Stop Working More than 40 Hours a Week - <AUTHOR> http://business.time.com/2012/04/26/stop-working-more-than-40-hours-a-week/?iid=biz-main-lede <comment><USER2> Honestly, for people who work more than 40 hours a week, how many of them are actually working more than 40 hours a week? Sometimes it feels like half my day is spent reading HN and the like. If I could focus much more, I'm sure I wouldn't need to spend more than 40 hours a week to get my stuff done.

<comment><USER3> having grown up on a farm, forty hours came and went usually mid week. In the business world its not the hours I work that wear on me, its the non productive hours during that do.

I guess the difference between the farm and business is that the former doesn't have non productive work. It is amazing how much energy I lose in meetings or similar.

<comment><USER4> While hunter-gatherers spend only 10-20 hours a week on obtaining food, how is farming an improvement on that? <http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html>

<comment><USER5> A farmer working a 40 (60... 70... 80...) hour week can produce enough food to feed hundreds of people, freeing them up to do other things. If you've ever played Civilization, agriculture is a prerequisite to doing any sort of technological development.

<comment><USER6> >If you've ever played Civilization, agriculture is a prerequisite to doing any sort of technological development.

What on earth do you think this proves?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every office is different with regard to the hours worked as well as when those hours are worked. I find the latter is more important than the former.

At my office most people get in around 9:30am to 10:00am, and leave around 8 hours later. What I found was that I couldn't get any work done around that time because productivity slows down to a crawl in the middle of the day, usually due to meetings, figuring out what they need to do for the day, or the usual inter-cubicle communication.

I fixed this for myself by coming in early, around 7:00am. That means I have approximately 2-2.5 hours of uninterrupted time when I have peak energy. Then when everyone gets into the office I don't mind the interruptions. Those are the pros.

The cons are that I have to wake up at 6am to drive into the office (~40mins drive). As well, 8 hours from 7am is 3pm, but there's no way I can leave at that time without losing face. Instead, I leave at 4pm. I currently rationalize this extra hour of "work" by saying that I take a 1 hour lunch that I don't charge for.

Timeboxing myself into a 8-9 hour timespan means I really need to prioritize my work for the day. Once the clock strikes 3:30pm, I make it a mission to take the next 30 minutes to wind down and prepare for the next day. This has helped me reduce the stress associated with the work day.

<comment><USER8> > without losing face.

Honestly, isn't the crux of the problem? Even if you are a superstar, you'll _still_ get typecasted as smart-but-lazy and find yourself on the outside. Generally speaking, this is an _organizational_ problem.

<comment><USER9> In many offices, you need to be around when things come up. There are very few jobs where you come in, work by yourself for 8 hours and then go home. Communication is important, and if you aren't there, it's hard to communicate.

<comment><USER10> Email, sms, voice can cope with crisis that arise. In a small office face is important; less important in an environment that's geographically distributed.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but when that emergency crops up in the middle of that 40 minute commute, you aren't going to be helping the team very much.

<comment><USER10> It's no different than being out to lunch. You're 20 minutes away from the office in your scenario, and hopefully you're not the only person who can fix things. No one should be the company savior, and if you can't leave the office, you have bigger issues than working different schedules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most people who think they work 50-60 hours actually work 40 hours. Most people who think they work 40 hours actually work 30 or less. I've seen that for myself, working very hard from morning to mid-night taking breaks only to eat and tracking every minute, adds up to only 50 hours of REAL work per week (not counting Saturday Sunday). People work a lot less than they think they do. Track your EXACT time worked and see how much you really worked ... I've been doing this for at least the last year.

<comment><USER13> I find that most of the "most people" who fall into the category of "working" that many hours but actually only doing 40 hours of work related work are the younger/entitlement generation (I'm 35 fwiw)

When you are at work, do you work. You shouldn't be browsing reddit or checking facebook/twitter or fantasy football/espn. You shouldnt have a chat client open with friends/family (create a work only one)

At our office we are allowed (and encouraged) to read tech blogs such as hackernews, but no one abuses that and reads for hours on end.

We use RescueTime and part of our 8 hours includes email, irc (work #channel), instant message (work only 'friends' screenname), reading rss on top of the actual coding. No one is looked down on for having a high google/stackoverflow time in a week.

Two 4 hour blocks of coding is not that hard (and normally broken up with meetings or some form of communication anyways)

I find people that have to work 10+ hours to get in 8 actual work related hours are the same people who used to "NEED music" to study. Just have some self discipline and focus.

<comment><USER14> Downvoted for using the term "entitlement generation." Seriously, get over yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've worked frequently where 40 hours is long in the rear view mirror by the end of the week, but it's completely unsustainable over a long term period. I saw a few friends I'd not seen for a while and when they asked what I'd been up to all I could think was "um, work?", which completely defeats the point of working. Building something awesome is, well, awesome, but for the most part you also need to have a life and enjoy yourself.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I had about 6 months to a year where I didn't really do anything but work and pay off debts.

The worst part is meeting up with friends who you haven't seen in a while and realising that you are officially the most boring person in the world because you have _nothing_ interesting at all to talk about. It wasn't even like I was building something exciting that I could talk about.

<comment><USER17> Then you realize that all they have to talk about is television or sports teams or LOL cat pictures or the toys they bought on credit.

<comment><USER18> ... or recent travels or instruments they play or people they've seen or concerts they went to or adventures they've had or sports they play or side projects or dates or ...

<comment><USER17> That's only the retired folks and trust fund kids...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately the statement that 40 hrs a weeks is optimal for each and every person is yet another fallacy. I've started my first full-time job a year ago, I work in France as a dev on a 37.5 hrs contract (extended French 35 hrs in exchange for more days off, which is pretty standard in tech companies here AFAIK).

For the first couple of months, I've been drifting away mentally after 6.5-7 hrs. Now I'm used to it, and of course, sometimes when I'm in programming nirvana, I deliberately stay longer to finish some logical part of the task to avoid the recreating-the-context problems next day, but anyway even with avg of 37.5 hrs a week, in the long term I'm exhausted.

Long commute (2x1h) and living alone (everything's on my head) certainly do not help.

<comment><USER4> If you live alone, why not move closer to the office?

<comment><USER19> The company is located in the middle of nowhere ;) But I'd have to consider this soon indeed.

<comment><USER20> If you can, avoid working at companies located in the middle of nowhere. Location is the first thing I consider when working for a company, and if it means a real car commute or living in the middle of nowhere...the better tech companies understand having a decent location is very important in retaining talent!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I work at a company that has a mean age of probably 35-40. It has the great effect that 9-5 is pretty pervasive. I can take a half day without giving notice, work more or less than 8 hours a day. Doesn't matter as long as I get my stuff done. Honestly, if I'm having a productive day, I can't get more than 8 hours of work out of my brain anyway.

</comment><comment><USER22> Take the "Germany bans 48 hours weeks" with a grain of salt. In certain branches, working 50 hours and more is still considered part of the codex, especially in advertisement agencys. Hours are rarely logged. Working long hours is still seen favourably in Germany.

The big problem is that basically working an unbounded amount of time without logging it hides problems: your work environment sucks and make you slow? Just work more and the problem goes away.

<comment><USER23> Same goes for the UK, to some extent: our politicians are generous enough to have secured for us the ability to "opt out" of the 48-hour limit. The result is that almost all employment contracts contain a clause opting the new employee out.

Having said that, I've personally never exceeded 48 hours in a week, and it may be that the prevalence of the opt-out is more due to a disinclination to add bureaucracy that to a desire to exploit workers.

<comment><USER24> I'm pretty sure opting out is optional, and you can't be made to do it as a condition of employment. The alternative is often that they'll have you do a lot of extra time-tracking to make your life more difficult.

I have gone over 48 hours by about 12 hours a week for a period of a month, because this stuff had to be done. I got a promotion out of it.

Now I'm independent people have to pay me up front if they want that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I get this in the context in which it was initially studied: repetitive work that nobody would be passionate about, but I would theorize that with passion and variety you can extend this. In other words, you can only do 40 hours a week of factory labor, coding, sales calls, etc. However, you can do networking breakfasts at 7, alternate between a variety of tasks, do lunch meetings, product discussions, sales calls, and network until 7 Monday to Friday, then check email intermittently totaling an hour or two over the weekend.

So this is something like 60 hours and it sounds pretty sustainable to me, particularly if you have resources to avoid doing non paying work, such as chores. Anyone know if there is research to support this theory? Obviously that is relevant to startups.

<comment><USER26> I tend to agree that European Working Times Directive was especially useful to protect low pay low skill (or semi-skilled) jobs such as factory work. Some fast food workers were expected to turn up for work, and when the restaurant wasn't busy they'd have to clock out, but stay in their waiting room until they got busy, when they'd have to clock in.

That's clearly abusive, and those workers needed protection.

If someone loves their job and wants to work 50 hours; or can work and enjoy the occasional 60 hours, well, it's their choice and they should be able to.

But most people do not enjoy that, and recognise it's not healthy, and do not want to do that, but are pressured either by bosses or by work culture. And so this flexibility has been removed because some companies were not self regulating.

60 hours a week is 10 hours a day, with one day off. That doesn't include travel time. Let's say 30 minutes each way. Does it include lunch hours? (UK: No, but tea breaks are paid). Let's call lunch another 30 minutes. That's 11.5 hours a day. 7 hours for sleep makes 18.5 hours a day. That leave 5.5 hours a day (plus that one day off) for everything else; your parents, your partner, your children, your friends, your bills etc, your life.

<comment><USER27> _Some fast food workers were expected to turn up for work, and when the restaurant wasn't busy they'd have to clock out, but stay in their waiting room until they got busy, when they'd have to clock in._

That counts as work under the EWT. Any time you have to be on the premises, counts as 'work' under the EWT Directive.

<comment><USER26> Yes, that's what I'm saying. Before the EWT they were expected to do this, and were losing pay, and had little recourse.

The EWT comes in, and now they have legal protections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not really buying this.

Bill Gates and Elon Musk and their inner circle worked very long hours consistently to build something great.

How do you compete with those who work smart and work hard doing something they are very committed to and passionate about?

This is the issue I have with investing in most startups outside the Valley.

On average, are they not going to lose to those singularly focused on being the best?

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UNFjRkq...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UNFjRkquCewJ:www.mycomeup.com/Business- Opportunities/What-Was-Bill-Gates-Work-Ethic-Like-In-His-20s-Check-Out-His- Daily-Routine-When-He-Was-Just-Another- Millionaire.html%3Fprint%3D1%26tmpl%3Dcomponent+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER29> You've got only 1 life, and even among a pool of the most bright, hardworking people (take a sample that works as many hours as you like), there's only so many Bill Gateses. I'm thinking just one.

Even after all his success, I wouldn't be surprised if a guy like that now regrets some of how he spent his youth. I'm sure he could have done it just as well and been a little less crazy, had some more time outside the office. I'd be surprised if a rational person wouldn't admit that.

Passion and determination are fine, but your idea (or my reading of it, anyway) that places outside the Bay Area are less worthy because they've got fewer kids willing to waste their life away ... it seems pretty low.

<comment><USER30> Couldn't agree more with what you said.

I just find it amazing that Steve Jobs, who could have retired multiple times over, was still spending 10-12 hour days at the office, on a consistent basis. This was at the expense of spending time with his family.

I understand passion but balance is important in life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is anyone interesting in working on a long term project to change the laws about the computer professionals exemption from being paid overtime? Drop me a note email@example.com

<comment><USER27> No-one should be exempt from being paid overtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I recently had a phone interview that went rather well for a very interesting position but the company asks a minimum of 45 hours per week and that is a deal breaker for me.

</comment><comment><USER33> I manage full-time contractors who can work any hours they choose and have an endless stream of work. Many of them are paid 4-5x average pay for their countries. I've noticed that most of them end up working 30 hrs/week. They're required to stop tracking time for every break, verified by cam/screen shots. Additionally, many end up taking on a second job. I wonder if that's because they can extend their productivity by doing completely different things.

</comment><comment><USER34> Last week I worked 63 hours. The week before - 58 hours. This week i will probably reach 60 hours. I work in public accounting.

<comment><USER35> You forgot to mention it is during the quarter one financial crunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The problem is corporate culture and chasing secondary indicators of productivity (hours spent in the office, lines of code written, emails sent). The actual output of knowledge workers is hard to determine and bursty (you can spin your wheels on a problem for days but have a break-through in minutes) so people come to rely on these proxies.

I don't even think the problem is employers [in Silicon Valley]. Employees themselves, unaware of how best to show their worth, _choose_ to optimize for these proxies because it's perceived as a safer bet.

That said, I think when I've worked 80 hour weeks before I've gotten twice as much done as 40 hour weeks, but only because I felt driven to produce a certain output, not because I cared about the hours.

</comment><comment><USER37> I think a more precise message would be "Stop caring about time rather than productivity"

</comment><comment><USER38> Oh how I wish I could settle down to 40 hours a week.Im actually looking forward to it. Currently work about about 60, and thats without counting the extra work I do on weekends. Anybody got a remote position for a Python guy? :)

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a year old post although the title is very attractive. Does anyone now a newer, more comprehensive and scientifically solid article having the same claim?

<comment><USER40> > Does anyone now a newer, more comprehensive and scientifically solid article > having the same claim?

As to "scientifically solid", you may be reaching beyond the plausible. Such studies are in the domain of sociology, and sociology is less scientific even than psychology (in fact, sociology is located at the very bottom of the science heap). One reason is the fact that you can't run controlled experiments with such luxuries as control groups and experimental discipline.

<comment><USER39> Thanks, you're right. What I really meant was something backed by data. This is more about business management practices or motivational psychology and "optimum working hours" must be a well studied topic. There must be more than some weak anecdotal arguments about Sheryl Sandberg or Ford Motor Company in early 1900s.

<comment><USER41> There was a presentation given by a programmer that looked at the research. I seem to recall that 40 hours was optimal for manual labour but it was actually less for mental work like programming, but the real kicker was it compared actual productivity with self-perceived productivity and claimed that you felt like you were making progress even when you weren't.

This isn't the presentation I was thinking of, but it covers similar ground (and quotes 35 hours as the optimum for brain-based work):

[http://fr.slideshare.net/flowtown/rules-of- productivity-2756...](http://fr.slideshare.net/flowtown/rules-of- productivity-2756161)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> If you want a book full of studies on this very topic -- many of which show the perils, yes, of trying to do non-manual-labor for extended hours -- get the book Be Excellent at Anything, which is a misnomer. The book used to be titled The Way We're Working Isn't Working, and it was a huge overview of studies that show, well, the way people are working isn't working.</comment>


ARM Releases Machine Readable Architecture Specification - <AUTHOR> https://alastairreid.github.io/alastairreid.github.io/ARM-v8a-xml-release/ <comment><USER2> Yes, yes, but have they finally given a _human_ -understandable definition for BFM and related instructions? Because there's a really straightforward one possible but all of the current instructions are so misleadingly described that I _think_ they might be incorrectly described, but I can't tell.</comment>


Technological waste traced in blood of Africans inmigrating to Spain [spanish] - <AUTHOR> http://www.publico.es/ciencias/basura-tecnologica-del-primer-mundo-contamina-sangre-africanos.html <comment><AUTHOR> Study from University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and the Hospital Insular found that the blood of African immigrants arriving at the Canary Islands, regardless of their country of origin, is contaminated by vanadium and other remains of technological garbage at levels unknown in the West.</comment>


Hidden Camera Exposes Apple's Genius Bars Ripping Off Customers - <AUTHOR> http://digg.com/video/apple-rips-off-customers <comment><USER2> Even just the bullshit corporate speak of "we don't charge for labour" and "we're only charging for the cost of the parts" when I'm being charged $180 (iPhone 5c) for a screen replacement.

When a break down of the entire phone estimates the total cost of the parts within the device is around $180.

The only reason anyone should go to a an Apple store is to retain their warranty.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have experienced this happening every time I visit the genius bar. Usually some older couple being scammed. It's actually pretty sad.</comment>


The Idea Factory - CIC Cambridge - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/08/10/the_idea_factory/

<comment><USER2> good article. but i may be biased. :)</comment>


Correlations, returns, & market outlook suggest BTC is becoming a global hedge - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sfox.com/bitcoin-volatility-us-china-hedge-july-2019-57b718daeab9 <comment><USER2> Surprised to see that Bitcoin out performs gold as a hedge.</comment>


Unblock - A guide to the new Continuous Agile - <AUTHOR> http://www.continuousagile.com/unblock/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting compilation of advice on setting up and growing an Agile development team, moving to Scrum, Kanban, and beyond to advanced organizational designs such as Matrix of Services. Along the way, it includes suprisingly detailed recommendations on continuous delivery & deployment, product management strategy and tactics, feature switches, and source code management (among other topics), as well as interesting case studies from companies as diverse as Google, Edmunds, and oDesk.

I only wish it was available as an ebook.

Much of the material is also available from this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46NNc8DVV6w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46NNc8DVV6w)</comment>


Binstar: Create and manage PyPI or Conda repositories - <AUTHOR> http://continuum.io/blog/binstar

<comment><AUTHOR> My favorite part of this service is the Continuous Integration of your build.

[http://docs.binstar.org/continuous_integration.html](http://docs.binstar.org/continuous_integration.html)

One stop shop to keeping your builds up to date with master.

$ conda -c <your_channel> update <package_name></comment>


Amtrak exploring ending Southwest Chief through service - <AUTHOR> http://www.hutchnews.com/news/20180626/amtrak-exploring-ending-southwest-chief-through-service <comment><USER2> I just rode the Southwest Chief from New Mexico to Illinois and back, last month.

Had a long talk with one of the conductors while on the trip. We discussed the remarkable pattern that the Republicans follow: starve everything they don't like (or that they want to privatize so they can pocket the money), then use the subsequent difficulties and failures and budget shortfalls of the starved agency as proof that the agency can't function and deserves being shut down. They do this with Amtrak, they do it with the State Department, they do it with public schools, they do it with state universities, with healthcare, with prisons, with everything they want to privatize.

Funny, they do this with minorities too. Systematically deny them, over many generations, a good education, decent healthcare, safe neighborhoods, ability to vote, and economic opportunity, and then blame them for being uneducated, unhealthy, unsafe, frauds during elections, and for not contributing to the overall economy. Funny how the Rs' playbook is the same everywhere you look.

As for Amtrak, all the transcontinental routes are in jeopardy, the conductor told me. It's only a matter of time before they're gone.

No other civilized country in the world has such lousy transportation infrastructure. Especially trains. The U.S. should have bullet trains going everywhere, but no.

<comment><USER3> > No other civilized country in the world has such lousy transportation > infrastructure. Especially trains. The U.S. should have bullet trains going > everywhere, but no.

It depends on what metric you use. The US freight rail system is the envy of the world, for example.

The reality is that HSR isn't cost-effective if the trip takes more than about 5 hours. When you superimpose that time limit on the US, there's rather few viable HSR routes. A Chicago/NYC run is at that very margin of viability--and compared to most European countries, that's a longer trip than travelling from one border to another. It's quite easy to set up routes in UK or in Germany that hit all of the major cities in fairly short order, but that task is impossible in the US. Especially grating is the lack of collinearity between major cities; the Midwest in particular ends up having to be a star topology, since Chicago-X doesn't include multiple cities, and there's no route useful enough to be worth bypassing Chicago.

<comment><USER4> > The reality is that HSR isn't cost-effective if the trip takes more than > about 5 hours.

Can you expand on that? It's not obvious to me.

<comment><USER5> It's certainly not cost-effective on a relative basis when compared to air travel. The Delta Shuttle runs Chicago-NY-DC every hour on the half hour for a song. Hard to compete with that on rail.

With rail you do get the benefit of landing in the middle of the city rather than an airport 30 mins from city center, but it's still far less expensive in both time and money to fly when the trip exceeds about 4 or 5 hours.

<comment><USER6> And, indeed, high-speed rail isn't very price competitive with budget air a lot of the time either. Doesn't mean it's a bad idea; transporting a lot of people who are willing to pay a premium off the roads and out of airports may well be a net win. But understand that it's premium travel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Southwest Chief runs between Chicago and LA, via Kansas City, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff. It approaches Wichita within 25 miles, but bypasses it to run west for ~350 miles across rural Kansas and Colorado, serving several small towns, and forming a significant transportation backbone. Thereafter, between La Junta, CO (east of Pueblo, CO) and Lamy, NM (adjacent to Santa Fe, NM), the Southwest Chief runs over track owned by BNSF that the freight railroad no longer uses. This lattermost stretch is the most troublesome section, and the topic of much of the article.

BNSF has offered [1] to host this train over a different route that it actively uses -- the Southern Transcon. Using the Southern Transcon would add direct service to Wichita, Amarillo, Clovis, and Vaughn, but would bypass southwest Kansas, southeast Colorado, and northeast New Mexico. Doing so would also remove direct service from Albuquerque and put it even further from Santa Fe. If it weren't for the Albuquerque complication, this would be a pretty good route.

Amtrak has, under its previous leadership, worked with the governments of Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, and various localities along the route to solicit funding for continuing the service over its original route. It also got some federal grants. Previous CEOs were staunchly supportive of continuing long-distance service. The new CEO, significantly less so. Representatives from these states were caught unaware by his new approach, and now those matching funds could be in question.

The Southwest Chief is a notable cross-country service, but it's also the transportation backbone of southwest Kansas and southeast Colorado. In my opinion, KS and CO, together with Amtrak and BNSF, should investigate a service between eastern Kansas (e.g. Wichita or KC) and Denver, serving many of the same rural towns of both, but also the major cities of Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and Denver in Colorado. The track is owned by BNSF and is in good shape, and would provide service to new markets on a less fraught route. New Mexico should investigate a solution that works for them, which may or may not include more transportation options from Las Vegas, NM, to Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and working with Texas to explore routes towards Lubbock and Dallas.

[1] [https://www.codot.gov/about/southwest-chief- commission/swchi...](https://www.codot.gov/about/southwest-chief- commission/swchief-interim-leg-sub-comm-110614-v8-final)

<comment><USER7> > The Southwest Chief is a notable cross-country service, but it's also the > transportation backbone of southwest Kansas and southeast Colorado. In my > opinion, KS and CO, together with Amtrak and BNSF, should...

Stop right there. Colorado and Kansas should, together, buy the 219 mile segment that BNSF no longer uses and no longer wants to maintain. They can then hand off management of the segment to Amtrak and leave BNSF completely out of it.

Back in 2012, the Republican-controlled, car-loving state of Michigan bought a 135 mile segment from Norfolk Southern. At this time, over 90% of the Chicago- Detroit Amtrak service in Michigan runs on publicly-owned rail (Amtrak owns another large segment). The Michigan Department of Transportation maintains the line for 110 mph service.

There is no reason that Kansas and Colorado can't do the same. It's just a lack of ambition.

<comment><USER8> Good idea. New Mexico needs to be included too. There's probably more of this track segment in NM than in Colorado.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Las Vegas, New Mexico is a town that used to be a major rail station. Amazing Victorian houses, as the rail line enabled prosperous folk to import building materials and household items from Sears-Roebuck in Chicago. 100 years before Amazon was a thing.

I love the Lamy Amtrak station and ride every chance I get to leave town. Los Angeles for less than $100, or the other direction from Lamy to Raton to visit the family ranch.

Two months ago we rode that line out of Lamy and I was really surprised how busy it was, at least 50 people boarding at that station.

My favorite vacation ever was a long sleeper-car service, out of Emeryville (my home town at the time) and Denver. The views are spectacular. Meals are inclded with the sleeper service, and is really good. The people are remarkable. I was working for an early dot-com at the time and I slept deeply for 12 hours.

Also: NO STRESS of an airport. FREE PARKING. Show up 20 minites early, whatever, just walk right up and get on the train.

Even with coach service, the seats are huge recliners and you don't need to stay in your seat. Walk around!

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting how the politicians demand it be kept running and maintained yet don't talk about where the $30-$50 million in repairs to the existing track or the $55 million to install the required positive train controls safety systems will come from.

<comment><USER11> I find it interesting that politicians increase military spending by $100 billion or we cut future revenue by $1 trillion and nobody bats an eye. Meanwhile, people hem and haw over $50 million to maintain critical infrastructure.

<comment><USER12> Rich people sell guns, poor people ride trains.

Not all of them, obviously, but enough to "guide" the decisions of career politicians.

<comment><USER6> By and large poor people ride buses or drive. Buses go a lot places trains do not and, in the Northeast, buses are far cheaper than trains. Get above about 500 miles or so and planes are often cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is sad; as a Boy Scout I actually rode this train from Chicago to Raton for a trip to Philmont Scout Ranch. I know my troop and many others utilize this transportation option as flying can be expensive and inconvenient for large groups, especially when you are bringing large backpacking gear with TSA prohibited or check-only items like camping stove fuel, pocket knives, etc.

<comment><USER14> I hate to break it to you but some of those items don't seem to be allowed on Amtrak either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of these days I'd like to do one of the Amtrak long-haul Western US routes although I expect the idea is more appealing than the actual experience would be.

Unfortunately, Amtrak's Northeast Corridor basically makes money that it loses in almost of its other routes. There may be a few city pairs here that may eke out a profit but not a lot.

<comment><USER15> > One of these days I'd like to do one of the Amtrak long-haul Western US > routes although I expect the idea is more appealing than the actual > experience would be.

If I had to take one of those routes again, I'd do it as a sleeper car passenger.

I took the Empire Builder as regular passenger. I'm glad I tried it once, and the views in the Rockies were amazing, but 30+ hours straight in a reclining seat is a bit much to do again. I think it would have been much more enjoyable with a proper place to sleep.

<comment><USER16> Alternate view: I did it in coach but with stops in between (so not 30+ hours at a time) and would recommend my version. One of the highlights of the trip was talking to everyone else in the train, which is bound to happen when you're in what amounts to a very long corridor for 12 hours at a time. Most youngish solo travelers seemed to be doing it this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you like long distance trains make sure you ride the Amtraks before it's too late.

<comment><USER17> Or just go to Europe.

<comment><USER18> Unless you mean Russia, Europe doesn't have the same kind of long-distance rail service. Remember Europe is geographically very small.

And as much as it pains the anti-Americans in the audience, the United States still has the world's largest rail network. Number two is Russia, which is a distant second, followed by China.

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_transport_network_size)

<comment><USER19> Rail network != passenger rail network, though, which was the point of the top-level comment AIUI.

If we look at patronage, US passenger miles in 2017 were 6.53bn. UK passenger miles in just one quarter were 10bn.

<comment><USER20> Well american trains don't go anywhere anyone wants to go to in a reasonable amount of time.

<comment><USER6> I can get from Boston to NYC in a reasonable amount of time using the train. Very competitive with air. Not so much on my next trip from Boston to San Francisco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use this train and it will be a pity to lose it. It's quite pleasant; you can often get a sleeper for less than the price of a flight. Unlike a plane, you can get up and walk around, work on your laptop, talk on the phone, charge all your devices from a real 110v outlet, and eat fairly decent food. The scenery is beautiful. (The onboard wifi does suck but that's no surprise; I solve that problem by bringing my own hotspot.)

That said, over the last year or two, service has been degrading to the point of the train often being hours late. Food quality, cleanliness, and general attention to detail have been slipping from constant budget cuts.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wonder if this means that there is no hope for expanding the Amtrak line through OKC into Kansas. I hope they are able to expand north into more states.

</comment><comment><USER22> Apparently the plan is to offload management of passenger train service to the states, as this is clearly a states' rights issue. Possibly related: the current head of Amtrak is an airline guy.

<comment><USER18> _clearly a states ' rights issue_

Some of the states have formed regional rail alliances. There are also non- profits doing good work in this area.

Example: [https://www.midwesthsr.org](https://www.midwesthsr.org)</comment></comment>


Trying out Beats by Elastic for the first time - <AUTHOR> https://media-glass.es/trying-out-elastic-beats-db618e758afa#.4670ft702 <comment><USER2> Before actually reading the article and just the title, I was curious what's the association with Beats by Dre.</comment>


Books for Startups - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/books-for-startups/

<comment><USER2> Some great recommendations in here!

Remember, though, don't get caught up in the theories: put yourself out there and create stuff!</comment>


Sched.org uses Zapier to build their own Hubot: Notorious B.O.T. - <AUTHOR> https://zapier.com/blog/2012/06/11/get-notifications-notorious-bot/

<comment><USER2> Now I'm aware of Zapier, pretty slick app. I'm sure I can find many uses for this...</comment>


The c2 wiki was down - <AUTHOR> http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors <comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/WardCunningham/status/785960076041302016](https://twitter.com/WardCunningham/status/785960076041302016)

<comment><USER3> > [http://c2.com](http://c2.com) is again serving web requests after several > days of disk repair.

That is technically correct, c2.com is serving web requests, but the wiki is still down. I hope it comes back, notwithstanding the availability of the content on archive.org.

<comment><USER3> We have news from Ward. The c2 wiki will be moved over to a _federated wiki_ , whatever this means.

Discussion here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12715560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12715560).

<comment><USER4> I'd read it not as "Google (the company) federated wiki (product name)", but rather as "google (verb) federated wiki (keyword describing a technology)" \- i.e. [https://www.google.com/search?q=federated+wiki](https://www.google.com/search?q=federated+wiki), or [http://ddg.gg?q=federated+wiki](http://ddg.gg?q=federated+wiki) if you prefer.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I fixed it. Thanks for the pointers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aww hell no, this is one gigantic cultural artefact that needs to stay afloat.

<comment><USER6> I wish they reenabled comments if they haven't already. It was disabled shortly after I discovered it. I ended up reading all kinds of discussions there as they were really interesting.

<comment><USER7> Yes. The XmlIsaPoorCopyOfEssExpressions page is/was a classic.

Updated with archive link:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20160820214102/http://c2.com/cgi/...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160820214102/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?XmlIsaPoorCopyOfEssExpressions)

<comment><USER8> I remember that page. Thinking back some of the stuff on Plain Text formats, the Unix Way, YNGNI really did influence me.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, in a way a lot of those discussions were a last gasp of folks trying to do things correctly, before everyone learned to just relax and enjoy going with the flow.

It makes me sad to read them now, a decade or more later, and think of what might have been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Still running Apache 2.0.x as well; looks like it could just be a server going down/offline due to bitrot? There were a lot of great discussions in that wiki, hope it comes back up (though it's in the wayback machine, at least).

<comment><USER11> > though it's in the wayback machine, at least

We're going to see this more and more over the next decade. If you aren't yet, please become a sustaining member of the Internet Archive[0]. If you want to try Mozilla's new addon that automatically fetches the most recent saved page from the Wayback Machine, install No More 404s[1].

[0] [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

[1] [https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/no- more-404s](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/no-more-404s)

[1] This is how the page loads for me with No More 404s: [http://i.imgur.com/DyyRDZR.png](http://i.imgur.com/DyyRDZR.png)

<comment><USER12> > We're going to see this more and more over the next decade.

The same thing is happening with torrenting because of the advent of streaming services. I'm not criticizing, because I think it is clearly better that artists are paid for their content. My observation is simply that people don't download if they can stream, but eventually streaming services discontinue content. And when they do, the ability to acquire that content is much reduced.

<comment><USER13> You might like Karagarga :)

<comment><USER12> My point isn't to question how to acquire them now, my question is to what effect it might have in 10 years. Or 20?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Could someone explain what this was?

<comment><USER15> Beyond being the first wiki wiki and the model for Wikipedia, the Portland Pattern Repository was a place where many of the principles of Agile software development were hashed out through discussion of the leading members of that movement. It was closer to the discussion pages of Wikipedia, where someone would write on a topic, and another would add more dimension or a counterpoint to what was written. Instead of creating a page of what, say, Extreme Programming was, pages full of discussion of how it was implemented on site or how it could be improved were generated; when it became too large, someone might refactor that page into several different pages, such as XP Principles, XP Practices, XP implementations, and so on.

<comment><USER16> In practice, though, most of the "settled" pages ended up looking a lot like TVTropes. Basically, c2 is/was "Software Engineering Tropes."

<comment><USER17> Elsewhere on the net, there are two sites that convention mandated a warning flag for fear of clicking the rest of the afternoon following interesting things. TVTropes... and C2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Archive.org to the rescue:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160925063638/http://c2.com/cgi...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160925063638/http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors)

</comment><comment><USER19> Would it be possible to put the whole website on IPFS?

</comment><comment><USER20> Nooooo!

I've been trying to mirror it over the past few days, but it keeps going on and off...

Somebody contact Ward Cunningham!

<comment><USER21> Oh, so it's _you!_ ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> That makes me sad. I worked of a lot of those pages there.

</comment><comment><USER23>
      wayback_machine_downloader www.c2.com -c 20

Ref: [https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine- downloader](https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader)

</comment><comment><USER24> Since there's still a link to it on the home page ([http://www.c2.com](http://www.c2.com)), this may be a temporary situation.

</comment><comment><USER25> As of now it is up again, just noticed it personally. So no need for backups or archive.org :)

</comment><comment><USER26> There is a backup? Right ... ?

</comment><comment><USER27> I was trained as a developer under some of those early masters in Agile/XP. Including frequent references to that wiki. I sure hope we can reconstruct it and get it back online as soon as possible!</comment>


AVS RetroUSB: FPGA-Based Re-Implementation of the NES/Famicon - <AUTHOR> https://www.retrousb.com/product_info.php?cPath=36&products_id=78& <comment><USER2> > _A NES with composite compared to the AVS is a stunning difference in > picture quality._

So one counter-intuitive complaint of many modern emulation systems is that they provide "pixel-perfect" rendering. I.e. what the console outputs is what you get on screen.

Except that's not how the games looked back then! The video artifacts of TVs at the time, composite signal and NTSC, meant you had color bleed and slightly blurry pixels that weren't even square. It's not just scanlines. For practical examples, see this Gamasutra article [1]. Most telling to me is the comparisons of Link (from Zelda 2) therein.

The AVS page doesn't mention any of this, so am I to deduce it forgoes emulating these artifacts?

[1] [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/C...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KylePittman/20150420/241442/CRT_Simulation_in_Super_Win_the_Game.php)

<comment><USER3> I attended Powerfest '90 (The Nintendo World Championships)[0], and every game on display was shown on an SVideo connection. The beta Final Fantasy's pixels looked sharp and defined (I spent an hour playing it, though it reset every 15 minutes). They explicitly used the best connections possible to ensure video fidelity and minimize color bleeding.

Magazines were the same; outside of the "Take a picture of your TV Screen with a Polaroid Camera" section of the magazine (scoreboards), Nintendo Power always had screenshots of the game using a Super Wide Boy, which outputted the screen to a crisp video feed perfect for articles. EGM used the same device. Nobody wanted blurred pixels or color bleeding. They certainly didn't want cathode ray distortion.

There is nothing but anecdotal information that the developers of NES games _intended_ the blurring and bleeding to affect their game designs. The only purveyors of the "CRT Experience" seem to be milennials born after the NES's reign.

I didn't have the best TV for my NES, but it looked tons better than some of these scanline effects. If you were using a CGA monitor to play NES games, then maybe the shaders were accurate, but even the _black and white_ TV I had for a while was a superior experience to the scanline shaders available in the NES mini or RetroArch.

Playing Bionic Commando: Return of Hitler[1] on the NES right now, with no shaders. You should too.

0\. [http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-12-07/entertainment/...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-12-07/entertainment/9004110423_1_thor- aackerlund-jeff-falco-video-game-showdown)

1\. [http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2031/](http://www.romhacking.net/translations/2031/)

<comment><USER4> It's not anecdotal, it's a comment that showed up in design documents of games by experienced developers. Trade shows and magazines used the best quality possible, because it was marketing.

However, I'm not aware of any gdds that specified coloring as a technical challenge; most of the concerns were around overscan and making sure games weren't unplayable on B/W TVs

<comment><USER3> > It's not anecdotal, it's a comment that showed up in design documents of > games by experienced developers.

care to post some? I'm cool with being wrong.

<comment><USER4> I hate to be unable to put my money where my mouth is, but I read a bunch of early 3d game GDDs in college as part of understanding and overcoming hardware limitations in computer graphics. It wasn't so much "dont do this" as justifications such as "we did this because many tvs dont have stereo sound" or "using colors of the same hue is unviewable on black and white TVs and our portable systems"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's "Famicom," not some kind of organized convention!

It's short for _Fami_ ly _Com_ puter.

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

<comment><USER6> The Japanese transliteration of "computer" (コンピュータ) _is_ written with the "n" (ン) character, but it's pronounced more like an "m" sound because the lip movement for the following sound modifies it. The same dichotomy is seen with _shinbun_ / _shimbun_ , for example. Of course, "Famicom" is the official way to romanize it, so it's usually preferred.

<comment><USER7> Same thing happens in English: _incredible_ vs _important_. _input_ is still spelled with an _n_ but pronounced conversationally, you'll get _imput_.

<comment><USER8> It depends on the accent; I certainly say "input" and "incredible" with an _n_ sound.

<comment><USER7> I pronounce _incredible_ with an _n_ sound as well. I included it to contrast with _important_ , showing how the following consonant influences its pronunciation. When enunciating, I pronounce _input_ with an _n_ ; when conversationally, with an _m_. Different dialects are of course going to be a factor here as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love these kind of projects. I'd love it even more if it was open source.

Preservation of the software is the most important thing and I'm glad the game pirates are very fastidious about it, but preservation of hardware like this is - if not as important - at least as fascinating!

And still, I won't buy one. I doubt I'll ever earn enough money to make retro game collecting feasible, so I'll stick with collection retro game controllers and connecting them to PCs for faithful emulation ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> Interesting project - I wonder if this uses the 6502 core from Visual6502.

The price point might be tough for people. I think you can buy original NES systems for less. They aren't going to be HDMI compatible, but I think those adapters will run you $20 on Amazon.

<comment><USER11> On Ebay+Amazon, It looks like the front-load consoles are going for $75 and top-load ones are going for about 30% more. When I bought mine (front load) a couple of years ago, I think I spent $20-$30 on it, so those numbers are a little bit of a shock to me.

<comment><USER10> Hmm. Is this a sign of the publicly available stock dwindling? I guess we could see the market for these original systems start to really dry up and prices increase dramatically.

<comment><USER12> Demand increase. Retro gaming is big right now.

<comment><USER9> Seriously. I bought The Legend of Zelda (the original one) 10 years ago for <10 Euros. Now it's over 100! And that's a super common game (I assume)!

<comment><USER11> Wow. I see it around $35 on Amazon, and I know that I didn't pay that much for it around 6 years ago (can't find the order though, so I probably bought it in a large lot of games from Ebay).

A Link to the Past: Bought for $17.56 about 5 years ago, and it seems that I'd be paying around $45-$50 to get it now.

Zelda 2: Adventure of Link: bought for about $5 in 2010, selling for about $15 now.

Oof! This one's the biggest jump I've seen so far. Metal Warriors on SNES. I bought that in 2009 for $40, and the cheapest listing for it on Amazon right now is for $200.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Maybe it's my knackered, 50-year old eyes, but the white writing on blue background is not nice to read.</comment>


Envy All the Way Up - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/11/envy-all-the-way-up.html <comment><USER2> This is very true for all sorts of careers.

I remember thinking I was pretty successful when I got my first 6 figure bonus until I realized that my peers had been getting these kinds of bonuses for the past 8 years and the bonus was small potatoes compared to seeing your portfolio growing by 35 percent each year.

More success means more successful peers.

<comment><USER3> <https://twitter.com/Humblebrag>

<comment><USER2> > <https://twitter.com/Humblebrag>

Yes, almost by definition, that is part of the lesson of the article.

It's almost impossible to say, yes I agree and here is my anecdote without doing so:)

<comment><USER4> I think this exchange is part of the reason no one talks about this stuff, which is unfortunate.

<comment><USER5> Yes, and it's why this fantastic post ([http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/02/the-evolution- of...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/02/the-evolution-of-my- perception-of-money.html)) has never had traction on HN (as far as I know).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great post. Media coverage in silicon valley is slanted towards great financial success. It can aggravate the envy in any of us.

The most successful people I know are remarkably disinterested in money as a motivator, and mostly view it as a tool. In most cases, a tool to give control over the work they do more than anything else.

Statistics are a useful reminder of the actual incidence of super high incomes in the country. Reading about silicon valley it's easy to think that loads of people are making $100M left and right. But actually it's closer to one in a million:

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Census_income_discrep...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Census_income_discrepancies.png)

<comment><USER7> The problem is that:

(1) Yes, idiots are getting rich. But most idiots are still poor, just like most smart people are poor. No human society has managed to create a lasting positive correlation between merit and success, because we, as people, are too fucking stupid and prone to complacency for that to be stable.

(2) People everywhere exaggerate their success and connections to important people. In finance, you encounter this around bonus time because the bonus is a performance review, so everyone claims to have received the top bonus available to their year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really like the 'level of fearlessness' analogy. That's my main reason for wanting more money. My actual material needs are pretty low, and my material 'wants' aren't much higher.

<comment><USER9> Totally agree. The simple question "do I really fear doing that" is very useful too. I quit my management consulting job to start a company when I asked myself this and answered "anyway I'll always be able to live comfortably so why not"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Money is an attractive nuisance :-) Its too easy to use it as a proxy for 'score'. Kind of silly hearing folks smirk "he's only worth about 50 million." Its a problem I wouldn't mind having but wouldn't sacrifice my family for.

<comment><USER11> Envy is toxic.

There's nothing wrong with ambition or aiming to make lots of money, but when these are driven by envy you maximise angst on missing a goal and you will always have someone to still envy no matter how successful (unless you're literally one in a billion successful).</comment></comment>


Commodore 64 themed placeholder site (code on github) - <AUTHOR> http://priorityqueue.co.uk

<comment><USER2> So close.

        LOAD "BLAH",8

        SEARCHING FOR BLAH
        ?FILE NOT FOUND  ERROR
        READY.</comment>


Best clock ever - <AUTHOR> http://files.msurma.net/wykop/1120247/zegarek.php

<comment><USER2> Please change the title! It looks like a "Ch3ap R0lax Repl1cas" spam, and I only saw the submitted site to be sure it was spam before flagging it.

Proposed title: "Construction Site in Browser Video Watch". (Not a great title :(, I hope you can think something better.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool, slightly buffering on my system but love the idea.</comment>


Facebook and I - <AUTHOR> http://alexmuir.com/facebook-and-i

<comment><USER2> An interesting post, although I felt it ended a bit abruptly.

I loved your comment that "each unliked post might as well have had 150 comments saying 'I don't care.'" It sort of puts the whole thing into perspective. I also dislike the conversation killing aspect of social network.

I don't know, though. I'm still divided - on the one hand, I don't particularly like Facebook's effect on my life today. On the other hand, when I was a young kid (primary school) I was pretty shy and quiet and truth be told I think it is probably the case that I benefited quite a lot from vast swathes of my peers moving their social life online, somewhere I was already comfortable. (Context: I'm 21, and this change probably happened 8-9 years ago.)

So... does my gut tell me to stop using Facebook? a little bit. do I want to see the back of Facebook? Probably not.

anyway, thanks for making me think a bit.</comment>


VR and Steam days - <AUTHOR> http://www.3delement.com/ <comment><USER2> As someone who has used similar tech, I can vouch for the fact that the immersion really is on a completely different level. Vertigo can be especially unsettling. In my demo there was a large hole in the floor and I found myself physically unable to walk over it, despite knowing that it wasn't real.

Edit: on reflection, the sensation was remarkably similar to how it feels when dreaming. Signals from the real world can intrude on your experience (e.g. running into physical objects can cause pain in dreams), but it doesn't break the feeling of immersion. There's that strange mental transition point in a dream where you get dunked under water but realize that you can still breathe; the same thing happens in VR.

<comment><USER3> I had the same impression after reading the post, when he talks about the brain having difficulties knowing if the memory was from solething that really happend or not.

I often wondered whether you could truely resent someone after having dreamed of him doing something horrible for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like some of the smartest people I know about are now working on VR or AR tech: John Carmack at Oculus, Jeri Ellsworth at CastAR, Steve Mann at Meta, Michael Abrash at Valve, and even the Google X team working on Glass (if you consider that AR). If VR or AR tech doesn't catch on this decade, it certainly won't be due to the effort put into making it happen.

I wonder if the world of VR circa 2018 will be a bit like the state of mobile dev in 2008. It makes me think there will be a huge demand for 3D artists and programmers as companies suddenly decide they need their own VR experience, as they did with mobile apps 6 or 7 years ago. If so, now might be a good time to start getting some experience with 3D design and development.

<comment><USER5> Not sure about 3D artists, 3D scanning should be quite good by then.

<comment><USER6> Well, that's unless you're looking for something that doesn't exist in the real world...

<comment><USER7> You can always take a trip back in time, and make scale models out of clay & Styrofoam. Then maybe do a little smoothing in CAD. It's going to take a while for creation tools to make computer-assisted-creation of realistic texture & coloring as easy as painting some clay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Direct link to post, rather than home page of blog: [http://www.3delement.com/?p=332](http://www.3delement.com/?p=332)

</comment><comment><USER9> The future is crazy. It's hard for me to underestimate the debate and the philosophical implications of this type of VR going mainstream. I can't believe its so close. The world doesn't even see it coming.

</comment><comment><USER10> > understood that the demo was over, but it was if a lower level part of my > mind couldn't exactly be sure. It give me a very weird existential dread of > my entire situation, and the only way I could get rid of that feeling was to > walk around or touch things around me (or sit down, basically just get in a > situation where I wasn't just standing still like I was in the VR demo).

required viewing: existenz

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminded me of this [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/)

<comment><USER12> It reminded me of the techno-thriller book Daemon. A virus takes over the world, infects every major company, and creates a darknet reality based on a popular MMORPG. Everyone who is a part of the darknet wears VR glasses to tag and control physical objects as well as see new layers of virtual reality like interacting with AI beings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Michael Abrash's post about his talk at Steam Developer's Day, which includes a link to his slides: [http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/my-steam- developers-da...](http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/my-steam-developers- day-talk/)

</comment><comment><USER14> It's so great to see people working on this tech as the real world gets shittier!

For a second there, we may have actually had to worry about revolt.

<comment><USER15> I grew up during the 80s knowing that the Cold War could turn hot and end the world at any moment. Half of Europe lived in oppression. China was barely able to feed its people. Communism was still attempted by countries and defended by some intellectuals despite a 0% success rate at actually improving lives.

Yesterday, the Gates Foundation annual report was linked to from HN. It explained how the world is getting better fast and that extreme poverty could be a thing of the past in a few decades.

So please, go ahead explain and try to justify your claim that the world just gets worse!

<comment><USER14> We're almost done putting in the final pieces of a global surveillance network and security apparatus which, once turned on, will be near impossible to dismantle peacefully. The income and wealth inequality has never been worse.

The only way this could be resolved is with the middle and lower classes doing something, and these VR things are probably going to be the most effective bread and circuses we're ever going to see.

The oppression is either there or coming, soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > this isn't a consumer ready product, so it isn't surprising it isn't > designed for everyone's face yet

As far as I know, Valve does not currently plan to make it into a product (though they leave the door open if they feel it becomes necessary, as with steam machines). From what they've said so far, Valve's intention is to work with Oculus for consumer VR products.

<comment><AUTHOR> It definitely is entirely R&D tech - considering each HMD cost around 20k, and requires the walls plastered with codes for head tracking. The HMD they currently have actually have ripped out Samsung Galaxy S4 screens (for each eye) - so that obviously can't scale in manufacturing

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For extra retro fun, tack on "ML" to "VR" in the title and imagine all the comments are dated 1996. :)

<comment><USER18> When I was about 13 (around that time frame) I got a book about VRML. I remember spending literally hundreds of hours making worthless VRML worlds. I wonder whatever happened to that language...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I intend to purchase one of these VR sets as soon as possible, but I'll take extreme care to which games play on them. Either real life habits come to games and mindless killing FPS becomes less popular, or game habits come to real life and you risk acquiring bad traits.

Interesting times ahead.

<comment><USER20> If you're itching for VR, you can order an Oculus Rift dev kit right now ([https://www.oculusvr.com/order/](https://www.oculusvr.com/order/)). The consumer version with significant improvements should be available in about a year.

<comment><USER21> I don't recommend purchasing the current dev kit unless you actually plan to do development. The quality isn't high enough for prolonged use; motion sickness is virtually certain. There aren't any AAA quality made-for-VR games released yet; only demos and ports exist so far.

On the other hand, if you do actually plan to do development then by all means get a dev kit right now; don't wait for the next release. You need to try it as soon as possible because it's going to take a lot of time and experience to figure out how to convert your ideas into usable VR games and interfaces. Any development done now will transfer directly to the final consumer product.

<comment><USER22> If I know a bit of C++ and a lot of Web Languages, where would be the best place to get more information about VR Programming? For these games they are developing what language are they written in? What kind of software are they using to create 3D models ? Are they all using Unity?

<comment><USER23> You can use whatever language you like. There's really not much special about VR from the programming point of view. The Oculus Rift is really just a display that gets recognized as an additional monitor plus a USB device for head tracking. Oculus provides a library that you can use that takes care of interfacing with the USB device and some other gimmicks.

The main difference to non-VR 3D programming work is that getting latency down is much more important, so your priorities shift a bit. The real difference is in thinking of whether you can do cool new user interface stuff.

So in that sense, your question is a bit misplaced. You need to know about 3D development in general. Once you know that, the delta of what you need on top of that is very small, and everything you need can be found on the Oculus developer site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are you comparing it with the new or old version of the Oculus dev kit? The new one has addressed both resolution and latency. The difference between the versions is huge and I definitely think the consumer version later this year will step it up even further.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't tried the new Crystal Cove version - but I spoke to a number of devs who've tried both (the new Oculus and Valve's tech), and they said also it in no way compares. Crystal Cove is an incremental update, but I from what I've heard it won't have the sort of presence of Valve's current tech. I imagine just because they are limited to what they can actually manfacture

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Eagerly awaiting OASIS...

Now, what decade is Gabe Newell obsessed with?

<comment><USER26> I'm trying to figure out if James Halliday will end up being personified by Gabe Newell, Palmer Luckey, John Carmack or Michael Abrash...

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can't stop thinking about how they will ultimately solve the movement problem. The Omni looks pretty silly and limited.

Maybe a dedicated-room version like an Omni with curved tracks and padded walls. You buy a 4x4m base and install it in a room in your house?

Colleague suggested a frame that suspends you off the ground, then mechanical boots or splints on your leg that give your feet feedback and convince you that you're running and jumping.

End game is a direct feed to the brain to convince your limbs that they're moving?

Or maybe Thalmic Myos on each limb to track the intent of your limbs? That would lack feedback unless you wore a tactile suit.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can imagine this being extended into entertainment in general. Watching a scary movie (i.e. Blair Witch Project) from the point of the victim would be terrifying! Being one of the luge runners in the olympics would be thrilling! Not to mention the adult entertainment industry; now you don't have to just watch things happen, you can actually participate.

I think like any technology it has multiple uses, good & evil; its up to us to decide how we use it.

</comment><comment><USER29> A little bit tangential, but... if anyone has gotten the Oculus Rift working with TF2 on Ubuntu, we could use some help troubleshooting over here: [http://steamcommunity.com/app/440/discussions/2/648817378061...](http://steamcommunity.com/app/440/discussions/2/648817378061880494/)

It's strange; I have not yet found an actually useful support forum for this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious whether 3d models extracted from an array of cameras (maybe with a lidar as well) would be satisfying enough to watch movies like this.

<comment><USER31> Even watching currently available 3d imax movies(using occulus) is really fun according to people some around the web,

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> For some reason the OP linked to the blog's front page and not the actual article in question. Here it is for the benefit of anyone stumbling across this in the future:

[http://www.3delement.com/?p=332](http://www.3delement.com/?p=332)

</comment><comment><USER33> VR is undeniably going to take immersiveness a step forward, but user agency is still the true king of addiction.

Real life is obviously the benchmark for immsersiveness, but we don't consider it possible to be addicted to living in the real world. We might consider some to be "adrenaline junkies" for pursuing dangerous aspects of real life, but we say they are addicted to a certain chemical the body produces rather than life.

Books are one of the least immersive forms of entertainment widely consumed in that the interface is through abstract symbols. Still, they allow us to experience things that we are unlikely to encounter in our own lives. They engage our imagination and are indeed addictive. A good book lets you almost live another life.

Theater and film are, in most ways, more immersive than books. Instead of forcing us to construct everything in our own minds, much of what we experience is constructed externally, just as in real life. An actor's performance may be completely different from how we might imagine a character to be, just from reading his or her lines, and this really fools our minds into thinking characters are more real. However, as in books, we are almost always passive observers. We have no agency.

Video games are now capable of offering everything that film does, but while granting the audience agency. We can perform tasks, affect the outcome of the story, etc.. As with film, technical limitations mean that suspension of disbelief is necessary for us to buy into a video game world, but when a game does make us buy-in it can be a place we'll live in for many hours before exhausting the content. It can be grueling to sit through a 180 minute film, but a 180 minute game would be considered far too brief. We also respond very differently to challenge when we have agency. Many films that challenge the viewer too much are considered "confusing", and rapidly tire audiences. A game that doesn't offer challenge is unlikely to be fun at all! Many of us enjoy conquering games where challenge crosses the line into frustration!

Many video games made today are modeled after books and film. You play a truly exceptional protagonist who is easily capable of things beyond anyone else in the universe. The game-world pivots and changes around this character, even if the user doesn't have a lot of control over it. These are highly entertaining, but probably the least immersive. Other games take a much more realistic approach, most notably MMO's. Users, by technical necessity, cannot change the world radically because other players share the world. Users become just one more player in the crowd. MMO characters have little power in the simulated universe, but users have complete agency over their own characters. The unpredictable nature of interacting with real humans, the necessarily insurmountable challenges of the game (in terms of time required to "beat" the game, if nothing else), and total user agency make MMO's the most addictive form of video game known.

If you're with me this far, kudos for being patient! VR is a means to interact with both pre-recorded films (think google-street-view cam on a snow-boarder) and video games that has been largely neglected to date due to technical barriers. Oculus and Valve are clearly on the verge of shattering those barriers. We're probably going to see media running the gamut from pre- recorded VR videos offering no user agency (other than turning your head) to MMO's where humans can interact with each other in simulated environments with complete agency. The level of addiction posed by these different recordings and games is going to vary wildly, just as the addictiveness of current games and media varies. VR is an exciting step forward for immersiveness, but we shouldn't expect anything VR to be an addiction problem!

<comment><USER34> It's interesting to think of this from your perspective and I fully agree that agency will remain what people want.

I don't think its far off to consider a world in the not-so-distant future in which VR expands the possibilities of the universe, and therefore our agency.

Think of the limitations we have now in reality. There is one currently livable planet, clogged highways, limited resources, way too many people, the inability to jump up and fly across the world, etc. I can see VR shattering the boundaries of our current agency in reality, just like Oculus and Valve are certainly on their way to doing with technology.

And with such a highly immersive environment and increasingly interconnected world, I imagine it might even be nice to just plug-in and exist almost entirely in a virtual world. I don't think it is as much a matter of addiction as just, what might be better in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> As for the worry over 'addiction' and escapism, just let us go. The moment it becomes physically possible to get the hell out of this reality and take my chances in another one, I'm gone. Just stick an IV in me, store me in a coffin-sized apartment, and start the show.

<comment><USER36> I wonder how many other civilisations in the universe turned their gaze inwards into nested self-created realities rather than try the difficult job of voyaging outwards into "real" space. It could be a well trodden path ...

<comment><USER37> SMBC did a comic on this. Kind of makes you think..

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20131122.png](http://www.smbc- comics.com/comics/20131122.png)

<comment><USER38> Neat concept for a strip. One nitpick though, harnessing solar energy would make energy cheap and abundant enough to keep everyone in VR forever. As soon as the tech exists, you wouldn't need an exchange economy for energy anymore, any more than one exists for air.

What wouldn't be possible is slowing the perception of time down so much as to create immortality. The sheer amount of processing necessary would put a theoretical limit on how slow you can make time, while still providing a fine- grained enough experience to be seamless.

<comment><USER37> It does make me wonder what happens once we gain the ability to do two things:

1) VR by direct neural input, instead of by enveloping the senses (think more Johnny Mnemonic than the Star Trek holodeck)

2) Manipulating perception of time, which we already know is pretty mutable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Warp – Secure and simple terminal sharing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/spolu/warp?attempt=8 <comment><USER2> Cool tool but in the Readme you should probably explain a little bit 'how it works' rather than just 'how to work it'. In this case, I imagine it needs to connect to and trust some outside coordinating service run/owned by someone (you?).

<comment><USER3> I agree. This tool is pretty cool but I was a bit confused about how it could work since it just "worked" without prompting for a server. Looking at netstat it looks like warp connections are handled by connecting to an ec2 instance at ec2-35-162-152-151.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com, on port 4242.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Great feedback. I'll make sure to make it clearer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently built [https://debug-me.branchable.com/](https://debug- me.branchable.com/) which also does quick and easy terminal sharing, but with the addition of a cryptographically secure proof of what was done in the session, rooted at the gpg key of the person who connected to it.

<comment><USER5> Just say that it's a signed log of the session. "Cryptographic proof" isn't necessarily incorrect but it has other connotations which don't make any sense here and make it sound like it's doing something it's not (think cryptanalysis or ZKPs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another good open source terminal sharing service is [https://tmate.io/](https://tmate.io/)

This gives you 2 ssh addresses (read only and read write) that you can send out.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been using [https://www.teleconsole.com/](https://www.teleconsole.com/) from the team behind teleport. It has Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, x86_64 and ARM7 support.

This looks like a great project and I'll be keeping my eye on it, but there's no reason for me to switch to this and lose out on features.

It's open source, and you can even set up your own proxy so you don't need to rely on gravitational's servers.

<comment><USER8> It's a bit rude to post alternatives in someone's Show HN without also giving ideas on how to improve their product (e.g. which features specifically would you be missing out on?)

I guess it's not so much the posting of alternatives, but you're really selling that particular alternative. It'd be nice for Show HNs to be less cutthroat.

<comment><USER9> I've never heard this. I always find relevant alternatives in HN comments as helpful, allowing people to compare and contrast different features and functionality.

I also don't see anything in the guidelines about this kind of thing, has a mod commented about it before?

<comment><USER8> Again, it wasn't about the posting of the alternative. It was the casual dismissal plus the lack of any useful feedback.

This wasn't a Show HN when the comment was posted, though, so it's a moot point.

<comment><AUTHOR> The datapoints are definitely interesting. Thanks for sharing what you use!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone explain the actual use of sharing a terminal with someone while not being in person with them (in which case they could just watch you and shotgun the keyboard?)? I can't imagine watching someone else's terminal session without them talking about what they're doing and why would be particularly informative or help with onboarding. Maybe it's just one of those things that work for some people and not others?

<comment><USER10> You call them. You don't need to literally sit next to them to hear them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes this is intended to be used with an audio link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why no explicit Linux support?

</comment><comment> m-j-fox The feature I'd suggest for any peer-to-peer application such as this is some kind of firewall punching. It generally requires a 3rd-party on the internet. To avoid running services for a low-bandwidth application like this, maybe it could tunnel through a public IRC server or other public chat system.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does it relate somehow to Joey Hess's debug-me[1]?

[1]: [https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/announcing_debug- me/](https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/announcing_debug-me/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is this better than gotty?

</comment><comment><USER14> How many times is it reasonable to submit the same URL to HN?

This link is to [https://github.com/spolu/warp?attempt=8](https://github.com/spolu/warp?attempt=8). If one needs to add an "attempt" HTTP parameter to track submissions of the same URL, and this is the 8th attempt, that seems like way too many.

Here's a few prior identical submissions by the same person:

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14398392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14398392) (ie, [https://github.com/spolu/warp?attempt=1](https://github.com/spolu/warp?attempt=1))

4: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14407813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14407813)

6: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14452505)

If 8 isn't too many, what is? 20? Submit the same link every day indefinitely until it reaches the front page?

<comment><USER15> If something had enough inherent interestingness to end up at the #1 position (as this submission is right now), then I'd argue that its taking a number of attempts to do so is an indictment of the ranking algorithm for burying it before, rather than an indictment of the author for persisting.

Certainly, if someone persists in trying and the thing just _never_ gets popular, that's just spam. But if "the right timing" was all that was needed to cause the sumission to hit #1? Maybe "the right timing" needs to be a concept built into the submission queue.

<comment><USER14> It's an interesting question. I could see it being a mix of that and a poor- quality ranking algorithm, so that it's too easy for articles to end up buried.

Most examples of this are one person submitting daily articles from their own site or sites they're paid to market. Sometimes even those end up near the top of the front page, and often when that happens, if one looks at prior submissions from that same person and site, the article that made the front page seems like it would do worse than prior articles.

I could see all of this as an indicator that the ranking/voting doesn't do a great job of letting interesting stuff get a shot, nor of penalizing folks who constantly submit posts on their own site (for months - different than this situation). The "New" page is easy enough to ignore that I could imagine few visitors looking at it regularly, so the profile of visitors to that page is different than to the home page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I really like that it goes against the current cancer we are experiencing on the internet. That is,

* You don't need to rely or surrender to the cloud.

* Neither you nor the clients need to create an account (or worse, require a google/facebook account).

<comment><USER17> > You don't need to rely or surrender to the cloud

I would imagine that this goes through someone's server. It would be helpful if the readme gave a little more detail about how this works.

<comment><USER18> Looking at the source code suggests it is peer to peer. The code for daemon indicates you need to specify what address and port to listen on when starting up, and there is code about receiving incoming clients.

[https://github.com/spolu/warp/blob/master/daemon/cmd/warpd/m...](https://github.com/spolu/warp/blob/master/daemon/cmd/warpd/main.go#L22)

<comment><USER19> This is false. There has to be some way to resolve the name used (e.g. in the example, `warp connect goofy-dev` is used) to an IP address.

Looking through the source code, I've found these lines:

[https://github.com/spolu/warp/blob/master/client/command/con...](https://github.com/spolu/warp/blob/master/client/command/connect.go#L107) [https://github.com/spolu/warp/blob/master/client/command/con...](https://github.com/spolu/warp/blob/master/client/command/connect.go#L156) [https://github.com/spolu/warp/blob/master/protocol.go#L13](https://github.com/spolu/warp/blob/master/protocol.go#L13)

It looks like it defaults to connecting to `warp.link:4242`. I can't tell if it's routing the entire connection through warp.link or if it's just resolving the name to an IP address that then connect directly (I don't know Go very well).

<comment><USER20> Given that it's not explicit in the readme, not that easy to find in the code, and repeatedly posted to HN I would assume malicious intent and stay away from it.

Assuming no malicious intent, not disclosing anything about it in the readme suggests not very security oriented mindset and therefore it's likely just not secure enough to use.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hey dude, where's our future? - <AUTHOR> http://citizen428.net/archives/1348 <comment><USER3> Hey dude, here's my past:

First grade, 1961-1962:

We had to learn "duck and cover", in case of surprise nuclear attack by the Soviets.

For field trips, we toured our neighbors' underground bomb shelters, which were about as common as home theaters are now.

We had to say the Lord's Prayer, whether we wanted to or not.

Some of my classmates wore braces, because the polio vaccine didn't quite make it in time for them.

We played with the African American kids in our neighborhood, but they wen't to a different school. Even though Brown vs. Board of Education had been decided by the Supreme Court in 1954, integration was still years away.

We didn't realize it at the time (no one did), but the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us perilously close to WWIII.

We only saw my dad on weekends because he got home from work after our bedtime.

No one I knew had ever flown on an airplane; it would be 20 years before I would.

I had never been to a restaurant or a movie.

We had no computers, internet, cell phones, cable TV, or air conditioning.

Our hopes and dreams were simple: to be happy (we were), go to college (we did), get jobs as good as our father's (we didn't), and to have wonderful families of our own (some of us did, some of us didn't).

We made a lot of progress since then but not nearly enough. We never imagined the opportunites we now have, not the threats. OP is sure right about one thing; our work is never done.

<comment><USER4> "get jobs as good as our father's (we didn't)"

In which way have the jobs of your fathers been better?

<comment><USER5> I'm guessing "good" is relative for many people, but one measure might be the ability for just one person's job (typically a father's) to be able to sustain the family. Many of the people of that person's generation grew up to be two- income families just to keep a similar standard-of-living as their parents, because jobs paid less relative to cost-of-living and offered fewer benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As far as I can tell, the 'problem' is the huge gap between reality and what is generally accepted as 'true.'

I feel very much like the author of the post, as I imagine a lot of others do. I sometimes try and hold it all in my head; the government censorship, the people hating the censorship, the ever rising power of the hacker, the large sums of money spent on designer clothing, etc.

The only way I have been able to resolve this apparent paradox (how can everyone I know be _so good_ when the world is _so bad_ ), is to recognize explicit, intentional, and calculated 'misinformation campaigns' are fully integrated into US society.

A strong, self-reinforcing (if everyone believes, it must be true) network of truth and lies is pushed as a zeitgeist; and some probably-genetic tribal mechanism gets the dissidents ostracized from the community when they are like, "no seriously.. just look at WTC7"

Having been "off" the boob-tube and most forms of "popular entertainment" for almost a third of my life now; I have noticed my world view splitting farther and farther from that of the average uninformed, top-model watching citizen.

I would expect a very strong correlation between consumption of popular media and totally-naive world views, including any world view that gives our regime the benefit-of-the-doubt.

<comment><USER7> I agree that our consumer culture is probably not a sign of enlightenment. But it is hardly true that most of the evil in the world stems from lies told by a conspiring and all-powerful elite. A lot of good has been done by cynical governments because the way reality works is that unintended consequences are so important. The world today is probably better for most than it has ever been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any call to 'educate yourself' accompanied by inspirational Che Guevara quotes can't be taken seriously. Look behind the hagiography and there's nothing but a butcher with soundbites and a pretty face.

<comment><USER9> Being the OP I have to say I hesitated a bit before adding the quote, which wasn't in the original version of the post. I've done a fair amount of reading on the Cuban revolution, and mostly agree with your assessment of Che. The actual quote reflected my mood at the time of writing though, so I still chose to include it. Disagreeing with someone on a majority of things, does not mean that I can't quote them on the ones where we do, does it?

<comment><USER10> Maybe not - but it reduces the clarity of your position. People will associate Che with what they associate him with - not the iota of character you try to embody with one of his quotes.

To expound on that a little bit - what kind of confusion would there be if I wrote a blog post about efficient systems and quoted Adolf Hitler?

Generally I used to jump around to whatever seemed suitable for the message - but generally getting people to follow you from one thought to another is the hardest part - don't make it harder on them.

<comment><USER9> You know, there was a reason that post was tagged "rant". It wasn't meant as a position on anything, just a little rambling on my private blog. I didn't expect it to be read by anyone except my few regular readers and am frankly quite surprised it showed up here. I do appreciate the input however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Counting wars and conflicts seems like a pretty naive way to go about this. You only thought that world peace was inches away when the cold war ended because you weren't actually paying attention to what the cold war was suppressing/controlling. With hindsight, it was fairly obvious that we encounter the apparent 'uptick' in wars. Which really wasn't an uptick in total conflicts, but rather ones which the United States were directly involved in.

If you go to the wiki article on anything related to the cold war and look at the cold war section at the bottom where events are broken down by decade, just count the number of 'invasions' and 'civil wars' are listed.

It's possible things are getting worse. But this line -really- bugs me: "I'd rather have the cold war back, because in retrospect people who fight over ideology seem a lot less likely to blow the whole place to smithereens than the ones who fight over religion. "

That -might- be true if you happen to live in the developed world. But just look at all the shit both sides instigated in the developing world during the cold war. A necessary part of the cold war was constantly keeping a hand in the runnings of nearly every developing country to attempt to maintain a status quo.

All those toppling of government by the united states since the 50s? Nearly every single of them were motivated at least partly by the containment policy.

I'm not trying to argue that those actions were wrong. That's besides the point. The point is that many people (including the author) has the wrong view of the cold war period. Honestly, since I wasn't around then, I can't claim to have 'the correct' view. But I believe the facts speak for themselves. The Cold War period wasn't exactly a happy time for -world-.

</comment><comment><USER12> Born in 1985, my reference point for the world got calibrated at around 1992 and only started moving along sometime in late high school/early college - <USER2> 2000s.

Increasingly I'm noticing the differences just in that period from the mid-80s. I do feel like "the future is now" applies to our time.

I look at all the occupations of our society and think to myself... "Within in my lifetime, technology is probably going to change this." Retail districts seem unbelievably shiny and glossy these days, with a tendency to put flatscreens and bright LEDs and reflective surfaces everywhere. I haven't gotten a driver's license yet and wonder whether it will ever be necessary; the Internet is already a huge enabler for setting up carpools, and automated driving is quickly coming up on the horizon.

I'd like to think I'm on the ball and know where things are going, but unexpected things seem to keep happening all the time. Some months ago I decided that I might as well just give up on the futurism game and just focus on what's relevant to what I'm doing(games), cause everything else is moving so fast I'd never keep up anyway. Yet even within THAT, it's still hard.

</comment><comment><USER13> The future as fallen prey of the hand-wavy notion that things will be taken care of somehow by someone. Problem is, taking action can involve hard work, spending time in jail or other unpleasant activities so when there's abuses people just let it slide.

Maybe it's cynicism, maybe cowardice or just plain laziness. Anyway, gotta get back to watch Seinfeld reruns and stuff my face.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think as history progresses, the world becomes a more richly complex place; and more opportunities are made available to its inhabitants as a result.

I don't think that people are less worthy, or less 'good', than they were in the past. I do think that our attention has to fight more distractions than ever before.

Maybe it's not surprising that we sometimes lose track of what's truly important.

</comment><comment><USER15> World peace is a pretty unrealistic goal at this point. The population of the world has grown too large, concentrated and different (ie, between cultures) for fair apportionment of the resources available to it. Therefor, there will always be competition and strife. The Internet isn't going to change that...

<comment><USER6> I am not convinced. There is a rising trend of altruism and people just generally identifying beyond their families or countries.

Not to say it's bound to happen, but I think our chance of having a reasonably fair and acceptably peaceful world in which some/many of us alive now will experience is far from zero.

Barring a catastrophic event (nuclear or otherwise), with information spreading at the rate it is, I would put our chances about 80% of having unprecedented peace and fairness in this century.

<comment><USER15> That may be true in some portions of the developed world (where I assume you are probably located), but I assure you that areas where resources are tight and there's a high degree of stratification in society, that's just not the case. Look at Africa. Furthermore, the altruism of the first world is not always beneficial for goals of peace. Intruding into other people's wars in the name of peace may in fact worsen them. Again, look at Africa.

<comment><USER6> Right; I am in the developed world and I do recognize to some degree what is going on in Africa and rural parts of Asia and South America.

I think most of the first world's 'intruding into other peoples wars in the name of peace' are generally flat-out lies. We are invading their countries for resources, political gain, or strategically place military bases. So I am with you on that one, I think.

However, the rise of information sharing in the lower rungs of society, of which we are going to see all but the opt-outs being a part of by the end of this century, is going to breed (in my estimation) a feeling of camaraderie trans boarder.

It's really a matter of class consciousness. As people come to realize the similarity of their situation with others, those people will naturally ally with each other; and the shrinking middle class will see the direction it's heading and ally with the lower class as well.

The fact is, 98%~ of people on earth would greatly benefit from an fair world, its only the very very top that stand to lose something; and as people come to realize this (which they will as cheap information sharing gets to every corner of the globe in the next 15-20 years) the power will inevitably move away from those who keep their power by misinforming their constituency.

<comment><USER15> But there are many problems that information sharing just can't solve. Let's take African village X, imbue the population with a shared desire to break free of their government bondage, and give them a very poor infrastructure. Once they stop celebrating their defeat of the government, they're going to have to face issues such as who gets how much water. These things can't be solved by the Internet, and this is basically my original point about competing for resources.

I'd also take issue with the idea of the middle class being allied to the poor. Doesn't seem to work that way in the U.S., at least.

Don't get me wrong - I wish you were right. A more fair and equal world would undoubtedly be a better place, but I think the probability of that occurring anytime soon is pretty slim. Even if you solve issues like famine, medicine and economic development (which is a pretty gigantic if), something new will take their place as a focal point for competition.

EDIT: We could argue this til the cows come home. I think it just comes down to your optimistic view versus my pessimistic view. Only time will tell who's right.

<comment><USER6> Well let me try and convince you anyway that optimism is the rational view in this case.

        I'd also take issue with the idea of the middle class being allied to the poor. Doesn't seem to work that way in the U.S., at least.

You're actually just wrong here; liberalism is inherently an ally with the poor; and you will find more liberals in the middle class than any other alignment.

Beyond that, the reason I am optimistic is because I perceive a clear trend between sharing of information and 'fairness'. In virtually all cases of inequality, a small percentage of people control, have power over, or exploit a majority of people. The only reason they are able to maintain their regime is that when isolated instances of rebellion start to quell, they are quickly extinguished through force or other manipulation.

Historically, it's organization of these exploited-majorities, including efficient means of internal communication which has led to successful revolutions; and without the internal communication they are bound to remain fragmented, and thus easily extinguished.

The internet has completely changed the game in that regard; the total ramifications have not been seen yet; as the first people to mass adopt the internet were middle class and upwards and used it for what those people do with all their lives, entertainment and work.

However, that's not what poor people do. Not having ever been poorer than an avg broke 20-something; I can't speak directly; but at least in South America I know there is intense power struggles happening between the rich and the poor.

The rich can 'stay on top' the poor due to their power-advantage. They have control of the social structure, and beyond that just generally have capital, more freedom and ability to move and communicate, etc.

However, as the information age progresses, more and more things that used to require capital, or large amounts capital can now be infinitely distributed for free (or nearly free) as software; thus raising the power of the poor.

As the power of the poor, or the lowest classes of society raises, they will be more and more successful.

Beyond that, having an attitude of brotherly love and compassion for all humans is the best 'meta-game' strategy. That is, if life is a game and being altruistic or selfish is a strategy, altruism is going to win in the long run. Players tend to trend toward successful strategies as a game gets played more and more (and results of others success get more and more eyeballs), and thus I have to assume that overtime altruism will become more and more common as a life-strat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what Francis Fukuyama is up to these days:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)

</comment><comment><USER17> I think part of this is following a time line as he grew up. Just look at the abuses 1970s, and the 1980s was a recession time for many.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's an emotional plea that I can related to, but flag it I must, not HN material.</comment>