Why Aren't We Curious About the Things We Want to Be Curious About? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity-brain.html <comment><USER3> Worth noting that the ability to indulge practically any idle curiosity ("who was that guy in that one movie again?") with almost no effort is _very new_. Unless you happened to have the relevant book of trivia, or maybe a good encyclopedia for some things, _and_ you were at home or otherwise somewhere those were physically located, you couldn't find out without quite a bit of effort. That kind of stuff just dropped out of one's mind almost as quickly as it came up. You might ask the people around you, and if they couldn't remember, oh well, off it goes.

If you wanted to know something, you had to _work_ at it or _premeditate and spend time and /or money_ to be ready to find out information in a certain category (having the right books, mostly).

Your brain didn't _nag_ and _insist_ that you go find it out _right now_ , generally, for every little question of near-zero importance that happened to cross your mind. That's a curse of the Internet age.

<comment><USER4> A few people I know immediately go to their phones to check facts during hangouts and conversations. I find it pretty off-putting, that those close to me value a trivial fact over staying fully connected with the conversation. There is some dopaminergic itch that must be scratched here, and I find like most itching, it doesn't end up paying off for more than a second.

<comment><USER5> _> A few people I know immediately go to their phones to check facts during hangouts and conversations. I find it pretty off-putting, that those close to me value a trivial fact over staying fully connected with the conversation._

 _> , can we have screen-free time together?_

 _> , or can we look at each other and shrug and move on with connecting with other humans and not screens._

I wasn't there at your meetings so if you truly felt ignored, I can't argue with feelings.

That said, let me offer a different perspective: someone quickly going to a smartphone screen to look something up that's relevant to our conversation shows they are _more engaged_ with me and our conversation. It's like being in a professor's office and we discuss something and it prompts the professor to get up from his chair and pull a specific book from the shelf and page through it to clarify a fact. That shows caring. Or when you talk to a friend and you mention something about a specific place and they say "Oh, I happen to have a photo of that" so they go get their photo album and show it to me. That's staying connected with our conversation. I don't say, _" I wish our real-life interactions were book-free and photo-album-free."_

It really isn't the screen hardware that's the measure of (dis)engagement. _It depends on what they 're specifically doing on that screen._ If the person is distracted with typing Facebook replies, then yes, they're totally ignoring our conversation. On the other hand, if they're visiting wikipedia or doing a google search to enhance our talk, that's great.

EDIT to add an example weaving in some "screen time" to enhance a conversation. A priest talking to Google employees on how he uses their search engine during conversations with friends to clarify facts. Deep link at 2m40s and watch for about 1 minute: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enDhX49F3XI&t=2m40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enDhX49F3XI&t=2m40s)

<comment><USER6> > It's like being in a professor's office and we discuss something and it > prompts the professor to get up from his chair and pull a specific book from > the shelf and page through it to clarify a fact.

As a former professor, visiting a professor during, say, office hours, is not quite the same as spending time with a loved one (whether that be a parent, sibling, spouse, friend, what-have-you). The context for such a meeting is to share knowledge and information, which discursive domain provides the reason for meeting in the first place.

In many interpersonal meetings between loved ones, knowledge and information are a secondary or even more remote consideration to the basis of the meeting. In such cases, looking up trivial information is not necessarily a form of care but a form of distraction.

It takes judgement to know when looking up a piece of information is germane to the interpersonal context or whether doing so is incidental.

EDIT: Furnish missing object "care".

<comment><USER5> _> The context for such a meeting is to share knowledge and information, which discursive domain provides the reason for meeting in the first place._

Yes, that underlying context is true but you're missing the point of my example. The professor example was not about "information" vs "friendship". It was meant to illustrate "engaged" vs "disengaged" in the conversation which is _orthogonal_ to whether the context is teacher/student or friend/friend.

For example, professor X sits there with arms folded across the chest thinking the student doesn't really care about his class and is only there to lobby for a good grade. Therefore the professor just answers, _" Uhm, yes, I see. Well, I don't know what to say other than make sure you get your final paper in by next week"_.

On the other hand, professor Y was genuinely intrigued by something the student said and it spurs him to search his bookshelf and clarify something. _He didn 't have to physically get up to get a book_ but the conversation was engaging enough to do so. When the professor temporarily turns his back to the student to fetch a relevant book, that doesn't mean he's less disconnected from the conversation; he's actually _more connected_.

That's what I'm trying to convey: maybe measuring how much time your friend's eyes are glued to your face isn't the best way to measure connectedness. E.g. The professor X with the unbroken stare towards to the student was actually _less engaged_ than professor Y that paused the conversation to find a relevant book.

Like I said previously, I can't argue with others' feelings. This thread shows me that everybody seems to have different thresholds of annoyance for others using their smartphone to look up something. Personally, I'm never slighted or offended by it. I actually feel complimented if our conversation prompted their fingers to type out a search request because of something I said. Just last week, I was talking with a friend about iron supplements and as we were talking, she typed in a search query for the most iron-rich foods. It was great as the conversation then flowed into spinach, tofu, etc.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for expanding on your initial thoughts and for relating those expansions to my response. (First rate engagement. A+++ would read again.)

I agree engagement and relational context are orthogonal, and I think your elaboration captures very clearly what I mean by using

> _judgement to know when looking up a piece of information is germane to the > interpersonal context or whether doing so is incidental_

Professor Y clearly cares and that care is expressed by looking up information. My main point to your first comment was that sometimes the nature of a relationship and a meeting will make most citations of fact irrelevant. For sure, sometimes meetings between close relations will benefit from citations of fact.

Reading above, I don't think we're in disagreement, though we may be focusing more tightly on different scenarios.

Thanks for engaging!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The answer lies in understanding the Utility of the Novelty Seeker to a Group.

If groups don't need it, expect novelty seeking to be snuffed out and fast. Don't complain about it just go look for a group that needs you.

Not everyone is a novelty seeker - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_seeking)

Small populations don't need too many novelty seekers. If everyone in a village is curious about Tigers, sooner or later everyone in the village would be dead. As populations grow the number of Novelty seekers increase and sooner or later the village has knowledge of how to tame the Tiger.

In terms of groups or teams that work on problems that have known solutions, having Novelty seekers around can be a big distraction/waste of time and energy as they goof off and wander.

But for teams working on problems unknown, Novelty seekers are a must have. Nothing is guaranteed when working on unknowns, but the team will learn more/make progress with a Novelty Seeker around than without.

While sites like HN attract Novelty Seekers from all over and there is some spillover into startups (many working on problems with unknowns) this process of matching Novelty seekers to groups that need them has WAYS to go.

We do it in very inefficient ways and lacking awareness. Sometimes we misidentify them (lot of people pretend to be novelty seekers cause it gets them on teams) OR Novelty seekers are put in charge OR they want to be in charge Or we think we need a Novelty seeker on staff 24x7 when actually we just need them to come in and take a look at a specific problem once a week or once a month. These mistakes can be avoided if you know the role the Novelty Seeker plays in society and what problems they are needed for.

<comment><USER8> Is anything that you're saying based in a published theory that I can read about? Or, are you just making this up?

<comment><USER9> That's the perennial HN question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IME, reading quick articles or googling for a word doesn't work too. But there is a way to get an interesting information. I built my curiosity stream by checking channels on youtube (it _has_ non-crap channels, despite my beliefs). It wasn't a quick process. One video by another I filtered content and made a subscription set which feeds me a couple or more videos per week that are good content and build my curiosity, as tfa explained. When there is more free time, I just check archives and find even more. Now I have a non-distracting queue of knowledge that requires nothing to sustain.

Funnily, before that I never hit "subscribe", because it was perceived as a time-spending pit. And it is, for many "funny cats" or "fail compilation" channels which produce videos twice daily.

All this works because every piece there has easy connections. Articles do not connect – I have to lookup the author, register to subscribe, then manage updates from many sites, etc. Streams from mass-media like yt are more comfortable to follow and there are many suggestions from other channels on the topic.

<comment><USER11> Any way for you to share a few of your YouTube channels? I love watching channels such as 3blue1brown, numberphile, sixtysymbols, deepskyvideos, etc. it's true what you say about sitting down and actually watching more than just a sound bite. Having context of things helps a lot with learning.

However, I am lacking in some development channels.

<comment><USER10> Hi, of course! 3b1b and numberphile are two of my favorites too. Especially featuring Neil Sloane and prof. Tadashi Tokieda (no intent to undervalue other stars and/or Parker squares).

PBS network is also great. I watch PBS Eons and PBS Spacetime the same time I see a notification dot.

Recently added Astrum because of nice pics. melodysheep caught me with their timelapse videos. These two are in wait-and-see category atm.

Also Jay Foreman for british humour, London history and mapmen. Primer posts rarely, but was definitely worth a sub.

That's all. I visit few more topics/channels by hand, but they are of entertainment nature (starcraft tournaments, local evening letsplays, etc), thus no sub as it would create an unwanted distraction. As of games, MkIceAndFire plays them with decent skill in no commentary, no overlay style. Btw, when you're on a channel, you can check "channels" to see if an author likes or links to something on their own account.

Hope you like some of these!

>development channels

Sadly, it never clicked with me, despite (or because) me being full-time dev since when youtube still wasn't a thing. It just feels either too slow or too shallow/instructional rather than deep and full of decades of wisdom. Idk, can't force myself to watch any of these anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Many websites that snare your time feature scores of stories on the front > page, banking that one will strike each reader's sweet spot of knowledge. So > visit websites that use the same strategy but offer richer content, for > example, JSTOR Daily, Arts & Letters Daily or ScienceDaily.

or HackerNews :)

<comment><USER4> The articles linked to in HN aren't always the most fruitful, whereas the comments are a universe of wonderful discussion. I've learned dozens of things from browsing the comments here, which makes sense as we have world experts in dozens of fields who are regular commenters.

<comment><USER13> I usually get my HackerNews updated through the feed in Telegram, which means I usually go straight to the comments before even reading the article. Reading them is really nice, as it lets me gauge if I think the article is worth a read, then engage in some great conversations about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One idea is that population competes for positions, and that restricts your choices early on. You could imagine that you're either pushed away or drawn into some position. Another point of view is to see your actions through constraints, which is an inter-related point of view to competition. You're bound by money, time, energy (you can do just so much), and other resources. You can see your situation also trough psychology. You have fears, traumas, addictions, etc. Then there's intelligence that translates into how good you're at creating goals, how good you're at seeing yourself, how good you're at listening yourself, how good you're at solving problems, and how aware you're of your current condition, etc. in addition to having the ability to become better at such matters.

It's clear that all these things define how well you're in control what you're doing. There are a lot of outside sources of influences that you need to be aware of. All kind of distractions, commercials, games, noise, propaganda (manufacturing consent?). Your society wants you to do this, your employer wants you to do that, and often times you feel you have to give in, which means that you're fighting for control on a psychological level.

Creating your life so that you're 100% in control all time is very difficult, if not possible, but you can become aware of what's happening in yourself as you click mindlessly trough the internet, or when you do things/tasks you don't really want to do. You can change yourself to overcome procrastination in order to become a person that knows what he's doing, not just because you have to, but because you want to. You want to take part in society, you want to work for good causes, etc. You want to study in university to get into a certain position. And all this will that you're aware of diminishes the amount of random choices you make, I claim.

</comment><comment><USER15> > When I'm surfing the web I want to be drawn in by articles on Europe's > political history or the nature of quasars

That's the problem right there. Articles are the white sugar of information. They contain a tiny amount of actual info, but not enough to be useful in any meaningful way. If you truly want to learn about something, read a book or a paper. Articles will get you nowhere.

<comment><USER16> I think better than a book is just being curious about the world around you. Why does only my front car window have frost on it? Why does my granola bar wrapper emit light when I open it under my covers? You are guarenteed to learn relevant things that change your worldview instead of relying on whatever you are told to be curious about. Think for yourself, but you should also be curious for yourself.

<comment><USER17> And then when you try to google for information on these things, you end up reading the very same short articles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> if you're not reading about some subject you think you're curious about, can we still call it being curious about said subject ?

Maybe you just find the idea of being curious about the subject cool.

Makes me think of this quote ascribed to Picasso:

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

So maybe the author is not curious as an artist, but curious as an art critique.

<comment><USER19> There's a saying that having a typewriter on a desk is not the sign of a writer, it's a sign of someone who wants to present the image of a writer, to feel like a writer but without the hard bit of having to labour over writing something, to be seen as a writer.[1]

LessWrong talks about "Science as attire"[2] thus: " _The X-Men comics use terms like "evolution," "mutation," and "genetic code," purely to place themselves in what they conceive to be the literary genre of science._ ", and TheLastPsychiatrist wrote endlessly about narcissism in modern society - caring about our image and how others perceive us and how we control how we seem, over and above taking action and doing things (for others).

When the article said " _I want to be drawn in by the nature of quasars_ ", these things are what came to mind; maybe the author finds the idea of being curious about the subject cool; maybe the author wants to feel and appear smart and Quasars fit that image a lot more than popular macaroon flavours do. Yet Quasars have the difficult part of needing to read papers about radio astronomy and study masters degree level math, probably.

This has been a bitter, hard to learn, and not very thoroughly learned lesson in my life, and I feel a pang of identification with the author on that note. How much _cooler_ and _cleverer_ does their article look for their claim "I want to be curious about Quasars" instead of had they written "I want to be curious about cardboard glue" \- and yet does the substance of the article change at all for any value of X in "I want to be curious about X"? I think it doesn't, I think only the image changes. It's name-dropping Quasars.

It's the Richard Feynman vignette[3] about learning the names of a bird in different languages from his father, and then being shown that afterwards he knows nothing - but _nothing_ \- about the bird, and that being important in his focus on detail and how things behave, rather than studying names and descriptions.

At least the author can dodge to macaroon articles and still feel like they are learning and feel superior to another version of themselves where they just stared at the wall - reading is cleverer than doing nothing. Even when the thing they read is irrelevant, forgettable, flashy but insubstantial, disconnected from their knowledge. Why can't they simply say "I read about macaroon flavours because it was there and caught my eye"? Because that sounds weak and stupid.

> This function of curiosity — to heighten memory — is the key to > understanding why we're curious about some things and not others. We feel > most curious when exploration will yield the most learning. [..] We're > maximally curious when we sense that the environment offers new information > in the right proportion to complement what we already know.

Do we? How did the Alcatraz Menu fit into this claim?

My much less cheerful answer is that the author doesn't want to be curious about Quasars (radio telescope measurements and calculations made from them and mathematical models built from those), the author wants to be seen as someone interested in science (but not the nerdy topics which would bore a polite dinner party, only something popular and safely irrelevant), and is feeling shameful and inadequate about clicking on an Alcatraz menu. NB. I say ashamed at reading trivia because it's not smart enough for the image the author wants to portray, deliberately not guilty at the waste of time which could have been spent helping others instead. The Alcatraz menu was interesting, so the time was 'well spent' by some metric, so the author isn't unhappy with low productivity or bad use of time, the author is specifically unhappy at the use of time not being up to the image they want to portray to the world. "People would think I'm stupid if they knew what I was reading about, so I'd better dress it up in a NYT opinion piece then I can feel and look smart again". (I accuse).

[1] The sign of a writer is some writing - output from the act of writing - <USER2> it on typewriter or pen and paper or computer, etc.

[2] [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science- as...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire)

[3] Richard Feynman anecdote in an interview [https://youtu.be/GNhlNSLQAFE?t=240](https://youtu.be/GNhlNSLQAFE?t=240)

[4]

<comment><USER20> I couldn't agree more, and I'm also still learning this lesson. There are so many subjects for which I love the idea of being interested in, sometimes for years. The knowledge about these subjects is freely available, often in abundance, yet I rarely go seek it.

However, I'm still not sure what plays the bigger role in my lack of action: laziness + the abundance of junk content, or simply the lack of any real interest. Perhaps a combination of both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://archive.is/aFv56](http://archive.is/aFv56)

<comment><USER22> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can someone suggest good career options for person with novelty traits ? (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_seeking)).

Once you are settle down in a certain career (for example, IT/software development), not having to satisfy the itch for novelty seeking can make things really boring for you. So, my next question - how do satisfy that itch in a given career, say IT?

<comment><USER24> So - I am a strong 'novelty person'. Much of my life revolves around change and newness, and constant, ongoing learning (I've moved from travel wholesaling to banking to startups to energy to mining to bio-pharma to...who knows?). At the beginning of my career, I spent about 6 months working in a bank before I realised that working with the same people, the same task, the same desk day in and day out was not for me. I was not learning all that much after the first 2 months. I realised I needed to stay in 'those first two months' \- where everything is new, where you are constantly learning the ropes - but before anything gets repetitive.

So I became a management consultant; and it's awesome; my job changes every 10-12 weeks, with a new office, new team, new clients and new challenges. I can travel for projects if I want a new city, new bed, new bars etc, or I can stay at home and explore.

I work with a lot of technical folks in the field; devs, architects, project managers, business analysts, analytics specialists - all with (broadly) the same passion for learning and change that I have. If you're interested, check it out - there's lots of benefits, lots of great opportunities and a ton of learning to be had, as long as you can balance the expectations and demands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It reminds me of that sienfeld episode where George says he always wanted to be a civil war buff.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is why I have 20 unread books on my Kindle and at night when I'm looking for something to read I can't find anything.

<comment><USER27> That's like saying there doesn't exist riveting brain-changing books out there, which just isn't true. (Keep searching until you've found your bliss.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is like asking, "Why can't I decide to enjoy broccoli if I believe it's healthy to eat?" The evolutionary story behind curiosity notwithstanding, it seems to me that this is just a case of the more general observation you can't alter your desires simply by reflecting on whether they are good or bad.

<comment><USER29> Except that you can, by just doing the things you want to do until they become habits. It's not really much different than going to the gym or deciding not to drink too often. Even though you might want/not want to do the thing, you still do it because you know it's better for you.

The better way to say it is that it's difficult to alter one's desires via reflection, not that it cannot be done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's an issue I kinda wish I had, I get curious about lots of random non- practical things. Atlas Obscura is a great source of enjoyment.

<comment><USER31> That's exactly the problem that the article is talking about and it's so commonplace that there are quite a few running jokes about it, TVTropes being a common one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> One of the very few (somewhat) positive traits of having adult ADHD: this particular problem does not exist. If you want to be curious about something — even if it is a slightest spark of interest — it immediately activates to full-blown involvement, sometimes bordering on obsession.

I have spent a year studying quantum mechanics full time on my own, reading textbooks and practicing exercises, because I was mildly curious about quantum physics at some point. Got me fired from my job back then, as it had nothing to do with QM.

This is not always a good thing. :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Answer is simple - we think we know it. Once you think you know something it immediately all excitement and interest disappears. But can you really know anything absolutely, fully in this Universe? Someone involved into science should answer what grows more with study - knowledge or realization of one's own ignorance?

Someone said "I know only one thing - I know nothing", to me this is the most profound understanding of the limitation our knowledge has.

<comment><USER34> That's not true for me, I know very little electrical engineering/low level programming/embedded devices etc and wish I knew more, and yet I can't muster enough inherent interest to learn more. But I'm generally very curious about stuff and regularly read news/studies/documentation and get lost in wiki holes, but for a lot of useless stuff I don't really have a use for. So this is definitely an issue for me. I do profile myself and work as a generalist, and am good at trivia games, so I've managed to deal with it. But I would like to get better at specializing in things.

<comment><USER35> If this doesn't whet your appetite and make you feel like you've learned something, I don't know what will. But it's a hard course.

[https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:MITx+6.002x_6x+1T2...](https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:MITx+6.002x_6x+1T2015/course/)

This was another good one, more practically applicable to a programmer but less low-level:

[https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-the- world-...](https://www.edx.org/course/embedded-systems-shape-the-world- microcontroller-inputoutput-2)

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the suggestions!

I need to enroll to see the contents of the first one, but I will look into it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The article is interesting and raises a good point, but I don't think it really solves anything.

With the right perspective on (understanding of) your mental processes, deep, useful, questions like this cease to exist. They are solved. I've had success recently with subtle self-control over curiosity and motivation, and the way to do it is just as simple as it intuitively feels.

Reconfiguring your brain to follow through on your stated goals is a simple process over time that relies on simple goal-setting and reward. You set up a system of trivial goals, always at whatever pace you enjoy, and expand their novelty and risk factor. Being very simple and increasingly binary, this process can easily crystallize in your physical brain. Yet it is ever expanding in complexity as you become excited at your progress in broadening intelligence.

This is the kind of thing that some will want evidence for. Those are the ones that won't be able to make use of it. Follow intuition; only you can convince your inner self of truth in progress. Science is only a semi-precise tool for helping this process, as the controls of any experiment are infinite in reality.

BTW, the comment on Novelty Seeking was great hos234!

</comment><comment><USER37> Is the problem that we're not curious about the right things? Or is it more that passively wandering through a crap-garden has an astronomically small chance of offering you anything but crap? (Not to put too fine a point on the "crap" thing, because that's not really my point.)

The piece talks about those who read, but elides the free agency of those who offer. Clicking on an article someone offers is not just moving through an unbiased and natural "world" and interacting with it like picking berries off a bush. This world was built by other humans, framed by other humans, who decided what to offer. Behind every article is a human with an agenda and perhaps traffic & revenue targets. If you let them determine what you read, yeah there will tend to be a mismatch. This is not an "opportunistic" approach, it's a "passive" approach.

Let's say we were talking about pizza instead. You want pizza. Do you go wandering around hoping someone offers you pizza? Pretty sure if you don't already know where to get pizza, you go look up pizza. But then are you like "Oh but there are 'thousands of hits' for pizza, boo hoo?!" No, that is what _success_ at finding pizza looks like. Sorting out which one is your favorite pizza, the one that's _just right for you_ from all those many options is like, the least amount of work you can frigging do. It's fortunate-people problems.

If you're curious about something, this author was right the first time: Just look it up. First hit is almost always Wikipedia, which is fine. Start reading, and you're off to the races. They even have hyperlinks to all related terms/concepts that might need explication or that you might be, ahem, curious about. Yep it takes some minimal amount of will and discipline to read and click links and direct your own learning. If you can't muster that, you're kind of in trouble. But do it anyway; practicing will make you stronger.

</comment><comment><USER38> I can only speak for America society, but in my experience after a certain age general novelty seeking is discouraged. We've all experienced the feeling of being bombarded by questions from a toddler, but after a certain age we restrict the "universe of relevant questions" to be context specific.

As someone with ADHD, novelty seeking has never been an issue for me. Generally I think it benefits society as a whole to have a robust number of novelty seekers in the population -- but in a society where specialization is rewarded so greatly it can be a frustrating trait.

<comment><USER39> I think it's the more disruptive forms of curiosity that are actively discouraged -- where you publicly question whether a fundamental fact is wrong and suggest that it be corrected before we proceed with sopme standard operating procedure that others depend on. Pretty much everyone hates that.

But I think when curiosity is kept private, or you state that your explorations are personal, peripheral, and nowhere near anyone's critical path, curiosity shouldn't pose a threat.

But it is curious that after you leave school, curiosity is more often discouraged than encouraged in our society. It seems like 95% of people just want all their beliefs forever to be correct, certain, unchanging, and unthreatening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> May be it's not contributing/promoting our [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai)

</comment><comment><USER41> Because your attention is your future self. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16x8vd2L4cw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16x8vd2L4cw)

</comment><comment><USER42> Yeah that, or school real beats curiosity out of you. By the time you are done, you are a husk of the once curious human being you used to be?

</comment><comment><USER43> The premise of the article seems odd to me. Am I just unusual in the fact that my interests and curiosity are very closely aligned?

</comment><comment><USER44> No paywall: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity- brain.html)

<comment><USER45> Still paywalled for me.

Alternative is

curl [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/opinion/sunday/curiosity- brain.html) > nyt.html

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> \- "You've been clickbaited by your own brain"

\- full-screen paywall whooshes in

:(

<comment><USER47> Disable Javascript ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has YC changed it's MO for acceptance? - <AUTHOR> It's been really interesting looking at the last two posts from the Macro introducing the new YC cohort. Maybe an issue with the sample size, these could be the most late stage co's in the whole cohort, but these seem to be reasonably well established start-ups with a lot of traction and previous investment.
My question is, is this typical of a YC company now on acceptance?
Links here: "50+ million monthly viewers watch more than half a billion coubs every month." They've raised $3.8 mill already - http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/05/coub/
and
"Currently, more than 15k broadcasters use Revlo's platform–with a reach of more than 5 million fans." They've raised $1mill already. http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/05/revlo/
Note: This isn't about why those companies would go for YC, network, advice etc. arguments make sense. <comment><USER2> The companies profiled in the Macro are farther along than typical companies in the batch. They're more interesting to read about than ones with no product yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be interesting to see one from the other end of the scale to add some balance too.</comment></comment>


Viewing FICO Scores Spurs Better Financial Habits - <AUTHOR> https://review.chicagobooth.edu/behavioral-science/2018/article/viewing-fico-scores-spurs-better-financial-habits?source=ic-em-20200221&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWVRVM1pHRXlZV0U0T0RnNCIsInQiOiJ1Z0trOFpGeGhkZWR4SmNqd1AxY3FPazlLMDd4Y0Fab3J4SU5jeWdXVkNrMjFZMUxvSUZYMXY0QnY3b3RBbVQxZ3dZQkFLSktRRlhKYUlWOUx1VVVWM0g5MGVwNnQ3aUVFZjd6RkZ5TjVoR0N4UmRXVElaOTJqMGN6eWpOcGEwcCJ9 <comment><AUTHOR> Credit Karma in particular has been awesome for me to get in control of my financial life, I do wonder if that (and other similar services) have made a meaningful difference in the U.S.</comment>


Opus 1.2 Released - <AUTHOR> https://jmvalin.ca/opus/opus-1.2/ <comment><USER2> Opus is something really, really cool!

My last company (Zip Phone, YC S14) was a direct result of the fantastic work that the Opus team has done in the last few years. I remember researching audio codecs around the end of 2013 and stumbling across Opus, and being amazed at what it could do at extremely low bitrates, _and_ everything was available completely for free! Spent my fair share of time on the Opus IRC channel on freenode (shout out to derf, gmaxwell, jmspeex, mark4o) bugging them with basic queries, and getting excellent support.

Opus rocks.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't hear the difference between Opus 1.2 @ 32 kb/s and Uncompressed audio. I'm now excited about Opus 1.2 AND worried about my hearing.

<comment><USER4> If you listen to older versions of Opus @ 32kbps, you'll hear the distortion more pronounced and then when you slowly upgrade versions you can hear it go away and then when comparing to uncompressed, you'll notice just because you know what you're looking for.

Xiph is amazing; I hope Daala actually becomes commonplace, but with the recent Apple announcements it's looking like a chance to usurp h.265 is basically gone.

<comment><USER5> Many pieces of Daala are being folded into AV1, which is an industry effort supported by most large software and hardware companies to produce an HEVC replacement. This post summarizes the results of the different experiments: [https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/](https://people.xiph.org/~jm/daala/revisiting/)

Unfortunately some of the most innovative techniques around frequency-domain prediction ended up not panning out. :(

<comment><USER6> Sadly, Google is trying to patent AV1, and only giving a patent license to users of its implementation.

If you want to build your own implementation, either to implement it in hardware, or to release it under a different license, then you'll be fucked.

<comment> TD-Linux The AOM patent license covers _any_ implementation of the format. It additionally covers the reference implementation, because the encoder may use techniques that aren't part of the bitstream format, and it's important to grant rights to those too.

[http://aomedia.org/license/patent/](http://aomedia.org/license/patent/)

<comment><USER7> Indeed, the whole point of Daala and AV1 is to do a _really_ good job on the IP front so as to make it much harder for patent trolls to hold everyone hostage [0].

0: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3Yc5Hn9bhQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3Yc5Hn9bhQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Opus defaults to variable bitrate (VBR), but for a variety of reasons some > people prefer to use constant bitrate (CBR), which it has always supported.

For instance, if you want to encrypt speech, and don't want to leak information about its contents.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm having all my music stored as Flac and automatically converted as Opus to my phone. I couldn't be happier to the quality and encoding speed. The only thing I think I should've done different is to use a lower bitrate than 192 kbps to store more music to the memory card.

I reasoned the additional lossy encoding of Bluetooth would be too much with lower bitrates, but now I'm not so sure...

<comment><USER10> Does Android support Opus natively? One would hope so, given how open Opus is.

<comment><USER11> Yes, since 5.0: [https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/media- forma...](https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/media-formats.html)

That claims they need to be in a MKV container, but I just use the output of opusenc.

<comment><USER7> I heard their implementation was really poor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's really hard to exaggerate the quality of the opus codec.

It's just amazing.

You can throw anything at it. No matter the sample rate and the bitrate and the output has good quality without any of that narrowband, wideband, ultra- wideband speex nonsense.

All that is missing is an "hybrid" mode just like wavpack that produces combined output of roughly the same size as flac.

<comment><USER13> I don't know what you're looking for with the wavpack comparison, but 510kbps approaches the noise floor for most audio that isn't white noise or black metal. 96kbps is widely considered transparent on speakers (you have to try quite hard to notice 48kbps), 112-128kbps on headphones (and 96kbps at most for people older than 15, lol).

<comment><USER14> High-quality lossy files are fine for listening, but lossless is required if you want to _sample_ the audio to create a remix or DJ set from it, because you're inevitably going to have to encode the output artifact of _that_ —and you don't want to be chaining lossy encoding steps, as the loss-function of most psychoacoustic encodings tends to be exponential when applied repeatedly.

re: wavpack, from wikipedia:

> WavPack also incorporates a "hybrid" mode which still provides the features > of lossless compression, but it creates two files: a relatively small, high- > quality, lossy file (.wv) that can be used by itself; and a "correction" > file (.wvc) that, when combined with the lossy file, provides full lossless > restoration. This allows the use of lossy and lossless codecs together.

This hybrid encoding format lets you keep files for both purposes (lossless for audio production and archiving, pre-encoded to HQ lossy for audio consumption) in less space than would be required to keep e.g. an ALAC file + a cached lossy M4A encoding of it, the way iTunes does when you specify "optimize tracks' space-usage for portable devices."

Such a hybrid design is ideal for e.g. the Internet Archive, where they want to keep lossless archival representations of files for historians to study, and to _create_ encodings from; but also want to _serve_ usable representations of those artifacts to users who care more about transfer-speed and bandwidth cost than perfect fidelity.

<comment> TD-Linux This has been tried - the problem is that FLAC works by removing redundancies and correlation in the audio signal. When you subtract an Opus encoding from the original, the resulting difference file is the difference, which is much less correlated noise - often it actually compresses worse than the original FLAC. WavPack gets around this by making its lossy format a subset of the lossless data, but as a downside the lossy compression is far worse - about 3x worse than Opus.

Other attempts include Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD - but both of those ended up larger than just separate FLAC and Opus files.

<comment><USER12> > often it actually compresses worse than the original FLAC

I made some very crude tests a few minutes ago and got about 15% size increase in total size (opus + diff.flac vs flac --best)

<comment><USER15> Keep in mind that Opus does not define a bit-exact decoder. That allows it to have both floating-point and fixed-point implementations, as well as the flexibility to use different internal resamplers, MDCT implementations, etc. That flexibility helps to allow efficient implementations across a broad variety of devices.

However, as a result, the difference between an Opus decode and the original will only get you lossless reconstruction if you decode with the same build of Opus on the same machine. Also, since Opus uses IIR filters that ring to infinity, even on the same machine you only get bit-exact results if you decode each file from the beginning. It won't work if you seek.

Really, if you're concerned about the disk space required for separate FLAC and Opus encodes, delete the Opus version. FLAC decoding is extremely fast (5x faster than Wavpack), and Opus encoding is pretty efficient, too (on the same order as Wavpack decoding).

<comment><USER16> What do you use for your private listening webapp? mpd?

<comment><USER13> I'm guessing you meant to reply to my reply.

It's not published yet, though I might. It's pretty simple, just grabs a static JSON manifest (which is generated by the shell script I run when I add music to the collection, which adds replaygain tags and transcodes) which includes basic metadata and the ReplayGain tags so that I can set that manually in the browser. Uses the standard rule for continuous play and replaygain: play whatever was in the view when you played the first song then shuffle play, when the song you're playing is followed by the next song or follows the previous song on the same album, apply album gain, else apply track gain.

I have yet to add dynamic features like cross-player play count tracking, and server-side play counts for the webapp. I think these would be a lot more work than I put in.

My Github is [https://github.com/xorgy](https://github.com/xorgy) if you want to follow/check in to see if I publish it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you are sensitive to the quality of encrypted audio calls, a co-inventor of Opus (Koen Vos of Skype/SILK) now works at [http://wire.com](http://wire.com), which is taking an open approach to messaging.

<comment><USER7> Oh, when did he get hired? The audio quality sucks and my calls drop all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Given that Opus is built into the browser, is the format backwards compatible? Or will browsers need to update their Opus Libraries to get these changes?

<comment><AUTHOR> All Opus releases since 1.0 are fully compatible with the specification (RFC 6716) and all future releases will also be. That's why we have standards. If we ever decided to make something that's not compatible, it would be called a different name.

<comment><USER18> That's so awesome. I guess the webrtc audio encoding libraries would need to be updated in the browsers to take advantage of these improvements though?

<comment><AUTHOR> Even that should happen relatively quickly since so far we've also preserved API and ABI compatibility (since 1.0). Also, we're working closely with the Firefox and Chrome teams so they know what's going on with Opus.

<comment><USER15> In fact, libopus 1.2 has already landed in Firefox (including for WebRTC) and will be available in the next Nightly: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374870](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1374870)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My ears still feel that uncompressed is king for several of the test passages but Opus 1.2 was quite good. The problems with the compressed versions is hard to describe because I don't have the vocabulary but it was something that was only discernable on headphones and I would say had to do with phasing between left and right, a stereo 'presence' that was missing in all the compressed variations.

</comment><comment><USER20> Good Lord, they rediscovered integrated rounding! :)

(Re: quantization change in encoder. Also known as statistical or statistician rounding.)

<comment><USER21> "round to whichever number sounds the best"?

Anyway I assume they're taking their well deserved credit for the implementation, not necessarily the discovery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really hope every Linux distro and all these other OSs will support it from now on, right from the start. Including recognicing .opus files. It's the perfect format for podcasts, because it's great with voices even if the bitrate is low.

<comment><USER23> I've compressed 30 hours of one of my favourite podcasts in less than 100MB... And voice parts are almost indistinguishable from the original.</comment></comment>


The secret afterlife of lost German luggage - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/23/travel/germany-lost-luggage-auction.html <comment><USER2> There's a store like this in Alabama also profiled many times appropriately called "Unclaimed Baggage" and acts as a clearing house for most of the US lost bags.

Since 9/11 and newer TSA regulations have gone into effect, as well as just how much better we've gotten at tracking bags electronically, the quality and churn at the store has kind of plummeted.

One thinks one may pick up some Ming Dynasty vase or fossilized velociraptor eggs lost in transit (and to be sure there were good deals back in the day) but the reality now is more like a large thrift store. We all grumble about air travel but "lost bags" feels like something that's gotten markedly less common over the past 20 years.

<comment><USER3> But you can get great deals on TSA confiscated pocket knives and corkscrews.

[https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=2341&...](https://www.govdeals.com/index.cfm?fa=Main.Item&itemid=2341&acctid=1328)

<comment><USER4> This simply is stealing. Thanks for the link, I'm now disgusted.

<comment><USER5> What would you like to see happen instead?

Let people break the rule and take the items in their carry-on? (in which case why have the rule in the first place?)

Pay people when they take the items? That is going to be an administrative faf all because people can't read and follow rules correctly - do you want to pay for that admin in your ticket prices?

Allow people to pay for the items to be stored until their return? They'll be accused of profiteering there too because again the admin work will need to be paid for, and there is a logistical problem when people don't return to the same airport.

Just send the confiscated items to landfill?

You might argue that a lot of the security theatre around air travel places a hindrance on the passengers and that you consider it unfair, but the rules about carrying sharp objects are very clearly documented (at least they have been when I fly around Europe, are the US processes less organised?) and well known even if you don't bother to read the documentation, so having such items taken off you if you do bring them in pockets or other carry-on luggage should be no surprise.

<comment><USER6> The reason that pocket knives were banned is that the 9/11 hijackers used box- cutters to forcibly open the flimsy cockpit doors. Nowadays, the cockpit doors of all US airplanes have been reinforced and are no longer vulnerable to this attack, so the need for banning pocket knives so longer exists. A simple solution would be to scrap the outdated ban on pocket knives.

<comment><USER7> In all my international flights this year (Europe and South America) the food was served with metallic cutlery.

I would say the rule is obsolete in the civilized world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Deutsche Bahn, while having undergone preparations for going public like Deutsche Post (DHL), Postbank and Deutsche Telekom, is still 100% state-owned. The current political sentiment in Germany makes an IPO very unlikely to happen in the forseeable future, so those operations might just continue. Just recently a few laws passed, further integrating state and DB (soldiers travelling for free, state money as part of climate change prevention, VAT decrease, etc).

Edit: Writing this on a DB train and just got a christmas present. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> That actually sounds like quite a fun job, figuring out ways to trace the owner of luggage based on its contents, a bit like playing low stakes detective. I wonder if they learned a specific trade to work there?

Fun fact: In the early 90s, there used to be a whole German TV show around the concept of auctioning lost luggage from airports and exploring their contents, Koffer Hoffer [0].

[0] [https://youtu.be/-qE--luAfAU](https://youtu.be/-qE--luAfAU)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> U.S. Unclaimed Baggage Center website: [https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/](https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/)

>A Place Where Lost Luggage Gets Another Shot (2014)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/business/a-place-where- lo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/business/a-place-where-lost-luggage- gets-another-shot.html)

>This Is a Story About Loss: On losing things, losing people, and finding God at Unclaimed Baggage Center (2015)

[https://www.vox.com/2015/10/20/9487775/unclaimed-baggage- cen...](https://www.vox.com/2015/10/20/9487775/unclaimed-baggage-center)

>The Secret Treasures of Lost Luggage Land (2016)

[https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2016-05-23/the-secret- tre...](https://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2016-05-23/the-secret-treasures-of- lost-luggage-land)

>This store in Alabama is selling your lost luggage (2019)

[https://www.travelpulse.com/news/airlines/watch-this- store-i...](https://www.travelpulse.com/news/airlines/watch-this-store-in- alabama-is-selling-your-lost-luggage.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> There's a Youtube channel where they had a competition to see who could make the best outfit from lost British luggage. It was the same sort of auction so maybe this is a pattern in other countries.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ortv_e-G0bk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ortv_e-G0bk)

<comment><USER11> There are a number of auctions in the United States that auction off not only lost airline luggage but also actual airline surplus materials.

Some are run by liquidation companies and some are run by the airlines themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Instagram story-esque design is an interesting take. I'm viewing this on a desktop but I'm not sure how I feel about it. Usually I prefer scrolling but I suppose it works well with the high-res photos.

<comment><USER13> NYT like other media companies are expermimenting with different formats. Some are more interactive than others. I personally am not too crazy about this one because at least on my phone it appears as if poorly formatted and when swiping a slide back activates to the browser back command.

When at work I noticed that I almost always avoid these types of format especially when it take over the whole screen and have conspicuous animations.

<comment><USER14> BBC does this a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the 90s in Germany there was a TV-show with luggage auction. The contestants had to bid, open them, then dress up. Audience voted for the best cat walk.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article fails to answer some obvious, albeit perhaps tediously technical questions: How much do they charge people to get their property back? Do they bother in cases in which it's unlikely the owner will be willing to pay that amount? In what proportion of cases do they find the owner, but the owner is unwilling to pay? Can the owner still claim the auction proceeds if they refused to pay to get the item back? (In which case, refusing to answer the question might be the optimal response!) How do they handle cash? (It would be eccentric to send by post or auction bank notes, even if they're foreign bank notes.)

<comment><USER17> Between 5 and 50 € depending on whether you'll pick it up yourself or let them send it to you.

Also things that are apparently worth less than 15 € aren't shipped to the central lost&found.

Source only in german: [https://www.bahn.de/p/view/service/fundservice.shtml](https://www.bahn.de/p/view/service/fundservice.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can we please, for the love of god, forbid posting non-public links to HN??

What's the logic of linking to a page we cannot read?

<comment><USER15> See "Are paywalls ok?" on [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) You might disagree, but comments on paywall don't add anything to the discussion of the story.

<comment><USER18> How should I advocate for a change of policy then? I've been complaining about this for a long time, it seriously detracts from the experience of using this as a news source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would appreciate an article about "The secret afterlife of Belgium Mail"

The Belgium postal system ranks below Moldavia. It is a third world country and the postal system is dysfunctional.

Now wonder Boris Johnson is leaving after he lived some years in Bruessels.

</comment><comment><USER20> took me a second to figure out that i needed to use the arrow keys. also i read saugage at first... but very interesting story :)

</comment><comment><USER21> As a German: why does the clickbait title say this is secret?

Is this different from how other countries handle lost+found?

<comment><USER22> Don't focus on the literal meaning of the word 'secret' too much. Secret can be used colloquially to mean 'unseen' or less commonly 'that which is not widely known but not technically secret'.

It's a dramatic way of saying such a thing, but that's to be expected in a newspaper headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Someone needs to write a sequel to The Third Policeman but with bikes instead of luggage

</comment><comment><USER24> I spend 3 minutes to find out this has nothing to do with German language.

</comment><comment><USER25> mirror?

<comment><USER26> [https://outline.com/EqgDw6](https://outline.com/EqgDw6)

<comment><USER25> thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is the auctioneer a distant cousin of Bruce?</comment>


Tool for Thought (2005) - barry-cotter http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html <comment><AUTHOR> I believe this is the correct URL: [https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/tool-for- thought-b12c170fcc2...](https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/tool-for- thought-b12c170fcc24)

</comment><comment><USER2> 404</comment>


Skinner Marketing: We're the Rats, and Facebook Likes Are the Reward (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/skinner-marketing-were-the-rats-and-facebook-likes-are-the-reward/276613/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I believe capitalism works, however, "bad" actions are not properly punished. Case and point is the Equifax hacking which should have a company ending punishment, not a slap on the wrist. Once people and governments start punishing bad actions commensurate to both the scale of the action and the _size of the organization_ everything will correct itself.

I feel like a broken record for saying this, but the solution to this problem along with most social problems is education. A well educated population will know when they're being taken advantage of and punish the actors accordingly. It's no surprise that the most effective way to control people is to prevent them from being well educated.

<comment><USER3> If you ever find yourself advocating "education is a solution", you likely need to re-assess your position.

Education is never a solution, because its practically unsolvable. Here a list of factors that affect education outcomes.

Child/Student fetal health, maternal health, child nutrition, stimulation, General health, adult/child stress levels, prolonged illness, availability of food, water, electricity and security.

Family poverty levels, need to work, familial stability,

Study habits, study training, parental guidance, word use in family conversation, familiarity with language of education, ability to learn, availability of time to learn, which builds into whether you picked up the initial building blocks of the subject and therefore future success. Propensity to learn, interest in subject.

The list goes on. This is one of the weaker lists I've made, but the essence of it, is that there are a huge number of variables that can easily break the ability of a student to finish a subject.

Remember that completion rates for MOOCs are about 7%. That's the result when you have _voluntary_ , motivated students, _choosing_ the classes they want to study.

Solving "education", is a proxy for having already solved whatever societal problem required people to be educated in the first place.

People would love to have the time to take a class on philosophy to enrich their lives, or a class on logic, on media manipulation.

But if you remember conversations on HN, people constantly look down on the arts and humanities, such classes are "pointless", you wont get a job.

A non-controversial opinion at time your education system is being valued more as a treadmill for college, in itself a tread mill so people can get jobs.

The rule of thumb is that any time you find yourself saying "education will solve it", work backwards, because Education is currently unsolvable.

(and we may not want to solve it - if you could get people trained on a "good" subject in shorter times than ever before, then you can also train them on "bad" subjects in shorter times than ever before.)

<comment><USER4> I essentially agree with you that "education" isn't really education, but I don't follow that it's impossible. Practically speaking, I think it's very unlikely we'll solve education, or solve harmful flaws to the human condition for that matter, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they're unsolvable. Actual education has been sufficiently tried in this country. There's definitely a clear limit to the stupid ape we call the human, but even if we could improve the average autodidactic or philosophic ability, or even increase the mean IQ by 5 points, there could be a significant improvement to the health of our society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is what we are trying to rectify with Lyra, a conversation and debate service which respects the user's attention. Our team is led by a cognitive neuroscientist working on attention, and we're a nonprofit. You can read more about our approach at [https://hellolyra.com/introduction](https://hellolyra.com/introduction) .

</comment><comment><USER6> What would a good social network look like? Most of them are used for making friends, not connecting with existing real world ones, but the interests of users and platform are not aligned.

Perhaps it would charge high profile users and aim to satisfy readers and posters, not advertisers or shareholders?

</comment><comment><USER7> The reality is all this is a result of well done user testing and giving users more of what they respond to.

That said, cigarettes were the same thing so I think in the future the solution to "habit forming tech" is simply to create a cultural push back and potentially regulate.

<comment><USER8> Isn't it the same as so many "modern" tech ? mainly local hyper optimization ?

internet got to me to a point that when my line is broken I feel better in less than a second.

I have an issue, I'm a hoarder, and internet / socnet are an infinite graph to walk so I have a hard time not walking. Similar to the concept of "not missing things" (forgot the usual term).

<comment><USER9> FOMO -- fear of missing out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "We're the Rats, and Facebook Likes Are the Reward" \- This argument has no validity. Facebook doesn't even dispense the likes, other users do. It isn't valid to compare likes to Skinner rewarding rats, because Facebook isn't even the one dispensing the reward.

<comment><USER11> Your argument isn't sound. It doesn't matter who gives the rewards, what matters is the conditions under which the recipient _receives_ the rewards.

> Thanks to Skinner's work, brain MRIs, and more recent research by > psychologists, neuro-scientists, and behavioral economists, we now know how > to design cue, activity, and reward systems to more effectively leverage our > brain chemistry and program human behavior.

Effectively, Facebook designed a system that gives people rewards for giving people rewards.

<comment><USER10> I think you are giving far too much credit to a simple like button. It's the content of the user's post that the person is liking, not the genius of Facebook.

<comment><USER11> > I think you are giving far too much credit to a simple like button.

I'm giving credit to the thousands of engineering hours that gave rise to the simple like button, and weeded out the less addictive alternatives. (Remember the poke button?)

> It's the content of the user's post that the person is liking, not the > genius of Facebook.

I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes, and as they used to say 'Queen Anne's dead'. [https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5004/where- does-...](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/5004/where-does-the- idiom-queen-anne-is-dead-come-from)

</comment><comment><USER13> Lol you just described Capitalism.

A like is equivalent to a paycheck.

Just instead of an well marketed FB post you have to have a well marketed employee image.

<comment><USER14> Yes. However I think the definition of Capitalism is interesting. I don't think other people include "paycheck for work" as defining element of Capitalism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hate to be "that" guy, but lately I feel like capitalism is a poison on society. This is an awful situation but it's clearly driven by this massive amoral machine of capitalism which will be very hard to peacefully bring to a halt. The problem is systemmic. Has anyone written about better ways of fixing this shit?

<comment><USER16> I think Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote a thing or two about it...

<comment><USER15> Given that their ideas were tried and failed, I hope a more contemporary option is available...

<comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty) is the most mainstream modern option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tinder is the worst throttling matches to develop emotional dependency. They are not in the match making business, their goal is getting people to use the app and it can't be good for the emotional health of the people involved.

<comment><USER19> Tinder only throttles the want-to-match swipe.

<comment><USER20> For people not familiar with the app, what is the "want-to-match swipe" ?

<comment><USER21> One swipe direction is "yes I like this person" one direction is "no I don't like this person". In either case it shows you a new person after you swipe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Silicon Valley will have its Snowden moment.

[http://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly- War/](http://www.cultstate.com/2017/10/13/The-Butterfly-War/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I can understand destructive pursuits but I don't understand this, or grinding in some RPG, or virtue signalling. When you're chasing money, sex, even drugs, at least you get _something_.

Here it's nothing. And there is no way to miss that it's nothing after the fact.

Do you reminisce after writing a well-liked post? After a night spent levelling up?

<comment><USER23> For a rational mind it is difficult to understand. However, social networks and many apps activate dopamine pathways in our brains [1]. The same pathway that activates when reward is "real" (according to your definition). Problem is, designers and engineers now understand this and use that purposefully to hook their users. To learn more about this phenomenon I recommend R. Lustig's new book "The Hacking of the American Mind".

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

<comment><USER9> There's nothing real about a drug high, and I didn't say "real."

The explanation that these fearsome psychology engineers make us refresh Facebook waiting for a notification sounds a lot like updated neuro-linguistic programming (they drop an anchor!). Frankly, I don't buy it.

There's something deeper about people so desperately seeking an ersatz of connection over social networks. This alienation could not have been caused by Facebook. It just happens to be benefiting from the same trend that brought us an opioid addiction epidemic and below replacement TFRs.</comment></comment></comment>


Searching for Sunken Treasure Is the Future of American Archeology - <AUTHOR> https://www.inverse.com/article/16287-searching-for-sunken-treasure-is-the-brutal-future-of-american-archeology <comment><USER2> Another job soon to be lost to robots. :-)</comment>


Show HN: Most mentioned links on HN - <AUTHOR> http://www.hnstore.co/42.html

<comment><USER2> Nice job! I like how this is an easy way to find common links on a particular topic (e.g. javascript). Are the links within a tag sorted by mentions? If not that might be a helpful addition.

Keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many thanks for your feedback and kind words! Links are sorted by number of users who mentioned it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Scriggler: content platform for authors, removing barriers of entry - <AUTHOR> https://scriggler.com

<comment><USER2> > We have a way of dealing with abuse.

What is it? I mean, technically so does Twitter, but you see bad stuff on there all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We have a point system implemented - it is somewhat similar to what reddit has, but less aggressive (or rather community tends to be a lot less aggressive). There is an added twist. Any member can give a 'black card' to a comment or publication they feel is either abusive or inappropriate. It costs points to give one, but takes away a lot of the points from the receiver. These points impact visibility of publications, making them a valuable commodity. We can then also review the posts receiving a lot of black cards or members who tend to give a lot of them. The idea is to give all the power of moderation to the user base and only get involved in the most obvious cases. I must say - so far that black card tool has not really been used.</comment></comment>


Dependency Injection is a Virtue - <AUTHOR> http://blog.metaobject.com/2013/01/dependency-injection-is-virtue.html <comment><USER2> Couldn't agree more. If the behaviour or outcome of a function depends on the current time, then the current time is an input to that function. Inputs to functions should be declared explicitly as arguments where possible.

The existence of Time.now and the fact that it's _possible_ to stub this method are not in themselves a good enough justification for excluding the current time from the list of explicit inputs. The length of the list of a function's inputs is one of the indicators of whether a function has too many disparate inputs and therefore too many responsibilities. Obscuring this number is likely to lead to more cluttered code.

In DHH's example, Time.now should be called somewhere higher up the call stack where its return value doesn't matter to the outcome of the function in which it resides. It should look like this:

        def publish!(time)
          self.update published_at: time
        end

That way the inputs are clear. It also happens to mean that you can test it without requiring the linguistic flexibility provided by Ruby, but that doesn't mean that testability in inflexible languages is the only reason why it's the right thing to do.

<comment><USER3> I think most of you are missing the point. I think the example DHH used should be interpreted as calling

        post.publish!

is easier than

        post.publish! Time.now

Since when you publish, the time of publication is the only value that make sense. Now, you can argue that you can set a default argument to Time.now, but that's weird code that only make sense if you need to supply a value other than Time.now, which you will only do in testing, so the code in DHH's example is optimal.

The point of DHH's blog post is, in a flexible enough language like JS, Ruby and Python, you can still test pretty much anything without DI. I honestly don't know any other reason why one would want to use DI other than making Java testable. In fact, you don't even need that in Java anymore because you can use Mockito these days and it can mock private stuff.

The stupidest reason I keep hearing over and over again is DI makes it possible to change an implementation at runtime. Wait what? Don't you have to change the application.xml file in Spring and restart the app? AFAIK there's nothing in Javaland that lets you listen to config file changes and then magically reconfigure the app context and make a copy of said context as a thread local in every new thread. Correct me if I'm wrong please. Even if there was, what magical alien land would require such a "feature", and such feature is so important that requiring your entire code base to be littered with all these indirect abstractions acceptable?

<comment><USER4> DI to swap out an implementation at runtime is an extreme edge case, though "runtime" may mean "the app can determine at startup which implementation makes sense". If you want to have a look at a nice usage of DI, peek into the source of Elasticsearch. You can swap out pretty much any relevant part of the implementation. You can for example change the HTTP acceptor to provide authentication [1] or add SSL [2] So there are cases where changing the implementation makes sense.

[1] <https://github.com/Asquera/elasticsearch-http-basic>

[2] [https://github.com/Asquera/elasticsearch-ssl-transport- plugi...](https://github.com/Asquera/elasticsearch-ssl-transport-plugin)

<comment><USER3> For which any simple configuration mechanism will do, and as long as you stick with coding to the interface, the problem is solved. So while technically this is called DI in Java, it's simply code taken as granted in many dynamic languages because of duck-typing. So yes, this is totally valid use case, but one with no need for a DI container in dynamic languages to solve.

<comment><USER5> First a DI container is not a necessary to do DI in any of the discussed languages. This is shown by the fact that you describe using duck-typing as method of doing DI in Ruby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every few years, there are fashions in our industry that feel like moral virtues to follow; structured programming, object orientation, patterns, functional, TDD, IoC. They warm the cockles of your heart, make you feel good about yourself.

But I am suspicious of this feeling, because it is an emotional in-group attachment, a bit like a religion. All religions have costs to following them, so that disbelievers may be easily recognized and (to a greater or lesser degree) demonized. But the world isn't and shouldn't be so black and white. Actions should be analyzed more carefully, and above all, rationally.

Code structured in a fashionably virtuous way makes me suspicious that the situation may not have been analyzed dispassionately. The style may be an end in itself.

I'm especially on guard because I used to be an acolyte of the OO religion.

<comment><USER7> In other words, you're part of the _Programming, Motherfucker_ (<http://progmofo.com/>) religion now? ;)

<comment><USER8> I have never seen this before... I think I was just converted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally, I feel that a lot of the Java hate is misplaced.

Just because most Java programmers/architects use/love J2EE, crazy XML/DI frameworks, etc. is not a fundamental attribute of the language itself, just an unfortunate result of how it's mainstream usage has evolved.

I assert you can write "nice Java", either with something like (shameless plug):

[http://draconianoverlord.com/2011/03/17/frameworkless- di.htm...](http://draconianoverlord.com/2011/03/17/frameworkless-di.html)

Or, for a better source, GooS, Growing Object-Oriented Software, by Steve Freeman and Nay Pryce:

<http://www.growing-object-oriented-software.com/>

...although, yes, a more succinct language like Scala helps too.

<comment><USER10> Piggy-backing on your response:

The J2EE hate is a cheap shot. It's just a stack of tools/APIs. Which part of it do you hate?

The Servlet API is just Java's version of Rack. It's actually mostly pretty nice. It definitely have it's faults, but it's also much more robust than Rack.

Is it ejbeans?

Is it JMX?

I mean, what is the hate exactly? People might be rightfully annoyed if you just said "I hate Rails" when you actually meant "I hate Devise".

Anyone running JRuby Rails apps are using a portion of J2EE and they may not even know it. It's what allows you to flop between Mizuno, Trinidad or Torquebox and not have to care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mostly disagree. Pure functions are beautiful and have their place, but not every function should be a pure function. And a Rails controller method is the opposite of a pure function - it has a database connection, several file descriptors and hundreds of objects at its fingertips. That is its strength, and DI has no place there.

That said, if you have a pure function, and you need to know the current time, consider keeping it pure with DI.

<comment><USER12> Er. Obviously, not every function can be a pure function, otherwise your program will not work. However:

\- controllers should not touch the data layer directly (and therefore follow SRP)

\- controllers should have their business layer services injected from somewhere else

This does not make them pure in the sense they remain (indirectly) functions with side-effects, by virtue on relying on business services, which themselves interact with data access services which do IO. However, it does make them testable without resorting to hacks and offers a clean interface.

<comment><USER11> The vast majority of Rails apps fail those conditions. I'd say that it's not the Rails Way to follow those precepts, so I believe your comment dismisses Rails in one stroke. I'm not sure if that's a very productive line of thought.

<comment><USER12> It's not impossible to achieve with Rails, it depends on what you put in your fat models. There is nothing which keeps you from having an intermediate business layer. I'm not sure how you would handle DI cleanly though, maybe it's possible with Rails 3? My brief experiments with Rails date from a few years ago, so I'm a bit fuzzy about this sort of details.

I'm confused about your comment regarding productivity. Either my recommendations are mostly valid, in the sense that they offer a distinct advantage over the current, Rails-y way of doing things, or they are not (but in which case you would need to make a cogent argument for why they are not). If they are, surely recognizing the shortcomings of a particular design/set of accepted practices is a benefit.

The fact that Rails 3 has undergone significant architectural changes with the merge of Merb shows that Rails did not emerge perfect from the thigh of DHH. And we all strive to improve ourselves and the tools we work with (or alternatively, for those of us for whom this is not an option, we stay with PHP or VB and stare blindly at people talking about "MVC").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "I don't like this tool. I've found ways around using it." "I use this tool a lot."

Why is this so controversial? It's a hammer. Ultimately you're trying to get two pieces of wood held together and you've all found a way to do that.

As long as both camps can sustainably produce maintainable software the point is moot.

</comment><comment><USER14> DI is why I see AngularJS as the best of the new JS frameworks out there. Given current JS language limitations DI makes AngularJS so testable, and you cannot say this about other tools like Backbone.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think DHH is actually not complaining DI in a general sense - DHH just want to emphasize DI is not required in dynamic language such as Ruby.

He also said that the real problem is when people applying techniques to solve one language's limitation on other language which problem does not exist and think it is okay. _(..While we can cross-pollinate some ideas between languages, there are many we cannot. ..)_

So, if you are using Java, it is perfectly fine to continue to use DI, but think carefully when you are using DI (framework/container) on Ruby..

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the Spring concepts confuse things more than solve problems. Example: configuring stuff in a bean.xml file, your code does not own the creation of the instances, some magical springy mechanism does it for you. What's wrong with just letting the program read its startup parameters from a properties file? Stack traces from springy code is just that like trying to eat a pea with a knife.

<comment> brown9-2 Nothing is wrong with letting your program read it's startup parameters from a properties file (and thus doing all the wiring up of classes in code yourself). Spring and it's bean.xml files are meant as a replacement option for that for when you find that doing-it-yourself is too tedious/too much code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree ... I won't even complain about Java's DI implementation. I've used both Weld and Guice and will admit that both have edge cases that aren't ideal, but it's better than the alternative.

In general, I think I'll choose MF over DHH anytime both have an opinion:

<http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't for the life of me find the connection that DHH is making between dependency injection and the fact that a language is dynamically or statically typed.

These two concepts are completely orthogonal to each other.

</comment><comment><USER19> No, Dependency Injection is a language specific pattern. A pattern useful in Java, but not in Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER20> _"Having hard-coded class-names like in the example Time.now is effectively the same as communicating via global variables."_

But having DI is exactly that: DI is about glorified global variables!

I realize most HN participants living in the Java/C# + ORM ([N]Hibernate)) + XML + SQL hell are just loving DI because it's a tad bit less worse then global variables but, dudes, there's another world out there.

A lot of functions can be made idempotent (always returning the same output for a given set of inputs) and also pure (idempotent _and_ without any side- effect) and this facilitates everything: it gets much easier to "recreate the state" and it makes it easier to reason about your programs.

It's sad because HN is a community built by pg, who talked about "beating the average", about using Lisp dialects, about Emacs, etc.

I took all his writing as "thinking outside the box".

And what do I see here? I see that HN is mostly consisting of enterprisey programmers living in the Java/C# + ORM + XML + SQL hell and not even realizing there's another world out there.

It is sadening me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you bother to read about Newspeak or click on the links?

Did you see the part about Java "AbstractAbstractFactory" actually being very close to "worse" than global variables?

<http://newspeaklanguage.org>

But apparently clicking on links is too hard, so I'll quote inline:

"Newspeak is a new programming language in the tradition of Self and Smalltalk. Newspeak is highly dynamic and reflective – but designed to support modularity and security. It supports both object-oriented and functional programming.

Like Self, Newspeak is message-based; all names are dynamically bound. However, like Smalltalk, Newspeak uses classes rather than prototypes. As in Beta, classes may nest. Because class names are late bound, all classes are virtual, every class can act as a mixin, and class hierarchy inheritance falls out automatically. Top level classes are essentially self contained parametric namespaces, and serve to define component style modules, which naturally define sandboxes in an object-capability style. Newspeak was deliberately designed as a principled dynamically typed language. We plan to evolve the language to support pluggable types."

Sheesh.

Update: I know the creators of Newspeak, but am not affiliated in any way.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which project will teach me most about data structures and algorithms? - <AUTHOR> There are amazing data structures and algorithm courses out there. Many of these are mentioned in HN comments. However, as a person who feels more motivated doing an actual project (e.g. toy database, toy computer graphics engine or toy compiler) I wonder if anyone has a good suggestion for which project lends itself quite well for a data structures and algorithms course. <comment><USER2> Warning: There's a very large disparity between data structures in courses and in real life. From courses you can learn about the general ideas behind them. From successful projects you can learn how to implement them in cache-aware, low lock contention, space efficient way. It's a bit like learning about heat engines at school -vs- disassembling a modern computer-controlled-injection ICE.

If you really want to do that, check out almost any open source database. But I'd recommend starting from the courses.

</comment><comment><USER3> I recommend "Cracking The Coding Interview" ([https://amzn.to/2RjYkoG](https://amzn.to/2RjYkoG)) for the beginning. It is a good starting point.

If your are familiar with PHP, you can checkout my library based on CTCI: [https://github.com/doganoo/PHPAlgorithms](https://github.com/doganoo/PHPAlgorithms)

</comment><comment><USER4> You seem to be looking for a project bigger than what I had in mind, but try implementing Bagwell's Hash-Array mapped trie. It's a fantastic immutable data structure every programming language should have access to.

Pick a language that can call on hardware implemented popcnt.</comment>


The Problems With Collectives, Both in Development Shops and Agencies - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/rails-business/msg/d3a40792197cdc0c?hl=en

<comment><AUTHOR> A great rant IMO. I've never understood how a dev group would succeed as a collective and maybe it's because they don't.</comment>


Apple Strategy 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@scobleizer/im-inside-tim-cook-s-head-but-i-really-wonder-what-s-going-on-inside-mark-zuckerberg-s-head-5babf01c5713#.mlz44251l <comment><USER2> Isn't this drastically overestimating where the tech for all this is today?

<comment><USER3> That is decidedly the case.</comment></comment>


The state of Linux (infographic) - <AUTHOR> http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/11/05/the-state-of-linux-infographic/

<comment><USER2> most popular mint? mageia?? where did they get the data from? most popular on desktop is ubuntu, on servers debian and rh/cent.

this picture is crap and spam. flagged.

<comment><USER3> The number is likely from distrowatch.com . Yes, it is not credible. Distrowatch counts page hits, and some distros are good at getting people to click on them there for whatever reason.</comment></comment>