same.

The only way out of that kind (that I've found) is to seek help. Complain to random people about it, ask people with specific knowledge, etc etc. Just find help somewhere. Sometimes you just need a direction to start heading in.

<comment><USER10> >lost me again at "ancient brain" and not putting out unnecessary energy.

A lot of evolutionary science talks about energy expenditure. For an animal to survive it needs to take in at least as many calories as it expends, so evolutionary scientists often explain behavior in terms of expending calories and preserving calories. E.g, Predators tend to sleep a lot because hunting takes up a lot of calories. It's better to preserve the calories they gained hunting by sleeping a lot, rather then spend them on another hunt that may or may not be successful. As opposed to large herbivores that don't gain that many calories from grass, but don't spend so many eating it, either. They sleep very little because foraging those extra hours turns out to be a caloric win.

Our "ancient" brain (which is a crappy term, I know) refers to the set of behaviors we evolved to survive in a society pre civilization. In that environment, effort == calories spent. What the author is saying is that for evolutionary reasons, we evolved to not want to waste calories (put forth effort) if there isn't a good chance of getting them back. But, because our food sources no longer in jeopardy, that evolutionary urge which led to our survival in the wild now leads to the vice known as procrastination.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand the logic behind this line of reasoning for predators sleeping a lot.

Predators hunt to obtain food which provides them with calories. More calories must be gained than spent from hunting, otherwise it would be pointless as they would make a net loss and, ultimately, starve.

It is more likely that they hunt less, and sleep more, because hunting has large payoffs, and therefore they don't need to continue hunting for a while.

<comment><USER12> Also because they're full.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This strikes me as a somewhat naive understanding of human motivation. While these kinds of reframing techniques might have some impact, most people procrastinate because of subconscious motives they have rather than conscious ones. If you procrastinate to the point that it negatively impacts your ability to function effectively, by definition you have a psychological disorder (of whatever severity) and would do well to tackle that in some form of therapy.

Cognitive psychology might offer a more sophisticated version of this article's strategy, where psychodynamic would try to identify and work through the underlying cause of your motives not to work (e.g. part of you wants to experience the sense of crisis that comes from being incredibly behind on a deadline, so let's try to understand that part of you).

<comment><USER14> This kind of reframing _is_ a technique to align your subconscious motivations with conscious ones. In contrast, there's very little evidence that discovering the "cause" of a motivation really helps.

There's a significant amount of evidence that actively building positive emotional connections to the activities you want to do is useful-see Switch, or The Talent Code for examples.

<comment><USER15> I also seem to remember that professional therapy in many psychological cases is not significantly more likely to help a person than self discovery/friends/environment change, etc.

<comment><USER13> I'd be interested to see this research. My understanding is that talk therapy is generally considered to be effective, although there is much controversy about which kinds are most effective and how that effectiveness compares to drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Deep procrastination usually strikes students later in their college career, when the difficulty of their courses ratchets up. At this stage, their work load gets harder and harder, and at some point some powerful part of their brain says "no more!""

My mileage definitely varied. I found that after my second (Sophomore in the US) year in college I rarely procrastinated. It was getting through the required classes the first two years, where the why at the end of a long chain of questions was "because you have to to graduate from MIT." That's not as motivating as it sounds.

Eventually I was taking only classes I wanted to be in. And if I didnt want to do an assignment and wasnt going to destroy my GPA I just didnt do it.

Fast-forward to the real world and it returns. Deadlines from bosses help to avoid procrastination but if the work isn't too challenging and expectations are low enough you can still do some deep procrastinating.

But then again, maybe the reasoning my work isn't challenging enough is because I didn't get the most amazing job in the world because I didn't just push through those assignments in college that I really didn't want to do. Hmmm...that's some meta-circular evaluation right there[1].

[1] No it isnt.

</comment><comment><USER17> _503 Service Temporarily Unavailable_

That works as well :)

</comment><comment><USER18> o-f'r-cryinoutloud.

I can't believe everyone's actually discussing this as though it were insightful.

Look, you're sitting at home, you're a student, and you have, let's say, three things you can choose to do right now:

1\. You can study for your class tomorrow, working towards a degree. Effort required: high. Reward: far future.

2\. You can go out with friends. Effort required: medium to low. Reward: near future.

3\. You can play a video game. Effort required: low. Reward: immediate.

So which one do you really _want_ to do?

Before you answer that, let's add one more little piece to our hypothetical: let's imagine that you have all the time in the world. You're immortal. There is absolutely _no_ rush to get your degree. Whether you do it this year or in thirty years will make absolutely no difference.

So which one do you do?

This is procrastination. I should know. I'm an _expert_ procrastinator. There are about eleventy-seven things I should be doing right now -- and they are _all_ things which require a lot of effort right now, and won't pay off today. What am I doing instead? I'm wasting time on HN: low effort, immediate reward. If I couldn't be on HN, I'd probably be in my garden. Again: low effort, quick reward.

This guy's a book author. He wants to sell more books. He probably wants to make a little extra money doing speaking engagements. So he has to set himself up as an expert, and to do that, he's put together this notion about "ancient brains" and evolutionary psychology (which is mostly bunkem) and the "wasting" of energy.

And it sounds sort of OK, except that it skirts around the basic notion that we're largely reward driven, and all of these distractions that we have today are really good at pushing our little reward button, and we'll keep triggering our reward button for as long as we can -- until we become that little mouse that starved itself to death pushing its feel-good button.

Short-circuiting this requires two forms of self discipline: one, you have to tear yourself away from pushing the reward button occasionally (and no amount of telling yourself why you're trying to get a degree will do that). You have to have enough self-awareness to realize that you've just blown your entire afternoon on a game or online and you have nothing to show for it, and maybe you should try to squeeze in some actual work before the day's over.

Two, you have to have the discipline to recognize the things that make you procrastinate, and engineer around them. For me, it's barriers. Once I get working on something, I'll plow through it like a bullet through jelly. But, if I'm not yet working on it, and there's the merest little speed-bump of a barrier to overcome before I can work on it ... then I don't want to start.

So, for that reason, I put a lot of extra effort into making it really convenient to get things done. I write scripts that do things for me with a single command. I keep things organized so that I don't have to find things (which is a barrier) before I can get started. I try to keep things simple.

But that's just me. Maybe it's different for you.

But I seriously doubt that the approach in this guy's article will actually help anybody.

<comment><USER19> But here's where his idea helps you combat the desire for immediate rewards without "willpower".

Let's look at the impact on what sort of respect others will give you with your three options:

1\. Studying for a degree: high - hard worker, smart 2\. Going out: medium - friends like you, but you're a party-person and don't really do anything respectable. 3\. Video games: low - lazy bum.

I think the argument is that the part of your brain that is trying to procrastinate understands enough about society to realize that making yourself a better and more respectable person is a worthy goal and will help you work towards it. The trick is having that goal in mind. With the goal in mind, not making progress is an immediate negative reinforcement.

I used to play video games all day instead of working. Now I feel almost dirty if I do that. I know that the person I want to be is not someone who sits around and reads HN and gets no work done in a day.

Of course, there's a balance. If I'm ahead on a deadline, good luck getting me to finish it early.

<comment><USER20> The challenge is explaining the brain why exactly is making yourself a better and more respectable person a worthy goal. And then, how getting a degree would help you on that road (also not obvious, with lots of counterexamples and without a solid explanation of what does being a good person mean). Or maybe it's just my brain that doesn't understand enough about society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As an alternative explanation for why we procrastinate, I'd like to introduce the idea that modern society is fundamentally broken. If we have social structures (software) in place which go so deeply against the grain (wetware) then the problem is not the grain but the direction that we are sanding in. In essence, modern society is trying to run ARM instructions on an x86 CPU. It's a testament to how broken it is that someone would suggest that the effect is the thing to be cured, as opposed to the cause.

The fact of the matter is that we have orders of magnitude more knowledge about how we work and what makes us happy than even 50 years ago. Yet we do not apply it. It's the same as the issue in software development where we have accepted industry standards for producing quality work yet relatively few teams use them, and hardly any use all of them.

Ofcourse, the reason for these inefficiencies at processing new information is the same as the one which causes procrastination - the wetware simply isn't built for it. And so we have a vicious circle. There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. Whatever we are aware of at a given point in time will shape the next moment. Yes, our wetware is at odds with the environment it has created, but our wetware is capable of self-modification, hence the author's suggestion being a perfectly good one until we can reach the tipping point as a collective. But I still argue that curing procrastination is putting a bandage on a rotting limb which desperately needs to be amputated and replaced with a tentacle.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hmm, Cal is the only one who has pinpointed a very real, seemingly unexplored phenomenon. The problem is, he's just one person and seems to really struggle to grasp this phenomenon. Not struggle like he doesn't have any clue where he's going, but a kind of grappling with the essence of dp. So, his theories sort of feel like hypotheses that hes refining over time. This is very much how I read Cal, as if I'm reading a log of his ongoing research and suspicions

</comment><comment><USER23> BODY OF THE ARTICLE (currently 503):

The Deep Procrastination Crisis

Above is a snapshot of my blog e-mail inbox, filtered to only show e-mails from students struggling with deep procrastination. Notice that there are close to 60 such messages. If I include blog comments in the search, the number jumps into the hundreds.

Deep procrastination is a distressing affliction. Students who suffer from it lose the ability to start school work. Deadlines pass and they hand nothing in. Professors provide special extensions, but the students still can't bring themselves to do the work. And so on.

As evidenced by my inbox, this issue is surprisingly common, especially at elite colleges. Yet it's also almost entirely off the radar of traditional student counseling, which is why I dedicate time to it here.

In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don't have a believable plan for succeeding at what you're trying to do. In this post, as promised, I want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue.

The Question of "Why"

Deep procrastination usually strikes students later in their college career, when the difficulty of their courses ratchets up. At this stage, their work load gets harder and harder, and at some point some powerful part of their brain says "no more!"

An evolutionary perspective on procrastination helps explain this reaction. The student is asking his or her brain to expend lots of energy (from a biological perspective, studying for an orgo exam is an expensive thing to do). One way to see this process is that there's an ancient part of our brain that has evolved to evaluate any such plans — a filter, of sorts, to prevent the wasting of precious energy.

"Why are we going to expend so much precious energy?", it asks.

The more modern, abstract-reasoning, rational part of the student's brain is quick to respond: "Because we need to expend this energy to pass the test which we need to earn our degree!"

"What the hell is a 'degree' and why do we need one?", the ancient brain counters.

"Because that's what you're supposed to do," the rational brain responds.

And this is where the problem occurs.

The rational part of the brain is promoting an abstract societal value. It knows that for a middle class American, earning a college degree is an expected milestone on your path to integration into the middle class economy

But the ancient brain doesn't do well with abstract societal values, which are a recent addition to humankind on the scale of evolutionary time. One way to understand deep procrastination, therefore, is as a rejection of an ambiguous, abstract answer to the key question of why you're going through the mental strain required by the college experience.

(As in my previous post, I'm using an evolutionary explanation metaphorically — as a way to help explain a concrete phenomenon I've observed in my research and writing on this topic. Whether the evolutionary explanation for the phenomenon is strictly true is somewhat beside the point and beyond my expertise.)

The good news is that this understanding provides a clear strategy for combating this scourge: form a more concrete and personal answer to the question of "why."

Combating Deep Procrastination

From my experience, an effective answer to this question of why you're at college can be constructed through the following process:

First, devise a (tentative) answer to the following question: What makes a good life good? This is the foundation on which everything else in your life will be built. Your goal is not the identify the "right" answer, but to instead identify a working hypothesis. This answer will evolve along with your life experience, so this is not a time for perfectionism. If you're religious, your starting point for finding this answer is obvious. If you're not religious, you could jump into philosophy — as this question has been at the core of human thinking since the time of the Greeks — but I've found it's more approachable to start with biographies of people whose life you admire, looking for evidence of their own responses to this prompt. Second, decide how your experience at college can best be leveraged to support this vision of a good life. If, for example, you decide the key to a good life is to master something useful to the world, this might lead to you to see college as an opportunity to master a hard skill while exposing yourself to examples of people applying this skill in useful ways. Third, identify the set of specific student tactics that will help you succeed in this leveraging. In our above example, this thinking might lead you to the concrete strategies I espoused in my romantic scholar series. This process provides a more personal and concrete answer to the fundamental question being posed by your ancient brain.

"Why should I expend all this difficult energy?", it asks once again.

"Because it's part of a well-thought through plan for leading a good life," you now respond.

"Sounds good," it agrees while you head to the library.

As I noted in an earlier post on this subject, this self-reflection is not an easy process. But college really is a fantastic time to face these basic questions. Deep procrastination, once you understand its source, doesn't have to a Jobian affliction. It can instead be seen as the prompt you need to get your internal shop in order.

If you've had success combating deep procrastination with answers to these basic questions, please share your experience. Concrete examples help deep procrastinators commit to a way out.

<comment><USER24> > The student is asking his or her brain to expend lots of energy (from a > biological perspective, studying for an orgo exam is an expensive thing to > do).

I have wondered for some time: is there research that can put a number on how much caloric energy the brain (just the brain) uses when it's being worked/stressed (as the article suggests, studying for an organic chemistry exam) compared to when it's relatively relaxed or even asleep? Some cursory searching hasn't gotten me past "the brain uses about 20-25% of consumed energy a day," but that doesn't really answer my question. I acknowledge it is difficult to define when the brain is "relaxed," because it's always doing _something_ , but I suppose what I'd like to know is if there is a truly significant difference in energy expenditure due to intense activity or if comparatively it's just background noise because the brain is always working hard.

To take it to an extreme/absurd point, could thinking hard help you lose weight?

p.s. thanks for posting the article due to the 503

<comment><USER25> I used to start sweating while doing math homework. I still get hot when I am deep into some complex code.

<comment><USER26> Sounds like you were overclocking your brain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The general doctrine sounds great. The specific solution outlined sucks. My hypothesis: easier to get in touch with primal survival instincts and twiddling that directly. The author is still answering those self-reflection questions with abstract thoughts that has nothing to do with survival instincts.

Meaning: Interrupt yourself every time you feel procrastination -- that heavy, draining, depressing, oppressing feeling -- that sudden drop in energy when thinking about taking the next step -- or even planning and deciding the course of action to take you to your goal. Catch yourself feeling this. Then directly manipulate that.

</comment><comment><USER28> Conversely, sometimes you decide it _isn't_ worth it. My senior year of high school, I was being pushed to take 3 AP courses. I thought about what I wanted out of my senior year, and decided I already had what I needed to get into college and wanted to enjoy it. I took 1 AP course instead - <USER2> procrastinated in it horribly, but at least my GPA didn't suffer horribly from 1 course.

Sometimes you don't need to convince yourself of anything, you need to change course.

</comment><comment><USER29> I found that tackling a project is easier if you just do one fast and simple setup task without obligating yourself to do anything more than that.

The fast simple setup task could be something that takes less than one minute of your time, such as open an application, create a new document, type a few notes, save the file.

Procrastination is friction. Doing the first simple task without any direction or commitment gives you that initial push force needed to get the project moving.

<comment><USER30> This is for "regular" procrastination. Thi "deep procrastination" is a different animal.

I can actually give an example from my own life. And this is totally legit. Imagine having todo a parallel Masters in Physics so that you'd have the opportunity to do a Bachelors in EEE so that you could get a job working with computers!! I literally was "deep procrastination" for 4 years!

One good thing that came out of this is that I can handle really intense situations which others cannot psychologically handle for long periods of time. But on the flip side Im really bad at Prioritizing my own immediate happiness but I'm making progress in that regard.

Great post!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If you liked/needed this post, you'll LOVE The Now Habit: [http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming- Procrastination-G...](http://www.amazon.com/Now-Habit-Overcoming- Procrastination-Guilt- Free/dp/1585425524/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310753244&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER32> How to stop procrastinating:

1) Stop reading articles about procrastination. 2) Start doing what you're supposed to be doing, you lazy asshole.

<comment><USER33> Define procrastination. Perhaps I'm working on research for procrastination articles, or studying design of that web-page.

I understand what you're trying to do but a bit of advice for the future: do not offend your reader. You can offend something else they might hate, e.g. "fuck procrastination".

I just downvoted you solely on the lazy asshole comment because I took it personally, because I'm reading this. If you were to say it personally to someone, in certain cliques, you would've gotten the shit beaten out of you for saying things like that unless you aren't their teacher. I would personally just flip you off, told you to go fuck yourself, and then never spoke to you again.

Just friendly advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing like that> I chose not to choose life; I chose something else."

</comment><comment><USER30> I wish I had read this post in college! Any course I didn't like ended up with me being happy with a "D"...

</comment><comment><USER35> 503 error - "Please try again later"

Oh the irony

</comment><comment><USER36> Now I'm curious about the Good Will Hunting email.

</comment><comment><USER37> I added it to my Read-It-Later queue.

I win.

</comment><comment><USER38> Do something you love.

</comment><comment><USER39> Suggestion 1) Stop looking at Hacker News

<comment><USER22> If you read Cal's article, and especially his other DP articles, he is quite clear that this type of procrastination is NOT what he's talking about. Deep procrastination is about feeling completely _unable_ to start a task, and has symptoms like getting extensions and still not meeting them.

<comment><USER40> Suggestion 2) Stop visiting turntable.fm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'll read it later.

</comment><comment><USER42> I've been meaning to contribute something helpful to the discussion, but I keep putting it off.</comment>


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</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://whenisgood.net/5g99fi>

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://doodle.com>

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The man who reinvented the keyboard -- twice - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/01/05/swype.kushler/index.html?hpt=Sbin

<comment><USER2> "These companies don't want to license Swype. They want to buy us." --Mike McSherry, Swype CEO

Whom I wonder?

A fraction of a penny per phone or a sellout to Google.. not hard for me to see where I'd put my money (in the bank)</comment>