How to Take a Caffeine Nap - <AUTHOR> http://feint.me/2010/01/how-to-take-a-caffeine-nap/

<comment><USER3> I took "caffeine naps" all the time in college, usually just before all- nighters. Mind hacking was popular sport in the late 70's. I remember trying one or two "blotter naps", also. Good morning!!

</comment><comment><USER4> Why mess so much with your sleep cycles? If you look at the long lives of souther mediterraneans you don't see any of this stuff. Instead: good diet, don't overwork, big naps.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the Mediterranean especially were my Mum grew up in Italy, all the farmers, who live long lives took naps in the afternoon. This is a common practice all over the world

<comment><USER5> It is a more common occurrence in warmer climates (mexico and the siesta) and where the people undergo physical labor for work (such as farming).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been out of work for all but 2 of the last 16 months. This have given me time to do some experimenting (among other things). One thing I did was to try to find the best dose of caffeine for me. I tried regular coffee, decaff, and coffee and caffeine pills; several times and in different orders. With as close to controlled conditions as one person alone could arrange, I discovered that caffeine has _absolutely no effect_ on me. I could discern absolutely no difference in alertness, learning (read a textbook chapter and did test at end), or reaction time (simple video game). I already knew I didn't react strongly to caffeine, hence the experimenting, but the result was a surprise. Apparently all of the effects I had previously attributed to caffeine had been placebo.

</comment><comment><USER7> He lost me at "sleep debt" I have to be honest. All the current research I've read suggests there is no such thing (unless he just means "your a bit tired" :) which he could well do).

Im not convinced this is a good idea though (I'd like to see a link to the research he cites - done a bit of digging but I cant find it offhand).

Better to wake yourself up with Orang Juice and exercise.

<comment><AUTHOR> The research: <http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/310/6979/565>

There is no such thing as a sleep debt in the sense that it accumulates over a week. You could go days without sleep and only need 8 hours to get back to perfect. However, in the course of a 24 hour period. If you only have 4 hours of sleep you obviously have a sleep debt of 3-4 hours and need to take a power nap or something

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On an empty stomach I find that strong coffee affects me faster than 20 minutes. More like 5 or 10 minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah that can happen. I've also noticed a slight psychosomatic effect - <USER2> straight after drinking coffee I feel more awake simply because I associate coffee with alertness

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> why not just take the caffeine after the nap and avoid the risk? Does waiting the additional 20 minutes for the caffeine to kick in really change the benefit?

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that the caffeine will stop you from feeling drowsy when you wake up. Wheres the risk?

<comment><USER10> The risk is that if you want to fall asleep, but are unable to fall asleep within 20 minutes then the caffeine will have kicked in thus wasting your time trying to fall asleep

<comment><USER3> I don't agree, even an "awake nap" can be refreshing.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes absolutely. Its only risky if you are a polypahisc sleeper and rely on these naps as part of your sleep

<comment><USER11> Also, just being a polyphasic sleeper is risky.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Circuit: A Minimal Distributed Programmatic OS written in Go - <AUTHOR> http://gocircuit.github.io/circuit/ <comment><USER2> I'm getting really sick of people calling this kind of thing an Operating System. If your first step is "Install Linux", it's not an operating system. It might be a meta-operating system or something like that, but we've had a pretty standard definition of what constitutes an OS for decades now.

<comment><USER3> Not an operating system in traditional terms. but it certainly is operating a system, on a higher level. Plus, life is too short to be offended by what people call their product.

<comment><USER4> I operate systems myself, but that doesn't make me an operating system.

<comment><USER5> Operating system operator then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some noteworthy background: this was created by Petar Maymounkov, who is also known for creating the DHT Kademlia. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia)

</comment><comment><USER7> From the security page: "A HMAC-based symmetric authentication, followed by an asymmetric RC4 stream cipher is supported."

RC4 is WEBSCALE!

Well, and insecure.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, implementing your own crypto seems to be a per-requisite for working in the container networking space

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would someone give an overview of what this system does? I'm thinking this is like chef or puppet and not something like docker correct?

<comment><USER10> The README on github provides a little more information:

[https://github.com/gocircuit/circuit](https://github.com/gocircuit/circuit)

I too am having a hard time trying to figure out exactly where circuit fits vs. other technology.

It wasn't immediately clear to me if circuit launches the apps, or if it can start new instances if the current ones fail, or if it can grow the cluster if demand is the current utilization is too high, or what.

How does this help me vs. writing a script in (the shell, some other orchestration tool, etc)?

How much of the configuration does it handle? Does it replace etcd?

Those are questions I could ideally answer myself by exploring the documentation links on the main page. Where / how does it store its own state?

Edit: There is a comparison with Consul on the wiki:

[https://github.com/gocircuit/circuit/wiki/Circuit- vs.-Consul](https://github.com/gocircuit/circuit/wiki/Circuit-vs.-Consul)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was very excited when I read the headline. I thought someone wrote an OS kernel in Go. Which is something I would like to see.

<comment><USER12> That's an interesting idea, but because Go is garbage collected, it doesn't seem like a language that could be used to write an effective kernel, but I'm out of my depth, so I could be entirely incorrect. Here is the language authors' current thinking on where they want to go with GC:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Y4IsnNRCN43Mx0NZc5YXZLo...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Y4IsnNRCN43Mx0NZc5YXZLovrHvvLhK_h0KN8woTO4/edit)

It seems like a language like Rust with safe memory management and no GC pauses is better suited to writing a kernel. I know the two languages aren't really competing in the same space or for writing the same types of systems, but they are both gaining momentum at about the same time, so the comparison is a little inevitable.

<comment><USER11> I had this bookmarked [https://code.google.com/p/gofy](https://code.google.com/p/gofy). But it's pre Go 1.0. I wish someone would port this to recent a version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really confuse this: "Once a circuit cluster is formed, the circuit system itself cannot fail—only individual hosts can. In contrast, comparable systems (like CoreOS, Consul and Mesosphere) can fail if the hardware hosting the system's own software fails."

When I read the document, start a process in circuit is equal to start a process on a individual host. So how circuit make sure this process which run on a individual host could not fail?

But if the fail mean the whole circuit cluster could not fail, as I now, CoreOS, Mesos, Kubernetes also could not fail.

<comment><USER14> Afaict, the circuit server runs on every host, and is aware of the other nodes, coordinating with peers without a single master. So if one host fails, the other circuits can still function, broadcasting their underlying services.

"Clients dial into [any] circuit server in order to interact with the entire system. All [circuit] servers are equal citizens in every respect and, in particular, any one can be used as a choice for dial-in."

However, the example diagrams I've seen, include services which aren't masterless or even multi-master, so the app/system the circuit cluster supports will surely fail in some way.

<comment><USER7> "Clients dial into [any] circuit server in order to interact with the entire system. All [circuit] servers are equal citizens in every respect and, in particular, any one can be used as a choice for dial-in."

This sounds like it will cause exciting behavior under a network partition...</comment></comment></comment>


A little tool to generate unique lists of text/urls - <AUTHOR> http://apihouse.com/web-toolkit/url-list-generator

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a little tool I knocked up that I have found useful for downloading from and browsing URLs that may not be published or easy to find.

However, I think it might also be useful for generating arrays of data, unique test data and other purposes.

I'd love to hear what people think...</comment>


Internet Pirates Will Always Win - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/sunday-review/internet-pirates-will-always-win.html?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> What if the canard of online piracy is really cynically used as a way to push for tighter copyright controls, not to cut down on piracy, but rather just as an end to itself?

In many fairs, whac-a-mole prints out tickets and if you get enough you redeem for a prize. Here the prize is ever greater degrees of control and ever eroding protections for fair use. Copyright terms forever minus a day with no fair use possible? Maybe that's the real prize they are going after.

<comment><USER3> An interesting thought experiment! Sort of an outlook shared by concepts such as the not-entirely-true cliche of whatever doesn't kill them makes them stronger. Maybe also the "eternal recurrence" of the ebb and flow of control and anarchy. I think that any prohibition though will always create a black market, so, in converse, a thought could be that to really take the wind out of a pirate's sail would be to allow completely free streaming and copying of everything. After all, isn't it a battle for attention? (The profit would be then in seeing it at the million dollar screen and sound system, etc... no pirated copy could compete because we all don't have such insane setups, and perhaps 3D is in the neighborhood of this)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cheap AirLine tickets? - <AUTHOR>

Where is the best place to buy cheap Airline tickets? Is it me or does it seem like 45 day in advance is a lot cheaper than booking same day.<p>How do you guys find cheap tickets for same day? <comment><USER2> Havent seen anywhere for this - most/all airlines seem to prefer to go for maximum cost the closer to the day rather than trying to fill up empty seats. Lastminute.com was setup for this originally but ive never seen any good last minute flight deals on it - just the same as found on the airline's website. There does seem to be a sweet spot with pricing - if you buy too far in advance the cost can be higher too. The only deal I know of on the day is the last minute upgrade - business class can sometimes be had for a large discount - you have to ask when checking in and they will tell you if any deals are available.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know for same day but I usually use comparison sites like skyscanner for example.</comment>


The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild - <AUTHOR> http://japanesecomplete.com/777 <comment><USER2> The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. For example, "son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks."

98% is closer to what you need in order to read a text and have an idea of what's going on. See this article:

[https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-...](https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension- feels-like)

<comment><USER3> Being fluent in Japanese as a second language, I agree with this. It's Zipf's law and sounds great, but 90% isn't as useful as it sounds. You'll mostly recognize a single common Kanji of compound words consisting of 2-3 characters, or common structural words. It's a far cry from being able to understand content you find in the wild.

Also, "understanding" a Kanji is an ill-defined term. Most Kanji have multiple meanings based on context, and many different readings. So for each Kanji you're not learning a single character, but possibly a lot more. Especially the Kanji that correspond to more abstract concepts you cannot learn by themselves. They don't have a concrete meaning like "eat" or "drink". You essentially have to memorize all of their word compounds, a single character does not help.

EDIT: I also started out learning Japanese by memorizing the top 2000 Kanji using Spaced Repetition. While it definitely helped, it wasn't nearly as useful as some of these marketing-driven sites want you to believe. Kanji meaning are too complex to be captured like that. Even if you "know" all Kanji in a word you'll likely not understand the word's meaning unless it's something simple and concrete. I think you are much better of memorizing and studying word compounds. Over time you will automatically "pattern match" the Kanji you see often to their abstract concepts.

Example from 1min of browsing a JP text: Take "可能" which is a very common word that usually means "possible". Knowing the two Kanji (tolerant and ability) it not going to help you. It could mean dozens of other things based on those simplified Kanji meanings. This is not an exception, the majority of words are like this. On the other hand, let me give you a bunch of words containing "可": 許可、可決、可能性、不可欠 (permission, approval, possibility, essential) and you start to pattern-match that "可" corresponds to something like "positive possibility", but it's hard to translate.

<comment><USER3> Afterthought: Kawaii (cute) is actually 可愛い, also containing "可", which literally may mean something like "a thing that can be easily loved", or simpler, cute. But you wouldn't be able to guess that if you just know the Kanji.

<comment><USER4> I don't know for Japanese as meaning sometimes shifts from Chinese, but in Chinese the standard definition of 可 is "can, may, be able to".

You obviously learn it by itself but as Chinese words are mostly a combination of 2 characters, you immediately also have to learn e.g. 可以 (can, may, be able to), 可能 (maybe), 可爱 (cute) etc.

So someone who's learning characters in order to get 90% coverage (or whatever) would not simply learn characters but learn actual words. Learning characters in isolation would not be that helpful, indeed.

When you don't know a word (i.e. a combination) but you know the individual characters it is much easier to learn the new word either by guessing or checking.

In context, the meaning of 可爱 would be fairly straightforward to guess, for example. Even in English 'lovable' is a synonym of 'cute'.

<comment><USER5> > the meaning of 可爱 would be fairly straightforward to guess

To be honest this whole thread about 可愛い is more or less bonkers, because it's an ateji. The word's meaning doesn't derive from the characters, the characters got arbitrarily attached to an existing word because they were similar in sound and meaning.

As such, the whole thing is about as meaningful as talking about how easy it is to guess that 珈琲 means "coffee"...

<comment><USER4> I must say I don't know much about ateji in Japanese.

In this case, though it does seem that the characters where chosen at least partly because of their actual meaning.

It seems that it is both an ateji and a jukujikun [1] because the word does not come from the characters but the characters do have the correct meaning.

[1][https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF%E6%84%9B%E3%81%84#J...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF%E6%84%9B%E3%81%84#Japanese)

<comment><USER5> > the characters where chosen at least partly because of their actual meaning

Sure, didn't I say they were in my post?

The point was, in a discussion of how well X predicts Y, it's not very useful to examine a test case where Y came first and X was chosen post-hoc to match it.

<comment><USER4> > _Sure, didn 't I say they were in my post?_

No, quite the opposite actually ;)

<comment><USER5> > the characters got arbitrarily attached to an existing word _because they > were similar in sound and meaning_

<comment><USER4> It does not seem arbitrary in this case because the meaning does match.

I do take your point that using that word in the discussion above, which is about Japanese was not the best example. On the other hand, it is a good example in chinese.

<comment><USER5> (A) In Japanese the meanings don't match that closely. The word didn't originally mean cute, but rather pathetic or pitiable, and evolved over time. More info: [http://gogen-allguide.com/ka/kawaii.html](http://gogen- allguide.com/ka/kawaii.html)

(B) By arbitrary here I mean that there is no linguistic connection. "Arbitrarily chosen because they are similar" => "chosen for no reason other than their similarity".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> An interesting assertion, but the article is both vacuous and confusing. It doesn't link to the underlying study, combines what one tends to think of as kanji (single characters) with more complex juku-kanji (multiple characters) with straight up whole dictionary words. Some of those words are presented with English definitions to the side, but most aren't. Some of the kanji are presented with pronunciations, but most aren't. There's no support for the thesis statement.

I have no particular reason to disbelieve the headline, it sounds reasonable enough, but this page in specific is doing nothing to persuade me of its main point.

<comment><AUTHOR> A Japanese Logographic Frequency List (2000) Chikamatsu et. al

[https://researchmap.jp/YOKOYAMA_Shoichi/%E8%B3%87%E6%96%99%E...](https://researchmap.jp/YOKOYAMA_Shoichi/%E8%B3%87%E6%96%99%E5%85%AC%E9%96%8B/?action=multidatabase_action_main_filedownload&download_flag=1&upload_id=6391&metadata_id=18550)

<comment><USER7> Great find, digging up what appears to be the base of TFA's list.

Some critique of using the linked list: That is based on a newspaper corpus from 93, which explains why day/sun is at the top, which they won't be for list created from Wikipedia or television subtitles, both sources that are arguably closer to "in the wild"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know around 10,000 Japanese words. As far as kanji goes, I've studied some 1200 of them intensively; through vocab I know many more as parts of words. I quite often have to reach for a dictionary when reading.

If you know 777 kanji in some way (like associating them with meanings, through your native language) and you haven't crammed on any vocabulary, you absolutely will not be able to read a thing.

In fact, even if you continue that way and memorize over 2000 kanji, and recognize every single one in a given document, you still won't be able to read anything without vocab.

The broadened knowledge will help support vocabulary building, though.

<comment> matt-attack > I quite often have to reach for a dictionary when reading

So when reading kanji, how do you look up a word (picture) you don't know? Since there isn't a minimal set of characters, the notion of "alphabetical order" seems impossible. Weird that I've never thought about this until now, but I'm honestly baffled.

<comment><USER9> Let's say I see the word: 銀行 and want to look up the first character. I notice that the left hand side is 金 so I go to a dictionary, turn to the kanji radical section[1] find 金 and then find the original character by number of strokes[2]. This character has 14 strokes. If you have any experience with kanji then counting strokes is pretty trivial.

Also note that on the site linked to common kanji have a red background. Many of the characters are obscure so radical + stroke count narrows done the choices to very few kanji.

[1] [https://kanji.jitenon.jp/cat/bushu.html](https://kanji.jitenon.jp/cat/bushu.html)

[2] [https://kanji.jitenon.jp/cat/bushu08002.html](https://kanji.jitenon.jp/cat/bushu08002.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _Take solace in the fact that Japanese Complete has arranged the kanji and > the verbs based on a frequency analysis of the Japanese corpus._

Jim Breen's KANJIDIC has frequency information.

[http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/KANJIDIC_Project](http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/KANJIDIC_Project)

> _The 2,501 most-used characters have a ranking which expresses the relative > frequency of occurrence of a character in modern Japanese. The data is based > on an analysis of word frequencies in the Mainichi Shimbun over 4 years by > Alexandre Girardi. Note: (a) these frequencies are biased towards words and > kanji used in newspaper articles, and (b) the relative frequencies for the > last few hundred kanji so graded is quite imprecise._

</comment><comment><USER10> A few years ago I downloaded several hundreds of megabytes of Japanese subtitles, split into 3 categories: live action/drama, anime and foreign film/tv

I've listed them in a google sheets together with a few other corpora

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yb5dq4ahdwc_g0aQTL3Y...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yb5dq4ahdwc_g0aQTL3YM6i2mKiZ2m-AvhpwygbZD4A)

Choose the jimaku tab for subtitles to see how big the variation between corpus can be.

According to other comments here, it appears that OP list is based on a newspaper corpus from 1993.

<comment><USER11> The source links appear to no longer work. Do you know where we can download Japanese subtitles?

I would love to attempt to segment a bunch of Japanese subtitles into words and then do frequency analysis. My interest is in increasing my listening ability, so I want to put the most frequently spoken words into SRS/Anki, and perhaps even break it down by anime.

Alternatively, has anyone already done this?

<comment><USER10> That was my initial goal, but I had a lot of trouble with vanilla MeCab not understanding a lot of the text. But this was before neologd, so i think it would work better now.

I don't have the source code on me, but I scraped it from a website that publishes subtitles. The scraping was easy, the cleaning not, and I believe this spreadsheet is generated from my first attempt at cleaning.

A lot of sources in Japanese nlp and linguistics have a bad habit of changing url often, so it bitrots easily. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This means very little though.

Take me as English learner for example. I would say I was only able to understand everyday English without too much of a hassle, after I acquired like around 10k words, which as I just checked had a coverage about 98%+.

Noted, it is still NOT enough, actually far from enough. Right now I believe I master around 15k to 20k words, by various estimates, and navigating English on the internet is like a charm, very little context switch in between with my native language.

Still, reading literature is huge undertake for me. I would still need to pardon myself about every once a page that if I stumped upon certain unknown words/phrases and can't move on before fully understands it, my pleasure of reading would be ruined. Such comprise frustrates me still, to this day. On the other hand, I will never have a second thoughts reading most cryptic novel in my own language, understanding might still be a challenge, but unlikely due to my insufficient vocabulary.

<comment><USER13> How do you check your coverage? Or even how many words you know?

<comment><USER14> Just googling around, I found this test: [https://www.arealme.com/vocabulary- size-test/en/](https://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/)

No idea about its accuracy, but as a native English speaker it's telling me my vocabulary size is 30k words, which sounds roughly correct.

<comment><USER15> I've tried it now and got 22k, which seems not so bad for a foreigner ("Top 6.53% Your vocabulary is at the level of professional white-collars in the US!"), but I feel like I cheated: most of the more fancy English words are just misspelled Latin, and having even a modest Latin vocabulary (I'd don't think I know more than 4k Latin words) makes their meanings pretty obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If Japanese people just used kana (like Korean people use hangul today), kids in Japan don't have to spend countless hours learning this complex (and often irrational) writing system.

[http://kanamozi.org/hikari959-04.html](http://kanamozi.org/hikari959-04.html)

> If you really want to be native-level Japanese, kanji are essential

There are visually impaired people who have difficulty learning kanji but speak Japanese fluently. Language is not just for people who can read and write, let alone reading and writing complex characters, or spell things "correctly".

Richard Feynman:

 _If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend_

<comment><USER17> Have you read japanese written only with hiragana? The language has so many homonyms it is hard to distinguish them from a text as it is a heavily context based language. I'd argue abolishing kanji and using only hiragana/katakana or roman alphabet makes learning the language harder after the very beginning when your vocab starts to increase.

<comment><USER16> I'd recommend playing the excellent SNES game Mother 2 (マザー2), a huge hit in Japan and nobody complained about the text being difficult to read.

Or you can watch one of the let's play videos with narration here:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UrqsO2JQ0&list=PLC4EWNG6GsuY...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UrqsO2JQ0&list=PLC4EWNG6GsuY5SExvHdnN9l9nP_ghz5vo&index=2&t=0s)

<comment><USER18> But games don't show you pages and pages of Hiragana. And it's old games -- it's accepted technical limitation.

Have _you_ read pages and pages in Hiragana? Or even paragraphs? It's not fun, and it's take a lot of concentration.

<comment><USER16> It's no harder than having conversations in spoken Japanese where you don't see any text, kanji or otherwise.

It would look awkward initially, but that's just because people are just used to the status quo which is kanji-kana mix.

<comment><USER18> Spoken Japanese has intonation and rhythm which make identifying word boundaries and homonyms easier.

Reading hiragana (especially without space as word boundaries) is totally different. Reading long hiragana by speaking aloud help, but there is still a problem of ha/wa and he/e.

<comment><USER16> Using space is a given if you write exclusively in kana. See Kanamoji-kai:

[http://kanamozi.org/](http://kanamozi.org/)

Also, the very reason there are so many homonyms in written text in the first place is _because_ of the kanji (over)usage - that is, because people think there are visual cues they are less careful about choosing words that are also understood easily by people listening to the words.

When people speak, at least if they are a competent speaker, people tend to avoid the overuse of homonyms (mostly kango).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Vocabulary frequency lists have long been very popular with publishers, so I assume as well with language learners. The assumption behind these is that with knowledge of, say, 90% of the vocabulary you encounter, you will comprehend 90% of the writings you encounter. It doesn't work out at all that way, though, because it is generally the low frequency vocabulary that carries the key information in a text and on which the interpretation of everything else hinges.

<comment><USER20> In the US, there are beginning reader books (e.g. the "I Can Read!" and "Ready to Read" series) which intentionally use somewhat limited vocabulary. These are somewhere between a picture book and a chapter book: they have usually 1.5 pages of text and 0.5 pages of picture in each 2-page spread; the text is set in a large font but there are at least a few sentences per page; usually the books are 30–50 pages long, with 3–5 "chapters".

I don't know how useful these are for independent reading by 5–6-year-olds, but anecdotally they are great material for reading to 2-year-olds, better than most picture books. (Note: some of the recent readers are garbage marketing gimmicks with movie tie-ins, ranging from boring to incomprehensible; skip those.)

<comment><USER21> Notable examples are _The Cat in the Hat_ , which uses 236 words, and _Green Eggs and Ham_ , which uses only 50 words. (Wikipedia)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A brief tangent, but something I've noticed is that the meanings of words like "fluent" and even "native" are so ambiguous and poorly defined, that it is almost impossible to have a meaningful conversation about language learning unless you avoid them completely.

The marketing materials for language learning resources tend to make full use of this vagueness, like this one does. I wish these resources instead did more to enlighten their prospects as to what one can actually expect to achieve and in what kind of time frames.

Languages are endlessly deep. "Native" is not even close to the top. Even amongst "native" speakers, skill with and understanding of language is enormously varied. Compare the wedding toast of a skilled public speaker with that of an average one. Compare a literature scholar's understanding of a classic novel with that of an ordinary high school graduate. It's night and day.

IME, 777 kanji wouldn't get you very far in a newspaper and certainly not a novel. It would likely be enough to understand 90% of ordinary emails and text messages.

So many great resources to learn Japanese with these days; this vocabulary list is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is known in the education space, and tests like the JLPT N5-N1 are based on this! Also when learning English, the learning material and exams are based on this. The order of frequency is not strictly followed though, if you have to learn "Monday" now and "Tuesday" in a couple of days, it makes sense to bundle them all by concepts at once and learn "getsukasuimokukindonichi". So in Japanese learning, on a day-to-day it might seem like you learn random difficult-easy words or characters, but overall you only have to _memorize_ the top N characters/words for the next test and you'd be alright.

I made a free website to memorize Kanji that works offline: [https://core.cards/](https://core.cards/). Initially I did maintain a list of the top 100, top 500, and top 1000 (approx) if I recall correctly, extracted from Wikipedia lists, to learn Japanese Kanji. But now I've switched it to just follow the JLPT because they were almost the same.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have frequency lists of vocabulary broken down by type (verb, noun, etc.)? I've seen word lists on Wiktionary, and I'm attempting to cross- reference jisho and other sources.

How many words do you need to comprehend for daily competency? Would the 10,000 suffice?

How many words do you need to be able to watch anime aimed at children (eg Bono Bono) or teenagers (Boku no Hero Academia)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great questions, let's figure out the answers! I think 6,000-7,000 words (just a wild guess based on experience) would cover a lot of daily conversation, plus specializing in whatever domain you're in a little.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Disclaimer: native Chinese speaker, knows some Japanese, English sufferer

Putting aside the argument of whether removing all Hanzi from Japanese text would actually be more efficient or not, the question to me is: why stop at Hanzi? Why not romanizating all the Japanese literature? Surely almost all the reasoning in favor of getting rid of Hanzi can also apply here?

edit: grammar

<comment><USER25> That's essentially what Korean did. They replaced everything with their own morphophonemic orthography.

But even then they still use Hanja to disambiguate sometimes.

<comment><USER24> I was not even talking about Hangul, the point I made was on using a Latin alphabet. If we are revamping the whole writing system, why reinvent the wheel if the main goal is "efficiency"?

edit: obviously Kana has already been created

<comment><USER16> There have been notable Japanese people who argued that the Japanese writing system should adopt Latin alphabets since ~150 years ago.

[https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%...](https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%E5%AD%97%E8%AB%96)

I'm personally fine with both romaji and kana (learning kana is not a big cognitive burden anyways).

I'm even fine with kanji (or Latin or anything) if people learn it voluntarily. What's not ok is kids being forced to learn them in school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As someone who spent a lot of time learning kanji alone, there's not much you can do with kanji alone. It's a helpful step in learning actual words, learning strokes, finding patterns, but I'd be skeptical of the utility of this list.

If you're going to rote memorize something, I'd probably start with the radicals.

</comment><comment><USER27> What about kanji combinations? I bet you got to learn many thousands (made of the same 777 kanjis).

</comment><comment><USER11> Before this falls off the front page, I figured I would ask the following:

1) Does anyone have a resource for Japanese subtitles (in Japanese/kanji, not English)?

2) Does anyone have good frequency { word => frequency } lists? Especially if they are topical, eg. school-related, anime-related, industry-related.

3) What are the best programs for segmenting Japanese text into words reliably?

4) Does anyone have a vocabulary set for any given manga, anime, or film that you could study before watching?

5) In addition to Anki and Wanikani, what are good SRS apps or programs?

6) Does anyone use Skype (or similar) to practice with native Japanese speakers? How is it? How did you find people to practice with?

7) What is the inflection point (in terms of raw # of vocabulary) to being able to understand Japanese anime or drama? What JLPT level does this correspond to?

8) How many new words do you acquire per day of study? How long have you been studying? Have you taken any of the JLPT tests?

<comment><USER28> 5) zkanji: [https://github.com/z1dev/zkanji](https://github.com/z1dev/zkanji)! It's got a dictionary from which you can directly add words into its study decks when looking them up, and it has handwriting recognition plus let's you easily find similar looking kanji (with shared components etc), which is great when tesseract ocr fails, or when the text is so blurry/compressed you can't really even see it clearly (the online Japanese war history archives really love to compress their scans).

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the head's up! :)

Not long after this HN thread, this thread popped up on Reddit. It answered a lot of my questions ([1], [2], [4], and [7]), and I found it immensely useful:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/crlsqj/googl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/crlsqj/googlesheet_anime_frequency_list/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 私はネイティブの日本語話者です。確かに777個の漢字を知ると90%をカバーできるとは思いますが、それがイコール日本語の90%をマスターしたとは言えないはずです。実際、この文章は極めて平易ですが、外国人にはそれなりの難易度になっていて読むのに非常に苦労するんじゃないかなと思います。 それから、リストのすべてをレビューしましたが、一部「経(ふ)」や「格別空」は言葉としておかしいです。また「恬然」や「整復」は明らかに頻出語句ではなく、ソースに偏りが見られます。

I'm a native Japanese speaker. I agree that 777 kanjis are contained in common sentences at the rate of 90%, but it doesn't mean you can complete 90% of Japanese. Actually, these sentences are very easy to read for Japanese people, although it's hard for foreigners because of the difference of vocabulary. I also reviewed the list. I believe「経(ふ)」and「格別空」are odd as a word. In addition, 「恬然」and「整復」 are not frequently appeared so I think there was a bias to choose sources.

<comment><USER29> You can estimate your Japanese vocabulary size on this site. [https://www.arealme.com/japanese-vocabulary-size- test/ja/](https://www.arealme.com/japanese-vocabulary-size-test/ja/)

Here are examples of native Japanese speakers. Usually we can achieve 20,000 easily. My result was 36,000 words.

[http://burusoku-vip.com/archives/1798300.html](http://burusoku- vip.com/archives/1798300.html) [https://b.hatena.ne.jp/entry/s/www.arealme.com/japanese- voca...](https://b.hatena.ne.jp/entry/s/www.arealme.com/japanese-vocabulary- size-test/ja/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So what is the typical reason for people to learn Japanese? Is it a good destination for something more important than visiting a few shrines or buying rare manga? I'm currently learning vietnamese, another east Asian language. It's very difficult. I'm very good at learning languages, generally. But not this one. The only reason I'm doing this at all is i'm here anyways after my plans failed two days into the trip and I can't communicate so I'm alone and shit out of luck. I don't think I will know a reasonable level even after the three weeks are over. Waste of a trip but I still get some decent pictures to post online.

<comment><USER31> I like learning foreign languages because it's interesting to see how they outline ideas and idioms are a great way to learn about the culture. So it's an enjoyable hobby that builds a skill (maybe of little value, but I can deceive myself).

I chose Japanese because I watch and read a lot of stuff from Japan. It's also very different from English, which is fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The frustrating issue is that they don't state in _what situation_. I'm certain that most people will just do fine with only 100 kanji characters for daily life, or no kanji at all if they're just a tourist. But if you're applying for a full-time Japanese speaking job in a Japanese company, knowing only 777 characters is a joke (which is about the 5th-grader level). Just like a programming language, the level of fluency required depends on a task.

p.s. just confirmed that the list is not enough for filing a tax in Japan. They don't have words like 所得 (income), 控除 (deduction) or 医療費 (medical expense).

</comment><comment><USER33> Not really sure what the major point is. Sure, there's a core set of "units" (words / Kanji characters) that are useful when trying to learn a language. I didn't even attempt to speak English conversationally until I had about 200 verbs and 500 nouns and maybe 100 adjectives memorized. This lets you have useful conversations and basic understanding when reading, but it's still a struggle to get that last 10%.

</comment><comment><USER34> Website is about 777 kanji that give 90% coverage of Japanese.

No Kanji at all, english words and some romaji like "tsu" which, can also be kana.

I was disappointed by the article.

<comment><USER35> Disable automatic translation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Seems similar to what Fluent Forever (book, application and website) claims.

Memorize the 625 most used words to jump-start your language learning and then you can move to grammar and other stuff.

[https://blog.fluent-forever.com/base-vocabulary-list/](https://blog.fluent- forever.com/base-vocabulary-list/)

</comment><comment><USER37> For non-experts it is helpful to know there are around 50000 kanji characters so 777 is ~1.6%

[https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/11735/how- many-...](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/11735/how-many-kanji- characters-are-there)

</comment><comment><USER38> I've read through the linked paper and I can't understand where they get the assertion of 777 characters give 90% coverage. The original paper isn't even about that topic, but rather comparing and contrasting a corpus created in 1994 with a corpus created in 1962 and 1976.

</comment><comment><USER39> Yes, I have been studying Chinese for about five years now and I can recognize about 2700 characters. Looking at this Japanese character set, I'm guessing I know 80% or so. I always act like charts like this.

<comment><USER40> I've noticed the same where I can understand the basics of a Japanese program if there's subtitles. But there are some oddities like 食 being used in a verb (as in 食べる) or 行 as to go. But you still have good context and can at least understand the topic in most cases.

<comment><USER41> knowing Cantonese helps here, as both the verbs you mention are still common verbs in modern Cantonese.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Zipf's law

<comment><USER43> Beat me to it. To expound upon this, Japanese is not unique in basically adhering to Zipf's law. In many organization data sets, including the vocabulary of most languages, the most commonly used word is twice as common as the second-most, and the second-most word is twice as common as the third- most, and so forth.

<comment><USER5> > second-most word is twice as common as the third-most, and so forth.

Normally Zipf's law refers to the frequency being inversely proportional to rank - i.e. the 3rd most common element would be 1/3 as frequent as the first, not 1/4th.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A simple information-theoretic argument suggests that most of the information is in the remaining article 10%.

<comment><USER45> Not enough information. For example, in English some of the least common characters are also generally not important for conveying information.

Your argument only holds if Kanji was designed to be optimal in compressing information, which is of course not how Kanji came to be.

That doesn't mean you are wrong, but your argument is invalid.

<comment><USER46> Aren't kanji closer to english words than english letters?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's similar to learning about 3000 words in a foreign language will make you passably fluent.

</comment><comment><USER48> Wouldn't 777 words in any language give 90% coverage of all the words in a typical newspaper?

<comment><USER49> One difference here is that Japanese characters can be combined in various ways to create different words, so the 777 characters can be used to create many more than 777 words. Compare with the Simple English Wikipedia which strives to use only the 1000 most commonly used English words. I think you'll find that that experience quite a bit different from reading a typical English language newspaper.

[https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_W...](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simple_English_Wikipedia)

Another example of "using only the ten hundred words people use most often" is Randall Munroe's "Up Goer Five":

[https://xkcd.com/1133/](https://xkcd.com/1133/)

It may be helpful to think of "characters" as representing some middle ground between words and alphabetic letters, a little like word stems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I thought the number of standard kanji was only about 1900 to begin with.

<comment><USER51> 2136.

But the list isn't at all comprehensive. There are a considerable number of kanji in regular use that aren't on the list, and when you include place/person names, it grows massively.

It's possible to memorize all the standard kanji, but crack open a history book and you won't recognize half of the words.

<comment><USER50> Haha, it was 1,945 when I was studying Japanese, times change. Kind of surprised they added characters rather than further shrink the list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is kind of common knowledge. JLPT 4 then 3 then 2 then 1. Done

</comment><comment><USER53> Lol, 777 kanji is just too short to even be comfortable reading emails at work in Japanese. So what good is 90 percent if the only thing it allows you is to do shopping?

<comment><USER54> 777 of the most popular kanji from general Japanese might not be useful for work emails, but if you find the top 777 from a corpus of your own emails, it might be.

It's not hard - I've done this before using a corpus made up of work documents. There's a part-of-speech analysts tool called mecab that gives the word stems, and makes it easy to find word boundaries (since Japanese doesn't use spaces).

The output went into Anki and it didn't take long before I was reading emails and documents at work fairly easily.

<comment><AUTHOR> genius

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> In other news only 24 english characters give nearly 100% of all the characters in use in English

<comment><USER56> But knowing 24 characters doesn't make you understand 100% of the words. Actually, it gives you 0%.

<comment><USER57> It turns out there are more than 777 words commonly used. Kanji is not different in this respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> now do mandarin please :)

</comment><comment><USER59> The long tail is full of crucial nouns.

</comment><comment><USER60> hgv

</comment><comment><USER61> This is just a confirmation of Zipf's Law[0], which applies to all languages.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER62> Yet another (re)discovery of Pareto's distribution. Net worth, stock returns, popularity of words in languages, casualties in wars or natural disasters, size of cities, popularity of artwork pieces like songs or computer games, ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Applicatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Applications)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is closer to 90:25 rather than the typical Pareto of 80:20

<comment><USER62> 80:20 is a pop-culture take on the distribution. It does a good job of visualising it to someone who doesn't know maths.

It's really any distribution with the CDF of the form x^(-a)

<comment><AUTHOR> The wikipedia article says it's commonly formulated as 80:20, so that's where I'm getting my info. You're saying it covers every nice Pareto ratio, which is very different. Because 90:25 is much better than 80:20 but they are part of the same phenomenon. Well, you can call everything a Pareto phenomenon then and what's the point if everything fits in this universalish category? How can I explain the value of 90:25 without invoking Pareto and having it constantly diluted to 80:20?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Brief History of the Grand Unified Theory of Physics - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/a-brief-history-of-the-grand-unified-theory-of-physics <comment><USER2> Something I always felt 20 years ago when doing my physics degree, and now 20 years later when no measurable progress has been made down the road of unification feels even more appropriate:

General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are two astonishingly successful theories. They don't really have any massive gaps waiting to be filled. The belief that there _must_ be a way to unify them always seems to me to stem from the human desire for tidiness, not any sound epistemological reasoning about how physical laws behave.

We want the theories to be unifiable because we're human. Sadly the universe doesn't much seem to care what we want.

<comment><USER3> Well, maybe they don't need to be unifiable - but GR and the standard model are outright _contradictory_! We live in one universe, so there must be one true story about how it is.

<comment><USER4> > _We live in one universe_

I think this may be an oversimplification.

<comment><USER5> Nevertheless, GR and QFT describe the _same_ universe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deco Software – React Native IDE - <AUTHOR> https://www.decosoftware.com/ <comment><USER2> This looks really interesting and I'd love to try it, but these "refer your friend to jump ahead in line" tactics are pretty annoying. Stop pushing people to share it before they've even tried it, and let them share it after they actually enjoy using it.

<comment><USER3> And by the time they email me an say that I can download I'll have forgotten what this project was and what all the hype was about making me less likely to use it and even less likely to spread the news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So I just started developing a react native Android app and a react desktop app in electron and it's actually been a very rewarding experience so far. Some thoughts I have on this:

1\. I'd be interested to see the Android emulator and live reload in Deco. I'm using Genymotion and the live reload seems to work about half the time (as in I usually have to save the file twice to see my changes). It also sometimes can't connect to Chrome devtools. At some point I'll dive into webpack, genymotion, watchman, and devtools to see if I can fix these things but it'd be nice to have everything work smoothly out of the box.

2\. Speaking of devtools, devtools! I could imagine some really nice UI that wraps devtools directly into Deco but I didn't see that in the video (admittedly I skipped around a little).

3\. I love the built in styling bar. Right now styling for me involves having a color palette tab, a CSS reference, and an HTML/React native UI components reference tab open.

4\. I have one more problem that could probably be solved with a 10 minute investment on my part: react with electron and react native require different nodejs versions. React native needs at least v4.0 and I believe electron only works with 0.12.9 and below. Currently I switch between them using "n". I suppose this problem is unique to my situation but this is also the kind of thing an IDE could handle with project settings.

Well this kind of devolved into me listing my pain points with React but I'm excited to try this editor and I just signed up for the waitlist!

EDIT: clarification on point #4

<comment><USER5> To point #4, _if_ your toplevel react+electron vs. react native projects are in distinct working directories, then you can use tools like ndenv[1] to manage node/npm versions using a .node-version file at the root of each project directory, as well as a configurable 'global' default setting. ndenv is great for this, since it uses PATH to do its work, and is therefore far more widely compatible with tooling than nvm. (nvm unfortunately requires executing within a bash w/ a mess of shell functions injected into it.)

[1] [https://github.com/riywo/ndenv](https://github.com/riywo/ndenv)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is interesting, definitely. One thing people should be aware of if they're new to the React Native environment is that this technology comes built in. It is a big reason why React Native is such a huge success so far. You don't need an IDE and switching to one instead of using your own tools seems like a pretty big negative to me.

Tools such as rnpm allow for automated installation of new extensions (all of which are available on npm).

Extension installation is as simple as:

rnpm install react-native-video

Deployment is now as simple as:

react-native run-android react-native run-ios

No XCode, no Android Studio, etc. and you get live reloading, Chrome debugging, etc.

To me this is an ideal workflow, but others may disagree. Some may choose to build IDEs such as this on top of the existing architecture, that's cool too. I just want people who are starting out to be aware that there isn't much new here in terms of work flow efficiency.

<comment><USER7> >It is a big reason why React Native is such a huge success so far. You don't need an IDE...

Sorry if this a stupid question, but is this true if one is also targeting electron for the 'big 3' desktops for the HN crowd (rather than just mobile OSs)?

Edit: Clarifications made.

<comment><USER8> React Native is a platform for building _native_ iOS and Android apps (with no DOM (HTML or CSS)). Electron is about web apps for the desktop. Different things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Guys, this is amazing! I've been looking for something like this for a while and almost ended up building it myself.

What about pricing? Will the editor be free with premium paid services like push to deploy?

<comment><USER10> The IDE will always be free for developers. We may add premium services in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very nifty! One question I have is that many React Native components that expose native functionality tend to have an extra step in the install process that looks like this: [https://github.com/ProjectSeptemberInc/gl-react- native/raw/m...](https://github.com/ProjectSeptemberInc/gl-react- native/raw/master/docs/install-steps.png) \- where you have to drag in and link the library in xcode. Are these types of components handled automagically too?

<comment><USER12> I recently worked on a RN project, after months of not touching it, and found out that there's a new thing called rnpm ([https://github.com/rnpm/rnpm](https://github.com/rnpm/rnpm)) that solves this issue.

<comment><USER13> RNPM is pretty good, but it doesn't work with some libraries that require slightly unique initialization steps or paths. I imagine this will eventually lead to some kind of postinstall hook in the module packages, which will be picked up by RNPM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What exactly constitutes the Deco package registry?

Will I need to submit my React Native libraries to a new registry? Or are you working with something like [http://js.coach](http://js.coach) (formerly react.parts)?

<comment><USER10> For the beta, we currently have our own registry, but we are looking into ways to integrate with others.

<comment><USER14> Okay! And presumably for the code scaffolding you will eventually let library authors customize that themselves?

<comment><USER10> Yep, that's right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any info on platforms supported (Mac, Windows, Linux)? I know React Native's toolset is mostly built for OSX with some native tool dependencies (e.g. Homebrew) and am afraid this will be repeated here.

<comment><USER10> Though the current beta builds are for OS X, we built Deco with Windows and Linux in mind. So keep an eye out for those!

<comment><USER3> Are you sure there's an app to download? No offense but this seems like some shady promotion to just build an email list. Not one person here has said they've used the application or that they've got an invite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is one of the most useful-looking things I've seen on HN for some time, going by the video. It's a step closer to being able to live art-direct (as it were) sitting with a developer.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is great! Helps a ton for someone new to react native, lowers the already low barrier to entry. Integration with microsoft code push ([https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-code- push](https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-code-push)) could be cool.

<comment><USER18> We (the CodePush team) would love to discuss what that kind of integration might look like :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My wife is a designer who has been getting into react-native with me. She would absolutely love this UI. Looking forward to trying it!

</comment><comment><USER20> The screenshots seem to indicate full Apple walled garden. Will this work on Windows?

<comment><USER10> Currently OS X only, but we built it to be cross platform so keep an eye out for Windows version.

<comment><USER21> What?, Wait... React Native have windows support? or is comming? And linux?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm very excited to try this out. We've built one (very simple) React Native application so far and felt like the build chain could use some improvements.

Do you plan on supporting imports instead of require?

<comment><USER10> Absolutely! Everyone has their own preferred style for the new ES6 syntax, and we want to support it all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You should add support for desktop too, like:

[https://github.com/ptmt/react-native-desktop](https://github.com/ptmt/react- native-desktop)

<comment><USER24> Why not just use browser-based React inside a wrapper like Electron to build desktop apps? Is performance much better when using a desktop implementation of React Native?

<comment><USER23> That's not native, and is much bulkier and slower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This looks like a really cool piece of software, but I think a lot of it's best features should be unbundled or made available in the IDE you already use.

Namely:

* Simple package search + install _without_ opening a web browser * React-native hot-reloading * Scaffolding of added components, with required props filled in

I really don't want to use a different IDE, and lose everything I've got in my current IDE - I use webstorm, so this would be Live Templates, key bindings, etc.

That said, I'm really excited to see people building software that makes building react-native apps easier. It's not that it's too difficult right now - rather, it's awesome that the development workflow is so hackable, and that the react-native (and react) ecosystems seem to be evolving so rapidly, and are so willing to try out new ideas.

Anyways, nice work Deco Software, keep it up :-)

</comment><comment><USER26> I couldn't find anything about supported platforms on the site. Will this target Linux, or just OSX?

<comment><USER10> We built Deco to be cross platform so we will be able to support Linux in the future. Currently OS X only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I apologize that this comment is slightly off topic but does it worry anybody else that people are putting so many of their eggs in the React basket? Considering how fickle the world of front-end libraries can be..

</comment><comment> rafael-rinaldi This looks way better than things like Framer. Not only the code is more flexible (not a DSL nor their own API) but it's actually a React component that you can use anywhere. The IDE looks rad too.

</comment><comment><USER28> This looks pretty awesome. I really like the import package feature with the scaffolding. That looks like it saves a ton of time on whatever you're building.

</comment><comment><USER9> The left sidebar with Actions, Constants etc suggests use of some specific Flux library. Which one is that? Could others be used, too?

</comment><comment><USER29> Looks nice. Here's hoping you'll do support for ClojureScript and Reagent. Or open source it and let me do it :-)

</comment><comment><USER30> Released an app with react native recently and had an extremely pleasant experience throughout! Two thumbs way way up!

</comment><comment><USER31> Are beta testing only focused on select group of users? Signed up for beta and told there is a waiting line for it.

<comment><USER10> We are adding users to the beta in batches as quickly as the team can support. We're working very closely with our beta group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks awesome! We just released our React Native iOS app ( [https://yes.no](https://yes.no) ) and I will definitely try it out!

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER33> This is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow this is pretty impressive. Good job OP

</comment><comment><USER35> The beta signup form (#download) is broken in FF. The lower text is cut off. OSX: 10.10.5 FF: 43.0.4

<comment><USER10> Please send me an email at email@example.com and I'll look into it. We're having trouble reproducing the issue in Firefox. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> We figured it out and it should work on Firefox now. Thanks for reporting the issue! :)

<comment><USER35> Yep I can confirm that its working. No problem :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> fascinating video. love the IDE and the great convenient it offers.

</comment><comment><USER37> Looks good, definitely going to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER38> Here's hoping for a Linux version ...

</comment><comment><USER39> Closed beta and a lot of marketing. Nothing to see here.

</comment><comment><USER40> we have been building a few react native apps at gyrosco.pe/apps we have been loving it. Interested to see if we could add this to our flow easily.

</comment><comment><USER41> can i use it?

</comment><comment><USER42> OR you could just install react native CLI tools, then use the BUILT IN hot module reloading (which is basically like LiveReload for web editing), and just do it yourself without this bloated piece of thing.

Look how beautiful these docs are:

[https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting- started...](https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started.html)

Now would you rather rely on something that one person made? Or would you rely on a huge group of amazing folks, which would GLADLY help you with your project, such as the folks from Discord channel or ExponentJS on Slack.

[http://slack.exponentjs.com/](http://slack.exponentjs.com/)

<comment><USER43> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075830](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075830) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Haha not really, it's bloated. You end up wasting time dragging a slider when you could just put in a number and enable HMR hot module reloading which is BUILT INTO REACT NATIVE. Lol.

<comment><USER43> You've inundated this thread with uncivil and dismissive comments. I'm sure you do know a lot about this space, but the way you've chosen to express it here is not at all ok.

People go on tilt sometimes, so it's not the end of the world, but we've banned your account for now. If you don't want it to stay banned, email email@example.com.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11075389) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Android is over 70% of the market.

<comment><USER45> But Apple is over 60% of the market, which a more important metric for most developers.

[https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/2015-q1...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/2015-q1-market- index-charts_barchart.png)

(I'm an Android guy myself, just trying to be realistic)

<comment><USER44> But React apps aren't the kind you sell (like games), instead they are typically used to display data from a server - rather than process it.

Take a look at the showcase, all these apps are free! [https://facebook.github.io/react- native/showcase.html](https://facebook.github.io/react-native/showcase.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So the commoditization of mobile development begins...

<comment><USER47> isn't it what technology is about? Commoditizing what was exclusive before.

I'm personally glad to see tools simplyfying building a mobile app. The end goal rarely being producing the app, and more along the lines of producing value through the app.

I hope it has as big of an impact as what WP did for custom CMS…

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Things I have to say:

* Background noise in your video is annoying.

* Why are you showing your face? I'd rather see your code bigger.

* Using require instead of module imports shows me that this product is going to have trouble keeping pace with FB, Babel, ECMA speeds.

* I'm not in love with adding another IDE

* hello [http://getqwikly.com/](http://getqwikly.com/) all over again

Sorry, but I'm not betting on this horse.

<comment><USER49> This product may die, however I believe competition and the fire to get what you want is more valuable than king making through bad reviews (whether intentional or unintentional). Tbh, Im not going to look at the product because Im more interested in terminal editors at the moment. But criticism should be used to enhamce a product, not degrade the blood sweat and tears that went into it

<comment><USER48> I applaud effort. I just feel there's some glaring gaps that make alarms go off. I'm sharing those. I know this looks fantastic, but that's when I start checking for a venire. And when I do, those smells popped up.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I onboard at a big firm remotely? - <AUTHOR> I'm beginning an internship at a big tech company (think FAANG). I'm still getting to know people, but its hard to make organic conversations. Any suggestions? <comment><USER2> I'm struggling with your question, yet intrigued by the problem.

When you are new in an organisation, it is very common to feel awkward in making smalltalk and being remote would make it even more so. What technology are you conducting your conversations with? With Zoom you can read body language, etc. Using messaging alone provides far less clues.

I presume that you have been assigned a mentor and some tasks to perform. In which case, I would expect that your conversations pertain to the work you are doing and not shooting the breeze by the water cooler. Perhaps a good starting step would be to talk about aspects of the tasks at hand and then expand from there, asking about the decisions that led to the design / architecture / tool choices and from there the roles and personalities involved.</comment>


Ask HN: Technology stall - <AUTHOR> i'm an enterprise developer, specialized in .NET stack, i've been ranging from eCommerce, Media, Healthcare ad now Public Administration areas, it may sounds good, someone may says that i've been "lucky" to face with multiple biz domains, but is not all gold what's shines, in my country (Italy) there is no importance (or almost) to quality of projects (especially Technically), you have to face with ridiculous deadlines, poor team mate (in order of thech knowledge) and tremendous customers.<p>When i started to work i thought, "nice, i'm paid for doing what i would have done i my free time !", but now looking at the current situation i'm not of the same thought anymore, i would move on to different fields but i can't focus on one in particoular, i constantly feel interested in IT Security, then low level programming (C/C++) than again "new" languages like GOLang, RUST etc.. i can't focus on nothing, i think it's due to my work frustrations, does anyone ever been in a situation like mine ? and more... some advice on how to follow the right path ? <comment><USER2> First to your lack of focus. I had the same issue. I jumped around various languages like Scala and Closure and D. I would jump around background products like Mongo or Arango or PostgreSQL. Probably for the same reason for you: novelty driven by a sense of the industry leaving me behind.

I think this is a false sense driven by HN and the like. Startups playing with new things made me feel that my Java centric knowledge was outdated. They would say, "look at the scale we achieved with clusters of Node and Mongo." When I looked at what they were doing, what they actually produced the sheen faded. A generation spent on ads.

Then I turned my attention to a problem that I have and to another faced by my clients. This gave me clarity. Stay aware of new tools and techniques, but realize they are just tools and techniques. Don't lust after them. Rather look how and if they can be applied to your problems. Look if they are a better fit. See if they can help you achieve your goals in a compressed timeline. Then dig in.

As for teams and deadlines, that is not really a matter of tech. Poor teams occur even in the newest tech. I've seen people totally misunderstand, at best, and squander Hadoop and its tooling. I've seen systems that used proper decoupled design rot into a quagmire of failure due to people not reading about software architecture or the tools in the stack. You have to power through this. In such situations, I've seen first hand that people want leadership even if during the process of asserting that they despise you.

<comment><USER3> The way I deal with the lack of focus was to simply stop reading HN, /r/programming or any programming blogs for about six months. I just focused on working with the tools I knew and stuck with them, whether they were the best or not. I wasn't constantly distracted by new shiny stuff, wondering "Should I have used X instead?" It gave me a lot more confidence as a programmer. Instead of wondering whether some framework or tool would solve my problem, I remembered that I can solve those problems myself. That's what programming is. It's not just plugging frameworks together. It's actually solving problems with your brain, and that's the fun part. After that experience, I can follow tech developments with a lot more detachment. I'll sometimes get into things that genuinely look to solve a problem I'm hitting, but I don't feel any compulsion to use the latest, bestest stuff. And I enjoy programming much more than I had been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with other posters that you should exercise, take a vacation, make sure that you're not burning out. It does sound like you need to shake things up in your life. Can you leave Enterprise world and try a startup? Can you leave Italy? Can you take a job in a different industry for a year?

Here's what I learned when recovering from burnout (it took a year): the reason you do something dramatically impacts whether you're able to enjoy doing it. This is why being a prostitute is not the best job ever. I recommend to all of my artist friends that they find a job that pays the bills so that they can do art on evenings and weekends. This prevents them from coming to resent their art as necessary to live. Why do we let our need to buy things strip away the joy from things we enjoy most?

I do want to say that it's not your lack of focus which is the problem. It's good to be curious and try new things. There are some people that thrive because they spend their lives being the best at one thing, but many of us are valued because we're really good at a lot of different things.

Make sure that you have hobbies that are not technical. I like photography. You'll find that being an interesting person, you'll attract other interesting people (and opportunities) to you.

Finally, always make sure that anything "work" related that you do, including programming, that you do in the context of having a problem to solve or a project to finish. Even if you're the one with the project or problem. The key is that problem solving is how we learn to use tools and the reason we retain knowledge. You know a language or tool not when you have the API memorized (forgotten next week!) but when you have developed your instincts suitably to know how you'd use it to solve a problem.

People don't pay you to know everything, they pay you to be faster/better at figuring out the solution than the others.

Anything worth doing in life is hard. Good luck and have fun.

</comment><comment><USER5> Being specialized in .NET stack you're likely like me in your 30s or 40s. Life in our 20s was simple. Java or .NET or PHP, specialize in one or the other, and there we go, we can build a career on top.

I share many of your feelings. I live in Spain. The markets are common. But honestly, I think it's not a matter about Italy being shitty at anything. The IT world has changed. There is no three platforms any longer. There is no one single deployment paradigm any longer. Things are much more complex now and it's truly impossible to try to take on everything as it was 15 years ago. I found that myself frustrating many times. Thinking, heck, 15 years ago I could study this, this and this and be an expert pretty much on everything software related. Now this is not true any longer and it can be very frustrating for all of us that come from that world.

I think the key here is holidays of course, but also to adapt to the new software world. And learn that not all what appears in HN is shiny and great, not all that is done in the cool places like SV is shiny and great, and not all those frameworks and languages that pop up are shiny and great. Rather than a matter of focus is a matter of taking it easy. Do something that you like and that you enjoy learning and learn to let things pass on. You don't have to be a master of react, golang or angular to be a competent software person, there is more choices than ever. Focus on the models, patterns, problems and solutions. That's where the value is today.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, I have been in this situation and I guess most programmers who started programming coz it is amazing felt the same at some point. I call this the "infatuation with tools", where we keep learning new languages, frameworks, libraries, OS etc but once you learn it you feel empty and bored coz somehow our subconsciousness develop the idea that tools gives you silver bullet to solve any problem, which of-course is wrong. The way to overcome this is that you need to understand that Computing is a tool that can be used to many problems. The tools are not fun and interesting rather the problems are fun and interesting. Think about real world problem and how computing can solve them or at least play a part in solving them. Get fascinated by problems and not tools. Probably that's why I hate most job postings where they say "hey do u know x,y,z tools?" rather than saying "Hey we want to solve X, are u interested?".

And yes, computing is about data and algorithms and nothing else. Don't fall into the trap of new names of same concepts. Always think about problems in terms of data and algorithms and no other bullshit like objects, patterns that so called software engineering piled up in search for a silver bullet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Take a vacation; you are burning out.

If you can take a >1 week you can program for fun after 5-7 days and get a sense for what interests you without work interfering. If you can only take a shorter vacation have fun and do something outside of technology and relax.

Consider working on a side project in the weeks following a break and hack on small projects that interest you. If you want to leave the .net space find local companies working on interesting problems.

Ask to get coffee with anyone in your network (or outside) to get information about other parts of the industry/other companies and methodologies.

All in all take a vacation and then spend 2 months hacking on projects and talking to anyone in any part of the industry around your area (or potential prospect cities).

> I am interested in security, c, go ect...

Talking to people actually coding in a language, securing infrastructure, doing X, will be a lot better then learning Go for 2 months and finding out that it didn't help with your core goals.

Take a break. Expand your professional circle and knowledge base. Format a plan based on that info. Execute

</comment><comment><USER8> My suggestion is to try to audit a series of courses. This will force you to concentrate on a particular theme; some of the courses are not self-paced and have a deadline to finish problem-sets (which are Juyptor notebooks where you have to actually do the work, and fill-in the code snippet but not to muck around with setting up annoying IDE/dev environment, autograded with unit tests), so will force you to stick to deadlines.

Here are some of courses that you might (read: actually I am) interested.

[https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-science-engineering- apache-...](https://www.edx.org/xseries/data-science-engineering-apache-spark) (3 courses on Apache Spark using PySpark and introduction to simple machine learning and distributed computing)

[https://www.edx.org/xseries/genomics-data- analysis](https://www.edx.org/xseries/genomics-data-analysis) (3 courses on R, next-gen genomics sequencing, annotation and some more cool computation protocols involved with CHIP-Seq and RNA-seq).

[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/scala](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/scala) (4 courses + capstone, spearheaded by Martin Odersky; the guy who is the big- wig in the Scala community).

Also, I'd recommend taking the verified tracks for all of them. This will force you to complete them as money is on the line (if possible ask HR/your boss if it's related to your work, for tuition reimbursement benefit).

<comment><USER9> I recommend taking the specializations, but don't expect you will be able to reimburse them as Coursera is unable to provide invoices.

Yeah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Non tech advice but do you exercise? A 30 minute run ever day before work makes a day 100% more enjoyable.

Seldom does using a different language fix anything. Programming is programming.

Excercise can fix your life outlook. Better teammates can change things. Nicer boss. But seldom will language or business do that much do your day to day life.

<comment><USER11> I agree up to a point (regards to languages). A change from C# to F# isn't small and can give you new ways to evaluate problems. Likewise with C. The constraints of the languages highlight areas you can learn and improve.

As for excersice, anyone in a desk based job needs to include movement as part of their day. I take a walk at lunchtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most likely you will not be satisfied working on technology in a non- technology company. Find a job where a company considers technology to be instrumental to what they do, and you might see a much better environment.

If you can't, move to another country.

<comment><USER13> This. This is what I've come to realise has been my issue with a lack of work engagement, and the feeling of creative atrophy and itchy feet. I don't want to be the "magician" digital/developer person, to be doing things where technology is the sideline - need to be within a digital team, working to a common purpose. Hopefully find that once it's safe to move on from my current role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Whenever that new tech excites you, just remember that behind the scenes, everything is that same "old" tech you've always been using, and that your could do "the next big thing". Nothing is really "new" in programming _. Most of it is C and C++ behind the scenes. Those fancy new languages? - Some of them take just as long (if not more so) to create the same software you 're already making with the "old" stuff (despite the repeated boasting of a puny hello-world), and they have their own new set of pitfalls. If it makes you feel any better, find a fancy icon and stick it in your project folder. Once you do, congrats, you're now more geeky-hip. _I mean the action of programming, between you and the computer, not the industry, duh.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been there. The problem with being a good programmer is that you quickly exhaust the low hanging fruit of interesting things to work on in your career. Remember that time when you knew next to nothing and everything you did was interesting, because it was novel. Those days are over, because you are now pretty good at doing what 95% of organizations need out of Software Engineers.

Don't panic.

Work is going to be a little bit boring for you for a while; learn how to cope with this for a bit. It is going to take longer for you to become an expert at something interesting and important than it took for you to get to where you are now. This may seem counterintuitive as you are quite a bit more aware of what you don't know than you than you were before you typed your first "hello world". That's okay. This is how knowledge works. All those abstractions you've built up in your brain for the the low-level things you didn't need to know at first are massive wells of knowledge that you only see the surface of.

So How do you get good at something? I truly believe you can only get good at something that you can sustain working on for a few years. I find, personally, that I can read one theory book or set of papers between bouts of working on something. That seems to be a good mix for _me_.

This isn't a race, this takes time. Once you start down the path of becoming an expert at something you'll realize it is the work of an entire lifetime. Enjoy the ride.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's no good answer. __You have to learn how to focus. __You can 't wait for focus or motivation to come to you, you have to make it happen. Why do new languages interest you? Probably you're just looking for something different, to escape some depression you're feeling. Instead you should focus your attention on solving problems, and then picking the right language for those problems. You may also want to talk to a therapist about depression, it really does help a ton.

I don't know much about tech in Italy but I have heard the same complaints -- culturally, Italy doesn't have high standards for quality in technology. If you struggle with that, then there are two solutions: work for a US or Israeli company, remotely if you can, or start your own business.

If you want to start your own business, I'd recommend starting a solo software consulting practice _first_ , that way you know you can make some money on the side while building your business.

<comment><USER17> > work for a US or Israeli company

Why an Israeli company? I assume you mention the US because of the salary in SF and other tech hubs, but it doesn't seem to be comparable in Israel, nor higher than in cities like London, Berlin or Stockholm.

<comment><USER18> You took that out of it's context. The "that" in that sentence refers to the previous sentence. The poster is mentioning US and Israeli companies as places where quality is held to higher standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19>
      in my country (Italy) there is no importance (or almost)
      to quality of projects (especially Technically), you
      have to face with ridiculous deadlines, poor team
      mate (in order of thech knowledge) and tremendous
      customers.

Quality versus deadlines, jousting with shitty team members, or suffering the burden of demanding and insipid customers. All of this is normal. These are human factors, and they exist within a spectrum (or gradient). Some areas can be worse than others, but none are ever quite _good_.

Moving into a different field (one which is more specialized than _generalized-enterprise-business development-in-yet-another-problem-domain_ ) won't fix any of those things.

      i constantly feel interested in IT Security, then
      low level programming (C/C++) than again "new"
      languages like GOLang, RUST etc.. i can't focus on
      nothing, i think it's due to my work frustrations

Having tangential interests (security, low-level computing, new languages) is also normal, and a symptom of possessing a naturally curious creativity.

So, the question: Is an inability to deliver on hobbies, and convert them into productive professional skills, driven by miserable distractions? Nah. Whether you make something of them, isn't going to be the cure of the things that you find frustrating, _BUT_ the time you spend tending to frustrating tasks will be time that is poorly spent, under any circumstances. Fluffy bean-counting busy work will eat up the precious moments of your life, no matter the career.

So, now you'd like to migrate your skills over to newer hoobyist interests, that you've explored tangentially? Makes sense, but it won't solve the human factors stemming from social circumstance. Nor will it prevent unfulfilling, soul-crushing toil from creeping into your newfound career path.

It _WILL_ , however, temporarily cure your wanderlust, and relieve that dreaded sensation of stagnation.

I dunno, try this, for starters:

[https://taylorpearson.me/limits/](https://taylorpearson.me/limits/)

      LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman looked back over his
      career and cited his biggest career mistake as not
      leaving Microsoft for Netscape.

      At the time, Netscape was where all the innovation
      was happening. It was spouting out entrepreneurs.

      The right question wasn't "how can I learn to be a
      product manager?" It was, "how can I get in the
      building at Netscape?"

</comment><comment><USER20> For me it helps to try and recognize that a constant state of procrastination, and distraction, are just like a constant state of learning when it comes to finishing the task at hand.

The right tool for launching might be the one that requires the fewest trips to StackOverflow via Google, or maybe that idea is not an important optimization to your workflow.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hey, I can't express _how much_ I can relate. Some facts:

\- I'm Italian

\- I'm in my 30s

\- I have ~8 years of professional experience, mainly in big agencies

\- I have _fully_ experienced the pains of your country, consider also I have been independent contractor for some years (you know, clients not paying you?)

I moved to France following my girlfriend, and I'm sitting here waiting for a response to some job positions I applied for. Also I'm running out of money. I am also _really_ thirsty when it comes to technical challenge. So well I'm the last who can give you advice, but here are some things that worked for me:

\- Stop looking at Italy for jobs, instead look at Europe. I had an experience working for a company in San Francisco (ok, that's USA) and it was ages beyond the typical Italian experience. I'm pretty sure that Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona can offer great positions _and_ professional cultures. I'm actually checking europeremotely.com basically daily, but also StackOverflow jobs is pretty cool for that. I hope not being wrong about this.

\- Don't stop feeding your passion. If you love coding, keep doing it. Personally, I took everything which was outside my consolidated professional competence, and put it in a box called "game development". That's my secret corner where I experiment everything I love. Like well "modeling a mafia economic system through agent based simulation". There, I practice stuff I'll probably never use professionally: C#, LUA, C++, Golang, OpenGL.

\- When you evaluate new technologies which may become part of your daily work, don't stop at the tool, but look at the context around it. RUST is good for system development. Would you like a job in that area? I'm basically a PHP developer, but man how much I would like to escape from it. I'm currently learning Elixir, as it looks like the Ruby of the next decade. I bet there will be a _lot_ around it in web area.

\- I force myself to switch off the mac after 8 pm. Before, I could sit there all the day and a good part of the night. Doing something else, especially if it involves physical activity, often helps me seeing more clearly myself, my real interests, and above all works as an antidepressant.

After all of this, I'll fail and be forced to return to Italy anyway. In that case, I'll give up coding and learn doing pizzas.

<comment><USER22> Rust is good for web-development too. And name is Rust, not RUST.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> While other comments are great, I don't think the things you listed as new interests are really that diverse. As a security person I don't use C that often, but it's really useful to know well and gives you the knowledge of memory management that other languages will not. But if possible, I'd write any new user facing service in rust/go due to the safety they provide.

If those technologies excite you, great! Maybe you'd rather do security / be a generalist. Just make sure that's the path you choose rather than just looking for escape from boring enterprise software. If it's that, then see other answers and take a break.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, enterprise environments are in many cases are not early adopters. They may need to comply with different standards, policies or guidelines that make technology adoption slower.

There might be a division in your company dealing with newer technologies. You can try to switch there, or try to join a startup that is more akin to your technology preferences.

Regardless of what you prefer, I strongly suggest that you join a meetup (see meetup.com) that is related to your interests. You will be learning new things and connecting with people that share your interests. If you lack the time, hang out in IRC channels and join interesting conversations.

</comment><comment><USER25> Find something that seems challenging and maybe a little scary. Maybe that means getting away from development somehow and picking up a complementary skill. You've already seen a lot of aspects of development, but in the larger picture any development job is just one segment of how a business operates. As long as you feel like you're really changing and not just staying in your comfort zone you'll feel alive.

Edit: And try making it more than just a cursory whim. Write up a whole document of what you do and how you plan to do it, as if someone else had to approve it. That really tests your resolve up front.

</comment><comment><USER26> Work frustrations: find a better job, if you can. Not every software job in Italy has the problems you mention. Of course, its easy to say that, hard to find a really good job. I think honestly most people are frustrated one way or another with their job. Some are better than others though. A steady job though, in a way, is a good job, even if its a bad job.

Focus: its healthy to try lots of different things, there are lots of interesting areas. Maybe if you can get a better job, they will be using a particular new technology, and then that will motivate you to focus more on that.

</comment><comment><USER27> What do you want to do?

What is stopping you from doing it?

What can you do to remove the obstacles?

Can you work around the obstacles?

Note: Whenever I find myself in such situation these questions help figure out the next step. I posted them with hopes to help the OP.

</comment><comment><USER28> An italian expat colleague studying in Belgium explained to me that Italy is so beautiful that it has to have severe societal problems just to maintain homeostasis; otherwise everyone else would move there. If it's any consolation, there are people in colder, rainy countries, with worse food, and with cultures where next door neighbors don't even know each other's names, looking at Italy and wondering if they should accept some boring job there for the other benefits.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would suggest trying to contribute to various open-source projects e.g. in machine learning ("deep learning" is all the buzz). You could pick up a tool like Keras and see if that piques your interest. Similarly, you could try other areas such as security and see if you can contribute to some of the OSS such as Snort or OSSEC.

Personally I find trying to work on an OSS project the best way to "try- before-you-buy".

</comment><comment><USER30> A very vague comment but here goes: IIRC Italy is a pretty significant partner in ESA projects, maybe there are some interesting challenges in that space?

<comment><USER31> I was involved with a couple of ESA and EU FP7 projects. They're a joke. More paper than code is produced, and none of the code ends up being used.

<comment><USER32> Wouldn't surprise me if high waste ratio but let's give credit where due. The first, open-source CPU/SOC's were result of ESA:

[http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/Publications/LEON3%20SPARC%20P...](http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/Publications/LEON3%20SPARC%20Processor,%20The%20Past%20Present%20and%20Future.pdf)

Genode OS and some static analysis tools came up under FP7. I bet I'd find more with time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You sound unhappy, and if so, it won't disappear without concrete change. Change your job, change your department, change your neighborhood, change your girlfriend, change your friends, change your morning routine, you have to change something or nothing will change. I hope this is self-evident.

Since this is mostly work related, I'd say change your job. You want to find a place where you can work with psychological safety. Psychological safety is the condition where you feel safe to take risks, and be vulnerable to people you interact with. It's proven ([https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys- to-a-successful...](https://rework.withgoogle.com/blog/five-keys-to-a- successful-google-team/)) to be the most important factor in success and employee satisfaction. You cannot achieve this by yourself, it is dependent on the work culture of your workplace, and unless you have enough authority to change the work culture, you'll have to keep switching job until you find a place that has the culture you need to have psychological safety.

Trust me, at first glance, two jobs might appear similar, but work culture is a very subtle arrangement of tiny details that add up to be the most influential factor, and so, it's really hard to know without just trying the work for a few months. But also, each and every workplace will have a vastly different culture. So try other jobs, it's worth it.

Now about your lack of focus, that's normal. Try to work at two levels of attention. Off course, you want to have some fun, learn some new things, be curious. This is your intrinsic motivation, and do not kill it off by trying to tell yourself you need to focus and bore yourself to death to become more "professional". Don't try to have rewards take over it either, value a lesser paid job if it allows you more creativity and freedom for you to learn and try new things. This is the first level of attention, you enjoy the details, the tech for tech's sake. Now also try to think more about the second level of attention, imagine all the code you write is assembly language, and even though such details are interesting, it is mostly the case because it is also easy for you to work at that level. So spend some time learning about the higher level. What happens if I consider all algorithms to exist as tools for me to use, what problems can I become interested in solving at that layer. This is when you realize it takes you closer to business problems. How do you optimize the business needs, with the tools you have. How do you arrange multiple systems together to scale, etc. Unfortunately, most people's CS degree didn't go there, and so going to that level is hard, and most people find hard things less interesting. If you put some more thoughts into hard things though, they start to become easy, and suddenly, interesting again.

</comment><comment><USER34> My brother in law worked in IT in Italy. He ended up quitting and working for a US company. Makes a lot more money.

Italy is so far behind when it comes to the internet adoption, it's not funny. It's also a rather poor country, especially among the young generation, many young people live with their parents till 35-40. So you're much better off making (or working on) a project that faces some of the more developed countries (US, Australia, UK, Germany).</comment>


Antimatter Supernova -The Biggest Bomb in the Cosmos - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/03/antimatter-supernova-the-biggest-bomb-in-the-cosmos.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+(The+Daily+Galaxy:+News+from+Planet+Earth+%26+Beyond)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher <comment><USER2> I wish elementary school / junior high science text books read so excitingly.

<comment><USER3> The textbook writers need to hire the guys from the "Dude, What Would Happen" show, where chewing gum is "epic". It's an awful show, but my 9 year old likes it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not really an antimatter explosion, but rather that antimatter is involved: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair-instability_supernova>

</comment><comment><USER5> _> Biggest Bomb in the Cosmos_

Doesn't beat a gamma ray burst. We can see those clear from the other side of the universe.</comment>


Where can you afford to rent in California? - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-california-rental-affordable-map/ <comment><USER2> The most mind blowing thing in my mind is the absolute windfall that landlords have received over the last 10 years while the local communities get zero benefit from it because Prop 13 means property taxes stay flat. If the landlord is from out of state California doesn't even get a cut of their income/corporate taxes. All that insane rent money just gone while our infrastructure crumbles.

</comment><comment><USER3> San Antonio. I have a home there. The mortgage is 800 and I rent it or for 1500. There are several military bases around, so there are always people looking for temporary housing.

[https://us.teamblind.com/article/where-is-a-good-place-to- bu...](https://us.teamblind.com/article/where-is-a-good-place-to-buy-a- investment-home-jttecFDj)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why is this 30% of gross income? I thought the target was 33% of net.

<comment><USER5> >Why is this 30% of gross income? I thought the target was 33% of net.

33% of net is a fantasy in California. That will just barely get you a run down studio in a bad part of town on an engineer's salary.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't make the target wrong, it just makes CA's market absurd.</comment></comment></comment>