Ask HN: How do programmers deal with ADD? - <AUTHOR> I have constantly struggled with the issue and have wondered how other people in the community deal with it because the cost of context switching is so high when coding. I have tried ritalin and although it helped a little, I have consciously tried to stay away from medication. Would be great if people here could share their strategies of dealing with this. <comment><USER5> Caffeine and "forest therapy." Caffeine is only a stopgap. Impulsive feelings, I believe, are due to the body not getting something it wants like food, exercise, sleep, toilet, etc. Forest therapy is a two hour block of distraction free time for problem solving. The thing that's different is that the body needs to be doing something autonomously. Walking through the woods in a straight line for two hours is basically automatic. Why a forest? Line of sight is about 50 yards and sound is muffled. And it's pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER6> You probably just dont want to do whatever you are trying to do, simple as that. Seriously, ask yourself whether, deep down, this is something you really 'want' to do, or its something you feel you 'have' to do (school? work?). This is a completely normal feeling.

Now comes the hard part - doing what you 'have' to do.

Few steps

0a. Get excited about what you 'have' to do - whether it be the learning aspect, the mastery of your work (craftsmanship), the purpose of your work (helping users, making money, etc)

0b. Think about what you are going to do, and write down some granular steps (key)

1\. Get yourself to start by hook or crook, and remove absolutely all distractions you can find (spend the time doing this). Start the first step you did in 0b.

2\. Work for an hour at least.

3\. Feel a sense of accomplishment, pat yourself on the back for completing some work. Look back on the work you completed. The goal is to start 'feeling' a positive sense about doing work you 'have' to do, which will make it easier in the future to do more.

Starting is always the hardest part like anything. Once you get into a routine, it becomes much easier. The hardest part is converting feelings of pain / 'have to do' into feelings of 'want to do' or curiosity.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thanks for all the responses. I think I would like to share more of what troubles me the most. I usually back away when the task seems even slightly complex. For example, I need to try to join 2 collections in mongo and want to try out map-reduce on it and see how long it takes.. I am just postponing it although I know if I stay with it, I will probably get it done in an hour or two. My mind refuses to start anything that seems complex. I get overwhelemed and anxious and delay everything to the last minute and then work in panic mode and do a half-assed job sometimes. Even though I have evidence that when I just start and stay with the problem, I more often than not do it well, I can't seem to internalize this and repeat this. What do you do when you have to do something seemingly complex. I always have trouble breaking it down into smaller tasks unless I have someone to talk to.. then somehow it gets very easy.. I have found that when I work in a group or in pairs, I am way more effective and my speed goes up tremendously. So much so that others often need time to catch up to what I saying. What advice would you give for someone struggling to work on his own?

<comment><USER7> Try this book: One Small Step Can Change Your Life; basically the author is a cognitive psychologist who studied various business processes and came to the conclusion that the ones that were most effective were not necessarily the best, they just worked because they were put into actual practice ... because they were non-threatening. His research then led him to the following insight: big planning is perceived as a threat by the brain because in the past it meant 1 of 2 things: (1) no more food, gather the group and get ready to move or (2) some other group doesn't like us, there is going to be some armed conflict, gather the group and ... Basically "big picture planning" while necessary if engaged too long activates the "fight or flight" response and you get all agitated and can't concentrate and wind up doing nothing all day. In other words, it's not that you "have trouble breaking things into pieces" it's because you don't break things into pieces that you activate parts of your brain and nervous system that make it impossible for you to calmly focus on the only reality you control - little pieces. So he suggest getting going by sidestepping/bypassing the activation of your "big changes are coming along with danger" systems by sneaking by them with the teeny, tiniest thing you can imagine doing successfully. Don't make it a goal to finish this part of your project or code for 4 hours or whatever. Make it a goal to sit at the computer for five minutes, open up your environment and not waste time with facebook/hacker news/email for 5 minutes. That's it - don't code, don't plan, just open up environment and then walk away after five minutes and get a small treat - a glass of water or something. Then instead of being overwhelmed your brain will be stimulated but not "activated" ... kind of like in the middle of the bell curve - not too aroused ... and you'll think, "Well, that wasn't too bad, I guess I could actually do a little bit more." Come back and just say, "If I could work on a teeny tiny problem, not a whole lot, but something that's been keeping me back and if I finished it and it became a building block I never had to rebuild and could move forward to, what would that thing be - and work on only that for the day. Don't look at other stuff until that's over. If it gets too frustrating, walk away and then ask yourself, can you go at it again for 15 minutes without distractions? Work up to a pomodoro (30 minutes of work of which 5 are a break). In other words, you have to trick your brain and keep it "asleep" so as to not hyper-arouse it too quick. Teeny tiny problems. So small they're laughable. Almost an funny not to get them done. So doable it's almost beneath you. But string together a couple of thousand of those over a few months and you'll be very productive. But don't plan them. Find one, do it, see where that leads you, take the next step, focus only on that until you did it. Make it so small it's not possible to get distracted. So small it's not possible to get overwhelmed. Make your problem being underwhelmed, so underwhelmed you quiet your hyperactive mind down enough to let you actually get work done. There are no complex anythings. Just strings of simples, some strings longer than others, some strings connect to more strings, but everything is an individual bead and you can handle each and every bead. Can you make a cup of tea? Sure! Can you do it while contemplating your place in the universe, and the meaning of life? No, because you're using part of your brain that needs to shut down the tea making part. Just focus on putting water in the pot and lighting the flame. You can do it. Really there is no secret other than this. You may forget to do it, but deep down you know this to be reality. You even say it ("I can't seem to internalize this and repeat it.") You don't have to internalize it. Here's another trick: everybody falls of their paths all the time, then they have to "remember" what works and just repeat it. It's so simple it's boring and that's why we forget - <USER2> we get bored and want to forget it's that simple. But you seem to know this. Just be okay with falling off, get back and apply it again. Until you forget again. Then you'll remember you forgot and keep repeating this. You got this. That's for the by yourself thing. As for pairs or groups - stop fighting it and just pair up with someone with similar goals and workstyles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Mild medication and habits are my saviours.

Habits around when I sleep, wake, eat, and what I eat. Interruptions to habits result in drop-outs, things get forgotten watch, lunch bag, keys, appointments, ...).

Medicatio: be careful exploring what works nd what does not. Ritalin, Adderal, Concerta, are basically Speed, albeit our different brain chemistry reacts to it differently than neurotypical brains. Aderal puts me to sleep. COncerta turned me into an a-hole with an obsessive focus on coding. Three months of hyperfocus. I did an insane amount of coding, and it worked too, but ... Btw, if you use that phrase with your doctor, check his spelling. My record turned out to have "obsession with codeine" in it. Got it caught soon by my therapist and corrected OK, so hopefuly no harm done.

Ritalin is working, after a while spent varying dosage to find a sweet spot. It is good for that, fast acting, fast to clear out, and tiny dosage tablets at 5mg. My sweet spot is two a day, one starting work and one halfway through. At three, my wife complains I tap and grind my teeth too loudly.

Therapist. Alternitvely in ADHD cse know as Life Coach. My saving. I had spent 63 yers developing random baroque and unconsciou compensations to cover up my embarraassment t not even knowing what it was I would get accused of - <USER3> social epecttion for example. I have time blindness - can't plan, don't anticipate, don't remember, or if I do there's no timestamp. It is so bad my compensation for that was to become very very good at "making it up as I go". Including in programming. No good for college, makes me rather useless for the typical line programmer job, but there are a few niches that really need it, where there are no existing patterns or known solutions, for example. As a result, a 50 year career doing stuff nobody else has done before. Always inventing. Almost allways - a few times when I was not doing that, ranging from boring to painfully hellish.

Other than that, what pretty much everybody else has said. For making money, you are best off finding work in which you can easily enter and enjoy hyperfocus. For us folks on this forum, that would probably be programming in some form.

I have been very lucky also in employers and cofounders who, while maybe not knowing about the ADHD (I didn't myself, after all, until recently), had enough confidence in my results to let me get there in my own way, displacement behaviours and all.

</comment><comment><USER9> Staying away from medication for a brain chemistry problem seems like self- sabotage to me. I'm not a fan of medication myself, but I'm about to go to the doctor to get a prescription. I'm in the same boat as you.

Based on the research I've done, Ritalin is more for short term focus boosts. You should try Concerta or Vyvanse. Those are more designed for a daily dose/longer term usage.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have a lot of days where my mind just wanders to many, many things besides work tasks.

I get focused on work by keeping my diet in check (no junk food), just 1 coffee very early in the day and getting up and walking around a bit frequently, play with my dogs, pick up a book and read it for a few minutes.

Headphones also help me keep my head clear. I pump through them things that are conducive to my working and not getting distracted.

If I just can't focus, despite best efforts, I actually don't. I do something else until I am ready to focus again and then I give my work all of that attention. Sometimes this means working at night after the wife and kids are in bed because that is when my mind is back. Not everyone probably has this luxury as employers may not be this flexible.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've personally only ever used various alternative therapies for my various issues (ADHD, OCD, Autism, a tiny bit of bipolar). I'm not "ready for life" yet (still working through other career showstoppers) but on multiple occasions I've talked to people who have experience with mental health and they haven't picked up on my issues after talking with them for a while.

Here's a shortlist of different things that seem to have helped. One of the usernames I sometimes use online - for example with gmail - is "asmqb7". ;P

\- I switched from a "decent" fish oil to Nordic Naturals in 2012. The difference has been really good. Make sure the one you buy is a high-dose one - the only way you can make sure in a retail shop is to always check the back, without fail, to make sure the highest acting compounds are >=1g.

\- I take CoQ10 for extra energy because my system is poorly balanced internally and requires more for its cogs to "turn over". Try yourself with different combinations of ubiquinone and ubidecarenone - my system prefers the latter, even though the former is understood to be the more powerful compound. Also don't be afraid to feed yourself a lot of it.

\- Have a look at Alpha-lipoec acid. I'll admit I'm not _100%_ sure what it does but it definitely helps a lot.

\- Are you getting enough salt? The medical consensus is "salt is bad for you!!11eleventyfour!"... they forgot to prefix the word _table_. It's _table_ salt that's bad, other salt (like himalayan crystal salt) are better, and having a lot of salt per day is very good for you.

\- See if you have PKU ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria)), the MTHFR ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylenetetrahydrofolate_redu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylenetetrahydrofolate_reductase)) gene mutation, or Pyrrole's disorder.

\- Learn about Leaky Gut Syndrome. Most of the info you'll find is "this is the diet you need to follow"; take all that in your stride (apply it at your own discretion by all means though), I mostly reference this because the mechanics of the theories are good to know and understand.

This is all I can think of right now off the bat.

FWIW, I'm not the walking health encyclopedia, my Mum is :P Feel free to get in touch if you'd like more info.

<comment><USER11> Update: I wondered for a bit before I posted the above, about how I should word it and how much info I should share. I thought I'd go with a "post the most helpful info I've come across" approach, since I like trading high- quality information.

I'm interested to understand why people think the correct response to the info in my parent post is to downvote it (it's currently at -1 as I type this reply). It took me 9 years to learn what I know now, and this info has benefited my life greatly.

I will confess that I do still have a lot of issues with communication and social cues, but I cannot see any instance where I've behaved in a way that is behaviorally unacceptable and/or socially degrading, purported my view to be the only acceptable solution (far from it), or otherwise detracted from this conversation.

So I'm very confused :(

<comment><USER7> Yes, second what the other poster said - don't take it personally. You went out on a limb and shared some personal experiences; though it may seem anecdotal, a bit of research backs up a lot of what you said even though it may not work the same for all people with all ADD types; I for one was surprised at the resulting calm I felt when I just drank basically water with about a tablespoon of pink salt mixed in; then I suddenly realized about every psychiatric drug on the market has "sodium" as part of its makeup and am starting to wonder if the drug companies are not just selling people high- priced salt with some narcotics mixed in for the price justification. But in conclusion, this is a forum on the net, don't try to understand let alone predict people's reactions - you should focus only on what you can control, which is planting the seeds.

<comment><USER11> Ah, that's one of the things I still have an issue with, taking things personally, haha.

And yeah, now you mention it I realize I forgot to point out that this was my experience and that everyone's different.

Thanks for the kind words. :D

FWIW, __AFAIK __(not 1000% sure), panadol /hedanol/paracetamol/etc contain a form of Arnica (possibly along with one or two other things). Sourcing/using Arnica directly, in its natural form, can sometimes be effective. Pretty much the entire medical establishment is based on the idea of patented extraction techniques, which manufacturers can charge royalties for that are as high as they like.

I'm not against making money and being successful, but I think that an increasing majority of players in this field are making it hard for the establishment as a whole, and this has been going on for a while. I'm not sure how long it can keep going without cracking.

I figure most people (and HN) would be unimpressed with a random gigantic post in the middle of a thread, so I said more here: [http://pastebin.com/ch6rSFUC](http://pastebin.com/ch6rSFUC) (a few paragraphs out of an email I sent to someone recently)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I go for walks and let my mind wander aimlessly for an hour or so, heading back when the thoughts in my head finally start turning towards work related stuff and I want to engage with it.

I also tend to keep a few tasks on top of the stack and try to keep enough room before deadlines to let my self switch to something else when I feel blocked or unmotivated.

Also helps having a boss that is well aware of ADD tendencies and can work with them.

</comment><comment><USER13> The #1 biggest impact for me was working from home full time. I have been working from home for over 10 years now. It lets me control my environment -- most importantly I can minimize distractions. I also have two dogs who strongly encourage me to disconnect and clear my head (aka take them for a walk) a couple times a day.

</comment><comment><USER14> Former / occasional programmer here.

I was categorized as having ADD / ADHD and never bothered to take anything for it although it has caused me tremendous problems in my career and school life. If you know you have this problem you can either drug yourself into a coma or make significant life choices (and learn to master your condition) to steer you into career where your strengths come into play and your weaknesses are minimized. I tried both, I like the second option better.

I no longer believe there is something wrong with me, I believe society was built for people different than me (sit still, pay attention, do one thing at a time, obey etc) and I am expected to follow and obey their rules. I believe that ADHD is a real condition but the drugs are a false solution that are driven more by pharmaceutical company marketing than reality. If they can make you feel bad about who you are, they can sell more drugs. That is wrong - <USER4> you are unhappy its because something deeper is wrong in your life that you need to change and you should find what that is.

The Good:

There are massive benefits to being an ADD-er in my experience: I can simply handle more volume of work faster and more efficiently than anyone I know. My brain is a 40-lane highway and I have no problem multitasking across many different contexts. If my brain decides to become interested in a topic, I can learn everything there is to know about that topic faster than anyone...I now learn to recognize when something interests me and feed my brain information in that time slot while the opportunity presents itself (I think its called "hyperfocus"). I have learned to work with the peculiarities of my condition and take advantage when the wind is blowing in a useful direction.

It wasn't until later in my career that I learned to be extremely detail oriented.

The Bad:

The ADD super powers come with many downsides. I am chronically bored out of my mind and single-tasking is a challenge (e.g. sitting through a lecture or boring meeting). At most jobs I found myself growing completely bored in six months and being unable to focus on my job. This resulted in a lot of useless job hopping which I now recognize in retrospect as being a symptom of my underlying condition.

Learning material which doesn't interest me is impossible, killing my academic performance. I felt strongly that other people around me could simply absorb boring "stuff" without issue and just deal with it and take the pain while my brain simply turned off in that situation, remembering nothing.

Finally, I have difficulty communicating with people. When I talk I jump all over the place (often off topic) or I skip three steps ahead. Most people's brains don't work like this.

Some Solutions:

The most important fix was to find a job or career which, by definition, involved lots of crazy stuff going on all the time. Being a programmer working on a single product for years was simply impossible to me to sustain.

Many smaller, single-product, companies work like this: Here is the one thing you do for the next two years. If you have ADHD that isn't going to work.

Many developers I know (with more normal brains) prefer to focus on one technology (Say, Ruby on Rails) to the exclusion of everything else for years. I have embraced being a super-generalist.

If you are a programmer, I recommend finding one of the following: (a) an agency which has dozens of ongoing projects in many technologies (many digital agencies are like this) so you can never get bored (b) a large company with a lot of interesting stuff going on (e.g. take a company like Microsoft which has ridiculous amounts of different technologies, products and initiatives underway at any given time).

In my case I decided that software wasn't for me and found a related career (technical marketing) which was more varied in nature (lots of new products, unexpected surprises and events going on all the time).

I thought a large company would be horrible, I was wrong - My current job is like an endless "all you can eat" buffet where I am allowed to eat as much as I want and work on projects that interest me all day long. It probably depends which department you land in.

More Immediate Solutions and Strategies:

1.) Lose weight and exercise regularly.

This will physiologically change your body and brain and make it easier to sustain focus. Can't recommend going for a run regularly enough.

2.) Embrace a single page "Shit to do" list.

Everything you need to do should fit on a single page. I tried many different techniques for time management including any number of ToDo apps etc. Everything was less efficient than Evernote or notepad.

If I have something to do, it goes on the list. Then you can ignore it or check it once a day and cross stuff off. I used to be really bad about dropping tasks and forgetting details, now I am at 100% all the time.

3.) Build your entire life around Evernote

I now completely live in Evernote. Every meeting, everything gets an Evernote page that I can come back to. The really important stuff goes in Shit To Do.

I tend to multitask through every meeting and only have part of my brain in a listening state. I take notes for that meeting in Evernote and come back to them.

People with ADD suffer from "poor working memory" which means you forget things much faster than normal people. The cure is to rely on Everynote or some other method to store all the details for you. That way, you can get around the poor working memory issue by letting the computer do the remembering.

<comment><USER15> This is pretty scary. You just described me to a "T" (except the Evernote part - I use Onenote). I've been lucky enough however, to fall into jobs where I became the "tech lead" and as such, explore all sorts of new technologies and systems every day. But jeez, maybe I'm ADD. Appreciate the post!

<comment><USER16> It's me, too. I am craving a more "chaotic" multifaceted career and have been trying to make a change. But, who cares if some people created a term, ADD? Clearly, humans didn't evolve to sit in a chair in a quiet room doing the same thing all day. Do I have "ADD" when I'm running a massive event involving 200 participants with issues popping up all over the place, having to make quick decisions on my feet and managing people? Not even close. Do I have "ADD" when I'm sitting in an office doing rote paperwork tasks and answering the same email over and over again? Hell yes I do. And I don't see anything wrong with that. I see something wrong with those who think this is a "disorder." Which type of job sounds closer to how humans spent their days 50,000 years ago?

By the way, parent, you and I are probably all INTP or similar.

I'm done fighting it and being depressed about it and now embrace it. I'm glad I'm a generalist who would love nothing more than to try every job out there once and am hungry to learn about all the complex things out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I might be too late for this one, but:

Daily exercise To-do list for EVERYTHING. If it isn't on the list I don't get it done. Time-boxing and frequent breaks. Work a single task for 30 minutes. Then switch to something else or take a 5 minute break.

</comment><comment><USER18> One thing that has always helped me is just simple meditation. It trains your brain to rein-in focus, and after you have done it for a while you can recover focus in just a few seconds if you find your mind wandering.

</comment><comment><USER19> Find something i'm incredibly passionate about. Then I hyperfocus and go for hours and LOVE IT. Medication interfears with my super productivity because it prevents me mega-hyperfocusing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Try nootropics, a good choline source (alpha-gpc), piracetam and aniracetam. Rather than make your condition a problem they'll help you "go with it" and leverage it. Also although I'm not sure of the exact mechanisms of action, whatever it is that gets "drained" in context switching they seem to supply in abundance and you'll be able to context switch all day long without resulting fatigue. They are not stimulants, so don't expect a coffee "rush" ... the effects are evident with mental work done at the end of the day. Another thing that may help you: get into tDCS and use the "positive" side on the left side of your brain with the negative on the right when you need to "focus sequentially" ... but just make sure to balance that out with the reverse say, on the weekends so as to not overly direct your brain in one direction at the expense of balance. Holosync has worked for me as well although I'm not sure of the reasons why, although there is much technical info that comes with the free e-book from the website. It's a bit expensive, but I believe there is a "trial" version on that site by those guys in IKEA land that have funny replies to law firms threatening legal action for copyright infringement. Also I highly recommend a workflowy subscription as a sort of "brian cache" of your random trains of thought; you will need this especially if you try the nootropic route because you will be able to work for many hours at will pausing only for sleep. Also I would recommend you sample "focus@will" they have an experimental ADD channel (maybe part of the free trial?) and there are actually settings based on type (mostly sounds like Skrillex type music?). Various binaural stuff you can find on YouTube for free and high quality goes a long way. The point is any one of these is good, together they are greater than the sum of the parts and your thing can not only be "managed" but actually developed and directed to your advantage. Learn to use your super power. Also I would highly recommend you meditate on the logic of what used to be a nice niche game for the Mac a decade ago: Serenity. Basically it was a 3D polynomial rendering game where you had to "float" but the more direct and oriented the mouse movement, the worse the controls got. You had to "slow down" your brain and move sloooowly, gradually, with much subtlety to gain success. Then you got calm and sleep and could go to bed. Contrast that with the fast, twitchy nature of modern ... everything - cartoons, video games, movies, commercials, music ... and ask yourself if it contributes to your situation if perhaps your brain is a bit more sensitive to such stimulation. Learn when it's useful and when you need to isolate yourself from such inputs so that they don't "tip you over." Good luck.</comment>


Data Saved in Quartz Glass Might Last 300M Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/data-saved-quartz-glass-might-last-300-million-years/ <comment><USER2> "Hitachi recently announced that it has developed a medium that can outlast ... CDs, DVDs, hard drives and MP3s."

One of these things is not like the others; one of these things just doesn't belong.

<comment><USER3> [http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif](http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The dots represent information in binary form, a standard that should be comprehensible even in the distant future"

Said by someone who never had to import Word files into OpenOffice.

<comment><USER5> True ultra long term storage with decent storage capacity could prefix each and every binary files with an ASCII text file detailing the file structure on the binary in enough detail that a competent programmer could write a parser.

If you were still worried about that, all binary files could be duplicated in ASCII (minus formatting etc.)

<comment><USER6> And where does the information about the ASCII format go?

<comment><USER5> Easy.

Any civilization advanced enough to read microscopic encoded data would be advanced enough to do basic statistical analysis on ASCII encoded English/whatever and work out what it is. The harder part is figuring out how to understand English.

An example of this being done recently is MIT students decoding the ancient language Ugaritic

[http://news.mit.edu/2010/ugaritic- barzilay-0630](http://news.mit.edu/2010/ugaritic-barzilay-0630)

<comment><USER4> 300M years is a _very_ long time. Unless there is some continuity in the use of the stored information, in a way it's documented, translated and reinterpreted, there is no hope something alive 300M years from now, something that will not be remotely human, will be able to understand it any more than we understand the songs sponges sing each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It apparently has a data density similar to blu-ray. A better source: [http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2014/10/141020a.html](http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2014/10/141020a.html)

<comment><USER8> At quoted "1.5 GB/inch^2" they are comparing their 100 layer medium against a single-layer 25GB bluray disc. At three~four layers, current bluray discs offer 100~128GB of capacity.

Archival Disc spec brings optical media to 300GB now, 1TB on roadmap.[0] This leaves current Quartz Glass an order of magnitude behind current optical media.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Even if the data saved in Quartz Glass last 300M years, 300M years later, how can they figure out what all these binary digit mean, without knowing the format of the data.

For something lasting so far into the future, some clues must be left to help someone in the future to extract the information from the media.

</comment><comment><USER10> Maybe this would be a good medium for [http://cosmicos.github.io/](http://cosmicos.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER11> It looks like The Long Now Foundation's Rosetta disc needs to step up its game. It's only designed to last a couple of millennia.

</comment><comment><USER12> This article is from 2012.

</comment><comment><USER13> This would be a good solution assuming you only needed to write once to your archive. Since this is literally etched in glass, there's no way to edit any data. Also, instructions on what to do with a box of glass someone finds 100 years from now would be helpful. :P

</comment><comment><USER14> _The question is whether the world as we know it would even last that long._

I don't see how that is relevant. The world could end tomorrow. Do we just abandon long term data backup?

<comment><USER15> IMO that's even more of a reason for this. If the world continues normally, then old hard drives and CDs can just be copied onto new ones over and over again. If something ever happens, then everything will be lost. With this, we could preserve a huge amount of the world's knowledge forever.

However I see what they are trying to say. 300M years is a lot, when even 100 years would be great compared to current storage systems. And on that time scale, the rate of bit rot is less important than other factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Schroedinger's Aperiodic Crystal, taken literally.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm glad AOL floppy disks didn't last 300 million years.

</comment><comment><USER18> Superman's crystals, the ones that have encoded in them the full 3D HD movie of his parents and the fate of Krypton. I knew science would eventually catch up to sci fi :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Quartz is not glass. Quartz is a crystal.

<comment><USER20> Quartz glass refers to fused quartz, which is a glass.

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

<comment><USER19> You are indeed correct. This article uses quartz and quartz glass interchangeably, so I assumed the author was making the sapphire/"sapphire glass" error (because sapphire is never a glass) but upon checking out the original article, you are right, they are working on fused silica.</comment></comment></comment>


California Can Lead the Way in Open Access - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/california-can-lead-way-open-access <comment><USER2> The fact that intermediaries have been extracting fees from the public for access to publicly-funded research is despicable. Full public access should've always been the norm, and anything like this is at least a step in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mandating open access solves part of the problem (public access to research), but doesn't address the rents extracted by publishers.

I would bet that the publishers are actually ok with this, as they can (and do) make authors pay huge sums to make their articles open access. So now authors are forced to pay those fees. For the author, that's fine if you have a grant or institution that will pay those fees, but it is hard for others to pay $1500 per article they want to publish. And it just shifts how institutions are paying for journal access.

<comment><USER4> Self-archiving (i.e. in a state-provided repository) does not typically require additional charges.

However, I'd prefer mandating Open Access without providing those fees. Authors are not _really_ forced to pay those fees, i.e. some authors will not be able to and hence not publish their work in the traditional, expensive journals. That would mean that they would be missing out on quality work, leading to a diminished reputation, and even researchers who can pay publishing fees to forego those journals.

Well, in theory at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Under the bill, grantees would be required to put their works in a state- > provided open access repository within a year of publication.

I was nodding along until I got to that quote. Why does it have to be in the state-provided one? Can't you just set the rules and be done? And if you are concerned that researchers have to maintain a website, then you can have an optional state-provided repo. I hope this model is not adopted generally across states and just requiring transparent access is enough. That way places that comply with the spirit of the rule could arise without being run by the government or concerned with publishing to each grantor's repository.

<comment><USER6> Is it really that onerous to do whatever it is you want with your paper, and then just send a copy to the people who gave you your funding?

The State of California funds a lot of research, and having it all available in one place should make things like archiving much easier.

My lab has all our papers available on our website, but my supervisor is old. He's not going to live forever. It won't be too long after he goes that the website will go too. The server needs security updates every once in a while. The DNS will expire in ten years. We don't use HTTPS, but if we did, it would expire within a couple years. All easy stuff, but when the only person responsible for doing it has died, it won't get done.

<comment><USER5> If it is "just send a copy" of course it's not that onerous. But you intentionally framed it in the most simple sounding way. I understand the benefit of centralized hubs, I just also understand that governments are rarely good at building them. At the very least it's a concern worth noting instead of pretending everything will be perfect. I'd rather the law just stay with rules and move towards required centralization as needed. For your lab, it sounds like you'd leverage an optional system by choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some questions:

\- Does the research have to be funded solely by California, or is the requirement also for research partly funded by California?

\- Do researchers have to manually take action a year after publication, or can they deposit it now and tell the repository when to make it public?

\- Do researchers have to take action in the first place, or will the deposit happen automatically by publishers?

All in all, it's clearly a step forward, though I wouldn't call it "leading the way" \- at least not internationally. The embargo period is a shame (whether it's six or twelve months), and it being in some state-provided repository rather than at the primary point of publication really harms discovery and hence its usefulness (though tools like Unpaywall [0] help). In short, it doesn't tick all the right Open Access boxes [1], but at least it doesn't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

[0] [https://unpaywall.org/](https://unpaywall.org/)

[1] [https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access- be-c...](https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be- cf6662565ecd)

</comment><comment><USER7> this may be contextually relevant :

[http://www.dgs.ca.gov/pd/Home/CloudComputing.aspx](http://www.dgs.ca.gov/pd/Home/CloudComputing.aspx)</comment>


Segment Is Now Free for Early-Stage Startups - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/startups/ <comment><USER2> I have to say, a few years ago I was the world's biggest Segment evangelist. My absolutely favorite analytics service, and for any web project I worked on, installing Segment was step 1. I ran it primarily on my own company's site (100k visitors/month, most of whom were not monetized) and I think I paid them $79/month. Worth every penny as a router to send up to GA, Heap, and others. Their data warehouse became a wonderful adjunct part of my analytics stack (and maybe my bill went up to $200 or so when they added that.)

Then they changed their pricing so that bill became $1200 (per month!). Total insanity. When I did some consulting work for another startup that had even higher traffic numbers (150k-200k uniques) but was also very lightly monetized, I actually lost some serious political capital with the CEO when he saw the Segment price quote of nearly $2000 per month. He thought I was trying to fleece them.

Sorry guys. I think you've built a REALLY awesome product and I / similarly small businesses are clearly not the target demographic anymore, and I'm sure you're now making metric boatloads of money from big enterprise customers who don't care about a $20k annual bill for analytics, but man, it's disappointing to be so priced out of what was once a great part of my toolkit.

<comment><USER3> Hey, just wanted to let you know that we're reading/listening and this is really helpful feedback. I'd love to do a phone call, and get your feedback on a few pricing/packaging changes we're working on. If you're willing, my email is ilya @segment.com

<comment><USER4> I'm in the same boat. I love love love segment at Reforge (and I hear Segment loves Reforge, too). I've built some pretty awesome data pipelines (Personas are my favorite feature of all time) and have armed the marketing team to the teeth.

But my side project, Casting Call Club, has 150k uniques a month, most of which are not monetized. There's just simply no way I can justify paying for Segment. Many of the ideas I think about are simply lost because it would take too much time to build out myself.

<comment><USER5> We get almost 500,000 uniques a month, mostly unmonetized (though that's changing, slowly). I would LOVE to integrate an enterprise tracker but the pricing is just absurd. I mean, there's no way we can even 'try' it. We grew alot faster in organic traffic than we expected.

It's definitely meant for large enterprises, not for growing ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Segment is a good concept but when they bumped their pricing up to ludicrous mode, it justified a small rewrite to reproduce their functionality in our back-end to drop them and we haven't looked back. No way i'll be going back to their service factoring that experience.

Interested to see what the back-end of this 'free period' will cost for the startups who get in bed with them - $120 per month for up to 10k MAU and then 'custom' pricing beyond that according to their pricing page.

It's worth a lot less than that to us.

<comment><USER7> We did the same thing. $30,000 every 6 months or so I believe. Absolutely insane.

Took 1 day to rewrite.

<comment><USER8> How did you rack up that kind of price on Segment? Boatloads of anonymous web traffic?

<comment><USER7> I don't recall the exact quote. We do have a ton of traffic (more so back then as it was a freemium product then). Not sure if it included their warehouse as well.

Our dev team at the time said rewriting it internally was impossible, so we actually paid it for 6 months. After changing the team, this was on the top of the list. It was trivial to switch.

Now, all the services that we used were stable so the benefit of easily adding and removing services was not something we needed.

Rightscale suffered similar fate when their rates kept going up. At some point it became cheaper to rewrite it ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This thread suggests Segment is anchored to their initial value prop for developers here[1]. To this crowd they seem to be more or less a one-way JS wrapper for websites that can later be replaced with a simple "logs to S3" instrumentation.

From my perspective as a "business ops" person, they graduated past this years ago and have unlocked a ton of value with identity normalization and server- side Track events, particular in moving data around between core product and the services marketing + sales use to acquire and engage customers.

Segment is the one place I can manually push an identity update or Track event and know it will be broadcast back to all the other endpoints, including a warehouse. In addition, the services I use also push their user activity back to Segment as a destination, which then automatically broadcasts it back out to everything else.

Asking product engineers to do all this work every time a new need pops up (a) literally never happens, and (b) if it does happen, drives them crazy because they hate working on that stuff and they'll never touch it again once v1 ships.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4912076)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've used Segment at two companies in a row (in both cases they were implemented at early stages before I joined). It's a good product with broken pricing. They charge insane amounts of money for add-ons and seem to get exponentially more expensive as you grow. My recent renegotiation with them was the most painful experience with a vendor in my 12 year career.

I want to like Segment, I really do. But until they change their attitude I strongly recommend against using them. Especially for startups, because it's not easy to get off once you deeply integrate Segment into your stack.

<comment><USER10> Had a very similar experience at a previous company as well. At the end of the renewal meeting, we left with no indication our issues would get solved and a quote for a 4X price increase. We churned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you run a business, I really don't understand the appeal of sharing a crucial part of your data (for web based applications / services) with a third-party (Google, Amazon etc. or maybe even Segments in the future) that may at some point compete with you ... especially when you can just parse your own web logs ...

<comment><USER12> Agreed.

I'm starting to think that most of these analytics services are more trouble than their worth if you have a good engineering team. A few metrics API's + timescale DB + Grafana goes a long way. If you have a differentiated business you're probably measuring something unique. And if you're measuring something unique then you're better off building your own analytics.

Also, realistically most businesses are built on top of databases. So the most important stuff is in the databases anyway. So might as well just put metrics in SQL too.

<comment><USER13> Self-hosting your analytics is probably the better way to go. There's Piwik (name has changed to Matomo at some point) and I noticed Countly also has an open-source version your can host yourself. There's a lot of functionality in analytics software and you should not throw it all away and roll your own simplistic thing when you can just take a quality open-source product and host it yourself.

But I agree that applications have unique things about them and for those, people need to implement their own metrics to measure whatever interests them. In that case, the current best choices for time-series database are InfluxDB and Prometheus. They provide very simple APIs and tools for collecting and transmitting metrics, and if you prefer to store aggregations of your metrics instead of the many individual data points, you can use the very simple but powerful StatsD api/client/library/package.

Shameless plug: My company HostedMetrics ([https://HostedMetrics.com](https://HostedMetrics.com)) offers hosted and fully managed InfluxDB and Prometheus. It includes everything needed for a turnkey metrics platform that is ready to accept your metrics the moment you create an account: StatsD for data transmission, Grafana for dashboards, and the alerting functionalities of InfluxDB/Prometheus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Data volume-based pricing is a bit out of control across most analytics/data products. My company has been moving away from volume-based pricing to a feature/value-based model.

The big challenge is aligning data scale to company size/price.

I suspect Segment is trying to solve for this very problem with their price increases but at the expense of smaller business. The 'startup' program is a great way for them to keep the platform accessible to new businesses. I applaud them for that.

\--

Shameless plug: My company Indicative ([https://www.indicative.com](https://www.indicative.com)), a customer/behavioral analytics platform that integrates with Segment. We offer 1 billion events/user actions a month for free for Segment users, so that all companies, especially startups can start using data in bringing their products to market and without having to worry about data limits.

<comment><USER15> Your product looks great, is related to OP, and your post clearly indicates you are advertising. Good old Hacker News from circa 5-6 years ago would applaud you. Today??

Shame on all those who voted you down.

<comment><USER14> :) thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is an email I just sent internally:

XXXX,

Yeah....We need to have a conversation and push back on them-

IMHO, Segments pricing starts breaking down as company's scale because of a couple factors, that generally allow people to push back.

Some of these reasons (that I know of...and I'm sure you know better), are:

1\. Google tag manager is free

2\. Many services, like Marketo, don't allow Segment to use their universal javascript widget...so you end up using Segment as a tag manager to push that provider's proprietary widget...reducing the value of Segment. In fact, if you look at the "www." side of our website, we could directly instrument 2 sdk's and remove segment (so net +1 javascript library) and dump segment all together. This would also significantly reduce the unique people count...how they bill!

3\. We'll soon have a full-time front engineer focused on the website...So it's not very painful to instrument a new sdk, or add a shared cookie between sdk's.

4\. There are options that are really good at moving log files (e.g., fluentd.org) for server side logging. It's how the big boys move log files :)

5\. According to google analytics...we're at XX,XXX across webapp + www, so not sure why they are saying YYY,YYY

I realize there's value in Segment, but we can push back on pricing increases.

One last thing, allowing us access to our historic pricing, with no additional functionality, doesn't seem like a big give...especially as pricing usually reduces as you scale. So I am very skeptical of this "new pricing" line of reasoning they are trying to pull!

Looking forward to talking to them ~N

</comment><comment><USER17> I too tried their product, loved it, but couldn't use it because of the insane pricing -- despite me having a fairly small website and just wanting to get better insights to help start making a profit. I quickly exceeded their free limits (within two weeks) and the jump up to $200 per month was just ludicrous. I was also contacted by a very friendly sales/support person but they just couldn't see how spending $200 per month just wouldn't be feasible for me.

</comment><comment><USER18> Add me to the list of former Segment users. A pricing change made them want to bump our bill from $199 to $10999.

I would explain to them that this was insane. They'd grandfather me in for a quarter. But every quarter I'd get new urgent emails from a new account rep who thought they were going to make a huge score.

We rebuilt event pipes (really not that hard) in house and used stitchdata for pulling from external sources. DIY isn't without work, but use a hosted Kafka and it's really not a ton of work. And gives you a ton of flexibility.

I get their niche but I don't trust their pricing/business further than I can throw them.

<comment><USER18> Oh, link to a description [https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab- testing-at-...](https://engineering.ezcater.com/ezexperiments-ab-testing-at- ezcater-part-1-event-taxonomy-warehousing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can someone explain to me what Segment is and what it does? Even the website doesn't make it clear. What is it beyond analytics? Can someone clue me into why this is awesome or necessary? Am I dumb for not understanding this or a bad marketer?

<comment><USER20> its integrations. you drop one javascript snippet in there, and instrument the app with their sdk.

Want google analytics? add it in their UI and its there. Mixpanel? Click a button. Trying a new ad network? Click a button.

Basically, all these SaaS companies want some bits of your data and have some custom integrations.. instead of needing an engineer to implement it your marketing team can edit a UI. And you do it once, so you don't hit as many 'oops we forgot/implemented wrong conversion tracking for Random Service X'

None of it is that hard to do, but there's probably better things your engineer should be doing. Also, as the engineer whose done it, on the tenth marketing platform integration the engineering team will hate the marketing team.

<comment><USER21> This seems like a one-time problem during setup of someone's infrastructure. Is the one-time cost of doing these integrations really worth the monthly cost of Segment? There must be some other value they provide?

<comment><USER22> >> tenth marketing platform integration the engineering team will hate the marketing team

> one-time problem during setup of someone's infrastructure

As the marketer regularly making these requests, it's by no means a one-time problem, and I can attest to being hated by our tech team (for some reason they don't appreciate me hiding random JS code in our CMS to save on these requests either...).

GTM would solve many of the problems for us as we store all of our customer data in CRM anyway, but for other orgs that don't have a massive CRM policy, having an essentially outsourced data warehouse might be valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ah damn, signed up for segment one week ago or so. Some you win, some you lose I guess.

Echoing other commenters, pricing plans are quite steep for the more modest businesses out there who might have a pretty large reach (Monthly users) but nowhere near the budget to shell out big $$.

Tis a shame cause as someone with a foot in tech and the other one in marketing, I know there's a lof value for the real world businesses out there (outside of the tech bubble) but having to spend what I guess is a hefty amount of cash every month just for the pipes is going to be a hard sell for folks which might be already struggling to see value in investing in technology.

<comment><USER3> It's okay if you signed up one week ago. Email ilya @segment.com with the details and we'll get something good going!

<comment><USER23> Will do, cheers.

Been following you guys for a while, cool to see you're expanding -esp here in good auld Dublin and having enough momentum to afford such a move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Was thinking about using segment here but their pricing is insane.

Many product analytics companies have absolutely crazy pricing. Simply not worth it for the odd experiment, measuring MAU and a few other key metrics.

I think we are likely to setup track.domain.com/event endpoint dumping events into Redshift given that we will use SQL to report anyway.

</comment><comment><USER25> Segment is amazing. The price point is ludicrous.

</comment><comment><USER26> I remember a few years ago I was working for a company that wanted to build a Segment clone, just a clone without any different functionality, with hopes they would raise money. Even when I asked how a feature should be implemented, instead of showing me some designs, all they would do was open up Segment and show me the feature... Suffice to say, the project failed and I wasn't surprised nor sad.

<comment><USER27> Im not surprised though - the cost is prohibitive. And even if they provide a free tool for 2 years, what kind of bill do you expect.

I believe this market is ripe for disruption. A clone, very differentiated by focus would certainly eat away and bring more aligned pricing. Right now, Segment are literally the only folks who do what they do. They do it well, but its not affordable to bootstrapped startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> We created a Segment account over a year ago, but didn't start using the service because (a) our startup wasn't quite ready, or had the traffic to collect meaningful data, and (b) couldn't afford the pricing at the time.

I wonder if we could transition that old account to this new startup plan, as we are still at early stage (just got into our first accelerator a few months ago) and bootstrapped?

<comment><USER3> Yep, we can get you in :) Apply at segment.com/startups and send me an email: ilya @segment.com. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Segment is great for early-stage startups as it takes care of data pipeline for you so that you don't need to hire data engineers or waste time downloading reports from marketing tools and analyzing data offline using a BI solution or Excel.

Since it doesn't provide any user interface that allows you to get insights from Segment data, you need to use a BI tool in order to be able to make use of this data which also requires you to dedicate resource and spend some time on it.

Early stage startups usually don't have enough time and resource so we have been working on a tool that allows you to integrate Segment data-warehouse and run segmentation, funnel and retention queries. You can think of it as Mixpanel UI for your Segment data. Here is the details: [https://rakam.io/integration/segment/](https://rakam.io/integration/segment/)

<comment><USER30> > _Since it doesn 't provide any user interface that allows you to get > insights from Segment data, you need to use a BI tool in order to be able to > make use of this data which also requires you to dedicate resource and spend > some time on it._

The reason Segment doesn't have a user interface for insights is because it has destinations. There's a slew of BI tools you can choose from the catalog as destinations, including Mixpanel.

<comment><USER29> If you're using Segment for Mixpanel or other end-to-end analytics providers, that's OK but IMO the real benefit of using Segment is being able to collect all your company data including customer event data, marketing, and CRM into your data-warehouse so that you have the big picture of all your company data.

Our solution basically provides Mixpanel-like interface for your Segment Warehouse Data (See [https://segment.com/product/warehouses/](https://segment.com/product/warehouses/)) and you have the ability to see all your company data, unlike Mixpanel.

You can always use generic BI solutions to analyze the data collected by Segment but the product data has different semantics and Mixpanel-like solutions help the product teams to be able to ask more ad-hoc questions without any need of help from the data team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The form won't accept 0 in the total funding raised input. MacOS/Chrome

<comment><USER3> Hahah, woops we're on it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> clicked on the link to read this, apparently my pi hole has the domain blocked

<comment><USER33> Same. Seems like they've employed bots to upvote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I really loved Segment when they launched and recommended them repeatedly to anyone who would listen. I can no longer recommend them because of price and instead suggest people hack something together themselves or use Google Tag Manager. It's just not worth getting your company locked in even if they might give you a startup rate right now.

It was also really frustrating to us doing work in the political and advocacy sector that the their EU GDPR Data Processing Agreement explicitly forbids using their product for any of the things our EU clients would need like measuring petition signatures or donations to causes -- since those might be information about "political opinions" which their terms prohibit. This particular GDPR interpretation is somewhat unusual, we've negotiated workable DPAs with almost everyone else we've wanted to do business with but Segment was unmovable.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is awesome. Segment has always been a tool that speeds up our experimentation dramatically but the cost has been tough to swallow. I'm grateful your team has built this new program!

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm having trouble understanding what the use-case for Segment is.

Mind you: I work in a pretty unrelated field and almost never deal with the frontend/web stack.

What would I use it for?

<comment><USER30> A typical web analytics pipeline involves collecting web data (events like visits, clicks, sign-ups, logins, purchases, email opens, email clicks, website chat sessions, etc.), collating that data and loading the collated data into a data warehouse - we may think of it as the first-mile ETL :)

The web analytics SaaS market is diverse and fragmented and each of those event types (mentioned earlier) is usually recorded via a different SaaS tool. This is where Segment comes in. It provides a unified interface for collection and collation of web data across a wide variety of web analytics tools - Google Ads, Intercom, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Zendesk, etc. and makes this process extremely easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This landing page (especially the code/data example) is the best example on why we need something like GDPR. "Look how easy it is, I'll just send your personal identifiable data everywhere at once!!"

</comment><comment><USER38> They need to define "Startup". What about an established business with a new 'startup'-like product?

<comment><USER3> We define startups as new companies with <2 years since founding and <$5M in funding. We have soft limits, and we'd love to hear from you either way.

<comment><USER38> The form assumes you are <2yr/<$5m. So should I email you with details of our company. We are already a customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Oh Nice! I've been waiting for that.

</comment><comment><USER40> Back when I was in school there's this guy who sold meth. First hit was free.</comment>


Apple's Nitro JavaScript Engine Available To All Apps - <AUTHOR> http://zoompf.com/blog/2014/06/apples-nitro-javascript-engine-available-to-all-apps <comment><USER2> 40 times faster! This is great news for cross-platform solutions which use UIWebView now to create apps in JS, such as PhoneGap. This will mean a big bump in performance for those apps, of which there are probably many on the App Store.

</comment><comment><USER3> certainly is exciting. but, this article makes my head hurt. why don't people proof read their shit?</comment>


It's Time for a Four-Day Workweek - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/08/its-time-for-a-four-day-workweek/378911/ <comment><USER2> I did a year of a 4 day/9 hour schedule (our normal work week is 35 hours). I would do Monday-Thursday one week, followed by a Tuesday-Friday, to make alternate weekends 4 days long. For the last year, due to a head injury, I've worked 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, in 2.5 hour chunks. While my hours are shorter, I've found it really refreshing to have a 3 hour midday break. Lunch is never rushed, I have time to watch a tv show or run an errand or two, and I generally come back to work in the afternoon very refreshed. On top of that, it's easier to focus in - 2.5 hour blocks don't leave time for distractedness.

I liked the 4/10 schedule, but I don't think it fulfilled my hopes for it. My intention was to use my off days for my own projects, as I was starting to burn out and feel uninspired. What I found was that it was difficult to shift gears for just a day or two, especially after working long hours the previous several days. For the most part, the off days would just be when I would run errands. Instead of taking a half day to take the dogs to the vet, I would use my free day. So, it was nice enough, but hard to fully utilize well.

Of course, I think the real trick is finding a job that lets you have a good work life balance. My work year, if I were full time, is only ~1500 hours. That, more than anything, is what I'll be looking for in any future jobs.

</comment><comment><USER3> My current schedule is 12 days on 13 hour shifts followed by two days off. Resident physicians get screwed and only recently were 'limited' to 80 hour work weeks. I would _love_ even a five day work week.

I have noticed my moral has dropped immensely on this schedule. It is definitely hard to balance work with social life, exercise, and sleep.

<comment><USER4> Why are working hours in the medical industry so crazy? It doesn't seem to be in anyone's interest.

<comment><USER5> My brother in law just finished a residency and we asked him the same question. Apparently more mistakes are made in hand offs between doctors than from tired doctors.

<comment> barry-cotter I am too lazy to check since I'm on my phone but I believe in the UK between less fatigue and fewer handoff errors it's a wash except for surgeons where there's a clear loss, as in under the new system more patients die.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "some have speculated that the Jews adopted this after their exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C."

Citation needed. The Torah would clearly put the 7 day week as one of the earliest doctrines, far before the Babylonian exile.

<comment><USER7> Unless you believe that the Torah was handed down intact on Mount Sinai, it was written between 600 and 400 BCE. Anything before that is, er, hearsay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At my job we've been doing 4x10 schedule and it works pretty well for the most part, but there are downsides. A 3 day weekend is great, but less great if your spouse/family is not around that extra day. Also, the extra day tends to get filled up with chores or other stuff. It becomes everyone else's "catch all" kind of day.

I have noticed that 10 hour days tend to grind on a team and it can make a bad situation potentially worse than it actually is as people get stressed out or tired during a compressd time period.

I think a better solution doesn't lie in rearranging the 40 hour week. I think it lies in a 20 hour week. Work two days, "rest" 5 days. Work becomes the exception, not the rule.

We absolutely right now have enough productivity at our fingertips that the average person could work 20 hour weeks and probably get about the same amount of stuff done, just with less time spent "working" while on twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. throughout the day. There would be less time spent emailing and frankly, I'm not sure people would notice the difference in output, but they'd probably notice the difference in their life.

For most people, the problem is pay and it's not because there isn't enough money to make this work, it's because people attach salaries to the notion of the 40 hour week and how things traditionally are run. For many businesses, a 20 hour week would be plenty if people accepted this reality and worked around it.

The fact is, all the gains in productivity from automation and technology for the most part have gone to the bottom line profits, not to the employees pocketbooks.

If we are going to start negotiating for better work life balance and working conditions, don't just shuffle hours around, eliminate the nonessential busy work that fills the day and work towards a dramatic improvement, not just an incremental change.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, 4x10 sounds awful -- in fact, working 10 hour days in general sounds awful. I doubt that advocates of a shorter work week have "work the same number of hours, but in a different configuration."

The problem is that even without enough work to go around, people in the U.S. believe that we should be working at _minimum_ 40 hours a week. I think it's going to be really difficult to get people to change that. I can imagine a lot of people staying late or working at home on the weekends to "catch up" with a shortened week.

Maybe it would be easier to start a "9-3" campaign than a "Monday-Thursday" campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recently moved from a Mon-Fri 9-5 to Tue-Fri 9-5; I've definitely noticed an improvement in my morale, and possibly an improvement in my productivity, though that's harder to measure. I don't necessarily think replacing the day missed with more work each day is a brilliant solution though, as productivity tends to drop off dramatically over the day anyway. If we want to work less, it might be best to actually _work less._

</comment><comment><USER11> Weeks were originally based around market day: you'd work your fields for 6 days then go into town on the 7th to trade, socialise, etc. Basing weeks around a day of rest was a Jewish innovation.

There are examples of places using 8 or 10 day weeks (e.g. the Roman Empire, revolutionary France, the USSR) but everyone keeps returning to a 7 day week.

<comment><USER12> Yes, but we have technology available that wasn't in the days of Roman Empire, or even the USSR. Politicians keep telling us we have had growth, yet everyone seems to be working more and more just to make ends meets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would gladly move to 10 hour days for four days. Hell I'd do 12 hours for 3 days

<comment><USER14> Just as long as you don't try to do 40 hours in one day... (heck, why not... we have multi-tasking now....)

But really, I'll believe 4 day work weeks when I see them. They will always find something wasteful for people to do to eat up the hours even if we do become on the whole more efficient. Besides, all the insurance people and real estate people will still hang out chatting for 60+ hours and then tell everyone they work 60 hours a week. (My girlfriend is a realtor...that's how I know what they do. She doesn't understand why she can't just call to chat anytime while I'm at work because... I'm working! And no, I probably can't "work" 60 hours a week for an extended period of time. But given the choice, I'd prefer to have to work 60 hours a week rather than have to chat 60 hours a week.... so I say they deserve their money!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the best 4 day work week would be a rolling day off and probably not coincide with co workers ( allows someone to be in every business day). First week you get Monday off, second week Tuesday off, etc. if you need a day that everyone needs to be in perhaps you exclude a day, perhaps Wednesdays, from the rolling off day.

<comment><USER15> Your coworker would get first work Tuesday off, second week Thursday off ( if excluding Wednesdays for all hands in day), etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think I prefer 5 six hour days.

<comment><USER17> Provided you don't have to physically travel to a work location more days but shorter does seem to be more productive, for me at least.

I could work a few long days a week but I get a lot more done working a few hours a day instead. I'll often work 6 or even 7 days a week but those work days are only 1-4 hours long.

In particular 1-2 hours spent working on saturday or sunday usually results in a extremely disproportionate increase in overall productivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am team leader of a software development team and thanks to tolerance of my boss I have a 4-day work week for past 20 months (Monday - Thursday, 8 working hours per day on average). The rest of my team (and also rest of the company employees) is working 5 days.

Compared to 5 work days per week I feel my work is much more focused, better organized and prioritized. there is no space to spend 1 hour a day reading hacker news.

The team does not seem to suffer from the fact I am not there at Friday. they have the option to call me via phone if they get completely blocked in some issue (such a call occurs maybe once in two months).

I try proactively to avoid being the blocker any time by replacing email communication by issue tracking and shared intranet boards and documents as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER19> Let's say, as an experiment, we decide to work four days a week. Which day do we take off? Just a hunch but the top two candidates most likely are Monday and Friday.

Friday's claims: 1) "TGIF" now has some teeth. 2) Friendly gesture towards our Muslim countrymen. Hey, we took the rest of Saturday off to help get along with our Jewish friends. 3) We can still hate Mondays.

Monday's claims: 1) A lot of work for artists churning out anti-Tuesday work that oddly resembles the old anti-Monday work.

Aw, screw that - I have a better idea. 365 divided by 7 = 52.14whatever but 365 divided by 5 = 73. So if the 4 day workweek seems unworkable, let's instead eliminate Saturday and Sunday. MWahHahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!

</comment><comment><USER20> We don't have two days of rest.

On Saturday we need to go shopping for the rest of the week in the morning, in the afternoon we must prepare the family for the night out, and in the evening we must take care of the family as they are out.

On Sunday we have to clean the house, doing all the cleaning tasks we couldn't do on the previous days, and watch the ball games with the relatives in the evening.

<comment><USER12> This.

I struggle without kids to get myself organised. Trying to do a side project in my spare time (what spare time?). Its difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What if we just stopped caring about weeks and employers required 20 days of work per month?

If you wanted an extra long vacation, you could work 40 days in a row and take 20 days off.

This, in addition, to the 13-month, 28-day calendar would be interesting time innovations to me.

I also find 100-second minutes and 10-hour days intriguing. But we would have to redefine the second.

<comment><USER22> This is highly dependent on jobs that don't require "coverage". Lots of jobs do not fit into that category but could still benefit from a reduced work week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I thought this was an interesting comment buried down below: about Utah adopting a 4/10hr work schedule to cut operating costs during the recession.

[http://le.utah.gov/audit/10_10arpt.pdf](http://le.utah.gov/audit/10_10arpt.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> The evidence here is pretty scant, and some of that is for good reason. Different jobs/tasks are more prone to benefit from reduced workweeks, others are not. Different individuals work at different paces.

</comment><comment><USER25> Some tech companies here (in Argentina) are implementing implementing 9-2 or 3 on fridays. It's a nice touch.

</comment><comment><USER26> <shameless plug for working at iRobot>

It's not quite all the way to a 4-day workweek, but we've got something close at iRobot:

At iRobot we have "summer hours" during (surprise!) the summer. Fridays are half days as long as you get in your 40 hours by noon on Friday, which many people do. I love it!

Want to work here (Boston, MA or Pasadena, CA)? Check out our available jobs (we're hiring software engineers!!!) ([http://www.irobot.com/us/Company/Careers.aspx](http://www.irobot.com/us/Company/Careers.aspx)) and then email me: firstname.lastname@example.com

</shameless plug>

<comment><USER27> >Fridays are half days as long as you get in your 40 hours by noon on Friday

You keep track of hours? Aren't you salaried professionals? Who cares how long you work if you get your work done.

<comment><USER12> I do. If my work refuses to pay me more than for 40 hours, why should I work more? I already have enough work for 3 people.

<comment><USER27> Because you're not hourly. You're not paid to work for 40 hours, you're paid to fulfill certain obligations and be held accountable for them. That means sometimes you might have to work more than 40 hours, and sometimes you might work less.

This is not unique to software, you might have to wake up and fix something in the middle of the night the same way a doctor might have to take a call w/ a patient on a weekend when they're on-call. It's part of the job.

<comment><USER12> Sue if they want that sort of commitment, they can pay me for it. At the moment they are getting a good deal with the crappy salary I am getting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Clojure web server in (less than) 100 lines of code - <AUTHOR> http://robert.zubek.net/blog/2008/04/26/clojure-web-server/

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, OK, so it's really a how-to use jetty from within Clojure, but it is an excellent look into how to consume java classes from within Clojure; which some people (like me) have a hard time envisioning from the docs on the official site.

</comment><comment><USER2> I really like Clojure, but I have to say that the shit smell of Java still leaks through the clean Lisp coating. _sigh_.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really been the sticking point for me. As time goes on though, it becomes a little less irritating. Rich Hickey has done a really great job of managing where the language is going so far.

Initially, I didn't even want to _look_ at Clojure due to it living on the JVM. However, this article shows that leveraging the JVM isn't entirely terrible - sure the setup of the structures is kind of ugly, but the actual usage doesn't look bad at all.

If you reframe it as a Java FFI instead of a language living on the JVM, it's a little less... smelly.

<comment><USER3> Is it too late for you to reframe this item that way? Your title suggests it's implementing a web server in 100 lines, when really it's creating a 100-line API for driving Java classes that implement a web server.

<comment><AUTHOR> A) You're absolutely right.

B) The title I used is the title from the blog. Aside from that, it's too late for me to make the edit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have just recently created a command line utility for making clojure scripts/plugins for ImageJ, from within ImageJ. Release details very soon at <http://pacific.mpi-cbg.de/wiki>

Clojure is an excellent language for extending any java application and using java libraries.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your last sentence illustrates why guys like me (unfairly) have issues with Clojure wrt the JVM. I don't do Java at all; I messed around with it back in the days of 1.2 and pretty much forgot about it.

It seems like a most of the people using Clojure come from a Java background, and most of the things being done with Clojure dip heavily into the Java ecosystem.

Now as I said previously, I think this is an unfair assessment, from me or from anyone else. I realize that Clojure used to also live on the CLR. It's just that it is incredibly easy to implement the functionality from Java (and I suppose it was this way on .Net as well), so that it feels almost like it's loose DSL written in Java, not a full language that _just happens_ to live on the JVM.</comment></comment>


Why there is a aversion towards single founder startups from VC's and incubators - <AUTHOR>

My question is simple:Why there is a aversion towards single founder startups from VC's and incubators like YC?
Whether they are thinking that a single person won't able to handle much of crap paper work they are interested in?
I think this is a simple myth that needs to be busted.. <comment><USER2> Because there's a single failure mode. If your project is hosed after one guy gets hit by a truck, it's a risky project - no matter how good everything else looks.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to this: <http://startupgenome.cc/>

They have some stats that say its not a myth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Stats are wrong..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> an aversion

and incubators usually are full of shit, they want you to do what they want in the way that they want.</comment>