Are you suffering from burn-out? - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/Are+you+suffering+from+burn-out <comment><USER2> My personal test for preventing another burnout:

        Can I do this forever? (Y/N)

        If you answered N, stop making excuses, realize you deserve positive changes
        in your own life, and do it.

<comment><USER3> This. The keyword is: S-U-S-T-A-I-N-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I my early 20s, after getting out of the service, I worked as an assistant manager at a fast-foot restaurant in the evenings while I did college during the day. It was a full load of credits, and the food place I was working was very busy too, so it made for a long, hard slog.

One day I was talking to another of the assistant managers. I asked him about burn-out. Do you ever feel like you might be burning out?

"Not me. Can't happen"

"Why"

"Because I got burnt-out a year or two ago. I just pushed through it."

He was smiling. Sort of in a fatalistic way.

I'm not denying burn-out: I get it all the time. But I do think we over- emphasize it. As Jacques points out, if you live a life of leisure you have little danger of burning out. You also have little danger of living a life of challenging yourself to do new and complex things.

I think, as my friend pointed out so many years ago, that the problem is viewing burn-out as an yes-or-no situation. In fact, there are degrees of burn-out, and you can drift into burn-out land and drift back. What people really need to do, in my opinion, is learn their own rhythms. Personally, I like working hard for a few months then skating for a month or two. I find I get more done. I find when I am working hard, taking a ten minute break every hour helps. Sometimes I take all day on Saturday and watch movies. Or go for a hike.

So the trick isn't avoiding burn-out. The trick is learning your own rhythms so you maximize your productivity while you're stuck on this rock. Burnt-out? Back off, sure. But note your rhythm, and next time you won't burn out as much.

Life is a marathon, not a sprint. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't get your kick on.

EDIT: That didn't come out exactly as I wanted. It sounded as if I were just telling folks to buck up. But that's not what I meant to say. The point was self-reflection.

This gets back to learning yourself -- your rhythms and values. I find that if I immerse myself in something I am deeply committed to, burning out is a learning experience. But I immerse myself in something I hate -- working for some other guy, doing something because I am forced to? Burning out can really hurt and require lots of time to recover from.

That's why I don't do that.

Burning out early and for a long time -- indication that you are putting a lot of effort in something you resent.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still trying to figure out if the 'fast foot' restaurant was a mistake or a pun in relation to life being a marathon ;)

That's an excellent point though, and if life is a marathon then being burnt out is probably best compared to having to sit out a part of the race because you can't run any more.

I'm all for tackling all kinds of stuff, sometimes more than what you can naturally expect a person to do, as long as it doesn't leave any lasting marks (or at least none that are disfiguring) I say go for it. But keep an eye on the limits. When I was 23 the wife of a friend told me I'd be dead by 30 if I didn't slow down. So far so good. But I do understand now that there are limits to how much you can do without paying the price for it, and in some ways (in terms of missed opportunities and lost friends) the price was pretty high indeed. If I had slowed down just a bit somewhere in the early 2000's I'm fairly sure my life would have been quite different compared to what it is today.

You are spot on that it is all about learning yourself, your rhythms and values, that's exactly what it is. The machine called your body does not come with a list of 'do not exceed' parameters, and they're different for everybody, so only experience will tell you what you can and what you can't do.

I tend to live like a cat nowadays, either extremely lazy or hyper focussed on some project for a while, and then I take a break again. It's worked well in that I can still push myself to achieve something when I have to (and those lists really help), but at the same time I've learned that there are limits and that there is more in life than a keyboard and a screen.

<comment><USER4> _I'm still trying to figure out if the 'fast foot' restaurant was a mistake or a pun in relation to life being a marathon ;)_

Hey I was up until 2am coding and got back up at 8. When I get the coding Pon Farr on my mornings get a little hazy :)

This actually relates to your article. For the last month or so, I have been trying "banker's hours" coding -- 9-5 and taking time for everything else. It was great.

But something funny happened: I stopped making progress. Sure, I would make a little bit at a time, but nothing like what I used to do.

I finally figured it out a couple of days ago. For some reason, unless my body and mind is convinced I am serious about driving through to solve a problem, I get very little traction. But if it's 11pm and I'm getting ready to go to bed but realize I can code it better _and then go act on it_ , things work out. Unlike working for a BigCorp, working for yourself involves a gut check.

A lot of problems are like hills -- tough on the front side but easy on the back side. If you only go 1/4 way up the hill, you just slide back down overnight. But if you go balls-in and stay with it until you make it, suddenly it becomes easier.

Perhaps one must suffer for their art.

At least that's my experience, for what it's worth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What does this blog bring besides an abstract of what Wikipedia says ?

I mean, the timing is right: we just had some burnout discussions on the first page, but what does this blog post bring ?

<comment><AUTHOR> An abstract is a reduction, I tried to write this with some context so that it becomes easier to figure out if this is something that you might be flirting with or not, to make it live. As a person that has come pretty close to burning out (not quite ready to admit that I did) I figure I can sketch the situations a bit clearer than if you've never experienced this first hand.

I know we just had a burn-out discussion on the first page, that's exactly why I wrote this.

Please note that it is very well possible to be well on the road towards being burned out without realising it and that by showing what is and what is not burn-out related it might help a few people to realise what is going on.

Sometimes the 'normal' lack of inspiration or drive for a while gets mistakenly labelled as burn-out, sometimes you get the notice that person 'x' is no longer because they and those around them failed to notice the seriousness of the situation until it was _much_ too late.

If you feel that it is a waste of space and time to write this you're welcome to use the 'flag' option, I thought it was relevant and that's why I spent the time on putting it together.

<comment><USER5> The problem with your blog post is that it doesn't show your voice at all! I couldn't tell that you were pretty close to burning out nor did you mention anything that seemed to be part of your own experience.

You start the blog with some introduction, you put a link to Wikipedia and then you re-list the Wikipedia phases.

So, I'm not dismissing your time spent writing this and I'm pretty sure it helps, but there are probably much better ways to rewrite that blog post and make it better.

<comment><USER6> This is HN. Writing stuff here is like writing it in two-foot high letters on a prominent wall in NYC, except more public, more accountable, and far more permanent.

So, rather than beg for more, I thank jacquesm for being willing to share as much as he already has.

Yes, his sharing is mostly in the form of ambiguous subtext. That's okay. I can read hints and I enjoy ambiguity.

Here's a general piece of valuable advice: If you want people to tell you what their life lessons _really_ are, meet them offline, perhaps in a bar or coffeeshop. Keep all recording devices off. Promise not to blog what they tell you without permission, and/or until one or both of you are dead. Keep that promise.

Meta-advice: Make a habit of meeting people in coffeeshops. Though it has many advantages, the Google-enabled internet is a lousy medium for heart-to-heart honesty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote about my experience with burnout on a HN comment earlier: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1508844>

I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of burnout jacquesm mentions.

A compulsion to prove oneself:

This was my entire purpose in life. I worked for a consulting firm with an 'up or out' culture, and this really fed into my desire to prove myself. It's like getting addicted to leveling your character in an RPG, except in real life.

Working harder:

My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder', which of course fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when I saw how much work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I didn't think I could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said as much, and they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break it up into pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with me for the next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.

Neglecting one's own needs:

At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend off. He was a bit shocked since I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I remember still taking calls on my 'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not so that I could take a break, but instead so I could waste less time commuting or dealing with stuff like personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually rationalized this). My schedule was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and start working. Work until I was hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich and have a 'working' lunch. Around dinner time my wife would feed me, and I would usually work straight through dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of dinner talking about work. Then I would typically work until I fell asleep. I did this for months.

Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress):

Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and their attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally realize these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was almost entirely my own fault.

Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed):

It's hard to have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have a social life and I killed all hobbies.

Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent):

\-- See displacement of conflicts

Withdrawal, behavioural changes, substance abuse, depression:

I went from occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I became physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full month to get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people will learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't cry, but during this period of my life, I did.

Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very productive.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for sharing your experience. combined with the 'exact' same experience as <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545774>, I have been in this phase for couple of years. I am trying to fight it (have to due to peer pressure to make money). It has come to my losing interest in anything. I used to love programming for the sole reason of enjoyment. I haven't made any changes to my lifestyle (I probably cannot). Last 3 weeks, I have been in the 'isolation phase' My work place, it's a farce of work with people pretending to get work done with unnecessary complex sub systems. My family raised concerns (they understand my phase, my wife often tells me to pursue academics, as I seen not raised for the corporate world). It's only when three members in my family asked the same question, I started to wonder. I have a thousand things in my mind and a struggling pain of not accomplishing anything. I encounter this every single minute of the day. I am so stressed by the whole lagging behind the world that I feel I cannot learn anything new. I have finished the first chapters of how to prove it, foundations of computer science and algorithms book. Although I am interested, I find myself lacking the motivation to continue...And this adds up, days to weeks and then months. Then the cumulative depression rides me to hell. The thought that someone started learning math about 6 years ago when I too picked interest and the comparison istantly drives me for a whole day of depression. During those days, I don't absorb a thing of what I read. I shake my legs when I think and I think all day. I am supposed to working on getting xml schema related work done and I am here shaking my legs and thinking. I have frequented HN enough to know to that I should visit a doctor. But I know that it will not work for me. I don't have the comfort in talking to a 'stranger'.I have heard few here: try a physically involved job. I want to try out (but feel I cannot due to the money factor). I have to earn the bread. I fight with myself saying 'there is do or do not, there is no try', the difference between doing it and thinking about it. I have all the motivation inside, but I just cannot bring myself to do anything. I can never finish any task that I start. This has been going for years. My sanity is still in positive numbers, thanks to my wife.

could you share how did you come out of this phase (perhaps there is much more than just moving to a different job). Do you have any personal stories? I ask this because, as I understand this is not the nature of the job but an intrinsic battle that you won.

<comment><USER7> I don't know how to fix your situation, but I do know what helped me, so I'll tell you that and maybe something will be helpful to you.

The first challenge is to recognize your foe. You feel stressed and anxious at work, so it must be your job. You aren't achieving your goals as fast as you like, so it must be you aren't working hard enough, or you're not smart enough. You don't like anything you are doing, so there is something wrong with the world, or you don't have an adequate answer for meaning of life questions. For me the first step in getting better was realizing that the problem was exactly none of these.

The problem for me was balance. A lack of balance in my life was directly affecting my health which in turn was directly affecting my emotional and psychological well being, which made it pretty tough to deal with life, especially one as intense as I had created for myself. I got better by getting balance and getting my health back.

I quit smoking. I quit my job because it took up too much of my attention. I got a new job at a company with a culture that respects my life outside of work, but I gave myself a month between jobs to read scifi and work on fun projects. I started running. I started a diet to lose weight. I let myself play video games on occasion. I spent time on projects that were interesting and fun to me, not just projects that advanced my career. I went on dates with my wife again.

And then I just waited. It took a long time to get better. I ran my first 5K a week ago, about two years after I started). It took me two attempts to quit smoking, but it's two years of no cigarettes on the 29th. It took two years to lose the 40 pounds I put on. I emerged from my mental funk after about a year of this treatment. Then I almost did it to myself again, but this time I knew what was happening and stopped myself before much damage was done. I'm sure other people could have knocked out these goals faster than I did, but that was not the point. The point was to learn how to have balance in my life.

And now that I have something resembling balance I have my health back and my problems, (at least what I thought were my problems), seem to have melted away. I'm less stressed at work, I'm less concerned about achieving career milestones and I'm far more confident about my own abilities. I still have meaning of life questions I'd like to dig into, but they seem less pressing, less looming and gloomy, and more inviting. I still have stress, I still compare myself to others, and I still work too much. But what I experience of stress and anxiety these days is just a shadow of what experienced back then.

And there you have it. The foe I was looking for was me the entire time. But the solution wasn't to beat myself up or too work harder or be more ruthless. Instead I needed to learn how to find balance.

<comment><USER8> A sincere thank you!

I could relate the 'balance' aspect to (unburnt) people I see (both I whom look upto and them, who are seemingly 'happy' in doing the chores of the day). I am by code/articles/hn all of my waking hour. During work hours and when I go back. I even have my lunch and dinner by my laptop. I read articles or watch (from the huge list of google tech videos, that I have to finish).

What I gathered from earlier posts here is to 1) not compare with anyone. If anything learn and use yourself as a benchmark to improve upon. 2) don't worry about the results. 3) don't fear the failure. 4) baby steps (do anything that is answerable to big task, anything.) and from you : 5) balance.

I look forward to doing a 'Tell HN' after I overcome this struggle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, I am suffering from burn-out. And I can tell you, it •is• suffering. You wouldn't want it happening to you.

It started to manifest itself in 2002. I worked too much, had too much responsibility. I went into a decline and 2005 it all went awry because of change in circumstances I didn't have the resources to cope with. I was wise enough to quit my job, but it was too late. Anything I tried after that wouldn't succeed.

It's a condition where it's hard to reflect on yourself. To see your personal condition. And accepting it, even less. I couldn't.

One day I stumbled upon a stress test and took it. Bang! Almost full score. Then I took notice of myself, started analyzing my condition, and realized, "I'm a burn-out. God dammit".

That was 2007. I've been laying low, really low, since then. Living off my pension. Recently I realized I was better off again. I could read book again. I even felt an urge to start some coding again. I took a stress test again. Much lower score, great!. But right there was also a test for depression ... I took it. Bang! Almost full score. "Now I'm _depressed_. God dammit".

That was shocking. But I have this strange feeling, that depression is much easier to deal with. I'm growing in my capabilities. I can learn again. I believe I'll become reasonably functioning again. Only time will tell. And time it will take. I can wait. I want my life back.

I could give you details quite similar to SMrF's comment. Read that, and take care.

<comment><USER7> Please do make sure you are getting help.

My personal path to recovery involved a complete redo of my entire life. I quit my job, moved to a new city. I took an entire month off and did nothing but stuff that was fun, (mainly programming :-) My new job is a boring corporate coder type job that requires very little of my attention. I also started dieting, quit smoking and took up running.

You can get better! It just takes time. Please be patient with yourself.

Believe it or not, even after everything that happened to me, I very nearly did it again! I began spending all of my spare time working on my side project, (my goal here is to eventually own my own company/startup). But at least this time when I started getting anxiety I realized, "wait a minute, I think I know why this is happening..." :-)

<comment><USER9> Thank you. I'm reasonably confident in my progress. The hardest part is realising, that you may never be able do again, what you once did. I think I'm there now.

<comment><USER7> I look at it as a battle scar, or a really cool limp or something. I've been there, done that, and now I know my own limits better than almost anyone else. To me it's an advantage. I also admit to worrying I wouldn't be able to accomplish what I have in the past, but you know what? I simply don't want to ever, ever do that again...so what did I lose exactly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When I was in college I took an internship at a Call Center building reporting software and some websites. I went in with a positive attitude and wanted to help as much as I could and prove myself and get a full time position, all that jazz.

They ended up taking advantage of me. Even though I was a Part-Time worker they would try to give me Full-Time work. In the end I was leading projects still as a part-time employee. I had endured many late nights and one full on 24 hour marathon coding session to prepare for a big telethon (American Idol - IdolAid). I frequently found myself wishing I could just walk out, but I was afraid of the effect it would have on my career. I developed trouble sleeping at night. I would stay up all night laying in bed because my head was still racing. Even though my body was exhausted, I couldn't fall asleep. I still have this problem now and then till this day.

When I finally got my degree I decided to leave that place and it was the best decision I ever made. Even though I didn't have a job lined up yet I was not nearly as stressed. Everything turned out fine for me, though I still feel the effects sometimes. I often joke that it was like Frodo in LOTR, once I had borne the ring (stress) for so long I could never be the same.

</comment><comment><USER11> While a lot of what's written in that article sounds fearfully familiar, I think he's taking it too far, by referring only to the most extreme forms of burn-out. Burn-out can be temporary and mild, and I suspect this defines most of the cases. For example, a few weeks of low productivity (not 0!) with a recovery within a month or so.

<comment><USER12> Yeah. This sort of burn-out is definitely the extreme, but it's also the rarest. I think there's a far more common level of burn-out (perhaps "brown- out") which misses a few of the more serious symptoms and yet seriously impacts ongoing productivity and motivation.

The danger of defining burn-out as only this extreme is that there are a lot of people with milder though serious cases who may not appreciate that it's a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm at -- hopefully -- the tail end of a long and deep burnout. I can summarize the experience as doing what other people wanted against / at the expense of my own wishes. Life always involves a certain amount of this, but in my case it came to dominate and to define my life.

Doing such things should be held to the level where they merely and as optimally as possible enable your own wishes. Not that this does NOT preclude altruism. I practice altruism and take great pleasure from it. But then, it can thusly be seen as one of my wishes -- when I approach it on my terms.

For a long time, work and neighbors wanted me to meet their needs. But they paid little or no attention to mine. Very one way, and very draining. Don't mistake profession of mutual interest by another party for actual interest on their part. (Actions speak louder than words.) If you continue to be rather underwhelmed at what they offer in return, it's a good sign that your interests do not align. You are at the edge of the tar pit of burnout; turn around, before you turn into one of those fossils that will one day be displayed in a museum. Very undignified. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is it possible to be burnt out for extended periods? (2yrs+)

<comment><AUTHOR> Without any doubt, in fact, that's probably a good sign that you need some external help (friends, family, maybe professionals) to guide you back on to the road to recovery.

I've spent 3 full years doing nothing but manual work (metalworking, building a house and a windmill) because I was literally at low tide. Still not sure if it actually was 'burn-out' (no sign of depression afaik) but other people I know in my environment that structurally overworked themselves have taken similar measures.

It's tricky because it is easy to confuse an extended case of 'programmers block' with being burnt-out, I think the key difference is that a person that is burned out will not be easily able to get back in to the same profession that they burned out in.

<comment><USER15> Did working manual labor help you figure things out? I am seriously considering working a job such as the one you described part time to pay the bills after school while I try to build a freelancing business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, I think it kept - and keeps - me sane. Physical stuff is great in that it keeps your body in shape and at the end of a day you can literally touch the result, you can see it, it is solid. Virtual work is much less satisfying in that sense, you could be programming the stars from heaven but if it is business logic internal to some application you'll be happy if some maintenance programmer sees it 10 years down the line.

I think that's a big part of what drives the open source movement, programmers getting appreciation from other programmers about their work in a way that 'closed source' will never give and money can't provide.

The last couple of weeks I spent on two tracks, the one is building a small RV (just drove it to the other side of Europe, so I guess that worked out well :)), and a web project that I hope to launch sometime later this year.

When I'm tired of the one kind of work, I switch to the other, it seems to work better that way.

<comment><USER16> I think one of the biggest benefits of physical work is that you can more easily turn it completely off.

You have to be in your garage to be woodworking for example. You can't be on the couch with your wife pretending to watch a movie with her.

Perhaps we can also see the quality of work more easily from physical work too.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's so true. Especially for debugging, that's something I can't ever fully quit until it is done and the bug is squashed. I might as well stay awake until a bug is taken care of once I know about it because I'll just keep on fretting about it and mentally reviewing the code trying to figure out what is going wrong.

That sort of mental occupation does not happen with physical work at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think burnout can be a serious issue, as witnessed throughout many of these comments. I seem to be a successful burnout about once every week. I go to sleep early, take a deep breath and start the cycle over again.

I am 20 years old, and I feel that I have a lot of catching up to do. This may be viewed as an insecurity, but it is an extremely motivating part of my life.

No matter how much of these I read, it is not going to slow me down. From an outside perspective it is unhealthy, yet there is no way that I can withdraw from this cycle until its the right time.

The right time will come for everyone. Just as it did for those telling there stories.

Thanks. HN is the shit.

</comment><comment><USER18> What is the effect of increased exercise on the burned out? I've started getting 20-30 minutes of additional almost daily exercise by bicycling for transportation, 10-15 minutes and 2.5 miles each way. I wouldn't say that I am a lot happier or that I'm sleeping earlier, but my legs are tired all the time and I derive some intellectual satisfaction from the perceived increase in my health. The psychological reality has not quite lived up to the hype.

</comment><comment><USER19> Uhh... jacquesm is following me around and writing about my life. This article is something I really needed to read. Thanks for writing Jacques!

</comment><comment><USER7> I wrote about my experience with burnout on a HN comment earlier: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1508844>

I really, really, really want people to avoid what I went through, so it thought I'd share some gory details. I clearly went through every phase of burnout jacquesm mentions.

A compulsion to prove oneself: This was my entire purpose in life. I worked for a consulting firm with an 'up or out' culture, and this really fed into my desire to prove myself. It's like getting addicted to leveling your character in an RPG, except in real life.

Working harder: My only mechanism for coping with stress was to 'work harder', which of course fed right back into this vicious cycle. There was a point when I saw how much work was ahead of me on my project, and it was distressing. I didn't think I could keep up the pace. I spoke to someone close to me and said as much, and they said sometimes this is what is required in a job; just break it up into pieces and bulldoze through it. That's the advice that stuck with me for the next year. That advice fed into all of my personality flaws.

Neglecting one's own needs: At one point I told my boss I needed a weekend off. He was a bit shocked since I hadn't had a weekend off in months. I remember still taking calls on my 'weekend off'. I worked from home, but not so that I could take a break, but instead so I could waste less time commuting or dealing with stuff like personal hygiene, (I'm not joking, I actually rationalized this). My schedule was wakeup, grab breakfast and laptop and start working. Work until I was hungry, then stop to make myself a sandwich and have a 'working' lunch. Around dinner time my wife would feed me, and I would usually work straight through dinner, if I didn't I would spend most of dinner talking about work. Then I would typically work until I fell asleep. I did this for months.

Displacement of conflicts (the person does not realize the root cause of the distress) Near the end I fabricated paranoid stories about my coworkers and their attempts to make me fail. It took me a year of recovery to finally realize these stories were false and my failure and eventual collapse was almost entirely my own fault.

Revision of values (friends or hobbies are completely dismissed) It's hard to have friends when you are working 80 hours a week. I didn't have a social life and I killed all hobbies.

Denial of emerging problems (cynicism and aggression become apparent) \-- See displacement of conflicts

Withdrawal, behavioural changes, substance abuse, depression I went from occasional smoker to smoking a pack a day. I gained 40 pounds. I became physically ill for weeks at a time, (a simple cough took me a full month to get over). And..(and this is humiliating, but I'm hoping other people will learn from my mistakes), I cried myself to sleep most nights. I don't cry, but during this period of my life, I did.

Nothing is this important. It takes years to recover. If you are still convinced that you need to 'optimize your productivity' then know that my output dropped to zero and stayed there for a long time. That is not very productive.

</comment><comment><USER20> Modern technology makes it so much easier to flirt with burnout without even realizing it. The laptop is always open on the kitchen table. The cell is never out of reach. There's no conscious thought to the work day or work week having a beginning and an end. It's amazing how easily all of this just becomes "normal."

<comment><USER21> I fully agree with this one. By simply switching my blackberry to not buzz me when emails came in felt like a vacation. I realized at that point that I was close to burn-out.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Clutch.io helps you build iOS apps fast and update them instantly - <AUTHOR> https://clutch.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> We originally launched an app called "Can'tWait!" and we ended up having a really hard time iterating fast on the product after it was launched. Little- by-little over the course of several months, we ended up building all of this syncing and hybrid-integration stuff to help us iterate faster. At some point we realized we had gotten so much faster with these tools, that we had to make them available to everyone. Clutch.io is our MVP for bringing those tools to the world.

<comment><USER4> Eric, who did the video on the homepage? Did you guys do it yourselves, or farm it out? What tool(s) were used? I have a project that needs a video with that kind of look, and would love some pointers! Thnx

<comment><USER5> Hey there, we did all the videos ourselves. We created most of the graphics in Photoshop and animated them in After Effects, we recorded the voiceover in Audacity and did the final audio with music in garageband. Oh and we purchased the audio loop from audiojungle.com. Cheap but they have some decent stuff, you just have to find it ;) Hope that helps!

<comment><USER6> > _showing you the most imPPPortant things_ (~00:52)

You really should use an anti-pop filter; you can make one yourself with a pair of stockings and a wire hanger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really cool stuff and I'm not trying to sound negative, but I can't help but think that if you guys get successful with this product (which I hope you will) one of your customers will sooner or later use it to work around the App Store submission process in order to violate the rules in a very visible manner (say for instance, to push porn to the App Store) and in response Apple will decide to reject every app based on your tool in the future. Do you think this is a possible course of events? Are you prepared for it somehow?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a valid point, and one we've actually thought about a decent amount. If we find anyone doing this, we will take steps on our end to make sure they stop. In the end, it's Apple's decision whether to ban a developer or not, no matter which tools or frameworks they use. A developer would not be wise to do this because they risk being banned from us as well as being banned from Apple.

<comment><USER8> Oh no, the risk is much, much greater for you if you're planning on creating any more AStore apps using the developer id in this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Every developer submits to the app store using their own id, not ours.

<comment><USER9> Flurry pissed Steve Jobs off _, and he banned all analytics tools from the App Store for quite a long time (they could only be used for advertising purposes).

_ SJ's own words, at D8 conference: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/steve- jobs-at-d8-conferen...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs- at-d8-conference/id377953458)

They also banned interpreted codes (including Lua), but later relaxed this restriction: [http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/11/apple_relaxes_...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/06/11/apple_relaxes_ios_sdk_to_allow_lua_but_block_flash.html)

If you (or one of your customers) pisses them off, they'll ban all of you. You should be very careful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it's an interesting product, but one of the biggest arguments _for_ web technologies on native apps is reducing the cross platform burden. Your example uses Parse as the data backend - I think Parse would be far less well received if it only supported iOS. I wonder if you're considering supporting additional platforms?

"Update your apps without pushing updates to the store" is a good problem to solve...but if you're going to extrapolate your native logic and encapsulate it in JavaScript I'd hope the next step might be an Android library to complement the iOS one.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are planning an Android release. You will be able to re-use most or all of your web portions, which we're _really_ excited about. Our bet is that today this will help some iOS developers enough to use, and when we release Android it will bring that many more developers into the fold.

<comment><USER11> Honestly, it's not useful to me until it's cross-platform, and your one "killer feature" that other enhanced JavaScript wrappers don't have is explicitly against Apple's developer TOS.

I would worry about releasing this feature publicly at all, since it might jeopardize your existing apps when Apple realizes you're able to push changes to code. They used to ban all scripting languages in large part because they were worried about developers pushing new code to apps; after a lot of pressure from various directions, they relaxed the scripting language restriction, but it's still quite explicitly against the developer agreement to ever download new code to an app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The business model seems a little odd; I assume by "monthly users", you mean end users? And the only plan that supports unlimited users is custom-priced? I'm loving the platform as a concept, but to have a cap on the total number of users feels strange and scary.

What happens if I go over this cap? Do users who stop using the app still count against the total? What about a single user with 2+ devices?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, "monthly users" means end users. However, like you pointed out, we can't differentiate between a user and a device. Maybe our marketing should say "monthly active devices." In any case, this is good feedback for us to hear, because it could indicate that our pricing still needs work. Thanks!

EDIT: Realized I forgot to answer your second question. If you go over your cap, users will still be able to use the app 100% uninterrupted--you just won't be able to push out any updates to those users.

<comment><USER13> Ya, that part of the pricing page scared me too. I think adding a plan for unlimited users that had a set price would assuage many people's fears.

<comment><USER14> They have to first find out what pushing updates actually costs them in hardware and traffic costs (and perhaps even support costs). I'm sure they will add a fixed-price unlimited plan when they have found out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Your pricing is seriously flawed IMHO. I was really interested in the concept of Clutch.io because we struggle with iteration speed on the iOS platform. But we've got users in the millions and it's scary what "custom" is going to charge. In the iOS/Android world, there are lots of apps with millions of users and I don't think you're pricing model reflects that. And it's not if you have millions of users that your app is raking it in either. It might be a free app and making nominal ad money, which a significant portion seems it would go to pay for Clutch.io.

<comment><AUTHOR> This really was our first stab at it--I'd love to talk more with you about this. You can probably change our mind about the direction we've gone with the pricing. Please e-mail me ericflo at clutch dot io.

<comment><USER15> I'm also confused as to what exactly clutch.io does. Are you hosting files for us? Or just providing a sdk?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's both an SDK and a web service. Clutch gives you some JavaScript primitives and iOS code to help integrate some HTML-based content areas into your app in a very seamless way. Whenever a user opens your app, Clutch checks for (and downloads asynchronously) any new web data you've pushed to our web service, which is ready to be shown the next time the user opens your app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. It hardly seems like there's been enough time between Convore and this for this to look as solid as it does. Grats ericflo and company.

Any ideas on an approximate time table for when the Android version might be expected? (ballpark is fine, months vs years is the kind of answer I'm hoping to find.)

Offtopic, I feel like I should start a poll for who says "sue dough" vs "sue doo". It struck me as funny when I heard it in the video backwards from how I say it.

<comment><USER17> I've always tried to say "sue doo" to be etymologically correct, but it always seems to come out rhyming with pseudo. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Solid landing page and probably a neat service, but my good impression of your company deteriorated when I saw an image scroll by with "go fuck yourself" at 0:38 in your demo video. I'm all for lowbrow net humor, but its place is not within an otherwise professional looking site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! That video is in the process of being updated, and that's one of the things that's being changed. I'll admit that I forgot about that detail, which was careless before showing HN :(

<comment><USER19> Then again, people could stand to relax a bit. I thought it was kinda funny.

<comment><USER20> It was comically out of place, more than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The pricing seems funny. The Gold plan is more than twice the price of the Silver plan but you get only twice the product. Similar but worse when going from gold to platinum.

<comment><USER22> Gold has got unlimited apps compared to 2 apps for silver. But yeah agreed the platinum pricing seems broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Awesome idea, I've wanted something like this for iOS/Android for a long time. It would be nice to have a self hosted version, with a one off fee.

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks really good!

1)really solid landing page! *really got me 2)love the "hybrid chart" (not being a techy, I got it) 3)I agree with some of the comments that I wasnt clear "where this fits", "Are you hosting files for us? Or just providing a sdk?" - but i sorta get it now. 4)It would be cool if I can build an APP entirely with Clutch.IO - though, I get it that Clutch.io isnt about that.

Anyway. Thank you for doing such a great job with the site, et al!

</comment><comment><USER25> It sounds like it lets you build native apps with updatable HTML/JavaScript extensions.

So in the spectrum of native <-> web-app, this is closer to native, like Titanium (but more so?) and PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova) is closer to the web-app side.

It differs from the others in that it provides the dynamic update capability and is intended to be embedded as a part of a native application, rather than being the full application.

</comment><comment><USER26> You folks may want to all-out forward clutchio.com to clutch.io. I curiously tried it out, and some may find Chrome's security alert scary.

</comment><comment><USER27> Eric, firstly I love your site, very nice landing page.

I'm curious on why a developer would want to pay for your solution to what seems like a problem that most can easily solve themselves with very little investment ? (Dynamic updates, pre-caching HTML/JS and presenting it locally for rendering).

The second component you offer on first blush is the JS wrapper / bridge to the native UI widgets which although might be nice to have most seasoned developers may find it a hard sell.

Cross platform would be compelling although the concern there being that the JS bridge is (obviously) iOS centric and may be difficult on other platforms ( Android / Blackberry / win 7 ).

Like I said, looks great I'm just curious what the value add would really be for a high volume application where cost to develop would be less than the pricing you offer (which is also of course recurring).

<comment><AUTHOR> First, thanks for the compliment!

However about the idea that people can easily build this themselves, I'm not quite convinced. I think it's possible to build 70% of the solution in a short amount of time, but that last 30% is so very fiddly (speaking from experience here.) Some of the big apps have built their own versions of this, and have gotten a piece of it wrong or have learned hard lessons along the way. It's things like race conditions when syncing, reducing bandwidth by downloading intelligently, etc.

The other thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The plan is to solve these same problems on Android, and then to include a comprehensive A/B testing suite, to build drop-in frontend components on top of this platform, and other cool stuff.

<comment><USER28> I like it. Looks slick and as a native iOs dev I'd strongly consider it when I want to work with more complex web views for rapid iteration.

A lot of PhoneGap/Web View apps are second rate on the UI front, so if you can help developers improve that experience without a lot of work I'd say you're onto a winner.

I also think you're on the right track with your A/B testing plans - <USER2> this from scratch can be a huge chunk of work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Neat idea. Pricing: The more end user seats you buy, the more expensive they are? Doesn't seem right.

</comment><comment><USER30> Cool! Another way to build crappy iPhone apps with HTML!

App Store rules exist for a reason. There is better ways to make them reduce the approval time by not creating workarounds to build your app with limited HTML.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice.

I don't agree really on your definiton or usage of "hybrid". For me, your are just a different form of hybrid. Let me explain: With Phonegap the "shell" or container is native, the rest is webview. So this is "hybrid".

If I got your approach right your container includes a bigger bit of native logic and you sparkle some smaller html webviews through the apps. So Phonegap apps tend to be "little container, much webview" while yours are more "much container and app, little webview". Correct?

But this is a detail, I still like the concept and page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I wish there were a better word. We actually struggle with this because when we initially explain the concept, people tend to gravitate towards thinking of it like PhoneGap. So, I wish a more descriptive word existed for what we've built, but I think "hybrid" is what we're stuck with-- at least for a while.

<comment><USER32> Can you elaborate some more on how clutch differs from phonegap. Or why I'd choose clutch instead of phonegap.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are two main differences: syncing of code, and philosophy.

The main tangible difference is that we enable you to push out incremental updates to your app, immediately. And to do so in a way that your app feels completely native. PhoneGap does not offer this. The only way to do it with PhoneGap is to actually point their UIWebView instance at a URL on the live internet, which makes your app slow. That, or you'll have to build a lot of complicated syncing and caching and updating stuff, which is what we've built.

The second difference is more philosophical. That is, for most apps, we don't believe that you should attempt to write a whole app inside a web view. It just leads to apps that don't feel native. So our approach, and the one that Clutch has been tuned for, is where you build most of your app using native tools. Then, you use Clutch to build out certain display areas using web tech.

I hope that answers your question.

<comment><USER33> Interesting. Excuse me for my ignorance here (I haven't fully looked at your product), but how do you push app updates? Is it like Heroku/git? Or do I have to "submit" it to you? Can you schedule when the update goes live?

<comment> johnx123-up I make a rough guess about the technology... It's like HTML5 based webapp relying on local storage. You change the remote HTML and clean the local storage for the update.

Like I mentioned in another thread, similar "push updates" mechanism have already been banned by Apple. (I don't know, why am I downvoted for informing HN users).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the imgs source html files there is always this call to <http://127.0.0.1:41676/target/target-script-min.js#anonymous> (see [https://github.com/boilerplate/imgs/blob/master/clutchimgs/a...](https://github.com/boilerplate/imgs/blob/master/clutchimgs/about/index.html)) If I am correct this is weinre. Is this normally a part of production apps of clutch.io?

</comment><comment><USER31> You mention the facebook app directly on the line between hybrid and multi- platform (<https://clutch.io/clutch-hybrid/>). Do you know an examination or break-down of the facebook mobile app (or any of the others you mention in the graph) where I can read about how these apps really do it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not aware of any central place where you can go to learn more about all of the apps. But in the case of Facebook you can find out more how they do it here:

* Go to <https://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/>

* Go to the f8 | Developer tab

* Click "Building Great Social Apps"

* Hit "previous segments"

* Go the end, "F8 inside HTML5 development at Facebook"

<comment><USER34> direct link: [http://www.livestream.com/f8socialapps/video?clipId=pla_e174...](http://www.livestream.com/f8socialapps/video?clipId=pla_e174c0e5-4d1d-4ca1-a4af-23edb3b9e616)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> First, congratulations; this looks very impressive. Just signed up.

Second, how does this compare to Mulberry: <http://mulberry.toura.com/>? I used Mulberry once at a hackathon and was able to create a decent demo app in a few hours using only web development tools and techniques.

Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER36> Pushing updates is slow for a reason - it's because Apple wants to approve everything.

I don't mean to sound negative but I see two scenarios, non of which is great:

1\. You become a huge success and Apple is unhappy about people avoiding their scrutiny.

2\. Apple doesn't mind you because you have limited traction.

Having said that, I love the way you implemented it. Very clever!

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER37> Looks quite nifty but the app costs are really high! For a decent iPhone app your now looking at launching at free and you want to be in the millions of MAU and 100,000's of DAU to be a serious contender. This would make the app a very expensive service to base your service on?

</comment><comment><USER38> Beautiful site, and neat idea, but I feel like we're all ignoring the elephant in the room here. Developers absolutely cannot use this service to deploy apps to the App Store. Right in the published review guidelines:

"2.7 Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected"

This clearly violates that!

</comment><comment><USER39> Clutch.io would be even better if they offered the ability to easily do A/B testing.

<comment><USER5> A/B testing is def on our roadmap

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is f-ing awesome, nice work. How long have you been working on it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's hard to say how long we've been working on it because it evolved out of our last project. We split it out towards the end of last year and we've been in private beta for a few months working out the kinks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> If we use your service do you have any terms for selling an app on the store? Do we have to give you a % or can we just freely do what we wish/if we pay your service?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a fixed monthly rate, so you're free to sell apps and not owe us a percentage, or anything like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I just tried your tutorial. It was a smooth ride. Everything worked great: creating the initial app, adding a screen and pushing updates.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'm new to iOS development, can you briefly explain how your solution differentiates from the following:

Sencha Touch, Appcelerator Titanium and Phonegap

Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> I just wrote up a few thoughts about this here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3800522>

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Didn't Apple have some rules preventing apps from downloading code from the Internet?

<comment><USER45> They allow data to be downloaded, and they allow web content (HTML + JavaScript) to be downloaded. Hence, it's possible to use a combination of native-interfaced templating and sandboxed JavaScript (i.e. "put native button with title n here and attach it to this JS action") to make native-feeling downloaded apps.

Presumably these restrictions are designed so that the only code which hasn't been through their static analysis tool is sandboxed, and they trust their JS sandbox to keep the JS where it belongs. Just like most of the Apple restrictions, it's pretty arbitrary in practice, because their "prevent private API usage" static analyzer is not very good (Camera+ was able to use restricted APIs simply by invoking a selector constructed via interpolation).

<comment><USER46> Apple's static analyzer will catch you if you import/include private framework headers, but it can't stop you from sending messages to private framework objects that are sitting around at runtime because it's a dynamically typed language, which means it resolves method calls at runtime, and static analysis can't touch runtime[1].

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otCpCn0l4Wo#t=21s>

1\. Otherwise, it would be dynamic analysis.

<comment><USER45> You can easily detect most trivial methods of performing direct message sends to private framework objects via static analysis - both the name of the class and the message are used as string data. You can even find a naive message send using strings and grep, regardless of the use or non-use of a header!

The use of the header is irrelevant - <USER3>

        [NSClassFromString(@"WebView") _enableRemoteInspector];

is going to show up the same way in a static analysis tool regardless of whether I made a WebView.h header defining +(void) enableRemoteInspector; or not - it compiles to the exact same thing!

You have to be at least one level more clever to defeat Apple's static analysis tool - it looks at the values of the objc_msgSend's _message_ only. Hence, using methodForSelector defeats it - the static analyzer sees a "methodForSelector" message (which isn't blacklisted), ignores the parameters, and then sees a straight function call (also not blacklisted).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> So does this work for iPad or universal apps? If so, what needs to be changed?

</comment><comment><USER47> Ironically, the video cannot be played on a stock iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER48> IMHO, whole selling point of app store was manual, rigid review framework for each app. Now, even if Apple will not ban all apps built on top of clutch.io, quality of apps in store degrade for sure.

Strict apps review process is a feature, not a bug (i am actually "apple hater", but I see why app store successful)

<comment><USER49> > IMHO, whole selling point of app store was manual, rigid review framework > for each app.

With half a million apps in the store, I wouldn't count on much more than a cursory review.

From my reading of the Clutch.io home page, this is exactly how the current version of the Facebook app works. It changes functionality quite significantly without actual app updates.</comment></comment>


Stop plagiarism in 3 easy steps - <AUTHOR> http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2008/10/stop-plagiarism-in-3-easy-steps.htm

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I suspect that your targets will just be more careful with their copy pasting instead of falling back on actual content production. It still easier to check a page for image links than actually write something. However, this doubtlessly has some "personal satisfaction" value :)</comment>


A sketch of string unescaping on GPGPU - <AUTHOR> https://raphlinus.github.io/personal/2018/04/25/gpu-unescaping.html <comment><USER2> It's late and I may not be thinking clearly or be well informed enough but...

I wonder if this type of thing - implementing algorithms on GPUS that have been the bread and butter of CPUs for generations (parsing regular languages?) - begets a new style of using computer hardware. The sketch shows several clever techniques to get a modest performance gain on the GPU, but what happens when the GPU hardware keeps getting better and the CPU stagnates?

I keep thinking back to that Feynman lecture of computers using the analogy of an office filing system. There the final step was a filing clerk so dumb he could only add one to things but he could do it so fast that he was still better than the filing clerk that could reason out all the operations. Can we extend that analogy to have 8 filing clerks all adding one to different wrong indexes and then choosing the right one in the end? (I'll be honest, my understanding of how GPUs work is rudimentary).

Perhaps the gains we get from doing the wrong things in parallel actually start to outweigh CPUs doing the right things in sequence (ex branch mispredictions).

EDIT: My ramblings aside, kudos to the author for a thought provoking piece.

<comment><USER3> Some GPU based methods are faster when they rely on raw parallel processing power, even if it caused a huge amount of work to be discarded. These chips are well suited for regular, embarassingly parallel, dumb work. This starts to drop sharply with increasing branching and the amount of unordered memory accesses, although GPUs get better and better at that. So it can be better right now to do the dumb thing instead of the smart thing.

I think that sorting on the GPU is a good example: a parallel quicksort is hard to implement and maps badly to GPU threads. A bitonic sort algorithm is likely to be much faster, although it is a very dumb algorithm.

<comment><USER4> In general, all algorithms seem to get pushed more and more towards "optimize for memory access" than actually optimizing for computations. GPUs are no exception.

Personally, I wonder more what effect widespread HBM (with speeds realistically expressed in TB/s for future iterations) will have on the algorithms we design.

<comment><USER3> Well, GPUs expose the memory hierarchy to the programmer and have atrocious latency when hitting global memory with unordered memory access patterns. Your only chance to make a GPU outperform a CPU is to design your algorithm completely around memory usage. The difference between doing it right and wrong can be several orders of magnitude.

Even CPUs show huge performance gains when all the algorithm's data fits in the cache. This can easily be a factor 10 or more when you get it right.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Light-induced propulsion of graphene-on-grid sails in microgravity - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576520301582?via%3Dihub <comment><USER2> >Light sailing is the only existing in-space propulsion technology that could allow us to visit other star systems in a human lifespan.

as this article shows the light sailing requires unobtanium to make the real light sail. Whereis nuclear explosion propulsion - project Orion - can me made with existing materials. Of course bringing into orbit the required several millions tons of cargo to build the ship from, majority of it being the tens of thousands of nukes, seems to be an endeavor behind our current capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER3> This research pertains only to the question of how we propel an object in a way that enables interstellar travel with a duration of fewer than ~100 years.

There's a whole other question, which must be answered separately, about how to keep that object from being destroyed during its travels.

The effectively 2D graphene material might be the right material from a propulsion perspective, but it may be totally unsuitable in terms of making sure the object gets to another star system in one piece.

<comment><USER4> The most interesting piece of the link isn't the sail application, it's the theoretical implication. More thrust was experienced than expected from photon pressure alone. A lot more.

<comment><USER5> How why? New physics?

<comment><USER4> All good questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The measured thrust is one order of magnitude larger than the theoretical > calculations for radiation pressure alone.

Nice!

</comment><comment><USER7> >> 2D sails pave the way for reaching other star systems in a human lifespan.

Pave the way? Explain to me how the laser is going to work? There are some fundimental size/optics restrictions here that keep the sail very much a seconday concern in terms of interstellar travel.

<comment><USER8> What are the size/optics restrictions?

<comment><USER7> You have to focus the outgoing light, the laser energy, just as a telescope does inbound light. To hit a small target (say a 1x1km light sail with a 4x4km beam) at interstellar ranges would require laser emitting equipment many kilometers in size repeated across multiple locations.

How large of a telescope is needed to focus the image of a 4km feature on Pluto? Then multiply that by a few orders of magnitude. Then plug in a laser powerful enough to vaporize a small town. Those are the real problems, not the mass of the sail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love seeing when science fiction starts to turn into reality!</comment>


"We think you'd also like..." and the Math of Suggestion – Part 1 (from Directed Edge) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gruenderszene.de/it/we-think-youd-also-like-and-the-math-of-suggestion-–-teil-1/

<comment><USER2> Ilya Grigorik wrote a great article on recommendation systems (with code in Ruby):

[http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation- system-i...](http://www.igvita.com/2007/01/15/svd-recommendation-system-in- ruby/)

<comment><USER3> much better than the submitted article, thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> For our own blog, which tends to be more tech-heavy, I'm open to writing on some topics that people have specific interest in in the recommendations world, so if there's stuff you're curious about I'm all ears. This article was naturally geared more towards the audience of the place publishing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's unfortunately split up into two parts due to requirements on the blog that published it (literally "Founder Scene"), but this hits on some of the basics of collaborative filtering. The next part gets into item-based collaborative filtering and a little on graph-based stuff. I'll post the second part here when it comes around.

The article is definitely targeted at being a quick introduction to how recommendations work rather than being a how-to. Most Gründerszene's subscribers aren't developers so it's an attempt to present the stuff in a digestible format.

<comment><USER4> Is there a part two out there yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it's written, but not published yet. It was written as one article, but since it was over their word limit, they split it into two parts. I think they usually space them out by about a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It will be nice to see part two, but there is enough fodder in part one to talk about.

There is no doubt recommendation engines are a great sales generator. But are they any good at what they do? Plotting points on a graph based on user ratings has always seemed artificial to me. I may like a book because of its rhythm and someone else may like the subject matter; will we like the same books? This is why I think netflix created their competition. They're not looking for better math, but for a better approach all together.

At the end of the day, it probably has to be a combination of factors. For example, think of pandora's engine. It is based on analysis of the music, not just user preferences. And yes, math will be involved, which is why part two of this article will be worth reading.

<comment><AUTHOR> The funny thing is that we're not using the standard approaches to recommendations, though in an introduction to how the systems work in general, it seemed best to take the simplest explanation. Part II has something on graph-based approaches, but in general, the class of algorithms we're using tends to, at least in my opinion, produce better results in a couple orders of magnitude less time. I loved Greg's post here:

[http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/22925-what-is-a-good- rec...](http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/22925-what-is-a-good- recommendation-algorithm/fulltext)

It's a valid question to ask, "Will these algorithms really suss out my personal taste?" And I think the answer is, a lot of the time, they'll get close enough to be interesting.

When we started Directed Edge, one of the tipping point moments was seeing how bad some of the related films shown in IMDB for my favorite film were. It was a real watershed moment this week when I was running our algorithm against the Netflix dataset after adding 15 of my own ratings to the system and my two favorite films (which I had not rated) came out at #1 and #5, respectively, and at that, with 300x less computation time than a standard item-to-item recommender requires. (We've got implementations of a lot of standard algorithms that we use for benchmarking our own.)</comment></comment>


Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) – Visually Explained - <AUTHOR> https://visuallyexplainedxss.barricade.io <comment><USER2> The design of the web page is nicely done

<comment><USER3> Looks cool but the fonts are a little wonky for me on Firefox. [http://i.imgur.com/XdktaPt.png](http://i.imgur.com/XdktaPt.png)</comment></comment>


Adobe Carousel - Cloud based photo storage and editing - <AUTHOR> http://www.adobe.com/products/carousel.html

<comment><USER2> Hmmm, Carousel was the pre-release name for Acrobat many years ago.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you archive/cache full-page back-ups of your bookmarks - <AUTHOR>

You've carefully curated bookmarks over the years.
This is a knowledge bank for you.
Then one day you click on one of the bookmarks, and you discover that the original page is gone, and instead, in its place, is an ad for GoDaddy.
*
Is there a way for me to archive/cache full-page backups of all my bookmarks? (In some smart way. I shouldn't have to go into each Bookmark and download each page individually.) <comment><USER2> [http://pinboard.in/](http://pinboard.in/)

For $25/year, it'll scrape and save everything you bookmark, and you can view that copy even if the original site disappears.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm scrapping this page right now into pocket. If it's worth archiving, it goes to Evernote afterwords.

The more important question is how I can archive to my home USB drive, aka personal cloud, with some ready to use page scrapping tool like Evernote's. This is my own knowledge graph, and I don't feel like pay anyone or rely on anyone else to maintain for me. Evernote and it's toolkit is almost everything I need, except it doesn't allow me to keep a backup on my own drive. When cloud becomes a obligation, it lost its charm.

</comment><comment><USER4> Instapaper ([http://www.instapaper.com/u](http://www.instapaper.com/u)) does for the actual article/page content but not the full page

</comment><comment><USER5> EverNote w/ Web Clipper

<comment><AUTHOR> Will it do it all automatically or does one have to clip web pages one by one?

<comment><USER5> AFAIK, you'd have to do them one-by-one.

Automatically? As in periodically update your snapshots? Or scan through bookmarks.html and grab each page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Either the latter, or the moment I save a bookmark it should archive a backup copy.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Better Lesson - <AUTHOR> https://rodneybrooks.com/a-better-lesson/ <comment><AUTHOR> comments on The Bitter lesson, previously discussed [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19393432)</comment>


VideoLAN celebrates 10 years of open source of VLC - <AUTHOR> http://www.videolan.org/videolan/events/10y/

<comment><USER2> One of the best video players there is! I think over the years I've only had 1 file it couldn't play.</comment>