Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/negative-emotions-key-well-being/ <comment><USER2> Depression was a major part of Winston Churchill's life, and he used the phrase 'Black Dog' as a euphemism when talking to family and friends. Sometimes when I feel the negative emotions come to me (every few weeks / months), I think about that and I think about just walking alongside the black dog. It helps to remember that.

<comment><USER3> Often, depression is actually an avoidance of the underlying emotions -- very often anger. Unexpressed anger goes inward and is directed toward the self, which becomes experienced as depression.

<comment><USER4> Is this an accepted psychiatric phenomenon, or just some Freudian bullshit?

<comment><USER5> Insofar as a therapist with a psychology degree has said OP's words to me, it's accepted by some professionals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How I see negative emotion is, it's similar to what physical pain teaches us.

You touch a burning stove. It hurts. You learn this action -> undesirable outcome and avoid doing it. (Sometimes it can take a few times though!)

Just that with negative emotions, sometimes it's less obvious the cause or it's an interplay between a few. And sometimes, there's a time delay between an action and the negative emotion. That's why self-awareness and introspection helps a lot in learning from your experiences.

I think the "you can choose to be happy all the time" movement maligns negative emotions too much - it can be an important warning "hey something is wrong" system in life. Also, I believe the use of the word 'happiness' often leads to misunderstandings.

You cannot be happy, the emotion, all the time. Hour to hour, day to day, we all go through different emotions.

You can however be more consistently happy, as a perspective on life and approach to life.

That I believe is what people really mean when they talk about 'being more happy'.

But a lot of people misunderstand that, thinking if you aren't feeling weeeee most of the day, you aren't really 'happy'.

<comment><USER7> The issue with depression is I think this emotional signaling can be entirely miscalibrated, and sometimes, you do you have to figure out a way to override those signals.

<comment><USER5> This can happen if you grew up in an abusive environment and learned that even people who are supposed to love you unconditionally can be dangerous.

<comment><USER8> This can happen anytime, and could since the times human life became more complicated than hunting and gathering and living in caves.

Negavive emotions (and physical pain) may be a warning, but I strongly wish I'd have more control over them. It reminds me of a typical scene from a naval or sci-fi movie, when something happens and there's an alarm siren blaring. The captain comes to bridge and asks some crewman to shut off the alarm sound. Because such a warning is useful _until_ it's heard and understood, and then it's only seriously distracting. Much like negative emotions and physical pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> (In my opinion) Negative emotions are indeed useful. Feeling sad or griping about something is not all that bad as long as it helps you define what it is in your life you don't like.

The hard part is forcing yourself, after some time in the dumps, to say "OK, no what am I going to _DO_ about this?"

<comment><USER10> Yes, this is key.

For some people, it's not really surprising that they're depressed. Low opportunity, low-income, poor surroundings, poor education, stressful paycheck to paycheck existence. Of course they're miserable.

Of course, adversely comparing yourself to peers is also a strategy for misery.

For those of us to be lucky enough to be in reasonable shape, the knack to avoiding self-pity and depression is to accept yourself, and work through or around your own limitations and count your blessings.

"I tell you, we were put here to have fun and fart around, and don't let anyone tell you different." (with apologies to) Kurt Vonnegut.

<comment><USER11> If the things you listed "Low opportunity, low-income, ..." actually caused depression, then most of the people in Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia would be depressed, but this is obviously not the case. The causes of depression are complicated and aren't directly related to being poor in an absolute sense.

<comment><USER12> Exactly! A lot of people in developed and developing countries are depressed because they thought that wealth and materialistic possessions would bring them happiness, when all it got was more things to worry about.

<comment><USER13> Social standards are the principal causes of depression: too overweight, too skinny, too tall, too short, being single, not owning a house, not having a job, not owning a car, not having enough friends, not hanging out enough, not being noticed/praised enough, not smart enough... and the list goes on and on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see a parallel with healthy companies and management.

Healthy companies don't avoid thinking about problems, don't subsist solely on interpersonal praise, and don't succeed based on "if we do our best, then we're doing a good job."

I imagine too many young startups and companies fall into this trap of always wanting to feel like they are doing a good job, both in self scrutiny and scrutiny of employees.

That's not to say I think managers should constantly harp on employees to spur them along, or that founders should constantly berate themselves. But it's harder than it seems to dole out negative feedback, for some people at least. We like to talk about being results oriented and merit based, but it's easier just to say everyone is doing great and trying, which can kill a company before it starts. And maybe only in the post mortem do we take time to analyze if we were doing the right things and doing them enough.

</comment><comment><USER15> I watched a documentary about heroin addiction in a wealthy northeast U.S. town.

I recall being struck at how the parents of the addicts presented in the documentary (who were all young) talked about how all of their kids were always so happy as children.

Then, when interviewing the addicts, there was a clear recurring theme that they wanted to do drugs because they could not handle the pain of being off drugs.

I did not feel these things to be unrelated.

<comment><USER16> "So happy as little children" seems to be a recurring line in nearly ever episode of Intervention I've ever seen

I usually assume that the parents are pretty poor historians

Or that people aren't very good at figuring out when little kids aren't happy

I have trouble believing that happy childhood are correlated with later life problems

<comment><USER3> As someone who has helped people get off heroin, booze,toxic relationships, etc.. That jumps out as a red flag that the parents were sending signals that the kids were ONLY allowed to feel "happy", so of course they would be primed for addiction, not having learned the beauty of their entire range of emotions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think PC culture is maybe a problem here.

I worked in an F50 and for political reasons ... emotions are just not allowed.

I personally don't mind a little bit here and there. Someone gets angry, argues, whatever. It's life. As long as it's not personal.

I worked at startups and we used to debate, hardcore, all the time. No harm done. At the F50, it was too politically costly - everyone is trying to 'one up' one another, so it's about making as 'few social mistakes as possible' \- and getting the occasional 'win' and making sure you kiss your boss's butt.

That's it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I just read "life of a slave" by frederick douglass. It's been helpful to calibrate my emotional responses. I try to treat emotion like sound or light - a signal from the outside world, with appropriate responses.

When I get upset at things now, I compare whatever's bothering me to "being a slave, being whipped for teaching fellow slaves how to read the bible" \- and i realize how unimportant the thing was.

This ability - to compare our experiences to those of others - is why i think christianity has something to it. I ignore all the talk about God, and just think of the story of Jesus - a guy who went around telling everyone, "hey lets be nice", and got tortured for it. Being able to forgive someone who'd do that to you is a tall order - but if you have that ability and truly follow that pattern, you'll be much happier and contented.

I don't see the guy as divine - i see him as a helpful calibration point. Forgiveness is a path out of anger. There's a lot to be angry about in our modern world, but that doesn't make it helpful for us.

<comment><USER19> I used to think that this was a good way to cope with unhappiness that I experienced. I would tell myself, "At least I'm not starving to death" or, "At least I don't feel like killing myself this morning." I would feel better at first, but it didn't change the fact that I would still get the same negative feelings again. It became frustrating that this tactic lost its effectiveness over time.

While on one hand it trivializes what it actually means to go through starvation, or having suicidal thoughts, or what it's like to actually be a slave, I think it also trivializes your own feelings as well.

Like the article points out, this mentality suppresses your feelings. "Oh, I'm not allowed to feel this way. Look at all the wealth and happiness I am surrounded with and non-extreme situations I don't have to face!"

Admitting my feelings and writing them down in my journal in the heat of the moment, no matter how pathetic they made me seem, gave me a chance to reflect on what I had written. It gave me a snapshot to come back to later and say "Is this really what I am like? Have I exaggerated or downplayed my emotions?"

And from there, I was able to come to two types of conclusions:

1) Accept that sometimes for a given situation I would feel blue no matter what. Something I realized after 8 years of heartbreak, things not working out, or rejection in dating is that while I got better at being functional, the pain itself never dulled. And what a relief! I kept expecting that it would somehow hurt less after all these years, but that's just not how it turned out. And I feel so much better now with that in mind.

2) I can decide to act on the problem. I can act and succeed, or act and fail. And after enough failures, sometimes it's OK to give up for the time being and work on other types of dissatisfaction.

I think the article did a great job of succinctly describing a process I have gone through myself for several years. I highly recommend it.

<comment><USER20> Completely agree with you and would add that I've found mourning after something that gets me down is ESSENTIAL for moving through those things. If I avoid grieving the loss I'm perceiving, that's also suppressing my emotions.

I used to not associate mourning with everyday events; it was something reserved for people/pets dying. Now, if I can't shake a bad feeling, I try mentally eulogizing whatever I lost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> norea-armozel I think there's a limit to those negative emotions in as much as long we suppress them then we can't recover from their cause. Like for me, my gender dysphoria has been a life long issue which has been associated with my depression and anxiety issues. Specifically, the more I suppressed my dysphoria the more depressed I've gotten (even more anxious). Conversely, the more I tried to suppress the depression and/or anxiety the more my dysphoria made me feel worse. Basically, a feel back loop of suck. So the key to dealing with negative emotions is figuring out what's wrong and either learning to cope with the cause of them or resolve the cause altogether (sometimes both as with me since I'm not ready to come out).

</comment><comment><USER21> I've often heard the exhortation to practice meditation, focus on your breathing and simply accept any thoughts/feelings without any judgement. For a long time, I simply thought that such teachings were some new-age feel-good psuedo-therapy. Yesterday, I happened to stumble across the book "The Inner of Tennis", and spent my entire evening devouring half the book. It made me realise how profound and powerful those teachings truly are. Give it a read if you find yourself dismissing such advice.

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/reeveswiedeman/the-inner-game-of- ev...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/reeveswiedeman/the-inner-game-of-everything- why-is-a-four-decade-old-tennis)

</comment><comment><USER22> I look at negative experiences (not emotions) the same way I look at lifting weights. It is a stimulus that can cause you to grow stronger. Much like you have to lift weights with proper technique to avoid injury, you have to learn to respond to negative events with the proper cognitive strategy to avoid suffering.

I don't think negative emotions are necessary, however. The benefit comes from learning to process negative events constructively, which people (sometimes) learn to do in order to avoid the pain.

</comment><comment><USER23> Grief and sorrow are essential since you're expressing the loss of something that caused a great change in your life. Knowing that this change existed and has provoked such strange lows and highs can be deeper and more fulfilling than painless happiness. IMO anyway.

</comment><comment><USER24> Inspired by this thread, I looked up Freud's 12 Human Defense Mechanism when negative emotions stew in our mind to look at how I delude myself on daily basis: [https://kevinfitzmaurice.com/self-esteem/self-esteem- issues/...](https://kevinfitzmaurice.com/self-esteem/self-esteem- issues/sigmund-freud-the-12-defense-mechanisms/)

1\. Over-compensation/Projection: To overcome my greatest fear that I'm just a programmer making a comfortable living but ultimately making meaningless web apps for BigCo or for startups but afraid of sitting with this feeling for too long; I try to "cultivate" cultural hobbies like playing in a blues band, joined a rec-league, travel, attend book/film clubs to convince myself that I'm different than the other people but find people who are most like me in the book clubs and art galleries openings are just as empty, pretentious and obnoxious. Similarly I project onto others my insecurity, and judge them accordingly to the snobbery by the impact factor (IF) of their "CV" and of their "cultural output".

2\. Denial/Ritual for Undoing/Regression: I escape via various social media distractions and comfort food. I go to startup social gatherings, when the caffeine or alcoholic or fun-social distraction buzz kick-in, I convince myself that this is the way things are suppose to go. But the buzz wears off, I realize that my problems are still there and chasing that original high with that good sushi meal, new brew of coffee or dance-party venue feel like eating a diminishing return chocolate cake.

3\. Displacement/Identification: I visit a lot of right-wing subreddits like /r/the_donald that rage against the left-wing subreddits to the point that I realize that as much as I hate on the facebook feeds of my enemies on the left, they have also now become my indisposable personal crucible because the outrage inspired has become almost a comforting ally to lean onto to channel my otherwise impotent rage; I visit HN and glow over the triumphs by techies like unveiling of new Tesla model or new VR headsets and startup podcasts and blog posts about the #hustle. I sometimes even Google search pictures of PR pictures of Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes (before she became reviled by this forum) while listening to positive YouTube music video's to bask in the positive glow.

4\. Acceptance/Humble Identification/Sublimation: I accept that I won't ever be like Elon Musk or Elizabeth Holmes or a mere YC Founder for that matter. I've been trying to find more realistic models to model my behavior like my boss who is very organized, shows up to work on time and is very empathy for people, but someone who is otherwise (gasp) an average person judged by my earlier metric of Personal Impact Factor. I try to find more socially acceptable, stable and support roles like playing Healer heroes in Dota2 or LoL instead of battling it out with my team about who to play to the Carry; my fear of just giving in and becoming just an mediocre everyman like Willie Loman, I just let go and trying to keep score every day cleared up to make room to find simple joys like washing dishes, taking out the trash on time and closing JIRA tickets. Walking by the local hip and edgy co-working space, I cannot help but feel a tinge of poetic sadomasochism that in order to attain peace, I chased the opposite of what I was afraid of becoming only to end up becoming the very thing of this existential guilt by way of being wore down by the daily pressure of unable to run away from this guilt; and realizing that this guilt of unbecoming of the becoming is also the real unbecoming, but the real becoming is also the unbecoming.

<comment><USER25> Would you really like to be Elizabeth Holmes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> They usually stop being useful when they destroy you from the inside and make you do things you'd never do in a normal mood range. But what he says has a nice ring to it, in line with all the modern self-help nonsense.

<comment><USER27> The dose makes the poison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "The complexity of life" is really ambiguous. The actual headline, "Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being", is much more descriptive.

<comment><USER29> We've reverted the title from "Acknowledging the complexity of life may be a fruitful path to well-being".

<comment><USER30> I find "Acknowledging the complexity of life may be a fruitful path to well- being" to be much more revealing. The 'term' negative is too subjective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I doubt the term "negative emotion" holds up to scientific standards.

</comment><comment><USER32> > "In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research > shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental > health."

Translation: "New Research": Having watched Inside Out.

<comment><USER33> I searched the thread to see if anyone had mentioned inside out. I found that quite a powerful movie, with an important message. A lot of time and money has been spent trying to prevent people from feeling any kind of negative emotions. Most recently in the form of medicating these emotions away.

There are a few issues with medication, as I see it. Should we try change a person? Are you the same person if you medicate how your brain responds to certain events? There are risks involved of course, people react differently and increased anxiety levels are often associated with some anti depressants. There is also the problem of dependence and the search for the "perfect pill" to make them feel perfectly at peace.

And finally there is the question of whether or not these negative feelings are actually a key part of who we are, and trying to lock them away, and contain them just prolongs the suffering we endure. I think sometimes you just got to embrace what you feel and go with it.

Let me stress though, I completely accept that for some people medication is absolutely vital to ensure they stay well, and for many others it can be completely life changing in a totally positive way. I just think it shouldn't be the first thing your doctor recommends when you present with depressed or anxious thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Great news, I should live forever then.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your Postgres GUI Client? - <AUTHOR>

I've recently started using Postgres in place of MySQL which was in use at my last job. I really miss SequelPro (I use a mac) as it is MySQL only. Induction is a bit unstable for me so I have settled on Valentina Studio.<p>What do you use? <comment><USER2> I use pgAdmin III

Some features I like:

* You can highlight code in the Query window and hit play and it only runs the highlighted code.

* You can export query results to CSV easily from the Query window File Menu.

* Stores history of commands run, can run them again with a click ("Previous queries" in Query window).

* Not all options are available by default. File > Options > Browser > Display to show more stuff.

* Can run EXPLAIN with a click.

I also sometimes use IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate which has a good SQL editor

</comment><comment><USER3> pgadmin, [http://www.pgadmin.org/download/macosx.php](http://www.pgadmin.org/download/macosx.php)</comment>


Ask HN: Translation Service to Recommend? - <AUTHOR> Google Translate alike, REST API, low volume (~200 characters), low frequency (50/hour), reliable, not too stringent latency.
Any positive experience to share ? <comment><USER2> i saw [https://deepl.com](https://deepl.com) mentioned in another comment on another post. seems pretty nifty, im having a good time just chaining translations across languages to see how effective it as at maintaining the original intent and context. im quite happy with it as a toy but i imagine it could be very useful in other more focused applications

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems promising. Thank you for info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I used the Microsoft one for a project, it wasn't bad, but it had a specific language bug (I don't remember what) that meant a common phrase didn't work for us, so the project swapped to google translate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for reply. Did you test some other sites before going to Google Translate?

<comment><USER3> Not really. They already had a google cloud account with other services and were happy to pay the higher costs to solve the issue quickly.</comment></comment></comment>


Why nail salons in America are dominated by Vietnamese Americans - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32544343 <comment><USER2> Definitely an older article since a 41 year old today was born well after the fall of Saigon

<comment><USER3> (2015)</comment></comment>


MBOX to PST - <AUTHOR> If you really want to export your emails from an existing MBOX file format to PST format then you need a Software Which Convert your MBOX file to PST file. This MBOX file to PST file Converter software converts mailbox items in MBOX into PST format. These items can be imported into new PST files or existing PST file according to your choice. You can save the new PST files on any desired location over the network or on the system. They can be imported into Outlook to access the data.<p>You Can Download this Software free trial version from here: http://www.mboxtopstconverter.emltopstutility.com/ <comment><USER2> You can also try KDETools MBOX to PST Converter that easily export MBOX files into Outlook PST format. Converted files can be easily imported in any version of Microsoft Outlook:

[https://www.kdetools.com/mbox-to-pst- converter.html](https://www.kdetools.com/mbox-to-pst-converter.html)</comment>


Engadget's Top Editors Topolsky and Patel Exit From AOL's Giant Tech Site - <AUTHOR> http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110312/engadgets-top-editors-topolsky-and-patel-exit-from-aols-giant-tech-site/

<comment><USER2> Considering the AOL Way highlights them as a glorified content farm (that everyone scrambled to say doesn't apply to _them_ leaving approximately nobody it _does_ apply to) I don't blame them for leaving.

Churning out content on w/e the stats say is trending would be a shit way for a writer to express their creativity.

<comment><USER3> Actually, Topolsky said before that Engadget is not affected by the AOL Way.

Arianna Huffington (the new Cheif Editor of all AOL content sites) said she won't be messing with TechCrunch and Engadget.

<comment><USER2> Engadget are a textbook example of it and quite likely where the entire plan _originated_.

Their most recent article other than the resignation letter:

[http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/12/htc-droid- incredible-2-sm...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/12/htc-droid- incredible-2-smiles-pretty-for-the-camera-shows-off-i/)

\- 3 sentence summary gives them a strong chance of hitting their rev per article goals.

\- 3 internal links and a shitton of tags to reinforce their SEO

\- 1 solitary little external link at the bottom to minimize the SEO juice they leak

If your job involves tagging summaries with "Android 2.2" _and_ "Android2.2" then you're working the Aol Way™, even if it's not official.

<comment><USER4> I've always found the tags on Engadget to be completely useless, and I was wondering why they even waste their time with them. SEO makes a lot of sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow - both Topolsky & Patel are out now[1]. Before was Ross Miller[2] & Paul Miller[3]. With all these Engadget people leaving, I haven't heard about anyone leaving their rival Gizmodo.

I wonder how Arrington feels about this. Arrington was pissed over Topolsky trying to kill the AOL/TC deal[4].

[1] <http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/12/hello-i-must-be-going/> [2] <http://ohnoros.co/post/3407371558/goodbye-engadget> [3] <http://pauljmiller.com/2011/02/leaving-aol/> [4] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/16/blog-fight-rules-of- engagem...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/16/blog-fight-rules-of-engagement/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Some times the decision to leave is made many months before but actual resignation happens in March. February and March are the months when annual bonus is paid. It is a natural time to leave. I've seen a lot of March departures in the past years.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't imagine Topolsky will stray far from his existing career. He has a very visible position that people tend not to relinquish lightly. How many other bloggers are able to command guest slots on late night talk shows?

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm going to miss the Engadget Podcast. After Paul Miller left, I thought it might still have a chance, but now all three are gone!

<comment><USER8> Now that they're all gone, I'm hoping that maybe they'll continue podcasting together, even if they no longer use the Engadget name.

<comment><USER9> Topolsky did mention in his post that he has a project on the horizon that he will be sharing more about. Ryan Block and Peter Rojas went on to start GDGT so maybe the alienated engadget editors have some new fresh take on tech up their sleeve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a loss for AOL. There are a few reviews which you really look out for, and Topolsky's was always one of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> From Topolsky: <http://engt.co/ftwNtM>

<comment><USER11> Unshortened URL:

<http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/12/hello-i-must-be-going/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> AOL mass exodus lately

<comment><USER13> specifically Engadget. So strange ... obviously none of them have declared what the real reason is yet.

<comment><USER14> I don't have any inside knowledge w/ Josh / Nilay's exit, but I can say Enagdget editors tend to last about three years. Peter "left" and worked on rcrdlbl right after AOL acquired Engadget (twoish years into the site's life), then Ryan left after three years of tenure (2008), now Josh is leaving... not a surprise.

Blogging the Engadget way is hard. You have to always be on your game, making sure posts are timed, etc. It's not a picnic. These guys are really good at what they do, and having a corporate overlord wears on you.

[Disclosure: I was at Engadget in 2005-2007]</comment></comment></comment>


Image Caption Generation with Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/image-captioning-in-deep-learning-9cd23fb4d8d2 <comment><USER2> There are no references to a paper or code. It isn't even clear to me that the example images represent unseen and unused data. The model could have just memorized the answers. A more realistic test of the model would be to plug in images not found in the training set.</comment>


Why Charging Electric Cars for Road Use Is Tricky - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/07/electric-vehicles-gas-tax-mileage-fees-highway-trust-fund/594466/ <comment><USER2> It's my understanding that the vast majority of road wear is caused by very large vehicles.

[https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle- weigh...](https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weight-vs- road-damage-levels/)

It would seem that it may make more sense to make up the difference in other consumption taxes as transport of goods is probably a good chunk of the road wear.

Increasing the cost of EVs at a time of climate crisis seems pretty short sighted.</comment>


Robert: ROBust and privacy-presERving proximity Tracing [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ROBERT-proximity-tracing/documents/blob/master/ROBERT-specification-EN-v1_0.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> This is the protocol that apparently PEPP-PT is backing now. The previous decentralized and privacy first approach DP-3T is now a separate initiative. The Swiss left the project it took a centralized approach.</comment>


Transcend (YC S15) Launches an Extra-Efficient LED Light for Indoor Farmers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/08/yc-backed-transcend-launches-an-extra-efficient-led-light-for-indoor-farmers/ <comment><USER2> Why are those lights so big?

Indoor farms, especially in Japan, have been using LED lights for a while. Red/blue combos, in the pink/purple range, seem to work best.[1] The big advantage of LED lighting is not the reduced power consumption, but the reduced heat. The lamps can be closer to the plants without cooking them, which means the trays can be stacked closer and the density of the operation goes up. For most non-druggie applications, the plants aren't that tall. So small, distributed lighting units are used, instead of huge ceiling lamps.

Some plants can be overclocked. They do need a light/dark cycle, but it can be shorter than 24 hours. The life cycle of the plant is then sped up.

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2160219...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21602194-indoor-farming-may-be-taking-root-light-fantastic)

<comment><USER3> I'm Brian, the founder of Transcend.

Each light is 19 pounds and is about 10"x8".

There are two reasons the light is the size that it is. First temperature. We have a passive heat sink with fins and a plastic remote phosphor sheet. Both have to stay relatively cool and more surface area makes this possible.

Its funny, the first fixture we built and sampled to growers was about 25x smaller. We used an active heat sink and a glass phosphor sheet. A common complaint was "why is this so small?" I want my lights to be "big and strong". We took this feedback and decided to move to passive design.

Our original logic was that smaller is better, especially in a greenhouse. The most efficient light is one that is off and the less shading of sunlight the better.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for coming here to reply to comments!

I think small lights could be a really good market for you, for all the urbanites like me, living in condos. Make a tiny kit that can grow herbs or lettuce at an accelerated rate using little power because of LEDs, and I'd buy it in a second.

As it stands, I think a 1m strand of TL-RL20 will be a purchase for me soon, and I'll build the kit myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Trancend's bulbs differ from typical LED lights because they only use blue light. The company has developed a wavelength conversion system that uses phosphorous to convert blue photons, which are the most efficient type of photon, into any other color photon._

Typical LEDs used for illumination are blue LEDs with a phosphor coating to produce white. Transcend is doing essentially the same thing, but the goal is to produce wavelengths optimal for plant growth instead of a broad spectrum for illumination. The biggest difference in implementation looks to be that Transcend is separating the phosphor from the emitter while most LEDs used for illumination bond the phosphor directly to the emitter.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are a lot of vegetables and fruits that I do not buy due to the air miles. For instance those nice peas in pods from Kenya. Those things don't get here (the UK) by boat whereas bananas from the Caribbean do get here by boat. Boat is acceptable to me, good for trade and enough arrives by boat for a decent meal to be made.

In theory these lights change everything, why grow peas in Kenya, put them on a plane and send them 1/4 the way around the world when a greenhouse in the Home Counties will do nicely?

The cannabis angle is pretty good too. As things stand growing those plants takes a stupendous amount of energy with all the problems of ventilation, mould growth, noise from the ventilation and the need to 'not get caught'. With this technology those that can hold down a job can get growing their own without having to have the huge 'leccy bill or having to be friends with dealers.

I like the lateral thinking of tuning the light to suit photosynthesis by using phosphors, I am surprised that has not been possible before. One day this will seem so obvious yet it wasn't until this product came along.

<comment><USER7> You have got to be kidding.

You are worried about air miles, but are willing to accept artificial light?

Do you just want to feel like you are being environmentally friendly, or do you actually want to be environmentally friendly?

I've been surprised at how many people only want to feel that way, but don't actually care about being environmentally friendly. (A good example of this is locavores.)

> of tuning the light to suit photosynthesis by using phosphors, I am > surprised that has not been possible before.

It has been thought of before, people have been doing it for decades. This is just an incremental improvement.

<comment><USER8> Is it your contention that LED lighting uses as much energy as flight?

<comment><USER7> Comparing light to grow plant, vs fuel to fly the fruits of that plant?

LED lighting use more, even without doing the calculations I feel quite confidant in saying that it uses much more.

<comment><USER9> Wrong. There are distance and repetition factors you are failing to consider.

With a single trip 100m trip, the LEDs lose. With 10^7 100km trips, the LEDs win. The question is where the line is, and the answer is that it's going down all the time.

<comment><USER7> > With 10^7 100km trips, the LEDs win.

Hu? You are planning on shipping a single tomato 621 million miles? That's enough to ship it to Mars and then back.

Why in the world would you do that? Wouldn't it spoil?

You know you have to pay to power the LED, right? It's not just equipment cost? It takes less energy to grow a tomato in the sun, then fly it somewhere then it does it grow it indoors with artificial light.

And no, LED efficiency is not going up all that much anymore - there are physical limits to that.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I'd still grow _just one single tomato_ and send it on many millions of trips. I'll call it "travel-with-my-tomato.com" (Overnight charges may apply for trips to mars.) /s

<comment><USER7> So if your whole post about 10^7 100km trips was a joke, why did you post it?

<comment><USER9> Your point was that LEDs don't break even. My point is that there's a threshold at which they would.

If you only ever grew one tomato then you probably could buy a cheap plane ticket to deliver it, for less than the lights. So you'd be right, the LEDs would use more energy (cost to make, ship, and use) vs the delivery charges for the sun-grown (free energy) tomato from farther away - even if shipped expensively.

But if you grew millions of tomatoes from the same LEDs then you'd be wrong - now buying the grow lights is much more efficient than shipping in sun-grown tomatoes from even a few kilometers away.

How many tomatoes are you going to grow?

<comment><USER7> Is there some reason you keep ignoring the power it takes to run the lights? It take FAR more power for the lights than it does for the airplane.

You keep focusing on _buying_ the lights, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about _running_ the lights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The descriptions on Transcend's website make me feel uneasy. I presume they have a solid product, but it feels like it's being oversold.

 _Each of our remote phosphor fixtures are rated to last for 96,000 hours to 90% output. That 's over 10 years of 24/7 use. _

How has this been tested? And if it is true, why is there a 5 year warranty rather than a 10 year? And what level of decline in output is covered by the 5 year warranty?

 _Efficiency: >2.0 μmoles per watt_

Presuming you mean "per joule" rather than "per watt", this is very close to the claimed efficiency of the underlying Royal Blue LED, and (I think) much higher than any white LED. While I can believe there is some benefit from the lower temperature of the remote phosphor, this would be a remarkably high number for a full spectrum light. How has this been measured?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it has been tested. The industry standar LM-80 lifetime testing of the LED shows an L70 lifetime of ~300,000 hours. We are operating the LEDs at a lower temperature meaning they should theoretically last even longer. This is how we specify the 96,000 hour operating time to 90%

The Royal Blue LEDs we use have a ~55% EQE (external quantum efficiency). This gives a μmoles per joule a fair amount above 2.0. We lose a few photons during the conversion process and that drops us down to about 2.0.

We have a ~30% efficiency improvement over standard white LEDs because the phosphor is remote. The gain is 100% due to to the recycling cavity and omnidirectional nature of phosphors.

<comment><USER10> I'm still surprised at the level of efficiency, but glad to hear that you can back it up. I wasn't doubting that an underdriven LED would last that long, rather I was surprised that the remote phosphors would last that long without decrease in output. But reading more elsewhere, I now see that the lifespan of the remote phosphors can be excellent: [http://www.digikey.com/en/articles/techzone/2014/apr/develop...](http://www.digikey.com/en/articles/techzone/2014/apr/developing- a-standard-test-for-remote-phosphor-lifetime-and-color-maintenance)

For others who are interested, here's another interesting link on the remote phosphor approach:

[http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/print/volume-9/issue-7/...](http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/print/volume-9/issue-7/features/fair- comparison-of-white-leds-and-remote-phosphor-guides-design-choice- magazine.html)

And a nice overview of the efficiencies of white LED's, and where the losses usually are: [http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/SSL_Trajectories_Proc_IEEE.pdf](http://www.sandia.gov/~jytsao/SSL_Trajectories_Proc_IEEE.pdf)

The exact figure in the last are already somewhat out of date, but if you plug in the specs for the newer LED's, presumably the underlying physics hasn't changed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congratulations on launching! We were in a previous YC batch (glowing plant, S14) and grow lots of plants indoors. We are interested in lighting systems which promote early flowering, as this shortens our product development cycle. Can your lights be set to encourage this (ie can you balance vegetative growth vs flowering?)

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

It is possible. We are coming out with a new LED T5 lamp where we can easily customize the output spectrum. It would be fun to work together to find out the ideal spectrum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> " _...blue photons, which are the most efficient type of photon..._ "

Argh.

Plants require light at 450 nm (blue) and light at 650 nm (red) to experience normal growth, and 730 nm (far-red) is also required to flower normally. (That last one may be important to growers of _certain plants valued for their flowers and /or fruits_.)

Phytochromes and photropins are the plant pigment-hormones that govern the plant life cycle. They respond to those 3 critical wavelengths of light to allow the plant to guess the time of day and the season of the year. Some plants also need a dark phase to "sleep", but it doesn't have to be as long as an actual night.

Blue light is likely most efficient _at forcing the increase in green plant mass_. That is, it makes bigger leaves and longer stems. That isn't always what you want for indoor farming.

The ideal indoor grow light would have a programmable, timed output of those three critical wavelengths of light, with a different ideal program for each type of plant. You may wish to start with red light, to germinate the seeds, go to blue light for rapid growth, then manipulate the plant into flowering out of season by switching between the two reds.

Transcend also needs a smaller, programmable 650/730nm light to offer a complete indoor farming solution, particularly for plants that do not get natural sunlight. It wouldn't need to use nearly as much energy, as it is being used primarily for hormonal signaling rather than photosynthesis.

<comment><USER13> Most efficient to produce not most efficient for plant growth.

Context: "The company has developed a wavelength conversion system that uses phosphorous to convert blue photons, which are the most efficient type of photon, into any other color photon."

<comment><USER12> If you're using phosphors, you do want to make blue or UV. It's far easier to step a photon down in energy than to absorb multiple lower energy photons and emit one at higher energy.

But the highest efficiency color for LEDs to produce largely depends on what Cree and Nichia are doing this year. Unfortunately, most of the readily available numbers tout luminous efficiency rather than raw light power. That's fine if you're looking for a reading light, but chlorophyll does not have the same absorption spectrum as the opsins in the human eye. You have to look for "wall-plug efficiency", which is less commonly reported.

So with respect to photons emitted per watt, I'm not sure which LED chemistry takes the prize. It depends on the temperature and input power, too. You can achieve 200% wall-plug efficiency, but only if you're converting picowatts of electricity into picowatts of photons in a hot LED. This is not possible (economically) for grow lights.

The benchmark for grow lights is the low-pressure sodium lamp, at about 38% efficiency. LEDs maybe get 30-65%, considering transformers, internal resistance, quantum efficiency, reflective losses at the die-capsule interface, etc. Higher efficiency comes from more expensive components.

As for chemistry, InGaN efficiency drops at longer wavelengths, and AlInGaP efficiency drops at shorter wavelengths, leaving a big efficiency trough in the green range. (Fortunately for this, plants don't need green.) I suspect that AlInGaP LEDs in the orange range are more efficient than visible blue InGaN LEDs, but this is hard to show with a lazy web search.

So when you say "most efficient" you really have to be _very explicit_ about the application. That was my implied complaint about that sentence in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, philips (nl) launched the exact same somewhere last week. [http://www.lighting.philips.nl/application_areas/horticultur...](http://www.lighting.philips.nl/application_areas/horticultural/cityfarming.wpd) sorry for the Dutch link, you can switch at the top to English.

</comment><comment><USER15> Don't you lose a lot of usable energy by not having any optics to shape the radiation? The phosphor surfaces will just diffusely glow. Of course, with an emitting area that big, you also need huge optics to control it properly

<comment><USER3> Phosphors are interesting in that they emit in 360 degrees. We have a "recycling cavity" behind the phosphor plates that reflects "backward" emitting photons. The design of this cavity is key to an efficient remote phosphor system.

As far as forward throw, the plate is a lambertian emitter. This means ~80% of the light is in a 60 degree beam angle and nearly >95% within 70 degrees.

<comment><USER15> If you already have a light-recycling setup for the phosphor - maybe you could additionally use brightness-enhancement films to use for light recycling in angular space. Just like in liquid crystal screens, BEFs could refract light rays with high exit angles back towards the phosphor, giving you a collimation of about 45° for rectangular, linear prism films.

But of course, conservation of optical étendue ('optical entropy' so to say) can't be cheated and absorption and scattering losses will be the trade-off for better collimation.

<comment><USER3> That's a great idea.

Etendue shouldn't be too much of a concern because we are emitting onto a relatively large space. We hadn't considered using a BEF but will certainly look into it.

Someone else mentioned using a holographic printed film for the same purpose of a BEF. Have you every used something like this?

<comment><USER15> Not personally - I've read about holographic films but they were rather for screen backlighting - you won't need that precision, I think. There are some advanced materials that are basically very advanced diffusers with a defined scattering distribution.

But BEFs are dirt cheap and do a very good job for this, your run-of the mill backlighting setup for screens is a very simple, effective system. Also: Using two linear BEFs (rotated relative to each other at a right angle) is more efficient than one pyramidal film.

The losses I mentioned are because of the light-recycling: You get lots more back reflections into the system - every ray that doesn't have the right exit angle gets reflected/refracted back into the system, the phosphor will absorb/re-emit/scatter, randomizing the ray's direction again and the ray 'retries' to get out of the system with a different angle.

These processes naturally induce losses (non-radiative decay in the phosphor, Fresnel losses at one of the BEFs, no perfect reflection on the back mirror). Even if you only lose a fraction of a percent, you lose that fraction lots of times before a ray may make it out of the system. It adds up - still, the collimation is very good for such a simple system (i.e. slap two films for a few dollars per sqm over your emitting area) it should be very easy to test.

Edit: You'll get the best collimation for 90°-angle prism films - there are other BEF types that'll smooth the angular distribution of the light recycling for wide viewing-angle displays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you're interested in indoor growing, Grove Labs is building an entire home aquaponics appliance. [https://grovelabs.io/](https://grovelabs.io/)

</comment><comment><USER17> The rope lights are especially cool for indoor hydro pole installations. Still, $1000 + 1$/day in electricity, it could grow let's say 100 kg of strawberries / year with that much light (that's an optimistic estimate), which would cost say 500$ to buy in a supermarket. That's not counting the cost of the rest of the installation, fertilizer etc. Could make sense at huge scale, but not for home sized installations, I think.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, the numbers are funny. They claim they will pay for themselves in energy savings in a year, but that seems to be against some unnamed alternative in their "up to 70% more efficient" claim.

High pressure sodium lamps (apparently the norm for indoor commercial food growing) look to be about 1.8µmoles/watt, compared against the ">2 µmoles/watt" of these lights, well, its going to take a long time to save $1000 in energy on a 250 watt lamp.

Lamp lifetime may tip the scales in favor of these LED lamps. Lamp size may also help, I used a 600 watt high pressure sodium lamp in my calculation against the 250 watt LED.

(µmoles are new units to me. I think I got through the lumens-lux-µmoles calculation correctly, but maybe not.)

<comment><USER3> The numbers are heavily influenced by cost of electricity and time of use. Payback ranges from 1-5 years with an average user seeing payback in about 3.

Average 600W HPS lamps are 1.0-1.3 µmoles/watt. A complete fixture consumes 660 watts with ballast losses. They generally lose about 20% of their light due to reflectors (omni-directional lamp in a directional application).

This means that our 2.0 µmoles/watt fixture at 230 watt consumption can replace a 660 watt HPS fixture, provide the same amount of light, and have a nice payback.

<comment><USER17> Here's what I didn't get from your website: there are typically two wavelengths you're interested in for growing plants, depending on the phenological stage: a red and a blue (I can't remember the exact numbers, but the band is quite narrow). How can it be that your lamps have higher efficiency despite providing a complete spectrum? I don't know anything about light physics, hence my question; intuitively, I'd say you could have higher 'yield' by focusing all energy you put in to one wavelength (or at least, a narrow band).

<comment><USER3> It turns out that plants use more than just red/blue for photosynthesis. They do indeed absorb narrow bands of red/blue more strongly than other colors like green (this is why plants are green) but only absorb about 10% more efficiently.

The green light not absorbed is reflected. This gives the opportunity for green photons to reflect their way down to the bottom leaves for a more distributed growth.

We have built a number of lights with "focused" spectrum but haven't seen a benefit. In many plants, like "red" lettuces the leaves only turn red with a full spectrum (I have no idea why, a botanist might know the answer...)

We do see a benefit to skew the spectrum for many flowering/fruiting plants in later growth cycles and have a plan to come out with a "fruiting spectrum" in the future. This will part of our August Indiegogo campaign.

<comment><USER17> Interesting. I do admit that much of what I know comes from books written for growing marijuana, since until a few years ago those were almost the only (large scale) applications of indoor growing, and that most of that knowledge isn't very scientific (for example until a few years ago the mainstream technique to force bloom on mj plants was to vary the light cycle only). Research is frantic in the field, a fascinating development.

One last question if you don't mind: do you see a market for this in small scale operations, or do market pressures force your customers to grow always bigger like in the rest of agriculture? It seems that the only (sustainable) way to make a profit on growing food (plants and animals) is by scaling up.

(OK I lied, I have another question actually: with the pressure on lighting system vendors in Europe to screen their customers for illegal operations, and increasing pressure to hold vendors accountable for such use, are you experiencing that American vendors actually have a market advantage on this? Do you export to Europe? (meta: who would have thought just 10 years ago that in 2015 the US would become the world's leader on high tech marijuana production!) also sorry for focusing on mj, your industry suffers from its association with it, I know - it's just that that market was the only non- academic source of knowledge on it for so long)

<comment><USER3> It will be interesting to see how the market scales. There are certainly advantages to large commercial greenhouses etc... but there is a quickly growing trend for small local producers that grow a few hundred or couple thousands plants at a time. They might service a grocery or a few restaurants. There is also a trend for people to grow at home, grove labs was already mentioned in this thread as an example. My guess, ultra-efficient, nearly fully automated indoor production facilities will be a major player. Labor and energy are the two biggest costs to production and there are emerging technologies to address both of these.

Regarding Europe, it hasn't been a primary focus for us but we have exported a few orders to the UK, Germany and Netherlands. I hadn't heard of pressure on vendors to screen their customers. I'll have to look into this.

Our orders so far have split about 50:50 between veggies and marijuana. The marijuana side of the business does certainly seem to overshadow the veggie side as far as general public interest goes!

<comment><USER17> Thanks for your answers, and best of luck with your business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It doesn't matter so much now with legalisation, but I cannot help but wonder what impact these high efficiency LED lights would have had on the illegal weed business. A lot of police forces did things like use infrared cameras and electricity usage to find people growing such things, but with these LEDs they could remain more undetected for longer.

But on a more broad note: Indoor farming has real potential, in particular for certain types of crops. Not only do indoor farms use less water (which takes energy to produce and transport), but requires less or no pesticides, can be grown out of season, and you're less subject of good/bad weather patterns.

I don't think we'll see this type of thing for inexpensive crops that use up a lot of land (e.g. corn) but we might be more expensive crops that are fairly land efficient (e.g. nuts, fruits, etc).

<comment><USER20> A guy is setting up a large-scale LED vegetable farm in Alaska, where getting fresh produce in the winter is quite expensive, since of course it has to be shipped in by a fairly fast (= costly) method. See:

[http://www.adn.com/article/20150315/vertical-farm-poised- ris...](http://www.adn.com/article/20150315/vertical-farm-poised-rise-inside- old-mat-maid-building)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting tech, but quite expensive. I'm looking to do some indoor herbs/greens in my office, but these lights look maybe 5x more expensive than the multi-color diode competitors.

I'd be curious to see comparison with PAR spectrum and plant grow results against similar wattage multi-color LED.

<comment><USER17> But their claim is 5x longer lifespan, too. And where do you buy 250w led grow lights for 200$?

<comment><USER21> Here's a 300w for $135: [http://www.amazon.com/GalaxyhydroTM-Spectrum- Greenhouse-Flow...](http://www.amazon.com/GalaxyhydroTM-Spectrum-Greenhouse- Flowering-Growing/dp/B00INM0750/)

Or a 1200w for $369: [http://www.amazon.com/KingTM-Spectrum-360-860nm-10bands- Flow...](http://www.amazon.com/KingTM-Spectrum-360-860nm-10bands- Flower/dp/B00WHF830K/)

I actually have free electricity at my office, otherwise I'd run the numbers to see the cost savings. 5x longer lifespan ... I'd want an independent review.

<comment><USER17> Oh wow those are very good prices. If they perform well (or even half of what they promise), then yes these will give the upmarkets ones a run for their money. Of course the same can be said for almost all goods. I'd love to have time to experiment with an indoor aquaponics garden in my basement, and try out various lights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> considering that not all plants need the same spectrums throughout growth, i wonder if they have any plans to allow tuning of such things. if you are trying to grow the best, energy efficiency doesn't matter as much as top quality product at any cost. I think heliospectra lights allows you to change their output via an open API.

with the legalization of marijuana already happening in some states and pending in many others, the lighting industry is full of fluff right now and too many players... will be interesting to see who stands, who falls and who M&A. I think many growers will stick to HIDs until someone can prove LEDs, Plasma or induction not only delivery the same quality product, but can actually do it cycle after cycle, these 50k hour guarantees are suspicious at best.

<comment><USER3> We don't have spectral tuning functionality at the moment but it's something we are working on. A number of customers growing fruiting/flowering plants have asked for this sort of spectral control. For non-fruiting plants there seems to be less of a demand. We plan on having a next gen remote phosphor design with spectral control within the next 12 months.

<comment><USER22> thanks for your response.

i would imagine spectral controls to be less useful for leafy greens. will the spectral controls be remote controllable? ie; an api over some type of wifi connection?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've been spending some time myself designing remote phosphor lighting and I'm wondering if they've really developed a new remote phosphor technology, or if they're sourcing a custom phosphor blend and substrate from someone like Intematix.

Also curious if they're using a film (like WhiteOptics White97) or having the cavities coated (I forget the product name). None of the coatings were cheap when I was researching them, but a % or two better than the films.

I'd love see the LED driver board on these...

But anyhow:

It's incredibly cool stuff, especially when you show someone the raw blue leds (blindingly bright), then drop a remote phosphor over it.

Kudos for going for it, and good luck. I wish I had your fortitude!

<comment><USER3> We build our own remote phosphor components and in some cases source components from companies like Intematix. We have a solid "side business" where we formulate and produce custom remote phosphor components for non general lighting applications.

For the recycling cavity we do indeed use WhiteOptics. We used Furakawa in our last design and have had success with both.</comment></comment>


Chart - What the average American eats in a year. - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/09/chart-this-is-what-you-eat-in-a-year-including-42-pounds-of-corn-syrup/244870/

<comment><USER2> Average of 2700 calories/day?! This might not be unusual for certain types of athletes, but this is astounding. Even more so when one considers that number likely includes children, so the adult average may be even higher.</comment>


Jay Z's Entire Catalog Has Been Removed from Spotify and Apple Music - <AUTHOR> https://genius.com/a/jay-z-s-entire-catalog-has-been-removed-from-spotify-apple-music <comment><AUTHOR> Most of the story is in the headline, but specifically it's about the magnitude of Jay Z with the size of his catalog and commercial success. Whether this change will have a net positive effect commercially is an interesting topic.

Many fans are just upset and unwilling to join a second music service for one artist.</comment>


How to beta test your mobile apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appstark.com/post/26209583662/7-tips-to-beta-test-your-mobile-app

<comment><USER2> The article is devoid of content, entire text can be summarized as "strategize your strategy", "do the right thing at the right time", and other such gibberish.

The point of the article is to plug something called "appstark", which as best I can tell is a library + service combo to collect and aggregate user feedback from inside iOS apps. Their web site a train-wreck of an attempt to explain what the service does, papered with "free trial start now!!!" buttons.

Frankly, a short and to the point explanation of what the service does would be more welcome here than this spam.

<comment><USER3> Feedback is awesome. But, I guess you could've reduced a bit of causticness in it.

This is the video, I want everyone on internet to watch - "A real person, a lot like you" - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfwwHa-7Ux8>

PS/Disclaimer: Not directly affiliated to them. Founders are my friends!

<comment><USER2> You're probably right, I was (still am) irked by the amount of nonsense I had to wade through before I got something tangible out of my time investment. In my defense I provided something useful to go with the my "causticism", so I can claim my heart was in the right place all along. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The one thing that I find most difficult is how to actually recruit new, quality beta testers, which the article doesn't really touch upon. I've had some success from sending out personal tweets, giving sneak peeks of upcoming projects on dribbble and emailing bloggers to give me a shout out.

Never the less, the signal to noise ratio has always been very high.

<comment><AUTHOR> Prior to Appstark, we were building games and we had to recruit beta testers. We recruited around 800 beta testers for our game on Android, all without a single blog covering us. I will do follow up post about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know what I was expecting. The title was, after all, "How to beta test your mobile apps".</comment>


Unfuddle Vs Asembla - <AUTHOR>

I have to choose between Assembla and Unfuddle for our distributed team. I have worked with Unfuddle, but for a new team and product I want to evaluate if Assembla is better. <comment><USER2> We tried both and didn't get on with either, Assembla bugged us less but we moved everything over to codebasehq.com about 8 months ago and never looked back.

Funnily enough Assembla sent me a bill today after 6+ months :)

</comment><comment><USER3> You should look at us as well - <http://xp-dev.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Just try <http://springloops.com></comment>


EventStorming: Continuous discovery beyond software modelling - <AUTHOR> https://xebia.com/blog/eventstorming-continuous-discovery-beyond-software-modelling/ <comment><USER2> > EventStorming ... is ... a flexible workshop format for collaborative > exploration of complex business domains. EventStorming is a technique that > uses visualisation to minimises assumptions by engaging in deliberate, > collaborative learning between different disciplines. EventStorming helps to > solve complex business problems in the most effective way beyond silos or > specialised boundaries.

So, deciphering this BuzzwordStorming: you get together and model your business domains in a group, using visual aids.

Quite revolutionary! _cough_

<comment><USER3> I know you're being sarcastic, and I agree that marketingspeak is, as always, annoying.

But I do think this is revolutionary. The typical processes people use for understanding a novel business domain take weeks to months. That's when they use them at all; most places just make shit up, write it into the software, and then experience a lot of pain when it is slowly discovered that the model expressed in the code doesn't really match the domain.

Traditional processes for understanding the domain also tend to focus on nouns. That's understandable, as a lot of what we build (UIs, objects, API results, identifiers, database tables) are about nouns. But starting there can be hard, especially for novice users; they _use_ an implicit domain model and domain language, but they have rarely thought about it, so prying it out of them can be half anthropology, half philosophy.

But events are something people understand better, as everybody knows how to tell stories. And over the last decade we've seen the rise in event-driven approaches to system design. Focusing on events can of course solve a lot of problems in distributed systems. But things like React also show how thinking about events and data flows help even at very small scales.

So I look forward to trying this out next time I have a new complex business domain to model. It looks faster, easier, and more fun. I'd then probably combine it with something like Patton's Story Mapping to figure out what needs to get built:

[http://www.jpattonassociates.com/the-new- backlog/](http://www.jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/)

<comment><USER4> > Traditional processes for understanding the domain also tend to focus on > nouns.

The most traditional requirements development and system analysis process I can think of, structured analysis (as developed by Ed Yourdon at others and first popularized in, IIRC, the 1970s), focuses on modelling a planned response system in terms of the events it needs to respond to and what it needs to do in response, and decomposing it into subsystems modelled the same way.

Using shared visual models is a common technique when applying Structured Analysis, too.

<comment><USER3> Good point. Perhaps instead of "traditional" I should have used a different word. Here I'm referring not to documented formal processes (which I almost never see used in the wild) but to what I have seen, which mainly seem to be folk wisdom. So tradition in that sense.

As I said, I think a lot of this folk tradition arises out of the practical needs of developers. They are asked to build a hazy thing; in trying to figure out what that thing is it's easy to reach for concrete representations, like business forms and database tables. And of the class structure in object- oriented languages, which is obviously noun-focused.

I suspect another source of difference between what I see used and most formal processes is that the most formal processes tend to come out of a waterfall tradition. There's a stop-the-world-for-months aspect to them that I think is incompatible with a lot of what people do today. Certainly with the dynamic world of startups, but also with the short-cycle processes that modern tools enable for everybody.

I could totally see using Event Storming and Story Mapping as two one-day activities as part of a kickoff week for a new project. Structured analysis, not so much.

<comment><USER4> > I suspect another source of difference between what I see used and most > formal processes is that the most formal processes tend to come out of a > waterfall tradition. There's a stop-the-world-for-months aspect to them that > I think is incompatible with a lot of what people do today.

It's true that a lot of formal methods were first defined then. Those that weren't abandoned entirely were refined beyond that time, though; you might find Yourdon's last (before throwing it to a Wiki which was somewhat unsuccessful and vandalized) documentation of the Structured Analysis method, his freely-available PDF _Just Enough Structured Analysis_ from 2006, illuminating. [0] There's no stop the world aspect (except in one of the two polar extremes of approaches to application, both of which are described as impractical for real projects.)

> I could totally see using Event Storming and Story Mapping as two one-day > activities as part of a kickoff week for a new project. Structured analysis, > not so much.

It's true that Structure Analysis is a full-lifecycle activity, not a kickoff event; OTOH, there are certainly parts that map out the problem space that work as kick off events.

[0] [http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~sasanr/Teaching- Material/SAD/JE...](http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~sasanr/Teaching- Material/SAD/JESA.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Is there some specific part of that 600-page book would I find illuminating? From the intro, this is clearly a phasist approach, so essentially waterfall. E.g.:

"Regardless of its name, it becomes the input to the person (or people) who are responsible for actually building the system — that is, designing the overall architecture of computer hardware and software and ultimately writing and testing the computer programs. This leads us to Part IV: life after systems analysis. We will explore the transition from systems analysis to systems design and briefly discuss the final details of programming and testing."

I'm sure there are people out there whose domains are stable enough that they can work like that. But fewer and fewer. And I suspect even the ones who can would be better working in a much more iterative, exploratory way.

<comment><USER4> > Is there some specific part of that 600-page book would I find illuminating?

The part most directly relevant to the point at which I raised it is Sec. 5.5, beginning on p. 91.

<comment><USER3> I see what you're saying, although I'm not sure it's really moving in a direction I'd call agile. He clearly paints the fully "radical" end as unthinkable lunacy, when it's entirely doable in practice. And looking at figure 5.4, it's very much a document-oriented process. When compared with a modern, short-cycle Agile approach (continuous delivery, unit-of-work size in the 1-3 day range) all of the documentation he describes ends up being pure waste.

This part strikes me as especially absurd:

"How does a project manager decide whether to adopt a radical or conservative approach? Basically, there is no right answer; the decision is usually based on the following factors:

* How fickle is the user?

* What pressure is the project team under to produce immediate, tangible results?

* What pressure is the project manager under to produce an accurate schedule, budget, and estimate of people and other resources?

* What are the dangers of making a major technical blunder?"

The contempt for users wrapped up in "fickle" is ridiculous, and ditto making business needs about "pressure". Most importantly, he hasn't even begun to recognize that a shorter cycle yields significant business benefits, even though that was being written about at least a half-dozen years before this book.

So I read this more as typical waterfall thinking with some concessions to practical reality (which is how waterfall has always been done) than anything relating to a modern approach. He doesn't say, "You must stop the world for 100% of your project!" But the fastest he's willing to describe is, "Stop the world for 50% of your project!" The notion that you could stop the world for 1% or less of your project (which is what happens with weekly cycles for a project of 2 years or more) is to him beyond ultra-radical. (Let alone a good kanban approach, where the cycle time drops into the hours-to-days range.) When instead I'd submit it's in reality the most conservative approach, in that it minimizes all sorts of risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recommend this book n which this method is described and explained. Also F#.

[https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made- functi...](https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional)

<comment><USER6> I'm especially fond of his description of boundaries and the trade-offs of different kinds of contracts between bounded contexts. There's also a lot of good insight into how we abuse the database and couple ourselves to it for the convenience of CRUD. Really feel like I should've picked up this book months ago.

<comment><USER7> It's always refreshing to see a writer that's honest about trade-offs, instead of spouting their preferred method as the one-true-way which will solve all your problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Process as a way of getting conference gigs.</comment>


The invented Chinese names of the 2019 Canadian federal election – ranked - <AUTHOR> http://www.nikobell.ca/the-invented-chinese-names-of-the-2019-federal-election-ranked/ <comment><USER2> As a native Chinese speaker, I find several points in the article a bit awkward to comprehend, especially when you flip the table around. It might be likely less than sophisticated for Françoise Duchamps to call herself Fran Swazzy in English (I don't think so), but I struggle to think she'd have trouble using simply "Frances" without a last name if she goes to a hypothetical English-speaking place where residents don't understand much French.

I also don't understand the author's lack of love to just using the straight phonetic translation (either first-last or only first/last name).[1] Sure it's nice to have a Chinese name that sounds familiar, but would you expect your (say) Indian immigrant colleague to adapt an English-sounding name when moving to Canada? Yeah, we don't mind you using your native name either.

Oh and the semantics don't matter either. Lietarally _zero_ native Chinese speaker would read 希拉里 and think "huh, hope pull inside, wierd name", we recognise immediately it's foreign, just like you know Kazuhiko and Jinping don't have Bible reference. Heck, we don't even think too much about meanings of our own names that often. When's the last time you see a guy named Chris and think how he bears Christ?

Anyway. I don't dislike the article, especially the latter part where the author digs into actual examples. It is always a fun exercise to read Chinese names, I do that a lot as well. But it's just that, fun exercise. That's not how we read names in daily life, and as long as you're happy with your Chinese-character-spelled names (be it Chinese-style or otherwise), we are happy to use it. Over-interpreting people's names (especially non-native speakers'), now _that's_ unsophisticated.

\---

[1]: I am Taiwanese, so maybe there's some cultral different to communities with China origin.

<comment><USER3> The author is not Chinese. It is common for people who study a foreign language to get a passion for things that to them seems more authentic.

For example, many learners of Japanese consider English loan words inferior to Sino Japanese words, even though in modern Japanese, they are equally Japanese.

<comment><USER4> I was always amused that "pine" street in San Francisco is transliterated to "plank" in chinese. Broadway, incidentally, is "avenue of 100 old people".

<comment><USER5> Another example: the Chinese name for SF is Laojinshan (老金山) afaik, which translates to Old Gold Mountain and sounds nothing like Hispanic/English name. I think it dates back to the California gold rush

<comment><USER6> It's 旧金山 (jiu jin shan), but otherwise you're right.

<comment><USER7> And in case anyone was wondering, the "New Gold Mountain" is another name for Melbourne[0].

[0] [https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%B0%E9%87%91%E5%B1%B1](https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%B0%E9%87%91%E5%B1%B1)

<comment><USER8> The Melbourne Gold rush was in the 1850s-1860s so the "new" part has become inaccurate.

See also: "New Forest", England, 1079.

<comment><USER7> >The Melbourne Gold rush was in the 1850s-1860s so the "new" part has become inaccurate.

It also happened just a few years (very much less than a decade) after the California Gold Rush, and there were other gold rushes after that, so I'm not sure why it's "new" either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The prototypical Chinese name has three characters, a single surname > followed by a two-character given name. A smaller number of Chinese people > only have a single given name, and a very few have two surname characters.

I'm not sure if this is correct. IIRC, in at least some areas/families, it's a tradition to alternate between giving a one or two character name from generation to generation. So if your parent has a two character given name, you'll have a one character name, and vice-versa.

Another interesting characteristic of Chinese names is that given names are very diverse and varied, while family names come from a small set (something like a hundred or so). This is opposite from the West (or at least America) where given names are pretty restricted (e.g. lots of Johns and Emilys) but family names have a lot of variation (probably due to all the immigration).

<comment><USER7> >>> The prototypical Chinese name has three characters, a single surname followed by a two-character given name. A smaller number of Chinese people only have a single given name, and a very few have two surname characters.

>I'm not sure if this is correct.

It's not. The distribution of one- and two-character given names is pretty even in China.

>Another interesting characteristic of Chinese names is that given names are very diverse and varied, while family names come from a small set (something like a hundred or so). This is opposite from the West (or at least America) where given names are pretty restricted (e.g. lots of Johns and Emilys) but family names have a lot of variation (probably due to all the immigration).

You know, maybe we should change how we think about the ordering. Instead of family-given or given-family, it's clearly restricted-arbitrary.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like the site fell over.

Internet archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20191021142028/www.nikobell.ca/t...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191021142028/www.nikobell.ca/the- invented-chinese-names-of-the-2019-federal-election-ranked/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome.

My Chinese name is 司馬文 "Sima Wen", with the surname being that of several series of famous Chinese historians, emperors, and generals, and my given name meaning culture.

My teachers were very proud of that one because it closely resembles my English name and they said it sounded dignified. I can only assume they knew what they were talking about.

<comment><USER11> Do you use that name with actual Chinese people, or is it more of a during- Chinese-class thing?

I would feel weird about giving myself a rare and ultra-high-prestige name. But, I have no idea how the Chinese would perceive it.

<comment><USER12> I would probably assume he's just really into Romance of the Three Kingdoms or other historical dramas where the 司馬 surname is common. Or that his real name is Zimmerman.

<comment><USER11> > Or that his real name is Zimmerman.

I've read that a number of Chinese with the surname 欧阳 [Ouyang] logically chose the English surname O'Young, confusing a lot of people who were led by the name to expect someone more Irish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting that Jagmeet Singh's "nom de Chine" in Cantonese is 駔勉誠 (roughly, "dzong min sing"), which sounds a lot more like his real name than the Mandarin ("zang mian cheng") does.

<comment><USER14> Good point. Many folks will be reading the Chinese names in Cantonese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does Canada have a large Chinese immigrant population? I'm curious as to why these would be on campaign ads.

<comment><USER16> Your question presupposes that folks of Chinese descent in Canada are immigrants. There's been a strong Chinese community in the area since before 1900. As a comparison, my great-great grandparents emigrated from Italy in the 1920s. It's quite typical for Canadians to retain their cultural identity and ancestral language post-immigration; the notable exception being indigenous peoples who were forced to assimilate. Where my family immigrated to the US and abandoned our language, I later immigrated to Canada, I was shocked to discover an Italian community where folks are still raising their kids to speak Italian after generations.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but these kids learn some spoken Italian (actually very often in the '20's and until maybe the '70's some specific italian dialect) while they have education ad everyday experiences outside the family in either French or English.

So, besides the high percentage of Chinese people in Vancouver, isn't the point about how many of them can vote but cannot read English?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> IDEA: A site that creates a good Chinese name either from your name or totally from scratch, with good visualization option to tweak 10-20 factors. Uses AI algorithms trained on nuances of names. If you pay extra, you can have the auto-generated name tweaked by an expert, someone like the author of this post. Sites like this exist (e.g. [https://www.mandarintools.com/chinesename.html](https://www.mandarintools.com/chinesename.html)) but are primitive.

<comment><USER19> That's a good idea ;-P I've been working on it but it's only for our internal use at this time. Chinese names are also required in some counties in California. I shared the following in our blog: The California State Legislature passed a bill this year (and it was approved by the Governor on July 12) that requires phonetic transliterations of candidates' alphabet-based names to appear on ballots and ballot materials in jurisdiction required to translate ballot materials into character-based languages. [https://service.goodcharacters.com/daily/20190701-ab-57-cand...](https://service.goodcharacters.com/daily/20190701-ab-57-candidates.html)

<comment><USER11> > requires phonetic transliterations of candidates' alphabet-based names to > appear on ballots and ballot materials in jurisdiction required to translate > ballot materials into character-based languages

In my experience, Chinese versions of foreign words, including foreign names, usually don't approach the sound of the original as closely as Chinese phonology allows. That is, they aren't really meant as "phonetic transliterations"; there are other options available purely within Chinese that would approximate the original sound more closely.[1]

Instead, the goal seems to be that you're in the right ballpark on the sound, and then you tweak the name for other factors such as character semantics while staying somewhere in the ballpark.

And of course, once a name is conventionalized, you'd want to use that rather than innovating a new version.

[1] Of course it's possible in general that while my foreign ears think a different Chinese syllable would better match the foreign one, the Chinese disagree and really believe they are using the closest available match. There are plenty of ready examples, such as Coca-Cola, where this is obviously not the case.

<comment><USER20> I presume most new translations now target Mandarin, but I wonder whether some older western imports got their names in Cantonese, is this a thing?

And likewise for candidate names -- IIRC lots of people moved to BC from HK, but perhaps a minority by now?

<comment><USER11> > I wonder whether some older western imports got their names in Cantonese, is > this a thing?

Yes, it is the norm for older loanwords. Compare Mandarin jia-na-da [Canada] from Cantonese ga-la-da, or Mandarin mo-xi-ge [Mexico] from Cantonese mak-sai- go.

EDIT: it's worth observing that the Chinese themselves are generally not aware that the older loanwords came through Cantonese.

<comment><USER21> I wouldn't affirm Canada transliteration come from Cantonese without serious proof. Not too long ago (about a century [1]), the initial now romanized by <j> was written with <k>. I'm not specialist of the phonetic changes that happen during that time in the involved languages and dialects, but it is totally credible that 加拿大 comes from Mandarin. The initial involved in 加 seems to have change "recently". This also explain the Peking/Beijing thing.

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

<comment><USER11> The Peking / Beijing thing is indeed the same thing you see in Canada / jianada. Peking / Nanking / etc. do not come from Mandarin.

Read your own link:

> The transcription of the EFEO did not borrow its phonetics from the national > official Standard Mandarin. Rather, it was synthesized independently to be a > mean of Chinese dialects, and shows a state of sounds a little older in form

<comment><USER21> Reading is good, understanding the implications is better. Standard Mandarin is newer than the period at which Canada would appear as a loanword in Chinese, so of course it is not drawn from that language. But that doesn't mean it is Cantonese either. Moreover, I wrote Mandarin (a Chinese languages with a variety of dialects), not Standard Mandarin (the language taught at school).

In particular, for the Beijing case, South Mandarin is involved: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_postal_romanization#Ma...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_postal_romanization#Main_features).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For those who were unaware, Canada is having its federal election today. Its no-fuss nature is an interesting contrast to the shenanigans of our southern neighbour.

</comment><comment><USER23> >"Chinese has no bite-sized phonetic components with which to build foreign sounds..."

That's not entirely true. There is bopomofodutunuh [1]. Maybe it's not as well known as Kana.

[1][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo)

<comment><USER24> That's mostly used in Taiwan for typing, I don't think it's really common in China. I could be wrong though.

Also, I think it would be weird to have a name made of those characters. They're strictly phonetic -- I've never seen a Chinese name made out of bopomofo letters.

<comment><USER25> Bopomofo was phased out as the official transliteration system in the PRC in 1958 and replaced by Pinyin. Most Mainland Chinese probably won't be able to read Bopomofo. And if you're going to use an alphabetic writing system like Pinyin, you might as well use the original orthography and skip the need for transliteration altogether.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I've collected names from the sublime—Vancouver city council candidate Jean > Swanson's (金玉鹅) beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name—

Was that joke? At least in Japanese, the two first are a very common colloquial for testicles.

<comment><USER26> I don't think it means that in Chinese. However I agree it is not a decent name.

金 = gold/golden, 玉 = jade, 鹅 = goose

Usually the more chars resembling wealth in your name, the less educated family you may be from. Basically it just shows your eagerness to become rich. Not to mention the last character, which is rarely used char in names, who wants to name their child "goose"?

金 and 玉 are actually common in names, but usually combined with other good words like 诺(promise), 心(heart),... something like that. Decent names are not that straightforward and I think it may be the same in the western world.

<comment><USER7> >鹅 = goose

鹅 can refer to quite a few birds in Chinese[0], and in this case, since the article noted:

 _Vancouver city council candidate Jean Swanson's (金玉鹅) [has a] beautifully phonetic and semantic rendering of her name_

鹅 is probably referring to 天鹅 ("swan")[1], which is part of Swanson's family name.

A bit of an explainer: In names, a word that's usually two characters long is often truncated. For example, the name of the kirin (麒麟) is often used in names, but is often truncated to 麟 (麒 is also possible) so that another character (e.g. a verb) can be introduced, e.g. Alan Tam's given name[2], 詠麟, means to rhapsodise about the kirin.

>Usually the more chars resembling wealth in your name, the less educated family you may be from.

Swanson's an anti-poverty activist,[3] so perhaps that may explain something about why 金玉 might have been appealing as a reference to 金玉滿堂.

Her party "has traditionally been associated with tenants, environmentalists, and the labour movement"[4], so I imagine that perhaps she wanted something green in the name as well, and jade (玉) fits the bill.

[0] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%B5%9D#Chinese](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%B5%9D#Chinese)

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E9%B5%9D#Chinese](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E9%B5%9D#Chinese)

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

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

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Progressive_Elect...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Progressive_Electors)

<comment><USER27> She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan and call the thing sky goose instead, but most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.

<comment><USER7> >She should use 鹄(swan) instead of 鹅(goose). Yes people don't usually use this character for swan

I've never heard of or seen this character until today.

>most people know of it as it's part of the idiom: 燕雀安知鸿鹄之志.

"Most people" usually mean "people around me", so it's not indicative.

There are plenty of ethnic Chinese people not living in China who might not have heard of this idiom -- in part because their knowledge of Chinese may not be as deep as people who've gone through the Chinese education system -- and one of them had probably advised Swanson on her name choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> After McDonald's (China) was acquired, McDonald's (Global) banned them from using McDonald's and its phonetic name 麥當勞 in China. It then changed its name to 金拱門, which literally means Golden Arches. Chinese people found it so hilarious that it went so viral. News got over nine billion views. It was such a success for marketing, but it doesn't hold the same profile as before.

<comment><USER29> They sure seem different than the ordinary McD in other countries.

The McD online ordering website in China is [https://www.4008-517-517.cn](https://www.4008-517-517.cn) \-- apparently "517" sounds like "I want to eat".

They sell a "Land, Air, Sea Warfare" combo menu which sounds ominous, but apparently it's commonly known "secret menu" item on ordinary McDonalds combining a Big Mac, McChicken and the McFish.

<comment><USER30> So odd to see numerical URLs. There was an article here on HN about that a month or so ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> If we expand the ranking to native historical names, I've always found the presence of somewhat derogatory or just absurd names among ancient Chinese figures fascinating and have a hard time fathoming why a parent would gives these to a child.

Note the following are not nicknames. These are given names.

Some I can chalk up to probably being purely phonetic spellings (不寿 a.k.a. Not-Long-Lived a king of Yue 越, who doesn't _seem_ to have lived a particularly short life, but his date of birth is unknown). Others to their names later taking on negative connotations because of their own actions (嫪毐 Lao Ai where 毐 later became used to describe immoral people, presumably because he pretended to be a eunuch, slept with the mother of Qin Shihuangdi, the first emperor of China, and then led a failed revolution against the emperor's father, the king of Qin. His whole story is insane. He's a performer who does tricks with his large penis who got used in a game of political intrigue by Lu Buwei to protect Lu Buwei from the king of Qin.).

There still others that maybe had their names invented or twisted to suit stories. See for example 牛缺(Lacking Niu), a high-ranking scholar who appears in 吕氏春秋 (Master Lu's Spring and Autumn Annals) who goes on a trip through the desert, has everything stolen from him, and then is later killed by his robbers for good measure.

And yet others may be a result of trying to ward off evil or encourage modesty by intentionally giving children modest or unappealing names.

However, there's some, especially from the Warring States and earlier, that just seem to be inexplicably absurd names, with a large focus on "not."

晋黑臀 (Black-Butt Jin), also known by his title Duke Cheng of Jin. Perhaps he just had very literal parents.

叔孙不敢 (Doesn't-Dare/Not-Brave Shusun), a Lu court official. Sure his father tried and failed to help Duke Zhao of Lu, but the historical account makes it sound like that probably happened after Doesn't-Dare's birth.

韩不信/韩不佞 (Not-Credible Han/Unworthy Han). Granted the latter could also mean not given to sophistry, but still why would you take that chance with a child (both meanings are attested to in fairly ancient sources)?

秦非 (Not Qin, note order is flipped compared to English names so it's literally Qin Not). A disciple of Confucius.

皇非我 (Not-Me Huang). An official of the kingdom of Song. Again maybe a result of traditions trying to protect children from evil spirits, but I still find it rather amusing.

I've never really heard a good explanation for these, other than given names didn't really matter back then, rather it was adult honorary names (e.g. Zi or 字) that mattered more, which sure I guess I can believe. On the other hand, if that was the case I'd expect a cornucopia of awful names rather than the comparatively few, but still abnormally many, that I observe now.

<comment><USER7> >皇非我 (Not-Me Huang). An official of the kingdom of Song. Again maybe a result of traditions trying to protect children from evil spirits, but I still find it rather amusing.

I'd think that, since 皇 means "emperor", the name is protective in the sense that it's trying to say "no, no, I'm not the emperor".

>I've never really heard a good explanation for these, other than given names didn't really matter back then, rather it was adult honorary names (e.g. Zi or 字) that mattered more, which sure I guess I can believe. On the other hand, if that was the case I'd expect a cornucopia of awful names rather than the comparatively few, but still abnormally many, that I observe now.

Presumably, honorary names are the ones that are recorded, since they mattered more, not the awful names given by your parents or nicknames.

<comment><USER31> This came before the usage of 皇 to broadly mean emperor (i.e. during the Spring and Autumn period before the Qin dynasty), although it is used to describe the three mythical emperors. Here it's a clan name (氏), the common clan name of the kingdom of Song.

When recording names in historical records usually the given name as well as honorary name are given as well (honorary names of these figures are all recorded alongside these given names and are far more ordinary).

<comment><USER7> >This came before the usage of 皇 to broadly mean emperor (i.e. during the Spring and Autumn period before the Qin dynasty), although it is used to describe the three mythical emperors. Here it's a clan name (氏), the common clan name of the kingdom of Song.

Good to know.

>When recording names in historical records usually the given name as well as honorary name are given as well (honorary names of these figures are all recorded alongside these given names and are far more ordinary).

I think the unusual names you've come across are those that've slipped through the cracks. In any case, Chinese men back then would have been given a few names before they reached adulthood: usually, a "milk name" from their parents and another (usually more dignified) name when they attend school. The honorary name comes much later. The unusual names may have been "milk names" that survived the cull because the bearers might not have attended school, for example.

Of course, the practice hasn't survived into the modern age, but you still see this practice in the Arabic world, where people can have multiple aliases. So what you labelled as the "given name" need not be the "given name" we understand today, but just the name that's survived to adulthood that's not the honorary name, which comes later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I definitely need a better Chinese name. How can I get one?

<comment><USER21> Consult Chinese speaking people? Try something then ask advices. Iterate quickly a few times and you should be set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Native Mandarin speaker here - please take this article with a grain of salt as it reeks of whitesplaining.

I know the writer spent a bunch of time in China but a bunch of the "nuance" of how the names are interpreted seem either excessive or overinterpretive.

Just-another-opinion: As a Chinese person I actually prefer direct translations such as 川普 (Trump) as the name is usually pretty distinct, and people who share the same surname can have different characters to represent them.

Off-handedly, the characters used to translate a person's name often times can convey additional info - I can't think of too many specifics by country, but it's very easy to tell who's from Japan because they just take the kanji and use the Chinese translation (which butchers the pronunciation), or Korean because certain characters are almost always used for translating certain surnames (such as 金 -> Kim).

<comment><USER7> >please take this article with a grain of salt as it reeks of whitesplaining.

Agreed. Also, most Chinese names are "invented" anyway, so why is that in the headline?</comment></comment>


Cheat Sheet for Startup Weekend and Hackathons - <AUTHOR> http://www.tokbox.com/blog/having-fun-at-startup-weekend/

<comment><USER2> Something you might not be aware of: browsing <https://www.tokbox.com/blog/> yields a 404 whilst using plain http works fine.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to write/add more to the list!

</comment><comment><USER3> this is great, very nifty and complete!

</comment><comment><USER4> love it</comment>


10 standard, must-have Ruby gems for Rails 3 - <AUTHOR> http://thinkvitamin.com/code/10-must-have-ruby-gems/

<comment><USER2> Its a decent list, but I would have liked to see Kaminari instead of will_paginate and perhaps CarrierWave instead of, or possibly as a really good alternative, to Paperclip.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been excited to get this list peer-reviewed and it seems that Kaminari and CarrierWave are 2 good alternatives from all the feedback. I'm looking forward to swapping these in on my next project.

<comment><USER2> I don't think you will be disappointed with Kaminari, it extends the new query interface really nicely. As for CarrierWave, I find it a lot more flexible than Paperclip.

Also, I hadn't seen Rack SSL Enforcer, thanks for that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> no big surprises, but if you want to know what all the latest apps are running, this is a good list. i rarely start a project without at least half of these.</comment>