How to Understand Things - <AUTHOR> https://nabeelqu.co/understanding <comment><USER2> Great post. Personal anecdote:

I don't think I really understood anything in school, but I was decent at going through the motions of carrying out certain methods and recalling certain facts when I needed to.

I went on to study Maths at university, and for most of my first year, I had the same surface level "methods + facts" knowledge that got me through school. After some studying, I could recite definitions and theorems, I'd memorised some proofs, and I could occasionally manipulate a problem to get an answer. I think about half of the cohort was in a similar position. But it was clear that there were others in a completely different league.

When we were studying for our first year exams, I was struggling to remember the proof of a specific theorem (it felt quite long). A friend was trying to help me learn it, and he asked me what "picture" I had in my head for the theorem. I didn't have any pictures in my head for anything.

It turned out that a simple drawing could capture the entire statement of the theorem, and from that drawing, the proof was trivial to derive. It was long- ish to write out in words, sure, but the underlying concept was really simple. This blew my mind — I realised I didn't have a clue what we'd been studying the whole year.

The worrying thing is that I actually thought I understood that stuff. Before that incident, I didn't know what it feels like to actually understand something, and I didn't have an appreciation for the layers of depth even within that. I suspect lots of people go through the entire education system like this.

<comment><USER3> >I suspect lots of people go through the entire education system like this.

+1. it took me a couple years after getting kicked out of college to get my head sorted out to the point where I felt like I could "think" again

I think one of the most harmful things about schooling is the way it imposes a tracked structure on learning. it demarcates knowledge into discrete subjects and sets up a linear progression through them and says you need to master each step on the track before moving onto the next one. this is poisonous and borderline evil, and I've encountered many people who are crippled for life by it. a lot of people never pursue things they're really interested in and could become extremely passionate about because school has convinced them they need to stack up prerequisite knowledge before they're even allowed to touch it

<comment><USER4> > says you need to master each step on the track before moving onto the next > one. this is poisonous and borderline evil

What's wrong with it? You do need to understand calculus before classical mechanics, classical mechanics before quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics before quantum field theory, and quantum field theory before the Standard Model. I've seen tons of people disregard this and the result is always confused word salad. People waste years of their lives this way, going in circles without ever carefully building their understanding from the ground up. The order in school was chosen for a reason.

<comment><USER5> Some people like to work their way in reverse. I'd often pick a really complicated subject I'm after like "stellar fusion" and then work my way downwards and learn whatever I need to learn in order to understand it. If I had to start from differential mathematics, without knowing why I need it, I'd probably give up.

<comment><USER6> This is the big problem I had with engineering in school, so much was based on faith that you needed it. And just now as I'm writing this, I realized that's completely counter to my personality.

side note: I remember Einstein needed to learn particular math skills to help prove his ideas and sought out to learn it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > This quality of "not stopping at an unsatisfactory answer" deserves some > examination.

> This requires a lot of intrinsic motivation, because it's so hard; so most > people simply don't do it.

It also requires self-confidence, persuasiveness, and social power.

Without these traits, your attempts to really understand something will be dismissed as "overthinking things" or "trying to understand the universe". Those around you will urge you to "stop thinking just do the task" or "do the obvious thing" as they lose patience with you. If you don't resist them you'll end up moving forward despite feeling confused, sometimes completely. You'll then end up pissing people off when you execute too slowly or fail (in their eyes, intentionally).

> This is a habit. It's easy to pick up.

Not if the people around you are exhausted by you.

<comment><USER8> There are both extremes, and best not to be at either one of them.

Example: I forget the name of the principle, but in mathematics the statement "P implies Q" is considered true if P can never be true. As an example, let P be "George Washington was a woman" and Q be "Queen Elizabeth is a man". Then the statement "If GW was a woman, then QE is a man" is considered to be a true statement.

I have a friend who refuses to accept that such a statement should be considered "true". And he has put off studying real analysis until he can learn enough logic theory to convince himself on the validity of accepting such statements as true. I do not think he'll ever get to study real analysis, because he is full of "No! I need to understand this really really well before proceeding!" statements.

It's a fine approach if you have an infinite amount of time.

The other issue, as another commenter pointed out: It's very difficult to measure progress in thought. The mind is great at fooling itself, and not until you try to solve real problems (or discuss them with others) will you expose most of the gaps in your mind. The same person in the above anecdote does suffer from this. He definitely puts in effort to learn a lot (and has succeeded), but there are always more things to learn, and he moves on to the next topic before really applying what he has learned. As someone who talks to him often, it's really hard to tell if he understands. He is the classic case of "I'm sure I can solve problems when I need to, with a bit of review".

At the other extreme, of course, are people who are not really that motivated to understand. They are satisfied if they get the answer at the back of the book. You won't get far with just that.

> If you don't resist them you'll end up moving forward despite feeling > confused, sometimes completely. You'll then end up pissing people off when > you execute too slowly or fail (in their eyes, intentionally).

This sounds more like an issue at work, and your experience is fairly universal - most jobs I've worked at have it. In my experience, understanding things well is sadly not valued on the job. They want you to "execute", and want you to minimize the time you spend learning. And of course, they would rather hire someone else instead of ensuring your proper learning/training.

<comment><USER9> A real logician can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think those statements are considered "vacuously true" for the same reason we say the empty set is a member of every set and x^0 is 1: it makes the rules of calculation simpler if we define it that way than other ways. But you can't use these convenient definitions to learn anything new.

You can keep multiplying your equation by x^0 and union-ing your set with the empty set and or-ing your proposition with "If eggs are diamonds then fish can talk" all the livelong day, but you never gain any more information.

<comment><USER8> I pretty much told him the same: That we declared such statements to be true merely for convenience - it makes the proofs shorter. And that none of the theorems he would normally deal with would have a different "outcome" if we don't accept such statements - they'd still be valid theorems.

But he won't be convinced until he formally studies logic. No idea when that will happen.

<comment><USER10> Well I have "formally" studied formal logic and he's in for a disappointment. Formal logic is a game, especially boolean logic, which has no grounding in truth, the world, or anything. Sometimes it's a useful game, but there's no inherent meaning behind it.

Tell your friend that implication works that way because that's what we've assumed, nothing more, nothing less.

<comment><USER8> > Formal logic is a game, especially boolean logic, which has no grounding in > truth, the world, or anything.

Thing is: He knows this. He's not a "beginner" who wants to learn a bit more. He just hasn't spent enough time pondering vacuously true statements, and is assuming there is more to it than there is, and hopes studying logic will shed some light. So he refuses to study analysis until he has time to study logic.

No doubt, if he ever gets to logic, he'll end up with more questions and branching off further and further. He'll never get around to analysis. But like the top level comment - he doesn't like it when people tell him not to bother.

<comment><USER10> Though not implication, there is some reasoning to some other vacuously true statements. Take for example:

All purple cows are smart.

This statement is true, because the set of purple cows is empty. It might seem, odd, but it's because we can rephrase it as:

There does not exist a purple cow that is not smart.

When you phrase it like that, I think most people would intuitively agree that it should evaluate to true. In other words, to preserve symmetry between the universal and existential qualifiers, you need the first statement to also be true. Without the ability to transform "exists" into "foralls" would make first order predicate logic pretty much useless. In addition, if the emptiness of a set actually changed how the quantifiers worked, it would be a big problem: breaking referential transparency, if you will.

I don't recall there being a similar justification for implication in boolean logic, but I think the reasoning is similar. Hope that helps!

<comment><USER11> > I don't recall there being a similar justification for implication in > boolean logic, but I think the reasoning is similar.

You can apply a similar equivalence, the contrapositive. Using the same example I gave sidethread:

0\. (Premise - I wish to snottily imply that "that guy" did not graduate from high school.)

1\. "If that guy graduated from high school, I'm the King of England."

(1) is exactly equivalent to (2):

2\. "If I'm not the King of England, that guy didn't graduate from high school."

A positive proposition in (1) is negative in (2), and vice versa. But they are the same thing; if one is defined, the other is also defined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As an engineering manager, I love having a mix of people who just always need to go deep on whatever they're working on and others who are just obsessed with shipping and getting stuff out. Particularly great when you pair them off and they push/pull each other a bit.

<comment><USER13> Totally agree with this. I used to be solely in the latter camp and my teammates pulled me in the deep direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have always thought that, as mentioned in the article, time is the greatest enemy. Human minds are incredible at understanding and theorizing, if given enough time. But when we are young and lacking information, pressure and trust of authority create a time-restriction that disallows us from forming truly "soft" or flexible models. Thus we are sort of taught to "forget" about a problem once it is solved. The problem itself becomes a task to be finished (for brownie points) rather than an actual problem with its own unique set of rewards. Not every problem rewards equally and even some problems may be detrimental to solve, but the self-education that our education system requires of our minds to succeed in the system makes it such that we regard problems as something we need to solve as proof to authority that we may get some free time.

Great post.

</comment><comment><USER15> Heh I get this a lot in my daily sysadmin/developer duties. When you need to turn on a knob somewhere you don't just wanna know that you have to turn it on, you want to know why you need to turn it on and follow the chain up until you get to facts you already know. But it's not always possible to get that far, there's too many layers of abstraction, the source code is not available or you just don't have the time.

<comment><USER16> I can draw a parallel to this in software development. Some product features that require development "from scratch", where you can get down to the original code and logic - this is where "taking time to think" really pays off.

But when you are basically composing a final product from components, libraries and features - this is where figuring something out may take really long time and a lot of effort. It today's world many libraries are open source, so you actually can get to the bottom of many issues. But the time and effort cost of that is almost never acceptable.

My conclusion is - if you are a "slow" thinker, prefer getting to the bottom and figuring stuff out - try and choose the "fundamental" type of work. Where you are "done is better than perfect" kinda person - you'll thrive in the upper layers of development stack where shipping stuff out is of utmost importance. Focus on your strengths.

<comment><USER17> Where do you find this "fundamental" kind of work? How do you select for it?

<comment><USER16> One example would be analytics libraries that require precise calculations and background in math as opposed to the UI that displays the bar chart with results. The former is what I consider to be "fundamental" where the latter is much higher level and close to the end user (UI).

Other examples: audio / video codecs vs. media player app; game engine vs. intro screen and menu stuff, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I worry that the way modern society is structured disincentivizes deep understanding.

1\. Industry cares more about concrete results, quick execution, and bias for action.

2\. Academia cares more about positive results, quantity of published papers, and small achievable experiments over big experiments that might fail.

Where are the institutions that care about deep understanding?

<comment><USER19> i agree. I think this is why I find companies like tesla and spacex exciting. They seem to have set up incentive structures that encourage _both_ quick execution and innovation (which requires deep understanding). One thing he's said that really struck me is that it's _really_ difficult to produce innovation if you tie punishment to failure. People tend to be conservative if they are punished / think they will be punished harshly for trying and failing. But if you want to innovate, failure has to be an acceptable outcome

hopefully we see more companies go in this direction

<comment><USER20> well that's where the whole mantra of "move fast and break things" comes from.

Putting it out there and failing also accelerates you faster to the right answers. If you release it today, it'll take 6 more months of iteration to really get it right. Or maybe you spend an extra 2 years of development to get it "right", but then once you release, you'll still have to spend 3 more months of iteration anyways to get it right.

<comment><USER19> yeah, this hits home for me because my team just spent a couple of years trying to get a product right and now it's on the verge of being replaced.

I think I've typically associated that mantra with pure software companies, so it's surprising when a company does this with rockets

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The points about education really resonate with me. In my engineering undergrad, it was frustrating to see in our applied math courses that the mechanical plugging and chugging of equations was the approach that most of my peers took in their studies. They got better grades than me. I wanted to understand concepts more deeply, but there was no time, and the tests rewarded those who could simply go through the motions of applying formulae to problems.

<comment><USER22> I'm a first-year engineering undergrad, last Friday I finished the last Calculus 3 exam on the semester.

I spent 2 days studying with friends just to see they would blindly memorize formulas with no regard whatsoever for what they were actually doing. "I'm not the understanding type", they said unironically.

Do you think this happens more often in engineering than other disciplines? Some people believe that applied science or mathematics means that just learning formulas is enough

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > But it's not just energy. You have to be able to motivate yourself to spend > large quantities of energy on a problem, which means on some level that not > understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you a > lot. You have the drive, the will to know.

This resonates with me. Someone once asked me how I decide when I'm finished with a particular thing I'm working on. The answer is as simple as "when I stop thinking about it". When it stops bubbling up in my thoughts. Until then, I'll keep returning, and I'll keep chipping away.

<comment><USER10> That's a really great and profound answer. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> One of the things I remember quite vividly from my Psychology classes in college was the idea of a "satisficing" problem solver. Given a (reasonably solvable) problem to solve most people can come up with a satisfactory solution. The difficulty comes when you ask them to come up with a new solution. Many people struggle because their brains say "I already came up with a solution, and it was a pretty darn good solution too."

The really creative people are the ones who insist that their brains come up with another solution, and another one until they can be confident that they've found the best solution within a reasonable time investment.

<comment><USER25> To me this seemed to get easier as I encountered more "languages of the mind", i.e. more ways to think about things. This, is very much tied to the "nurture" part of our lives, as foundational experiences are more by the very definition of "experience" subjective and unique.

Solving a problem within mathematics in a new way can be made much easier if you have grasped multiple fields (for example, algebra vs. geometry). I've seen people understanding chemistry well because they enjoyed cooking, and could sort of use either to get to a given explanation to solve a problem. I've definitely started to grasp chemistry only when I reached a decent level in theoretical physics.

Here's my assumption: everything has a likelihood of depending to some degree on other things (examples: can you do mathematics without a language or writing? can you do physics without mathematics?). Therefore, "thinking laterally" could very well be thought of more as "thinking with an interesting combination of previous vectors of thought". Perhaps the "genius" is to create nonlinear combinations of previous vectors.

So in short, this ability to come up with another solution, and another, and another.. I wonder how much it is tied to the richness of experiences you've had since your birth, and particularly the foundational ones (at the very least I would assume to be more testable than later on, if my hypothesis about dependency of "thought vectors" is true).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Not stopping after the first right answer is one metacognitive strategy[1] among many. Metacognition is an area of active research.

I first heard of metacognition as a distinct discipline in connection with the treatment of insecure attachment.[2]

Metarationality[3] is an aspect or extension of metacognition.

[1] [https://helpfulprofessor.com/metacognitive- strategies/](https://helpfulprofessor.com/metacognitive-strategies/)

[2] [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-resilient- brain/...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-resilient- brain/201609/attachment-disturbances-major-breakthrough-in-treatment)

[3] [https://meaningness.com/eggplant/introduction](https://meaningness.com/eggplant/introduction)

</comment><comment><USER27> From the article:

> Visualizing something, in three dimensions, can help you with a concrete > "hook" that your brain can grasp onto and use as a model; understanding then > has a physical context that it can "take place in".

I'm still sore at the educational system in my country (Serbia) for ignoring and occasionally discouraging this kind of visual thinking. Remembering words and reproducing them at the time of examination was rewarded far more than constructing a mental model of how things work at the abstract level, and then deriving conclusions from that. Some teachers were exception, of course, and I remember them vividly and fondly to this day, but the rest are like some amorphous gray mass that barely existed somewhere in may past.

I still remember being told to memorize the Schrödinger's equation in high school, before we even covered, let alone understood the underlying maths. And I still don't. The funny thing is that this teacher was one of the "good ones" and she actually apologized to us for forcing us do this. But her hands were tied by the teaching "plan and program" that was obviously created by a committee whose members didn't talk to each other.

At the university (maths + CS), we would write-down (to our notebooks) the computer programs scribbled onto the blackboard by the professor, then memorize them for the exam, which was taken on paper. Nobody ever asked any questions. I still remember a colleague who didn't understand the concept of a pointer. That was in the third year and she had good grades.

I honestly hope things have improved in the meantime (the above was in the '90s).

</comment><comment><USER28> Unironically writing about "honesty, integrity, and bravery" while working at Palantir

</comment><comment><USER29> Jesus christ that background is distracting.

<comment><USER30> Wasn't sure whether your comment was relevant, then I remembered I closed the article a third of the way through because of a deep annoyance with the background.

I'm all for individual expression, but here I think it subtracts from the reading experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Huge fan of this kind of thinking.

I try to recommend this technique with software all the time. Basically instead of the workflow bring this

1) follow some tutorial online 2) integrate into real work

I do

1) follow some tutorial online 2) spend an hour to see how I can break it 3) integrate into real work

That step two does all sorts of wonderful things like helping you understand failure modes, better understand quality, make it easier to debug. You get the same knowledge over time by doing "real work", but it is much much more efficient this way :)

</comment><comment><USER32> How would you create a training program to teach all of lessons?

I thought of creating a workshop at my uni, titled "how to ask stupid questions?" Essentially, do group activities where someone presents on some topic, and the goal of the audience is to ask genuine "stupid questions" \- questions about the fundamentals, which most people are embarrassed to ask, but which play a big part in understanding.

</comment><comment><USER33> There is one point there that I thought was interesting, regarding asking questions, and not being afraid to look stupid and about many senior/distinguished people doing that. Being in science, I noticed that it gets easier when you get more and more stature. I.e. if you are a professor, I think it is very easy to ask a postdoc/student after the talk -- sorry I don't understand it, or sorry if it is a stupid question. And the reason is 1) you know much better the limits of your knowledge, so it is unlikely a stupid question 2) You may be less dependent on the opinion of people surrounding you. While if you are say a grad student, when you ask a question, there is a higher chance of looking stupid, just because you may know significantly less and also you may be more afraid of people around you because of their higher career status.

Because of all this, I find it a bit disingenuous when senior people say to younger people that you should always ask questions and not being afraid of looking stupid. But being curious and asking questions is good overall. It is just not always easy.

<comment><USER34> > Because of all this, I find it a bit disingenuous when senior people say to > younger people that you should always ask questions and not being afraid of > looking stupid. But being curious and asking questions is good overall. It > is just not always easy.

I agree with your general point, but a minor comment here: in many cases the professor/leader asking those (stupid) questions may be to create psychological safety for a more open conversation. It is less threatening to the person being questioned; it also encourages other people to participate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Sharing one of my favorite quotes on this topic that James Clerk Maxwell was said [0] to tell his students:

"In this class I hope you will learn not merely results, or formulae applicable to cases that may possibly occur in our practice afterwards, but the principles on which those formulae depend, and without which the formulae are mere mental rubbish. I know the tendency of the human mind is to do anything rather than think. But mental labor is not thought, and those who have with labor acquired the habit of application often find it much easier to get up a formula than to master a principle."

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v40OcJ7rfSE&t=788s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v40OcJ7rfSE&t=788s)

</comment><comment><USER36> Excellent read. So much of this resonates deeply with me based on uni experiences. I studied math and was guilty on more than one occasion of basically memorizing some theorems and methods of manipulation, missing the forest for the trees so to speak.

</comment><comment><USER37> I catch myself doing this quite often: I read documentation, try a couple of things,if it works,I move on. Now this is all good when dealing with simple things but the more complex things are the less it works. It's like reading learn python in 10 days and then going on GitHub with all that newly gained knowledge and confidence and trying to understand how a large codebase works. Within about 30 seconds you close the browser and binary tears start dripping on your keyboard...

</comment><comment><USER38> > Moreover, I have noticed that these 'hardware' traits vary greatly in the > smartest people I know -- some are remarkably quick thinkers, calculators, > readers, whereas others are 'slow'.

This strikes a chord. I am much more of a nerd than my girlfriend, but I notice at almost every opportunity that she's a much quicker thinker and a much better learner than I am. I have studied math and computer science, but she regularly out-thinks me in puzzles, even when they are math-related.

</comment><comment><USER39> This takes a habit that's sometimes good for some people and some subjects, and turns it into a universal recommendation, and then claims that's what intelligence is, which is really quite dubious.

To work on math, you need time, a peaceful place to think, and motivation. Even then, you can't do this for everything, because there is too much. Obsessing on something that's not urgent when there's more important stuff to do may not be good time management, depending on your priorities and other claims on your time. But you might do it anyway, depending on your interests.

Also, learning some other subject well may be less about thinking by yourself and more about going out and talking to people, or playing a lot of games, or challenging yourself in some other way. All that takes time too.

But there is a lesson here: knowing something in more than one way means you know it better. I see this especially in music, where there are multiple ways to memorize a piece and they reinforce each other. Auditory memory (being able to hear it in your head), muscle memory, knowing the chords, knowing the lyrics, even remembering where it is on the page can all help.

</comment><comment><USER40> Gerry Sussman talked at length about IV during his DanFest [https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/dfried_celebration.html](https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/dfried_celebration.html) talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arMH5GjBwUQ&t=295](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arMH5GjBwUQ&t=295) .

</comment><comment><USER19> > not understanding something — or having a bug in your thinking — bothers you > a lot.

I find this to be true for nearly all of the best co-workers I've had. I think this is the same reason people enjoy debugging software. It's the computer telling you that there's a bug in your thinking

</comment><comment><USER41> My own take trying to express this dichotomy of second-hand versus firsthand knowledge [https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/682](https://blog.alexrohde.com/archives/682)

</comment><comment><USER42> Great article. A nice followup can be an article that talks about how to prioritize, or select which problems to take a deep dive in.

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting; for the chain rule proof he cites, it would seem at first glance that if you rewrite the leibniz notation as its equivalent limit notation, then the y terms cancel. It has been a while since I learned differential calculus, so perhaps that is why I don't immediately recall why this is wrong?

</comment><comment><USER44> > Another quality I have noticed in very intelligent people is being unafraid > to look stupid.

At school, there was a guy who used to ask questions which made him look stupid, at first. After discussing said questions for a few minutes, it often became apparent that those questions were in fact at the heart of the topic.

</comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of "How to Solve It" by George Pólya. Short read about finding approaches to problems, planning proofs, and understanding by restropect.

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

</comment><comment><USER46> > Understanding something really deeply is connected to our physical intuition

This rings true to me.

I think that I "understand" how to start a fire, which I do a couple dozen times a year, in a deeper more complete way than I understand any of the abstract software development that I spend 30 hours a week doing.

</comment><comment><USER47> I can't scale the text on that page. I tried in both Firefox and Edge.

</comment><comment><USER48> This reminds me of a discussion in the most recent episode of Django Chat with Aymeric Augustin on the difference between tutorials and reference documentation.

</comment><comment><USER49> Interesting that his understanding of calculus doesn't include non-standard analysis. But then mathematics has a lot of abstractions.

</comment><comment> Volker-E Oh my lord, why is Jesus in that list?

<comment><USER50> because it's actually quite relevant. The quality that the author is talking about is simply faith. Genuine intellectual activity is the recognition that there is a gap between how you understand the world and that there is is a more genuine degree of understanding to be found.

Because there's no guarantee of success the attitude one needs to adopt is the same attitude a believer needs to have, which is to take a leap of faith.

And like genuine faith, genuine intellectual activity is not goal oriented. If you only think to optimise your shopping list or make more money, you're impoverishing your own thinking by making it subject to what basically amounts some meaningless goal, that is to say you're instrumentalising thinking. Just like being faithful so you end up on God's or the churches good side is an impoverished version of belief.

<comment><USER51> The OP goes into some detail on the essentialness of honesty and integrity when it comes to inquiry. Without both, your pursuit of deep understanding will short-circuit. The best way I know to overlook truth is to willfully presume you know something, especially something unknowable. And that's faith. To exercise faith, you must stop questioning, shut your eyes, and jump into the abyss. You stop thinking. If some sort of understanding arises from faith, it most certainly is not the fruit of intellectual pursuit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Interesting. tl;dr -- we learn by experiencing things, not by being told things.

<comment><USER53> I think this is the transmissionism versus constructivist view on teaching.[0] This is something that is well-known in education and I wish more people knew about it! Lay people commonly think of education as transmission of ideas from teachers to learners, but educators believe that learners construct their own understanding of ideas. So these educators try to create situations where the learners can do that construction.

[0]: [http://nas- sites.org/responsiblescience/files/2016/05/Dirks-...](http://nas- sites.org/responsiblescience/files/2016/05/Dirks-and-Stith-ActiveLearning- May-81.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is this consciousness?

IQ being the biggest life changer.

Consciousness is considered second and more importantly is considered trainable.

<comment><USER54> Since spellcheck killed that -

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

It's part of the 'Big Five' factor of personality. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits)

It's interesting when Jordan Peterson was asked what he has been wrong about, he said he did not initially believe in the Big Five personality traits.

It fits with the hardware(IQ) and software(conscientiousness) analogy</comment></comment>


How Amazon Became America's Biggest Publisher of Translated Literature - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123150/americas-biggest-publisher-literature-translation-amazon/ <comment><USER2> That seems like an unambiguously good development. With the low number of Americans who travel to foreign countries, external cultural influences like these can only be enriching to the culture, in the same way that immigration and African-American influences seem to have been a key component of America's cultural hegemony.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anybody has any numbers on the share of translated literature in other markets?

<comment><USER4> No data. But anecdotally it's pretty high in Germany.

Eg Harry Potter has been a hit just as big as in Britain, but most people read it in the German translation.</comment></comment>


On Boredom (1975) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/08/07/on-boredom/ <comment><USER2> having been bored out of my skull all day; about mid-way through the piece I started to think this was a brilliant bit of reverse-psychology:

snip snip:

> It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp- > creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with > which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of > the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of > paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness > of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages</comment>


React flexbox layout and grid system - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jxnblk/reflexbox/ <comment><USER2> Why should I use this instead of plain CSS?

<comment><USER3> Why not?

<comment><USER4> bringing in another dependency for one</comment></comment></comment>


30 healthcare leaders under 40 using technology to shape the future of medicine - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.de/30-under-40-health-tech-leaders-2018-6?r=UK&IR=T <comment><USER2> From the 30 companies, the only one that tries to solve medical problems by going to the root cause: no 23. uBiome.com and the only one that has a helpful product: no 30. neopenda.com</comment>


What If Your Neighbor Could Give You a Parking Ticket? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/us/citizen-police.html <comment><USER2> I find it funny the article talks about have the right people with the right frame of mind and training to be parking enforcers. Yet, it doesn't seem the same thing applies the police. Cops can be pigheaded aggressive bullies who go through less training than a plumber.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE? - <AUTHOR>

I've been using Java for several years, but have never really yet felt the need for an IDE. I've toyed with Eclipse a bit, but for the most part my projects have been small enough that I've just done them in vim.
At work I've begun using Java much more heavily, and have been introduced to IntelliJ IDEA. I really like it so far, and it's making me wonder how I ever made do without the awesome code completion and refactoring features of a great Java IDE.
I've had a hard time finding a really good comparison of recent versions of the major IDEs (Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ), so for those of you who have used a few different Java IDEs (or even those who have only used one), what are your favourite features, or the things you most missed when you switched IDEs. Which one would you recommend to someone new to the world of Java IDEs  who hasn't yet developed too strong an allegiance? <comment><USER2> We've used Netbeans and Eclipse for previous projects, but moved to IntelliJ last year.

The language integration is much richer - and it has a more solid foundation for working with multiple languages. For example, find usages and refactor- rename will work across different languages and templates. When I find usages for a field, for instance, it shows me where it is used in hibernate queries, EL expressions on pages, etc.

Languages can be arbitrarily nested in each other, a lot more so than other IDEs I've used - for instance, I can still use command completion and refactoring in nested SQL, HTML, CSS or even Javascript (eg. GWT's JSNI methods) when it is inside java strings, or XML documents, or wherever else.

The JavaScript support far exceeds either Eclipse or Netbeans. IntelliJ has fairly decent refactoring and completion for Javascript, which the other IDEs (at least as of last year) barely supported.

It has full completion, find usages, and jump-to-usage within JPA/Hibernate queries, which all ties straight back to the original entity classes.

The refactoring tools are a lot richer, and a lot faster than Eclipse or netbeans offered. On a largish project the refactoring commands still feel near-instant in IntelliJ -- it may not sound like such a big deal, but after becoming accustomed to it, I use the refactoring tools _constantly_ while writing code. I didn't do it nearly as much with the other IDEs.

The refactoring commands are all extremely solid -- for instance, the extract method refactoring will detect similar code snippets and ask you if you want to replace them with the method call. I never had Eclipse or Netbeans ask me that (Have they changed in the newer versions?)

I've also found the support for Git far exceeds the other IDEs.

While the price seems expensive compared to the free competition, most programmers use their IDE 8 hours per day -- given programmer wages, it only takes a tiny improvement in productivity to pay for itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> I strongly prefer NetBeans to Eclipse. I haven't used IntelliJ, but would like to.

The big feature of NetBeans is simply that it's fully-integrated. Out of the box, it works with Maven, Subversion, Mercurial, etc. Comes with Tomcat and HSQL so you can deploy your web apps from within the IDE. It requires far less setup and just generally "does the right thing" without really requiring me to make a bunch of decisions and install a ton of plugins. With Eclipse I never managed to make any of that stuff work; there are many different plugins you'll find for any given task by searching, and many of them have plugin dependencies or are outdated or just suck. My time is too valuable to spend it making Eclipse into the one IDE to rule them all. I have not been disappointed by NetBeans, and three of my coworkers have switched to it since I've been there, I suspect because they got tired of configuring Eclipse.

Just my two cents. I'm sure a lot of what I gripe about is "easy" to do, and I certainly would admit that more is possible with Eclipse, but the tradeoff just doesn't seem worth it to me.

<comment><USER4> _I strongly prefer NetBeans to Eclipse. I haven't used IntelliJ, but would like to._

I have used IntelliJ and I far prefer Netbeans from 6.7 on. I suspect a lot of people used an older version of Netbeans but after 6.7 it is probably the most well integrated IDE available for Java as well as an assortment of other languages.

Someone said the Javascript support was better in IntelliJ product and I just don't see that, Netbeans has better support for Javascript than ever Aptana Studio as well it supports the syntax of all of the major JS Toolkits from Dojo to jQuery.

Netbeans rivals Visual Studio when it comes to an well integrated environment that provides UI's for SQL / DB managment, HTML, CSS, XML, JSON, Server managment and is the first IDE that I did not feel like I was roughing it in since coming back to Java from doing some .NET work for a couple of years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am currently a serious Vim user, but I was once an IntelliJ addict. I _highly_ recommend it. It is orders of magnitudes better than Eclipse and NetBeans. If you do consider plunking down the cash for a license, _force_ yourself to use the refactoring tools as much as possible. If you are primarily editing a single, strongly-typed language, then you can't go wrong with anything from JetBrains. IntelliJ IDEA, Resharper, etc. All brilliant.

On a bit of a tangent: If you are editing many different types of text (In my case: HTML/Templates, Sass/CSS, Javascript, Python, config files, a little bit of Java/Scala, etc.) then go completely IDE-free and learn Vim or Emacs. For me, the IDE vs Text Editor debate comes down to the question "Am I primarily editing one type of code in a single strongly typed language, or am I primarily edited _text_?"

<comment><USER2> I would phrase that question as "Am I editing one file, or a project of files?". As a Vim user, who previously only used IDEs for java projects, I now use IntelliJ for HTML/CSS/Javascript projects too. If you learn the refactoring and completion shortcuts, I believe it beats VIM at most multi- file projects.

If you install the Ruby plugin (also built by JetBrains, for their Ruby IDE) you get support for Sass - and they've just announced support for Less and Sass3 in the next version, including command completion and jump-to- declaration. [http://blogs.jetbrains.com/ruby/2010/07/whats-mining- leaner-...](http://blogs.jetbrains.com/ruby/2010/07/whats-mining-leaner-css/)

The Scala plugin doesn't seem too bad either, but I haven't used it extensively. It already has some simple refactoring features.

They're also working on a Python IDE, which is in beta, so the Python plugin will get fairly good too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I prefer Eclipse, but I haven't spent much time using Netbeans or IntelliJ, so I can't really say that Eclipse is "best." I can just say that it works very well for me, and has a rich ecosystem of plugins and additional tools that I find handy.

On the downside, Eclipse is awfully memory hungry in my experience. Not sure how it compares to Netbeans or IntelliJ though.

<comment><USER7>
        On the downside, Eclipse is awfully
        memory hungry in my experience.

I've heard that before, but I can't really understand why - I haven't had memory issues with eclipse in years.

I thought it might be because I've had at least 4gb of RAM in every computer I've used for several years now, but when I checked its memory usage eclipse was using around 250mb.

I've asked a friend who uses a netbook with 1gb of ram and he uses eclipse without issue on a regular basis as well, so I'm really not sure where this myth comes from.

Maybe people are just loading up their eclipses with a ton of plugins?

<comment><USER8> Memory usage depends on how much source code you have. A startup will never have enough source code to worry about it, unless you do something silly like compiling all your third-party libraries from source. It wasn't until I joined Google that I started seeing performance issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really like Eclipse, although lately I've read a lot of vitriol towards it. It works for me, but then again I only use Java for GWT and Google's plugin is only for Eclipse. But its refactoring capabilities are satisfactory for me.

I use Netbeans for Rails, but I've never really gotten into using it for Java. Although, I hear their Swing WYSIWYG editor is nice.

I've never used IDEA, but I've never read one negative thing about it. In fact, I've also get the impression that a lot of developers swear by it. I just don't want to pay for it.

<comment><USER8> There is a free, open source version of IDEA now (without all the plugins):

<http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/free_java_ide.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use vim with the brilliant eclim plugin to write java code on my netbook. <http://eclim.org> Lets you run eclipse headless and communicate to it through vim to get the fancy IDE stuff like code completion, automatic imports, etc. Best of both worlds, especially when coding on a netbook and not having the screen real-estate to run an IDE.

</comment><comment><USER11> Netbeans with the jVi plugin for my vim bindings is where it's at for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have done a comparison of Java IDEs, but it was more than 3 years ago and a lot of things have changed since then. Today I don't bother with JDeveloper anymore, I use NetBeans only if I want to hack on the JDK sources, Eclipse only when imposed by the client, and my choice is IntelliJ IDEA.

If you're interested, the comparison is at <http://www.datafaber.com/post/view/id/521> .

</comment><comment><USER13> BTW, Idea has nice VIM plugin: <http://plugins.jetbrains.net/plugin/?id=164>

</comment><comment><USER14> I prefer IntelliJ IDEA but in the past I have used Eclipse and Netbeans for long periods of time.

I find IntelliJ's support for Scala and Clojure to also be good. I built the open source version from source, and kicked its tires also: worked with the Clojure and Scala plugins but does not support much J2EE stuff - you might want to give that a try.

</comment><comment><USER15> IntelliJ IDEA rocks! I have used all three IDEs being discussed here and I would vouch for IDEA any day.

As already mentioned, besides other things, IDEA's refactoring is super solid. The ease with which one can perform such functions using IDEA actually supports their tagline - "... develop with pleasure!"

It's SVN integration is also good.

</comment><comment><USER16> I need to keep track of this thread. I have not heard of some of these before.

I'm currently learning with Notepad so I can force the syntax on myself. Is this a bad idea for a newb? I have Notepad++ but I haven't fired it up for Java yet, I just like it because I'm used to Geany on my linux machines and it feels similar.

<comment> brown9-2 An IDE can help you learn syntax as well, with the added benefit that your code is compiled incrementally every time you save the file (at least with Eclipse), meaning you don't need to drop back down to _javac_ each time you want to compile, and then compare the results in a command window to what is in your Notepad session.

So really, would you prefer to get red squiggly lines to show you your errors as you type, or would you rather try to get it perfect first before having to run a command-line program for compilation?

<comment><USER16> That's some cool stuff. I had no idea that there were IDE's that did incremental compiling.

On the other hand, spell check made my spelling take a dive, so I had to consciously decide to stop using the right-click and replace-- hmm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you can live with a bit slow but loads of plugins, stick to Eclipse. Bonus point is, you can use the same IDE for other languages (if you switch to other languages), withou wasting more time to bypass the learning curve.

</comment><comment><USER18> I prefer Eclipse but if I am forced to use maven as my build environment then it is IDEA.

</comment><comment><USER19> VIM

<comment><USER20> ...is not an IDE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Notice a common theme here? Everyone who's worked with IDEA says it's the best, and I agree.

A few years ago, IDEA was even more the-best than now, because the gap with Eclipse was wider. Nowadays Eclipse probably has most of the functionality, but there's still the difference that usually exists between open-source and commercial software. The commercial software tends to be better to use.</comment>


WebGazer.js: Eye Tracking on the Browser - <AUTHOR> http://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/# <comment><USER2> The demo you came here for

[https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/collision.html](https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/collision.html)

Click around the screen where you're currently looking to calibrate

<comment> martin-adams That is amazing. I've never used an eye-tracking device before so the experience of hitting the circles with my eyes is very surreal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this would be really useful to UX researchers! The folks I know in that space often set up screen-sharing sessions with users, and watch them interact with the UI in real time. Adding gaze tracking to this process seems like a natural progression, allowing the researchers to see where the user expects a button or UI feature to be, even if the user can't articulate that in real time.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is impressive work. My lab does eye tracking with really expensive equipment locally. It would be interesting to conduct visual/face processing studies through the web and include eye tracking data with this library. Granted the accuracy is low compared to specialized equipment and predictions are highly variable, other contributors could enhance its accuracy. I suspect that the variability in shape, size, and structure of human faces contributed greatly to the high variance/low resolution predictions issue. Maybe categorizing the user's face shape a priori would enhance predictions. That is, the library would first estimate the "type of face" and use those data to inform the eye tracking. This might not make sense --just a thought.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just curious, but does anyone who pays attention to this space/technology know if eye tracking (with commodity-ish hardware) has gotten to the point of "replacing the mouse"?

E.g. at the OS level, the pointer basically follows your gaze.

<comment><USER6> Eyes don't point a things we look at as accurate as a mouse does (they only aim within the fovea, about 1 degree angular, corresponding to about 1cm on the screen) and eye trackers are often far worse.

This summer I built a system that uses slight head movements for refinement, allowing hands free mousing as fast as a trackpad. However, eye trackers good enough for the system to be pleasant cost $10000+. I have ideas that would allow it to work with a $100 eye tracker, but even then it has the downside that the computer vision for your mouse will peg one core.

<comment><USER7> As someone who hates mice and hopes one day to have this sort of tech, I'm trying to understand what you mean by "Eyes don't point at things we look at as accurate as a mouse does" \- how is it that I can choose to "look at" an individual pixel on my screen, or an individual serif on a letter, and then choose another one far less than 1cm away, and my eye focus shifts to it? That shift is not detectable by a camera?

(Edit update: by "detectable" I mean theoretically detectable by a really good camera and software. In other words, it seems you are arguing the tech is impossible even theoretically due to some aspect of biology. Am I following you correctly there? Thanks)

<comment><USER8> I'm also not an expert, but I suspect a confounding problem is the fact that they eyes never stop moving, even when it feels to us like we're looking at a single point: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement#Saccades](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement#Saccades)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this could be useful with Digital Signage. My client uses HTML to display content and is run in browser which makes it easy to design and deploy content. He says one of the challenges is getting seamless user interactivity with his browser based digital signage.

This coupled with web camera recognizing hand gestures e.g. [http://hadi.io/gest.js/](http://hadi.io/gest.js/) could help grabbing user interaction inside his apps without too much hassle but right now its a janky solution compared to a real native kinect setup (I don't think its even possible to effectively connect to kinect in browser).

<comment><USER10> Someday soon USB devices will be accessible, thanks to the Chromebook. Not sure if that will help accessing the Kinect.

[https://wicg.github.io/webusb/](https://wicg.github.io/webusb/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well after I figured out that I could use clicks to calibrate the tracker it was somewhat accurate (ca. 100-200 px), however hte variance was quite large.

I think it's a really nice idea, however not yet precise enough to work for such tasks as user studies

<comment><USER12> 100px gives you around 70 zones in your average desktop window. More, when you consider shared hits between zones. That's enough to do basic heat maps of a web site (such as for ad impression tracking), coarse navigation, or integration into things like editors/IDEs.

<comment><USER13> I was thinking about ad impressions as well; but God forbid websites are ever able to use my camera for eye tracking by bypassing the webcam permissions (or through the removal of in the future? I expect anything when it comes to content monetisation).

<comment><USER12> Or simply refusing access to the content without access to the camera (thinking of Forbe's ill-conceived content blocking).

<comment><USER14> I will laugh my ass off if it ever comes to this. Hopefully I never have to come back to this comment and weep.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It sadly did not work for me either, even though I tried "calibrating" it with moving my mouse around the screen, but when i moved the mouse out of the window it was just as bad as before.

<comment><USER16> You need to click.

Open the game and follow the mouse with your eyes while you click each 8-directional edge of the game's viewport and then click the center.

Now you can let go of the mouse (don't need to move it out of the game) and the game should follow your gaze.

This demo is impressive. It's accurate enough for me to isolate the orange ball from the cluster.

On a website, the calibration could be done in a modal overlay. "Look at this dot while clicking it wherever it appears". After then Nth click, the modal goes away and the user lands on the website ready to gaze.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice work, well done.. one of the best one's we've seen !!!

I am one of the founders at xLabs and we too have been working on self calibrating real time interactive webcam eye tracking for a number of and have a number of demos and commercial products.

We'd love your feedback.. check out [http://xlabsgaze.com/](http://xlabsgaze.com/) (core tech) and our first commercial product [https://eyesdecide.com](https://eyesdecide.com) (Design effectiveness and usabilty testing SaaS).

Our just check out one of our video here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSnAfJWAhtE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSnAfJWAhtE)

Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER18> This could be useful to predict where the user will click next, so the website can preload data, with the result that user waiting time is reduced.

<comment><USER19> I assume it's meant for in-house user testing, not on the live web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> 100px accuracy. I thought eye tracking could do better than that in general? At 100px accuracy, WebGazer is more useful to advertisers than it is to consumers, as I can't see any consumer-friendly applications that would be useful with that precision. If that's the case, adoption won't grow. Are there other comparable eye tracking libraries out now?

<comment><USER12> > as I can't see any consumer-friendly applications that would be useful with > that precision

How about:

\- switching focus between windows

\- application selection a'la mission-control

\- coarse navigation through a document via a sidebar

\- real-time inventory management in a HTML5 game

\- Selective zoom of embedded images

Even more fun: Atom is run inside a web browser. Imagine what you could do with eye tracking within an IDE.

<comment><USER21> >Imagine what you could do with eye tracking within an IDE.

You provided really good cases for the rest, but for this I can't quite picture a need (other than maybe scrolling, which is arguably faster using vim movements already). Do you have any ideas?

<comment><USER16> Maybe it could be used for modal keybindings if your gaze changes modes e.g. focus between the panes of an IDE. hjkl moves the cursor when looking at the code, but it traverses the file hierarchy when looking at the sidebar, and enumerates tabs when looking at widgets.

Kind of like how keys are reused in Vim yet have similar meanings across each mode. You don't have to remember so many unique keybindings.

Some editors let you switch between panes with keybindings, but once you have more than a few or some in weird shapes, you end up needing tmux's `C-b q` pane selector. Seems like gaze could replace most of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nikki-9696 As a user, I find this creepy as f __k. I would love to know how to disable this sort of "feature" on my phone.

<comment><USER22> If you have an Apple device you don't need to disable it: webcam video streams (aka getUserMedia()) isn't supported on Safari. On other browsers you always need to give permission before the camera is switched on.

<comment> nikki-9696 Oh, great to know, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It didn't work for me until I did the following:

\- Zoom in so that my gaze is actually looking at distinct parts of the physical screen

\- Look at the cursor while _clicking_ a few times to train it

\- Take off my glasses

\- Move way closer to the camera and hold relatively still

It was a lot of hassle to get it to work but after it did work it was a lot of fun!

<comment><USER24> > Take off my glasses

I was wondering if that was the problem for me, but I'm so near-sighted that if I were close enough to actually see the cursor, there's no way the camera could see my eyes to track them. :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In the demo, I had to click on the screen a couple of times to get the dot to start moving around. Then, it seemed to want to follow my mouse quite a bit as I moved and clicked.

I was able to greatly move the red dot when I say closer to the webcam, really opened my eyes, and moved left to right, but the action was flipped for me — looking left moved the dot right, and vice versa. (I'm using an Apple Cinema Display… I've had issues before where it automatically flips the screen around in some cases.)

Although not very accurate, it's certainly an interesting experiment.

<comment><USER26> Did you calibrate it at all?

<comment><USER15> How do you calibrate it?

<comment><USER26> The instructions were on the page. Get it looking at your face properly, and then look directly at the mouse cursor and click it, on spots around the page. Make sure you don't move your head, just your eyes.

<comment><USER27> Maybe the site could detect if people have read the instructions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It didn't work for me at all; the red dot never appeared on my screen, though the face-outline in the preview image did fit my face quite well (when it wasn't detecting my chin as my mouth).

<comment><USER29> Hi, one of the authors here. It was probably not very clear on our part, but it's meant to train the eye tracking model as naturally you use the website. So it takes advantage of your interactions over time, like if you're using Gmail.

So if you're doing the demo on the blank page, click in a couple of places around the screen (while looking there as you would normally), and you should start seeing the prediction.

<comment><USER28> Oh, thanks, it worked now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm on a thunderbolt display (with integrated camera) sitting back about 3 feet. After 5 or so clicks against the corner regions, tracking became surprisingly accurate. I'm impressed!

</comment><comment><USER31> Very interesting project. Was excited to try this but the quality of the tracking is not there yet. The face detection was off most of the time unless I positioned my camera _just_ right. Then the eye tracking was no good. But they are only using a webcam and doing this right (see [http://www.tobii.com/xperience/](http://www.tobii.com/xperience/)) requires multiple IR emitters and an IR camera.

</comment><comment><USER32> It didn't work that well with the camera on my HP 8470p but great idea and I'm sure it took a lot of time and effort. I appreciate the effort.

</comment><comment><USER33> Interesting. Just curious, but does this library scalable for a facial recognition system? Eg: Authentication system.

</comment><comment><USER34> Cool idea and opens up a lot of interesting applications. Unfortunately, the demos don't work reliably (on my machine the tracking was completely off the wall).

</comment><comment><USER35> cool trick but we all know who will end up using this the most:

advertisers. another way for them to "gauge" their reach and brand appeal. or something.

literally i feel like every new thing that comes to the browser, a marketer at a company thinks, 'how can we exploit this to put more junk into the face of other people?'

i am not against advertising, i just think most of them have no limits in terms of what they'll exploit at the expense of their own users.

<comment><USER36> Well, advertisers couldn't use this without asking permission for a user's webcam, which would be a non-starter. I choose the less cynical path and say this could be tremendously useful for remote user testing.

<comment><USER37> Remote usability testing would be fantastic. This could be useful for local testing as well. Having a library or tool that could generically sit in front of a site to show where users look when taking action X sounds beneficial to me.

I can also imagine on a lighter note this being used for games where you look to where you want to move a character (maybe blink twice for confirmation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How many people are going to be hesitant to allow people to use their webcams?

I can't get it to work, but even if I could I would be very hesitant to use it.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if anyone has experimented with using something like this to make an incredibly inexpensive assistive technology interface

</comment><comment><USER40> Could this be useful to monitor user sentiment and correlate it with further data from applications/media?

</comment><comment><USER41> This is interesting. I don't see many practical implications though.

</comment><comment><USER42> pretty cool!</comment>


Martech 2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.customerlabs.co/martech-2-0-rise-of-marketing-operations-and-marketing-data-lake-55c9d4f188e8 <comment><AUTHOR> Marketing data lake, marketing operations will be the future. are you ready?

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks amazing. Does it also work like a tag manager?

<comment><USER3> Hey yes. It does support that feature. Www.customerlabs.co check it</comment></comment>


I chose Brave as my Chrome browser replacement - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/4/18249623/brave-browser-choice-chrome-vivaldi-replacement-chromium <comment><USER2> Interesting move! What are some of your favorite features/improvements thus far? I like that it now supports Chrome extensions</comment>


How Devastating was the Black Death? - <AUTHOR> http://www.medievalhistories.com/devastating-black-death/ <comment><USER2> Actual paper is titled "Next-generation ice core technology reveals true minimum natural levels of lead (Pb) in the atmosphere: Insights from the Black Death".

The gist is that we've been operating under wrong assumptions about what normal background levels of lead in the atmosphere are like. What we used to consider normal turns out to be affected by pre-industrial human activities way more than we thought. Natural lead levels, as the paper shows, are much lower. Assuming we've found the true baseline levels, we see that we and our ancestors were/are being exposed to higher, relative to baseline, lead levels than we thought.

The main kicker of this research to me is that it puts into question some _previous_ research pertaining to human health and lead (which, as we do already know, don't go well together at all—the friendly paper[0] provides a summary), as well as current public health measures.

[0] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GH000064/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GH000064/full)

<comment><USER3> Clair Patterson, during a 60 year quest to prove that lead in our modern environment was harmful, went to tremendous lengths to find evidence of pre- industrial levels of lead. This is the guy who invented the clean room and associated techniques.

Were he alive today I imagine he would be glad to see this research ongoing.

Fascinating (and long) read about his journey here. [http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson- scienti...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist- who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Malaria is also intriguing. According to Michael Stevens, as many as half of all humans who have ever lived (~50 billion) have died to Malaria. I've always wondered whether this was true. [https://youtu.be/1T4XMNN4bNM?t=235](https://youtu.be/1T4XMNN4bNM?t=235)

<comment><USER5> I remember reading an article by an African bloke in healthcare (can't recall the actual role) who was saying that the West's obsession with malaria is patronising. He said that malaria is like the flu - you get it, you're sick for a little while, then you get over it. Yes, some people die, but they tend to be the old and weak, just like the flu - yet the west doesn't go bananas over the flu like it does with malaria.

Looking at the wikipedia articles for both, it seems he has a point. 300M cases of malaria in 2015, with 750k deaths. 3-5M cases of influenza annually, with 350k deaths.

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

Given those numbers, I'm not sure I'd believe that half of all humans died from malaria.

<comment><USER6> Influenza has a cheap and very effective family of vaccines. Malaria doesn't. People in "the west" "go bananas" over Malaria because it's not reasonably preventable.

<comment><USER7> Malaria was eradicated in the US and Europe. It used to be endemic. Eradication is a pretty solid way to prevent it.

[https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...](https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html)

<comment><USER6> Except it hasn't worked everywhere. The point was that this was a practical issue and not a cultural one. Someone in "the west" who is paranoid about getting the flu just gets a flu shot. The same paranoia for Malaria has no treatment, so the same person with the same fears ends up "going bananas" about travel to Central America or whatnot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It was devastating enough to end the Mongol empire. This empire included pretty much all of Asia. With the demise of the empire, the silk road trade pretty much closed down, cutting China off from the Middle East and Europe.

<comment><USER9> I didn't know it went that far east. So it pretty much completely changed the course of events instead of just delaying progress for a few decades...interesting.

<comment><USER10> Keep in mind that the mongols didn't really have the institutions to survive anyway and that the empire was breaking apart anyway.

The plague was a stressor that sped some things along.

<comment><USER11> The plague didn't hit until after the Mongol empire fracture. I don't know what institutions you think the Mongols were missing, but an empire that size is just waiting to fragment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _For many years historians depended on written sources to assess the calamity of such events as the Black Death. This yielded widely disparate conclusions claiming that the death-toll lay between 30 to 50%...

Now, a new study of annual to multiannual levels of lead in the Alpine glacier, Colle Gnifetti, in the Swiss-Italian Alps provides further validation of the calamitous character of the plague and the accompanying events in the 14th century. These new hard-core data demonstrates the impact which the Black Death had on society and economy._

It's nice to have something that is potentially objective.

<comment><USER13> It's still rather indirect. If the population drops significantly then many types of mining simply becomes redundant because there is so much material no longer needed by the dead.

<comment><USER14> Well, lead deposition dropped about two orders of magnitude in ~1350. That's far more than a proportional decrease, unless the death rate was over 90%. Societal collapse seems more likely.

<comment><USER6> Not collapse: recycling. In a steady state population, you need to be mining enough new metal to replace items lost to use or rust. If the population drops, people just start using dead uncle Harald's knives when theirs break.

In such a situation, you'd actually expect expensive new production to drop all the way to zero until the recycling buffer was used up. The effect would be superlinear with the death rate, not proportional.

<comment><USER14> Maybe so. But maybe the recycling argument doesn't apply so much for lead as for iron.

<comment><USER6> The contention in the linked article was that atmospheric lead was the result of metal smelting. They're measuring the mining industry as a whole, not lead production.

<comment><USER14> Whatever they say, they're measuring production of lead and other metals that occur with it. Silver, copper and zinc would be the main ones, I think. Not iron, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm also a little curious about what happened about a century later—the line drops by about 90% for another decade or so in the mid-1400s. It's the only other significant drop in the chart (other than a single outlier datum in the late 1800s that might be an error of some sort).

<comment><USER16> There was a devastating cold period in the 1430s (cause still unknown to the best of my knowledge) that caused widespread global famine and in the 1450s the south Pacific volcano Kuwae had what seems to be two stratospheric eruptions within the decade. It was, in general, a shitty time to be alive no matter where you were on the planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> tl;dr pretty fucking bad.

This article use the presence of particles associated with mining found in ice cores of European glaciers to conclude that mining basically collapsed and that it was in fact "pretty fucking bad".

</comment><comment><USER18> The Black Death killed almost everyone settled (ie not a bedouin) in Palestine. This is important because no one can claim their ancestors lived on the land for a really long time. The region which supported million (perhaps even millions) two thousand years ago had less than 150K people around 1400. It won't even double by 1800 and for a good reason: given how arid the region is/was, not tending it constantly made almost all of Palestine into a barren wasteland except a few places like the Valley of Jezreel. It was just a (very) dusty backwater of the Damascus Eyalet of practically zero political importance. That has, of course, changed in more recent history.

<comment><USER19> Source? How much is "almost everyone". Why bring the Israel discussion into this topic to begin with?</comment></comment>