Apple Teases Upcoming Space Gray iMac Pro, "the most powerful Mac ever" - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/05/apple-teases-upcoming-space-gray-imac-pro-the-most-powerful-mac-ever/ <comment><USER3> Gonna leave this here from the official press release as it seems quite a few people have missed this point:

"In addition to the new iMac Pro, Apple is working on a completely redesigned, next-generation Mac Pro architected for pro customers who need the highest- end, high-throughput system in a modular design, as well as a new high-end pro display."

[https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/imac-pro-most- powerfu...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/06/imac-pro-most-powerful-mac- arrives-december/)

Also, I want that black keyboard!

<comment><USER4> That is just confusing. There will be a modular Mac Pro that is totally different from this iMac Pro? That leaves me to wonder who exactly this iMac Pro is targeted at.

<comment><USER5> I'm sure there are still professionals who would prefer pre-packaged solutions. Sure, many prefer being able to continually upgrade and add to their setups as well.

Just a different kind of sub-market, I think.

<comment><USER6> how is a mac pro not a pre-packaged solution? You choose from a few pre- configured setups if you wish.

<comment><USER7> In that the iMac displays are some of the best in the industry in a very competitive price (competitive displays cost nearly the same for the display alone).

<comment><USER4> The biggest problem is that the effective lifespan of a good display is much longer than a high performance computer. Even ignoring the compromises made to the computer to allow for the two to be merged, you are simply wasting money upgrading the monitor every time the computer needs to be upgraded. By attaching the two together this machine is even less practical to upgrade than the old trashcan Mac Pro.

<comment><USER8> Yup. I bought the 30" ACD in 2006. It's still running fine now, though a bit of image retention is creeping in.

<comment><USER7> Well, not the best argument for monitor's staying power.

Compared to 2006's ACD, new monitors have bigger brightness, better saturation, far wider color gamut, better viewing angles, AND double+ the resolution.

<comment><USER8> In today's world of disposable gear, I think lasting over 11 years is pretty darn good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'm a sheep but I think it's great. Up to 128GB ECC, up to 18 cores, large NVMe SSDs with up to 3GB/s speeds (likely reads, but probably also writes), and it's in that beautiful grey / black. Really cool. The 8-core model at 5k seems reasonable to me since the monitor is likely 2k itself.

You'll probably see a lot of them being bought for upper eschelon developers at hip startups. And the TCO of a mac vs. a beige box PC is said to be much lower by way of lower incidents of issues, failures, etc.

Edit: the one processor e5 16xx chip is less than a grand. That changes the value proposition of the iMac pro but if I had the cash I'd still get one.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, if I had that kind of money stuffed between my couch, I'd totally buy it. I don't care that it's a ridiculous machine and that single thread performance with that 18-core monster won't be anything to write home about. I still want it, because it is awesome.

<comment><USER9> I agree. I think the sweet spot for my workload (not encoding much video just compiling stuff) the 8-core model with higher clocks makes more sense for me.

<comment><USER11> "Finally, you can `npm install` in mere minutes!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is Apple's answer to their negligence to the Pro market, and it's hugely disappointing.

The iMac was already supposed to be a Pro machine. And then they "New Coke"'d it by making it too thin and susceptible to overheating. Performance suffered and now they're compensating with this machine.

At $5000 the iMac Pro falls just short of a ~$2000 Hackintosh. It's still locked into the thin form factor that can't be upgraded and does not vent heat well enough. I'm sure this works for big companies like Disney where machines are replaced every few years. However as a developer, a Pro user, I've never felt more validated in my choice to switch away from Apple's hardware.

<comment><USER13> If it's an 8-core Xeon, it's gotta be an E5. So the CPU alone could run $2,000 (pricing for E5 2667 v4, this probably uses an equivalent Skylake Xeon which isn't out yet).

<comment><USER14> Intel has just priced it's 18-core i9-7900X at 2K.

<comment><USER15> You do realise Xeons are a completely different range with different price points right?

<comment><USER14> Yes, I have Xeons in my WS. The reason why many people ended up buying Xeons for the desktop is core count -- i7 had 6, then 8 cores until recently, so a 10-18 core workstation could only be built with Xeons. The other difference is ECC, which most of the people don't necessarily want (let's not talk about whether they need it or not).

If a developer/pro/etc. need 18 cores, most of the time they'll be OK with a top-end i7 -- I think. Therefore it is fair to compare Xeons with i7s, they're not the same but yes, they have overlapping target audience when it comes to desktops.

<comment><USER16> > If a developer/pro/etc. need 18 cores, most of the time they'll be OK with a > top-end i7 -- I think.

Not if they need ECC RAM - and if you've got enough professional stuff to fill 128GB of RAM, you really, really need ECC RAM.

<comment><USER17> Ryzen 7: eight cores, ECC support, unbeatable pricing.

(No 128 GB RAM but you're not getting that with a desktop i7 either. Oh and the new HEDT platform that also has "i7"s… not all chips will support quad channel RAM!)

<comment><USER16> In context, I'm not sure I understand your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not very hard to release the "most powerful Mac ever" when you haven't updated your top of the line for 4 years.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm disappointed they chose "pretty" over a "functional" metal box like the old Mac Pros. They ran into thermal issues with the fancy design of the trash can, despite their promises of cutting edge thermal design. These iMac Pros are probably going to be soldered-CPU, soldered-RAM beasts with low repairability.

It's a bit of a small victory that they support external GPUs, but I think they are missing the boat here.

<comment><USER20> This is the stopgap. They said there'll be a real Pro in 2018.

<comment><USER21> Then why should anyone buy this one?

<comment><USER22> It is available earlier, and perhaps, with those "power" upgrades, it does the job for a large part of the audience. The iMac is a really great computer for all, who don't need to exchange components. Now with real workstation class power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How is this not another Trashcan Mac Pro? It is a beautiful, expensive device at launch but has no capability of being upgraded, expanded or experimented with. It looks to have same thermal conundrum as the trashcan needing to dissipate the heat of the screen - all while trapped in a consumer-level shell designed specifically for exterior looks at the cost of performance. Is it not just philosophically incorrect for the pro market?

And compared to the enthusiasm for their iOS here, the pro customer is clearly no longer of value to Apple.

<comment><USER15> > How is this not another Trashcan Mac Pro?

In that it's not a Mac Pro at all. They have (uniquely) pre-announced a tower- style Mac Pro for "not this year"[0] back in April: [https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives](https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives)

[0] and given how precise their wording was, it's not necessarily 2018 either.

<comment><USER24> It's pretty obvious that decision was made when this product was almost complete and this product was supposed to replace the entire Mac Pro line.

Obviously something changed their minds though.

<comment><USER23> Huh, that's an interesting thought.

Imagine Cupertino had (nearly) finished designing this sleek machine, thought it was a wonderful answer to refresh their Mac Pro, then they get completely railed in January for failing to provide professionals a pro machine when they expected it. They're late, they know it, but no biggie - they'll introduce this pro machine this summer and everyone will love it.

The pros then proceed to articulate exactly what their grievances are, and the machine that is sitting under the black cloth in the back room looks _nothing_ like what their most loyal users are hurting for. And if listened to closely, the machine that's mostly finished is actually an insult to their most valuable customers. What do you do in that case? Completely scrap the beautiful machine you've already made? Or eat (silent) crow and promise a completely new product that you start working on _tomorrow_ , and tell the engineers who were working on their pet dream computer to quickly finish up - let it be introduced mid-keynote by a non-executive, go back and painfully re- etch a diminutive 'i' in on each of the just-printed 'Mac Pro' bezels - <USER2> to never recoup their R&D costs on this 'lost' product.

That's a good point. I bet that's exactly what happened here. Because if Cook would have given this exact keynote, but had introduced this grey iMac as their 'next new thing' that was _replacing_ the Mac Pro, he'd have been booed off his own stage during Apple's most sacred moment. Apple had enough sense to avoid that moment. They have enough cash to produce an entire (temporary) product line that loses money. They _don 't_ have enough cash to lose their most die-hard and influential customers en masse and hear a crowd of 'boos' at the height of their hallowed keynote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg To all of you who're disappointed by this not being a "proper Pro":

"4x larger L2 cache" and "2x wider AVX" suggest they're going to use the upcoming i9 X-series chips [1] that are based on Skylake design with ~15% better instructions-per-clock (IPC) performance than Broadwell-based Xeons, plus they'll clock much higher than Xeons too: with turbo boost up to 4.5Ghz for even the 10-core model!. Quad channel DDR4 at 2666Mhz is also an improvement.

All this promises a much better single-thread performance vs the current Pro line. IMO that's insane amount of power, it can even probably handle Slack desktop client! :)

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/11464/intel-announces- skylakex...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/11464/intel-announces-skylakex- bringing-18core-hcc-silicon-to-consumers-for-1999)

<comment><USER25> With ECC support, these are almost certainly Xeons, not Skylake-X.

<comment><USER17> They literally said "Xeon" on stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> @dang @sctb Dupe detection just killed my iMac Pro submission with an Apple URL after it reached over 60 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14491068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14491068)

Perhaps a thread merge is in order? Official links tend to always be preferred for Apple announcements, hence my posting it. Sorry if I caused any extra work! :)

It's worth noting that dupe detection also killed off _salimmadjd_ 's submission linking to the hyphenated product URL (mine is just the non- hyphenated Apple redirect to that same URL).

</comment><comment><USER27> Keep in mind, that this sits between the iMac and the Mac Pro. A new iteration of the actual Mac Pro is expected in 2018.

</comment><comment><USER28> Given the support for major gaming engines, Steam VR, and changes within Metal 2, is it wrong to be optimistic for Mac gaming?

If the takeaway from this WWDC could be potential gaming parity with Windows, that's a really big deal for me. Me being the segment of Pro users who need to work on a Mac and want to game natively on one, too.

<comment><USER29> Optimism would be warranted if they announced Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5 and a commitment to update their product line with new internal GPUs more frequently and at reasonable prices. Thunderbolt 3 has less than half the bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0 x16 so that's a lame solution for GPU upgradability.

<comment><USER17> GPUs don't really use the whole 3.0 x16 bandwidth, x8 is enough. It is sad that they didn't drop Metal in favor of Vulkan, yeah.

<comment><USER30> I think some do now... And even if they do not, they will in the near future!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It is interesting that they have gone this direction, since Pros were clearly asking for something more akin to the cheese gater. The price for the entry- level model is also pretty bad.

It's also a shame that the Mac Mini seems to be dead (at least no updates in the keynote).

At least the MacBook and iMac line got nice bumps.

<comment><USER32> _> It's also a shame that the Mac Mini seems to be dead (at least no updates in the keynote)._

Yeah which is really too bad. I bet there's a larger market for a "Mac Mini Pro" with similar specs to this iMac, but without the integrated display (and hefty price premium Apple exerts).

I seriously don't understand how Apple supposedly have time to design an advanced cooling system for the iMac Pro yet can't come up with a bog-standard cheese grater case like the previous Mac Pro design...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> From what pro users wanted - this makes it worse, not better.

<comment><USER34> Atleast it's a relatively powerful all apple option. Earlier we'd have to go for a hackintosh, which is a no go in many professional environments.

Still not good enough tho - it's not upgradeable.

<comment><USER33> It would be a great thing if screen was a cintiq, like Surface. This.. it feels like a stopgap - expensive one at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I don't think an equivalent PC really costs $7000 USD....

<comment><USER36> A Dell Precision 7000 will set you back US$3000 at a configuration similar to the iMac Pro. Add a good 27" 5K display, PCI-based SSD and you are close to US$ 6000 with a GPU that's a generation behind.

And it comes with Windows. Nobody deserves that.

<comment><USER35> Wait, but Dell Precision 7000 is a laptop? you can't compare with a desktop. I just built a good gaming PC that can be overclocked including a GTX 1080 for just $2300 (monitor excluded).

I'm sure with $4700 more it's possible to get something still better than this new imac pro.. yet with a good cooling system and upgradable at any time.

edit: $2300 INCLUDING 15% taxes

<comment><USER36> Sorry, the Precision 7000 is the "Fixed workstation".

You'll probably can get something with higher performance, but it'll probably also take up more space, generate more heat and make more noise. It'll also demand more time to select the components and assemble it. If you enjoy doing it, OK. If you don't, your time is more expensive than the difference.

I selected a Dell because I want a single phone number to call when something goes wrong.

<comment><USER35> You're right about that, I installed 6 fans on the computer case alone and it can be noisy at times, but I'm happy with what I'm getting and I can upgrade later.

This is for desktop, for laptops I might still go with apple however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It will be awesome if the Space Gray keyboard/mouse are only available with the iMac Pro and not independently. Then they'll be must-haves :-)

</comment><comment><USER38> Hrm.. Folks here keep acting like this means Apple still doesn't get the Pro market (or that there _is_ still a pro market).. This really seems to me to be a "what can we get out sooner" product released as a stopgap to next year's preannounced new Mac Pro. I suppose it's still valid to fault them for the reality of their product line and for having gotten themselves into this position in the first place, but I think it's pretty clear that this is _not_ Apple's actual attempt to fully pent-up demand for a good traditional workstation from Apple.

<comment><USER24> >This really seems to me to be a "what can we get out sooner"

Feels the opposite to me, feels like they've considered this the Mac Pro killer. But then at the last minute back at the start of the year realised there was still a place for a Mac Pro.

Probably because this solves none of the real issues with the last Mac Pro.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apple's own product page is online now with a lot more information [https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/](https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Not a Mac user but do they ever release a top-end product that was less powerful than last year's top-end product? If not hasn't ever top-end mac ever been the most powerful mac ever?

<comment><USER40> MacMini 2013' are better than a new one.

<comment><USER41> You mean 2012 (Macmini6,x), right? The last of the quad-cores.

<comment><USER40> Yes, thank you for clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> They wouldn't need this rushed excuse for a 'Pro' machine if they hadn't totally taken their eyes off the MacPro for the last 3+ years!

It's like they woke up one day and realised 'oh crap people are pissed and when we asked them why we were surprised that we have upset customers because we haven't updated this MacPro thingy in a few years' and then Tim Cook must have decreed 'let's get SOMETHING out there to stop the masses turning out with pitchforks!'

Really should never have come to this.

<comment><USER43> I can't tell if you're being snarky or serious, but 1) the thermal dissipation on a 12-core (or is it 18? I forget) Xeon and a GPU like that is nuts, to fit that into an iMac must have taken years, and 2) you know that Apple prefers all-in-ones and has been wanting to take the industry in this direction for years.

I'd prefer a new version of the cheesegrater too but to suggest that they rushed this together is ludicrous. If anything, it's another reason why the Mac Pro got neglected for so long.

<comment><USER42> Here's the rub: people who actually buy Xeon CPUs and high-end GPUs want those parts to be replaceable and upgradeable. It's why the G5 MacPro lasted as long as it did, and why the 2013 MacPro was comparatively a straightjacket!

If Apple are targeting the same demographic then they're in for another public backlash. Sticking all this high-end gear into a sealed $5k device is baffling. Make no mistake, this iMac Pro will be another 'Pro' product that's put out into the market and forgotten about for a few years.

It also did not take Apple 'years' to come up with this - while it probably existed as a concept for a while I am convinced they started focussing on it after the grumbling about lack of MacPro updates. Otherwise why wait until December to release it.

<comment><USER43> Yes and no. I'm like you and I agree that this is not the computer for us.

This is a computer for Pixar artists. This is for some architects I know that do very technically demanding renders but shouldn't be trusted swapping out their own gpus. One can be a "Pro" and be qualified to or care about internals, and money is no object.

The problem isn't that computers like this exist, it's that our needs were misjudged. They acknowledged that a couple months ago, and the product is coming. Meanwhile it's dumb to deny that a market exists for Pro all-in-ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm still using my Mac Pro from 2008 and a still older 30" cinema display. I really need a new set up but so far I've not found the iMac or Mac Pro offerings really compelling.

I'm not really sure I want to sign up for an all in one design because displays are often useful for much longer than workstations and the last generation of Mac Pro didn't really seem like they were worth the cost.

</comment><comment><USER45> Still no OpenGL 4.5 support?

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm watching this iMac announcement and .. hm, I still find it underwhelming. The top-spec'd iMac will be less powerful (when it comes to CPU) in Jan/2018 than my current desktop I bought in mid-2015. We'll see the actual pricing though.

I don't think that forcing high-perf components into a small desktop chassis makes a lot of sense, but it might me only me.

<comment><USER46> For starting at 5k the pricing requires a bank loan for most people when you could pick up a refurbished desktop for $300-400

<comment><USER47> I bought a suit from Goodwill for $50 in uni. Doesn't mean there isn't a market for more expensive suits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I hope they sell the dark peripherals separately.

</comment><comment><USER49> $5K for a machine that's still tied to their display. I have a large display I already love, and no room on my desk for anything else.

I suppose there's a market for this - Probably Disney or related shops. But there's no way I would blow $5K on this. That's just insane.

Maybe the Mac Pro will be more worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER50> No Touch Bar on the keyboard.

Let's hope that is a sign they will do away with it on the MacBook "Pro" as well.

</comment><comment><USER51> If you need and cares about Display Quality, the Pricing for these iMac and iMac Pro are surprisingly attractive. I have yet to see anyone deliver 21" 4K Screen at a reasonable price. And all the listed spec for iMac Display aren't simply best in the industry apart from OLED.

</comment><comment><USER52> Okay, this is just bad. The memory cannot be upgraded by the user. [https://twitter.com/9to5mac/status/871852155455537152](https://twitter.com/9to5mac/status/871852155455537152)

</comment><comment><USER53> I think this is the first time Apple has advertised the specific GPU vendor and product line in their product since... the powerbook maybe? I might have missed out on a few examples. Vega must be really something.

<comment><USER17> They always listed the GPU for everything, down to "Intel Iris Pro whatever". But yeah, Vega hype train!

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> "The most powerful Mac ever" \- what kind of tech company would release a new product that's worse than the previous one?

Apple's Unnecessary superlatives are tiring.

</comment><comment><USER55> Any idea about what nCU (New Compute Unit) is? Was listed as one of the new features of the iMac Pro.

<comment><USER56> That's a feature of the graphics card, AMDs new Vega GPU architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I hope this isn't the "Mac Pro successor" Apple was alluding to earlier this year...

<comment><USER15> No it's not, in April they both talked about a modular Mac Pro which would ship "not this year" (the iMac Pro is slated to ship in December), and they did specifically refer to this iMac Pro:

> "great" new iMacs in the pipeline, slated for release "this year", including > configurations specifically targeted at large segments of the pro market.

[https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives](https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well, atleast it has a VESA mount?

</comment><comment><USER58> How is the Radeon Vega going to be used for machine learning without framework support?

<comment><USER59> [https://streamhpc.com/blog/2016-12-15/amd-gets-machine- intel...](https://streamhpc.com/blog/2016-12-15/amd-gets-machine-intelligence- mi-range-hardware-software/)

"AMD will be delivery HIP version of Caffe, Tensorflow, Torch7, MxNet, Theano, CNTK, Chainer, all supporting our new MIOpen – our new Deep Learning solver."

<comment><USER58> Theyve been saying "will" for a long while now. I'll believe it once they post the github link but expect there to be a long wait

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Is this the VR-capable one?

<comment><USER60> Honestly, I have no clue why I got downvoted. I was genuinely asking. People keep talking about the VR Apple computer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Space isn't gray?

</comment><comment><USER62> "As you'd expect from a pro machine, there are plenty of high-speed ports to create a high-performance workstation."

haha, except for your Macbook Pro.

</comment><comment><USER63> Wait wait wait... the last thing I want as a "Pro" is a single monitor. Feels like Apple is just repeatedly telling me to go somewhere else.

<comment><USER17> They showed TWO external 5K displays, so up to three 5K monitors total

<comment><USER63> They won't line up cleanly. I'm left with a desk that looks all cobbled together.

This is another "pro" in name-only machine I suspect. The fact that it's an all-in-one implies to me that I can't upgrade any part of it.

I don't want an all-in-one... I want a computer, with upgradable parts, and at least two monitors that match -- preferably the can use the same stand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I am so happy I switched to Windows, ha! My 7048A supermicro is running double E5-2650 (2x 10 cores) with 1TB ram, quadro P4000 and it was around 5000$ (not counting displays, which I had).

<comment><USER65> No one runs a Mac because they just want powerful hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I just can't believe they chose the 18-core 2018 Intel vaporware chip [1] over this year's 16-core AMD Threadripper. Very strange decision on Apple's part. Not to mention they could've sold the iMac Pro for like $1,000 less.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWFzWRoVNnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWFzWRoVNnE)

<comment><USER67> 18 core Xeon chips have been available for 3+ years. There is nothing particularly odd about Apple's choice -- AMD has not been a serious competitor in the workstation market for years, and even with their newest entrant are only nipping at the very bottom of the market.

<comment><USER15> Also, no Thunderbolt from AMD.</comment></comment></comment>


Google looking different suddenly - <AUTHOR>

It switched on me about a minute ago.
Search results: http://imgur.com/nhKBv.png
Home page: http://imgur.com/XHhMk.png <comment><USER2> They have been testing variations of this lately.</comment>


Woman takes 70k federal student loans in 2008, pays total of 60k, still owes 70k - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/lacymjohnson/status/1204963358266593280 <comment><USER2> $70k at 6% is $350/mo -- if you only pay $350/mo, you're gonna have this story to tell I guess...

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of people are talking about this but no one will do anything about it.

It's fun to get outraged and all. But how do we actually change it?

This is one reason I actually really like code camps. I got my bachelor's kicking and screaming because I knew most of the stuff I was learning was completely irrelevant. These code camps cut right through all the bullshit. In fact nowadays maybe you would question the intelligence of somebody who got a four-year degree to become a programmer?

<comment><USER4> 1) Free college tuition for anyone who wants it, along the lines of what Germany does.

2) Cancel existing student debt up to, say, $50K. (Eg, see Warren's plan)

3) Start treating trade schools as an equally worthy pathway as a college, and stop promoting the myth that college is the best way to succeed in life.

4) Organize actual trade schools for software development, with accreditation, full-time staff, etc. Again, with free tuition (and again, see Germany's V.E.T. programs - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system) ).

There are many pathways through life, and 'programming' is a wide topic. I can think of any number of programming careers where a four-year degree would be useful. Foremost are those who want to write software for specific field, where knowledge of that field is essential. I imagine it's much harder to write something like Mathematica without a pretty deep background in mathematics, and getting a mathematics degree is likely to help more than going to a code camp.

Replace "Mathematica" with "quantum chemistry" or "aerodynamics" or "astrophysics" any number of other topics.

Or, perhaps someone, you know, wants to be a programmer but is interested in other topics as well so wants a broader education instead of a deeper one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like the financing of education is messed up.

I also worry about these tragic stories where adults took irresponsible actions and they're simply cast as victims.

I don't like the system or the problem... I'm not sure I see the problem as starkly as some do....

<comment><USER6> > adults took irresponsible actions and they're simply cast as victims.

This is an extremely optimistic definition of adult, no? I didn't go to school in the US, but if I had I imagine I would have been under 18 while applying to college and applying for student loans.

You could argue that the students are adults in their later college years, but it being the "best worst choice" to graduate and continue receiving your student loan is nowhere near the same thing as having made an informed decision at the start.

<comment><USER5> Well you don't take out a loan for an entire education on day 1 so I'm not sure just 18 is when $70k happened.

But if they aren't capable of making such a decision, do we want to go down the road of saying they can't take out a loan?

<comment><USER6> I'm okay with allowing them to take out the loan, let's just not pretend it's actually done through fully informed adult consent. And if we're willing to do that, perhaps we'll decide to allow student loans to be discharged at bankruptcy, which they currently aren't.

<comment><USER5> I feel like the bankruptcy option would simply lead to the logical choice of declaring bankruptcy after college...and the collapse of any loan system.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NASA just made all the scientific research it funds available for free - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-just-made-all-the-scientific-research-it-funds-available-for-free <comment><AUTHOR> Here is the new research portal: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/funder/nasa/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/funder/nasa/)</comment>


These 10 cities have the most Pokemon Go-obsessed people - <AUTHOR> https://www.redfin.com/blog/2016/07/cities-with-the-most-pokemon-go-obsessed-people.html <comment><USER2> Phoenix doesn't surprise me... know too many people going out into "hell on earth" summer heat to play that game... Tempe Town Lake in particular is pretty full of them. It's an interesting phenomena. It might be more interesting to me, as a game in mid October when it cools off a bit.

I'm curious how more remote locations fare.</comment>


Severely deficient autobiographical memory in healthy adults (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839321500158X <comment><USER2> Personally, I have terrible autobiographical memory. I have no concept of the sequence of events as I recall them. For example, I know my father flew in to meet my fiance at the time, but I'm not sure what season it was, and for that matter I'm not even sure what year it was. I have to be constantly reminded by my wife about my important life events. I never thought I had a poor "memory" until my wife started to bring it up.

Curiously, this (self perceived) ailment has not hindered my ability to do well in academia and work. Once I learn a fact, I'll remember it forever - random details from senior chemistry class are still fresh in my mind. I believe it has something to do with my inability to record the sequence of memories, rather than my ability to recall them.

Edit: Hopefully SDAM gets further investigation. If people are wondering what I've learned to do to cope with this deficiency, I've got some recommendations

\- Learn to build habits - it's difficult to remember promises that you make to yourself and to others; but habits will stick forever.

\- Keep a calendar - for everything.

\- Take physical pictures of excursions and life events, and date them

<comment><USER3> That sounds normal to me. Maybe I also have a terrible autobiographical memory. But maybe your wife just has an exceptionally good memory?

<comment><USER4> It took me until my mid 20s to realize something was wrong with me. I have a few impressions here and there from my past but can only roughly order any of it and mostly it's just _gone_ , by a day or two later.

Probably why my most dreaded assignment every single year in elementary school was "write about what you did over the break" or "write about a fun time that [something from your past]". I'd struggle with those for _way_ longer than was intended. Not kidding, hardest schoolwork I had K-5. Occasionally things like that would still come up in later grades but by then I'd figured out I could just make up most of it and no-one would care, which solved the problem.

<comment><USER5> You do seem to have a pretty good memory of those assignments from school though, especially if it goes back to kindergarten.

<comment><USER4> I remember the general phenomenon. I couldn't tell you about any one of them in particular. That's about how my memory works.

"Oh that was totally a thing, yeah, I feel this way about it."

"Oh neat, can you tell me about a time that happened?"

"Um. No, not a single detail nor do I have any certainty when or how many times it may have happened. More than one I think? A half dozen? Over... years? Starting... youngish?"

Trying to conjure up something relevant I get an _incredibly_ impressionistic snapshot of I think some desks. Row? Pod? Dunno. It's... sunny? That's 100% of what I've got. No people or other objects are present. Just a splatter of colors that may be some desks in some configuration.

The only memories I _used_ to have in any detail were ones where I'd done something bad (I had a perhaps too-well tuned sense of "bad" for a kid, mind, though fortunately that also meant I didn't do bad things that much) and that's only because I'd spend like an hour cataloguing and re-living and ruminating over all of them every. Single. Night. Those are almost entirely gone now too, as I managed to break myself of that years ago.

It's really sad now that I have kids. Mostly I just try not to think about how I'm _kinda sorta_ more dead than most people, in a sense, even as I live. If not for the fact that being clever is so valuable to my family (as in it pays the bills) I'd trade a bit of that for a somewhat better autobiographical memory without hesitation.

I tried to hold on to a couple vivid memories of my kids when they were very young by re-playing them a few times a day, but I slipped too many times and those are mostly gone too. Kept one semi-intact for a year or two, which is really good for me. There's a bit left, but not much. I don't even remember what the others were at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always had an extremely bad memory, paired with behaviors that probably don't help at all. I have always thought (non-scientific, highly subjective text ahead) that a big part of the problem (the behavioral side) is that I never talk about the events of my life with others. I'm highly asocial, and even when I end up explaining something, I hate to repeat the same stories twice. I use alarms and calendars for everything. I've come to think that a big problem for my memory is precisely the fact that I never reinforce previous memories, I never link or associate them to new memories (for example, of myself reviving the memories when explaining them to other people). So, there's no repetition, and they kinda fade away sooner than later. The more disconnected the memories remain, the harder it becomes to recall them.

<comment><USER7> > _I have always thought (non-scientific, highly subjective text ahead) that a > big part of the problem (the behavioral side) is that I never talk about the > events of my life with others._

I've had the same hunch. I think some memories need repeating so that you can continue remembering them. Most of the memories that I have from my early childhood are ones that I think about once in a while. I had three serious falls with a skateboard before the age of 7, but I only remember the worst of the falls. It's the one I always thought of when I was reminded of those falls (broke a tooth, so any time I look in the mirror I might be reminded of it). At this point I only remember that I did fall before the worst one and I remember the extent of my injuries, but I don't even remember the specific place of it.

<comment><USER8> > I think some memories need repeating so that you can continue remembering > them. Most of the memories that I have from my early childhood are ones that > I think about once in a while.

I think this is exactly true. And for example if someone else is involved in the memory and you relate it to them they wonder 'how did you remember that it happened X years ago??'. But as you say it's that every now and then (at least with me) you have thought about it and reinforced the memory. The other person has not typically. Which is why they are surprised that you remember the event. So yes you 'remind' yourself I think this is true from what I experience as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "inability to vividly recollect personally experienced events from a first- person perspective"

I don't understand that... There is no perspective to my memories of events, they're just things I know happened.

For instance, I went for a run this morning. I know where I went, I know what the weather was like, etc. Am I supposed to be able "vividly recollect" like some sort of imaginary first-person shooter?

<comment><USER10> It's not a matter of "supposed to", but yes, that's part of the capability that is being discussed.

There seem to be a couple of different dimensions of variation in how human memory and imagination work. One is what is discussed here: the ability to "vividly" reconstruct remembered events "from a first-person perspective". Apparently, some people can do it, and others cannot. Presumably, there's a range of abilities in between.

At one end of the spectrum are people with hyperthymesia, who appear to be able to instantly reconstruct every tiny detail, including visual details from a first-person perspective, of everything they've ever experienced. At the other end are people like those discussed in this article.

Another dimension is how vividly and comprehensively people can construct, manipulate, and experience sensory models in their imaginations. Again, the spectrum seems to run from aphantasia at one end (that's the inability to construct mental imagery at all) to someone like Stephen Wiltshire, who appears to have an eidetic visual memory that enables him to draw large, detailed landscapes with roughly photographic accuracy after briefly seeing a scene a single time.

People with aphantasia generally seem to assume that when others describe mental imagery, they are being metaphorical; that they don't mean that they actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. Contrariwise, I do actually experience mental imagery in a literal sense. In my late teens I became fascinated with a series of exercises devised by Aleister Crowley, in which you practice constructing increasingly elaborate assemblies of colorful 3D shapes moving in different ways. The goal was to see how many shapes you could manage at once and keep all of the shapes, colors, textures, and movement patterns stable for as long as possible.

I assume an aphantastic person would think Crowley was joking or bullshitting, until they learned that some people can indeed construct and manipulate detailed mental images.

Further complicating the subject, we also know from experiments in psychology of perception that the brain tends to edit memories, altering their content over time. I'd be interested to know how this tendency interacts with the variables mentioned above.

I'm somewhere in the middle on both axes discussed above. I experience memories in the first person, and I remember and dream in color. When navigating, I rely on a 3D model of where I am and where I'm going, and if asked to go somewhere I haven't been before, I want to see a map that I can use to refresh and supplement that mental model.

By contrast, my mother navigates procedurally. She wants a sequence of operations to perform: "turn right here; go a certain distance looking for such and such a building,..." and so on. I _can_ navigate that way, but I find it much more difficult and error-prone than just constructing the 3D model. From what my mother says, I'm not sure she can construct a model like that at all.

Signs of the difference show up in, for example, the kind of information each of us wants when being directed to a new place. She wants detailed step-by- step instructions; I want coordinates in space and some identifying information (like the street address) to confirm when I've arrived at the right place. She will follow directions to the letter. I'll just pick a route that points in the right direction and improvise until I'm close enough to look for the confirming data.

<comment><USER11> For most of my adult life, I've felt that I have a problem with my memory. I cannot recall much of my past life. I can know things happen, and there are a few circumstances that I can recall visually. The visual recollections are retrieved as a series of photos, not like a video.

A few years ago, I discovered that I had a vitamin B12 deficiency. B12 is a contributor to memory, so I was hopeful that by clearing up the deficiency, my memory would improve. I'd have to say I don't think so, but it's a pretty subjective question. At least, I can say it was not dramatic, if improved at all.

Otherwise, I am quite introverted, on the spectrum. I focus on my thoughts much more than what is going on around me, and that strikes me as a more likely cause. The events are not imprinted because I am not paying attention.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty much in the same boat.

I have an experiment for you. If you listen to podcasts regularly while doing other stuff, pull one up that you've listened to in the past 3-5 days and listen to it again. When I do this, I will periodically get a stream of _vivid_ movies of what I was doing when I listened to it the first time. I'm talking an intrusive replay of the sensory experience I was having previously.

My next step is to fire up a dash cam and listen to podcasts while I'm driving, then re-listen a few days later and record myself describing what I see as I'm listening. Then sync the two videos and see how close my description is describing what I saw the first time.

<comment><USER13> When I was a teenager I used to read (fictional) books while listening to music at the same time.

For years afterwards listening to the same music would make my mind imagine events in the books I was reading listening to the same music. I'm not sure exactly when it stopped happening though.

<comment><USER14> Final Fantasy 4 and Stairway to Heaven are inextricably linked in my mind for a similar reason.

<comment> o-__-o For me it's Stunts and Bone Thugs n Harmony, E. 1999 Eternal. Listened to that CD on repeat building tracks on an IBM ps/2 as a kid.

Also Biggie's Warning and anything Visual Basic 3.0. I don't know why

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of a line from David Lynch's "Lost Highway" when the character is asked why he doesn't like video recordings of things in his life- "I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened."

I think deep down we are all a little like that.

<comment><USER16> Which reminds me of Ted Chiang's story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"[1] about exactly this tension.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I probably have some mild aphantasia, because my imagination doesn't usually include vivid pictures. I'm also pretty bad at graphic design and home decorating. On the other hand I do see things in dreams. And all my life even non-spatial things, like mathematical/logical/grammatical relationships, have felt like they had a spatial arrangement to them. And maybe this is something else, but I remember it wasn't until college that my own reasoning really started to feel "verbal".

Once I was reading a 20th century philosopher who was criticizing Locke and others of his time for describing knowledge or ideas as mental imagery, saying that of course it's not like we really see pictures in our heads. I wish I could remember who this was. I want to say Saussure or Deleuze. I was personally more sympathetic to Locke, but I could see this writer's point (or not, heh). It's funny to think that aphantasia has influenced philosophy.

I'm also curious what relation aphantasia has to chess-playing ability. I'm a pretty good chess player (for someone who doesn't take it seriously), but I can't see the board in my head at all. Grandmasters can play whole games blindfolded, and Magnus Carlsen has a YouTube video playing ten opponents at a time while blindfolded. I have to try really hard just to "see" a 3x3 position. I guess aphantasia makes it hard to mentally play a few moves and then stop and assess whether the new position is good for white or black, or even just notice basic tactics in it.

<comment><USER18> I think I'm in the same boat as you. I've discussed this with my spouse and we've determined that my mind's eye is pretty impaired. It's there, but just barely.

I totally agree with the "spatial arrangement" of math/logic etc, I'm a software engineer and arranging and abstracting things into their logical parts internally comes as easily as looking at component parts laid out on a table to me (although it's not really visual).

In regards to chess (I'm pretty decent at chess) I think it's like this, if you wrote a chess program, you wouldn't write it to visualize the representation of the board, you would set up variables to track state, etc. I think my "internal representations" of abstractions are just that, variables that my mind is tracking and understanding the relationships between, as easily as any other sense.

<comment><USER19> While looking for a way to explain my own aphantasia, I came across the works of Temple Grandin, a poster child of high-functioning autism. Since there is no physiological test for ASD, I believe that the following cognition types may be presented within the general audiences as well, however, they are not treated as outliers as long as their 'owners' have sufficient social skills. Thus, I suggest that you ignore autism/ASD references below:

"I have observed that there are three different specialized autistic/Asperger cognitive types. They are:

1) Visual thinkers such as I, who are often poor at algebra. 2) Verbal specialists who are good at talking and writing but they lack visual skills. 3) Pattern thinkers such as Daniel Tammet, who excel in math and music but may have problems with reading or writing composition." [1]

"<...>Chess masters think not in pictures or words, but are good in recognizing patterns. Pattern thinking is a more abstract form of visual thinking; thoughts are in patterns instead of photo-realistic pictures. Pattern thinkers see patterns and relationships between numbers. Some of the best descriptions are in Daniel Tammet's book Born on a Blue Day (Tammet 2006) and in Jerry Newport's book Mozart and the Whale (Newport et al. 2007). The weak areas in pattern thinkers is usually reading and writing composition." [1]

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/07/05/research- shows...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/07/05/research-shows-three- distinct-thought-styles-in-people-with-autism/#2f406ae5221e)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Presumably 'deficient' here is a term of art rather than something pejorative.

Given how poorly people perform at recollecting personally experienced events - as evidenced by fascinating phenomena like false memories - it seems highly likely that the memories are not stored in any particularly robust way.

It may well be normal to access memories similarly to watching a film but there is no reason to believe that is efficient. It is probably a crutch like sounding words out mentally when reading. The fast way is not going to be the visual way, in the same way that fast reading is not done verbally.

I have a well developed minds eye, but it normally sees the world more like a cartoon than a vivid image. Works great for a lot of practical tasks though. There will be an absurd amount of variation out there.

<comment><USER21> >Presumably 'deficient' here is a term of art rather than something pejorative.

"Deficient" means lacking, there is no presumption that lacking is a negative thing. These three individuals seem to be living normal, productive lives while being deficient.

<comment><USER22> Few hours ago there was link to article about quantum supremacy claims and one person commented how supremacy might be problematic word.

> The usage of the word "supremacy" is probably the primary thing that rubs > people the wrong way. When I first heard of it myself, it did feel a little > strange.

What is going on?

<comment><USER21> Words have multiple meanings, that can often be similar and context matters a lot. The press often uses this fact to sensationalize stories, while a scientific community may have a very specific definition in mind when using those words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If SRS software has taught me anything, it's that memory is reenforced when recalled.

If you don't have anyone to talk with and share your memories (or perhaps you don't find them important enough to think about), you're going to forget them.

I wonder if they found a correlation between introverts and extroverts here. Because I'd almost certainly peg this phenomenon on that.

</comment><comment><USER24> I just came back from Milan and while I can recollect certain situations and pictures, by no means I can "play" my memory as if it was happening to me.

Real experience has so much details compared to memory that I always tend to doubt that my memories are accurate.

On top of that, if you have repetitive schedule I can't imagine you can recreate specifics of particular day. You probably reconstruct the situation filling in your image of familiar places with peculiarities of situation you are trying to remember

</comment><comment><USER25> Flip side: Total recall: the people who never forget

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/08/total- recall...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/08/total-recall-the- people-who-never-forget)

</comment><comment><USER26> I'll add my voice to the chorus that says this is a symptom of a more fundamental issue: aphantasia. As a card-carrying aphantasiac, I'm skeptical of the ability of most people to visualize. I recall hearing of an experiment in which people were asked to draw a bicycle from their imagination. The results were laughable, yet, no doubt, the subjects would self report that, sure, they could visualize a bicycle.

</comment><comment><USER27> This acutely describes nearly all of my childhood, up until about age ten. What little I remmeber vividly is only extremely traumatic stuff: being lost at Stanford on a game day, physical abuse by a relative, my doctor trying to explain to me what cancer was, later on a discussion of the surgery I needed, a corporal punishment episode from a teacher when I was in kindergarten. Other than things like that, I can barely remember words associated with my home and schooling and family, let alone images. Until maybe age 10.

I wonder if that's a linked phenomenon. Most people I know do not have a gap that large in the memory of their early development.

<comment><USER28> Trauma and abuse are what cause the memory issues. It's well-known in the cPTSD and narcissism recovery communities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd love to have these tests done. I have a friend from college who serves as my memory of my college experience. She can recall all manner of events and sequences of events from over a decade ago that I can't even vaguely recall. I experience memories of the long past as postcards. A few disconnected images or feelings without sequence or much context. I've always been impressed when people can remember details of times long past and I've observed almost everyone is better at it than I am.

</comment><comment><USER30> It would be interesting to analyze these abilities from the viewpoint of evolutionary adaptation.

Perhaps from the perspective of a band of proto-humans, it was highly adaptive for _some_ members of the tribe to have strong episodic memories, but not necessary for everyone.

Similarly, it was probably highly adaptive for a few members to be gifted with a structured, logical approach to problem-solving. Given the development of language, the whole tribe benefits from the specialized abilities of various members.

<comment><USER31> Except there no reason to believe one style of memory is more or less related to being a logical/structured thinker. For example visual thinkers may be better at geometry by flipping and rotating images around in their head. Feynman describes solving logical things by reducing them to simple geometric problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I feel like I have bits of my memory and perception that are good and bits that are bad. I struggle with the idea of being asked to help with a 'photo- fit', to describe the person's face and reconstruct the features like you would when describing a suspect to a police officer or sketch artist, I simply cannot recall anyone's face. I can describe build, height, hair and colour, but the face itself is blocked in my mind. I cannot recall the majority of events in my life and most that I do recall are very recent or in some way traumatic or unpleasant, even then I only remember a freeze-frame of the scenario and note the whole event. Being able to remember a sequence of events or a long period of time within the same day is limited to a very small number of memories. I cannot remember most of my childhood or anything beyond a few years ago, just tiny snippets here and there. However... I remember nearly everywhere I've ever been, like a version of map software in my brain is keeping a record. I've re-visited places I've only been to once before many years earlier and been able to navigate the entire area without fault. I can remember the configuration of the shopping malls I've been to and I can even recall where nearly all products in the local grocery store or super markets are.... I can picture these things in my mind with real clarity. This ability also means I have fantastic dreams, often in the same places which only exist in my mind. I often remember dreams by where I was or what I was doing at the time based on which location I was in. I dream in first-person while also aware of what the third person sensation/ experience would be like. I can occasionally lucid dream so I know these dreams involve colour. I cannot remember what anything smells, sounds, or tastes like. If someone asked, 'what does your favourite food taste like?' I honestly could not describe it, but I can recall the texture of it perfectly. Yet even though my few memories do not include these details, if I smell something during the day I can easily remember what that is…the same applies to hearing a tune or sound or seeing someone's face in a TV show. The memories are there but the act of actually trying to recall something simply for the purposes of attempting to remember will result in a blank….passively try and remember something by association of some other stimuli then the memory will come back easy. I worry that now my child is turning 3 years old I can only recall a handful of memories from his life so far, will this get worse? If he ever asks me what life was like when he was just a baby….what will I say?

</comment><comment><USER33> Memory is a relative new thing, eh? Before we started civilization (about 12k years ago) was there much adaptive pressure to have accurate memories of one's personal history?

As I wrote the above I remembered that many cultures (like in Australia) have oral histories that go back tens of thousands of years. Hmm...

</comment><comment><USER34> As I worked more and more, in isolation especially, time seemed to fly faster and events seemed less salient. I remember things but not as vividly as when I was 15.

I hope this isn't a normal thing that has to do with individual years being less fractionally important with age, but just the brain adapting to loneliness.

<comment><USER35> The perception of time passing faster with age is well known phenomenon. An important secondary character in the novel Catch-22 is obsessed with this. I used to think I was just impatient as a kid when ten minutes felt like forever. Now having passed 40 I can say that I was actually experiencing time very differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> For most of my life I thought of myself as smart. In my 30s now I've realized I just have an unreasonably good memory, both long term and short term recall. In other areas of intelligence I'm average.

I would bet that many of those identifying with this study are excelling in other dimensions of intelligence.

<comment><USER37> I kind of had the opposite experience. It seemed like I could figure things out quickly, but not especially remember them. Memory definitely helps, and as I got older and my brain doesn't seem to work at the same clock speed, memory helps a lot more and seems easier than figuring things out again all of the time.

So, I kind of thought of it like a computer. You can sometimes have a look-up table of pre-computed things, but if you had more processor than memory, you'd go the other direction and re-compute instead of using memory/storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Am grateful I have an autobiographical deficit. I can't imagine being one of those people who remembers every slight or bad experience. Think about those people who are still impacted by something that happened to them in school.

Of course, it could be all that skate boarding w/o a helmet.

</comment><comment><USER37> Unless they can pinpoint some underlying structural deficit in the brain, the title seems to pathologize something rather trivial. I have very low autobiographical memory because I mostly consider it a silly made up story in my head and don't pay much attention to it.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is me all the time when we go out for a few beers :)

</comment><comment><USER40> The article seems to lack a clear definition of what "autobiographical memory" means.

<comment><USER41> It is a technical term: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_memory)

Usually journal articles expect a certain common knowledge of their readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> People thinking they can view movies or don't view movies in their mind seams a bit strange to me.

The mind works like the mind works. You can describe it in different ways. If you describe your memories like they are movies often enough you will start to think of them as movies. But that is not cause they are like movies that is simply cause you believe they are like movies.

A movie is a movie, a memory is a memory, a picture is a picture, visualisations in the mind are just that visualisations in the mind noting more nothing less. You can describe things more or less accurately with metaphors, but that does not make the thing in to the metaphor you use to describe it.

<comment><USER43> I'd guess from your comment that you don't experience visualisations or memories as movies - but others, like myself, do so. This isn't a postmodern "I can imagine it like a story, or movie, or song" the memory literally appears as a movie.

<comment><USER42> If you experience your memories as a movie it can't have subjective emotions cause those are not in movies.

With that in mind you might be able to see the perspective that I have here. You are not experiencing a movie in your head. You just call it a movie cause that is something familiar that you feel is similar.

A movie is a movie, a memory is a memory.

Things are what they are. One might call things other things but that does not make them in to that other thing no mater how similar or dissimilar they might or might not be.

<comment><USER44> Have you seen Pixar's movie "Inside Out"?

If not, this is irrelevant, but if you have, you will likely recall that the film's core narrative is about memories.

All those memories are depicted as audiovisual records of events, often (literally) colored by an emotional overlay.

I think they represented them that way because most or all of the core project team shared that experience of memory.

<comment><USER42> I have seen it, it is great movie :)

I am not sure if you are trying to convince me that memories are like movies?

I mean I can describe my memories as movies to, in a way they are like movies in certain ways.

But they are not movies, they are memories, they have properties that movies don't have and movies have properties that memories don't have. They share some properties but that does not make them the same thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Female Russian founder. Should I talk in Y Combinator video? - <AUTHOR> Hello, I am a female founder from Russia, and I am looking for advice, about my video for the YCombinator application. Thank you, for helping!
Here is my challenge: I have an accent when I speak English. Not so strong, but very obviously not native. My other founder is an American, so he speaks with perfect English. (And not perfect Russian!)
In my opinion, he should talk for maybe all the video. I can say hello and give my introduction, but he should explain the startup, and all technical details.
He says my accent is not annoying, and I should also talk, because of specific domain expertise of banking. For me, it is a simple practical issue. He speaks perfectly, so why should we use me, when my pronunciation is not perfect?
I read one interview from Paul Graham, about problems with accents. I took no offense! It is 100% logical. In each case, the accent interferes with communication. It is not racism. Just a truth.
Can we agree, that it is better for the American to speak his birth tongue? Or could the application be rejected, if I am shy to speak English?
All opinions are welcome. I truly appreciate advice. <comment><USER2> I can't speak for YC applications, however day to day in my workplace I am surrounded by engineers for whom English is a second language (and, for that matter, also native speakers with strong regional accents); I also regularly interview such.

I find that speaking with an accent is generally independent of the ability to clearly, fluidly communicate, which is actually what is important.

Do you frequently find yourself pausing mid-speech to think of the term you need? Do you frequently find yourself struggling to understand idiom-laced speech? Do you frequently find yourself talking at cross purposes with people because you have used a term with a different meaning to the one you intended, or have failed to correctly understand a term they have used?

These and similar problems can represent genuine failings of communication that may become an issue. It is usually obvious partway through a discussion or interview if this sort of thing is likely to be a problem: they hinder the candidate telling you about themselves and/or answering the questions they are asked.

If you do not experience this class of problem - if you are merely concerned about unusual stress/pronunciation or similar, but do not have trouble making yourself understood, understanding your interlocutor, or speaking at a sensible rate - then I suggest you should not worry about your accent, and it would actually be to your benefit to contribute significantly to the video, in order to demonstrate that there are no significant communication issues to anyone who may otherwise be concerned.

EDIT: PG says similar things here: [http://www.paulgraham.com/accents.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/accents.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> If this were a video to market to customers or clients, I would suggest letting him speak the whole time. Because your accent might get in the way of selling the product.

But when you're applying to an accelerator, the product you're selling is your team. You're an integral part of that team, and you need to show the YC folks what they're getting with you as part of that team.

YC seems to be trying to address the gender gap in startup founding, so I don't think that being female will put you at a disadvantage. And there are plenty of other foreign founders of successful startups.

Try to relax, speak slowly and as clearly as you can, and record as many takes as you need to feel confident that you can be understood. You'll be fine.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, you should speak in the YC video.

If your startup finds any reasonable degree of success in the US (given you are applying to YC, and perhaps other accelerators in the US) you will need to speak to prospective investors, and perhaps industry or trade groups, if not consumers directly. Consider this the first the first step getting comfortable doing it, which seems to be the problem.

As far as YC and rejection, the video, in part, is supposed to give them a read on how you guys interact. Not speaking certainly limits the amount of information you give them to do that accurately.

In the context of the team and how you guys interact I recommend considering your partner's input very seriously. If he is in favor of you speaking, and there is a significant practical reason, such as specific domain experience, you have to balance your discomfort against submitting the best possible application.

There will likely be many more items such as this and it's best to confront them, fail, learn, move through them and move on.

</comment><comment><USER5> Talk. I wouldn't worry about the "accent" in the sense of vocal register or overall "sound" (which is after all _you_ ), but (in the spirit of "don't make people think") it wouldn't hurt to get a precise script of you want to say corrected to be 100% grammatically (and _idiomatically_ ) correct, with the help of a native speaker. And to try to get the pronunciation smoothed over to be as correct as you can get it, also. Then practice it enough so that it sounds perfectly natural and not forced (resting for a few days in between, to let it seep in). Basic theatrical technique, in other words.

Because there's something about talking to people in their language on level that's 100% correct (while still not trying to hide the fact that you're a foreign speaker) that somehow really impresses people and makes them want to listen to you. (Which shouldn't be too difficult for you, because going by your writing, your English is really quite good already).

</comment><comment><USER6> English is spoken by over a billion people. Many of those people, even ones who are native speakers, have accents that are nearly incomprehensible to American English speakers. There are even debates about whether some dialects of English are actually separate languages at this point.

See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_the_Englis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_the_English_language)

See also: [http://dialectsarchive.com/](http://dialectsarchive.com/)

It's completely unrealistic in today's global world to expect everyone to speak with the same accent.

Talk.

<comment><AUTHOR> With respect, is this not proving the opposite point?!

If my accent is incomprehensible to the American English speaker, it is crazy for me to talk!!!

We need to communicate. My American founder has the strongest capability, for this extremist challenge. Every second I am taking from him, is one second he is not communicating.

<comment><USER6> I obviously can't tell you how YC will respond to your video, but I find it very unlikely your accent is incomprehensible if your American cofounder said it was fine.

Here's an example from the site I linked before that I would consider completely comprehensible: [http://dialectsarchive.com/russia-5](http://dialectsarchive.com/russia-5)

This, on the other hand, is probably pushing the limits the comprehensibility: [http://dialectsarchive.com/russia-13](http://dialectsarchive.com/russia-13)

If you fall closer to the second example, then American English speakers may have trouble understanding you clearly, but if you fall closer to the first, then I can't see anyone having a legitimate problem understanding you.

But again, I'm just trying to address actual comprehensibility issues. I can't say whether YC will respond positively or negatively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't worry about it.

If you're a founder then you have something meaningful to contribute and you should speak and make yourself heard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. It's true, I have lots to contribute. It's why we are partners! But why cannot I give my information for him to read, in a video?

The video recording is only for one minute. Such a short time for communicating! We need every second. He is the most efficient.

If it was a computer algorithm, it would be stupid to use such a leaky channel, with much entropy. Why should we do the same in recording the video?

<comment><USER8> Because a YC application isn't a computer program: it's about people developing an idea. While the idea is important, the people _behind_ that idea have a _lot_ to do with whether or not that idea can be realized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Let's just be clear: it _is_ racism, but it's just the sort of naturalistic —more comfortable with what you know and like— discrimination that's subconscious and extremely hard to avoid.

One would hope an investor would be able to look past that, but when so much about pitching is already about making your audience comfortable, you'd be silly to ignore it. If your co-founder CAN do the talk and is likely to be more "familiar" to your audience, you probably want them to do more of the talking.

Also remember that it's not just who's the native speaker. I'm AWFUL at public talking and I've been speaking the bloody language for 30 years. Confidence and passion are important.

Without seeing you both pitch, I can't tell you what to do, but you could tell friends and colleagues how important this is and try to get their honest opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> How can it be racism? I am the same white race. Blonde hair, blue eyes. Just Russian. My American founder is much darker. )))))

I have much experience with formal presentation, but only in my Russian language. I have made presentations about almost one billion dollars, but always in the native Russian.

In this language, my partner has so many accomplishments. Every week, he is appearing on BBC for example, as the respect expert. For me, this pressure is so strong.

We are equals in our company. He is the hacker, I am the banker. But it does not mean we are equals, in English presentation!

<comment><USER9> I include ethnicity under the umbrella that is "racism". It's less of a mouthful than "racial and ethnic discrimination". Ethnicity and race aren't the same thing, but people treat them in very similar ways. They'll hear accents, see facial shapes, learn small details and their stereotypes take over.

But we're not here to argue about that. I don't think we're here to argue at all. You've made a clear case that he should do the pitch. I agree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just for the optics of it alone, you should speak. It might send the very wrong message if your company has a male and female co-founder and only the man talks. There are all kinds of ways this can be interpreted that aren't good. Own your space. I guarantee they've heard a lot worse, and still brought them into the YC family.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd vote for speaking. IMO it's easier to convey passion and drive in fuller communication mediums.

That said: if you're shy about speaking English, that will come through. I'd focus on that aspect first: practice speaking with force and excitement. Take videos of yourself and watch them; you're more than capable of deciding when you're ready.)

(Full disclosure: I'm biased; I like accents, and unless it's quite thick, generally have no comprehension issues.)

</comment><comment><USER11> Definitely speck on the YC video . . . I think accents are cool and you want to show off the whole team . . . be yourself and show off your domain expertise . . . don't even think about your accent, just speak clearly as you would for any recording . . . good luck with YC and your startup!

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, you should speak.

Congratulations on speaking a second language. Don't be afraid of your accent.

<comment><AUTHOR> I speak six languages! In Russia, it is not anything special!

<comment><USER13> Very old joke, but one I've always found amusing:

"What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? American!"

(And as an American who spent a few years overseas teaching English, that is _so_ true :) )</comment></comment></comment>


Visualizing the Lorentz attractor in 3D with Python and VTK - <AUTHOR> http://www.martinlaprise.info/2010/02/28/visualizing-the-lorentz-attractor-with-vtk/

<comment><USER2> This is why Python is the "web language" of choice for people doing any kind of scientific or numerical programming. Libraries really make a language for certain applications, and Python seems to have an extremely broad range.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that would be the _Lorenz_ attractor, named after Edward Lorenz.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_attractor>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_N._Lorenz>

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow … shame on me ! I did too much of special relativity :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's brilliant - I just learned about this in class a few weeks ago where we saw 2d simulations. Thanks for posting.</comment>


MIT students figure out how to make delivery-by-drone a reality - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/22/mit-students-figure-out-how-to-make-delivery-by-drone-a-reality/

<comment><USER2> This is just 'low on fuel software, lets land on this safe spot" sort of software. Somehow I would expect more from MIT.

There is software which allows quadcopter to fly even if one rotor fails: [http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/new-algorithm-can- save-a...](http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/new-algorithm-can-save-a- quadcopter-after-one-motor-prop-failure)

Also it is relatively simple to equip drone with parachute: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D8OB-t3B_c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D8OB-t3B_c)</comment>


How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/09/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-a-guide-for-non-scientists/ <comment><USER2> I have a little "hack" that I find _extremely_ helpful for getting a sense of specific research fields.

Journal articles, even review papers, are cramped for space and so tend to be very dense. The author suggests methods for doing battle with this density, but I suggest that, before doing that, you search for a class of document that's allowed to be as expansive as the author desires, and whose authors have recently struggled to learn and understand their content, and so tend to _be_ expansive:

PhD Theses

Find out what research group published the research, find out which graduate students have recently graduated from that group, and _read their theses_ (if the author's command of the language of publication isn't what you'd prefer ... find another graduate student). I guarantee you it will function much better as an introduction to what the group does than trying to parse any of their journal publications. In particular, the "draw the experiment" step will often be solved for you, with photographs, at least in the fields where I've done this.

<comment><USER3> This is _very_ good advice. I am a PhD student in mathematics, and every time I try to learn a new area of math, I'm grateful when I stumble upon PhD theses about that topic. They actually include their calculations.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, and if you _are_ actually in the field and trying to learn it (as you are and this article's intended audience is not), a nice little bonus is that PhD theses are usually formatted in a way that's very friendly to markin' 'em up as you come to grips with the material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a good guide, but I will tell you a trick that is faster, easier, and more effective:

read 2 or 3 papers.

All that effort you would put into doing these steps? Instead, read 1 or 2 other papers that the author refers to in the beginning.

Science is a conversation. When you read the other papers, even if you don't understand them at first, you will get a sense of the conversation.

Also, some writers are abysmal, and others are amazingly lucid. Hopefully one of the 3 papers you read will be the lucid one that will help you understand the other 2.

<comment><USER5> There is a huge variety in the quality of writing in scientific papers, but most of it is bad, or at least totally opaque, so I'm not sure that 3 papers will give you a sense of what is good, or even have a high probability of containing a paper that you can use as an entry point, although I think your premise is correct.

Probably the best evidence that a paper is a good entry point is whether or not the author cared about the abstract. A lot of scientists treat it as a chore, picking some key points from the premise, methodology, and conclusion sections, and haphazardly pasting them together into a miniature version of the paper. An abstract is a sketch of your argument. It's supposed to be how the author thinks about the work they are doing, in terms of how it relates to the work everyone else is doing. Look for an abstract which presents an argument in plain english and isn't afraid to give a little background or motivation. It might take dozens to find one though.

<comment><USER6> Personally I find abstracts close to useless, and just skip them entirely. I've never found a particularly close correlation between what an abstract said and how interesting/informative/well written the rest of the paper was. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love how simple and clear this post is.

As a kind of weird aside, if anyone ever emailed me about any of my journal articles, I would 100% respond to them (assuming they weren't a machine). I think most of my colleagues would do the same (except for articles featured in a newspaper, which might garner a lot of weird emails).

<comment><USER8> Me too, most especially if the email is from a student. I imagine the same goes for many of us who write research papers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Keshav's "How to Read a Paper" [1] is a good guide, though perhaps less in the "for non-scientists" camp.

[1] [http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf](http://ccr.sigcomm.org/online/files/p83-keshavA.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> > As you read, write down every single word that you don't understand. You're > going to have to look them all up (yes, every one. I know it's a total pain. > But you won't understand the paper if you don't understand the vocabulary. > Scientific words have extremely precise meanings).

That's a great tip. I've found that a lot of papers aren't necessarily complicated, but the vocabulary is unfamiliar (but you experience the same sense of confusion with both). It's interesting that we often conflate complexity with unfamiliarity, my reading comprehension abilities improved quite a bit by understanding the difference between the two.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand the opposition to abstracts: dense means high information content, so if you know the field you can learn a whole lot (like whether you should read this paper or another one).

<comment><USER12> Abstracts often are misleading.

They're useful to decide whether you should read this paper or another one, but they're often _not_ useful to get a summary of what exactly the paper actually achieves. Often the abstract will imply a more interesting result by leaving out key aspects and limitations (which are detailed in the paper and its conclusions) that significantly change the impact of the paper, the abstract often is more like an advertisement for the paper than an effective summary. I mean, it _may_ be, but if I'd read just the abstract and go away thinking, "oh, so now there's a way to do X", I'd often be wrong.

<comment><USER13> I recently read a paper whose abstract seemed to imply to me that its content was much more technical and specific than it actually turned out to be, which was disappointing. It was more useful in telling you the particular area of research than summarising its content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh this is awesome, well presented and clear.

A couple of notes, generally if you email the author of a paper they will send you a copy. Scholar.google.com can be used to evaluate the other papers referenced, highly cited ones will be 'core' to the question, less highly cited ones will address some particular aspect of the research.

For any given paper, if it cites one or two seminal papers in the field, you can build a citation cloud to create what is best described as the 'current best thinking on this big question'. You do that by following up the citations and their citations for two or three hops. (kind of like a web crawler).

With something like sci-hub and some work on PDF translation, it should be possible to feed two or three 'seed' papers to an algorithm and have it produce a syllabus for the topic.

</comment><comment><USER15> I usually first start reading or glance over papers (and non-story books) from the end to the beginning before I read it the other way around. This has the following benefits for me:

\- By knowing about the conclusion first I will better understand the motivation and why certain steps are being taken.

\- I find out sooner if the paper (or book) is something I am looking for.

I like to read papers unrelated to my field to learn new thing to apply. To be honest, some papers still take me a long time to understand because they usually assume you already are researching the topic (for ex. certain terms, symbols and/or variables that are not being defined).

</comment><comment><USER16> There is a difference between reading and studying a paper. Many papers I just check the abstract for claims of A causes/correlates B (ie it is a "headline" claim), and look for a scatter plot of A vs B (it is missing).

Then I do ctrl-F "blind" (can't find it), ctrl-F "significance" (see p-value with nearby text indicating it has been misinterpreted). Boom, paper done in under a minute. There is really no reason to study such papers unless they have some very specific information you are searching for (like division rate of a certain cell line or something).

<comment><USER17> This only works for a very small subset of studies in a subset of scientific fields.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, the OP was about medical research though, where it does apply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> About identifying "The Big Question", I have a story from my days as a graduate student, where I failed to do so.

I was asked to help on a project that needed to identify humans in an audio stream. During my literature review, I came across the field of "Voice Activity Detection" or VAD, which concerns itself with identifying where in an audiosignal a human voice / speech is present (as opposed to _what_ the speech is).

I implemented several algorithms from the literature and tested it on the primary tests sets referenced in papers and spend a few months on this until I finally asked myself "What would happen if I gave my algorithm an audiostream of a dog barking?"

The barking was identified as "voice".

As it turns out, the "Big Question" in Voice Activity Detection is not to find human voices (or any voices), but to figure out when to pass on high-fidelity signals from phone calls. So the algorithms tend to only care about audio segments that are background noise and segments that are not background noise.

</comment><comment><USER19> >I want to help people become more scientifically literate, so I wrote this guide for how a layperson can approach reading and understanding a scientific research paper. It's appropriate for someone who has no background whatsoever in science or medicine, and based on the assumption that he or she is doing this for the purpose of getting a basic understanding of a paper and deciding whether or not it's a reputable study.

Better advice intended to make _layman with zero background in science_ become more scientifically literate would be to tell them to read some textbooks.

Later on in the article, she tells people to write down each and every thing you don't understand in an article and look them up later. And this is excellent advice for people with a background equivalent to an advanced undergraduate or higher, but for people with zero background it would be better to read some textbooks and get yourself a foundation.

Honestly, even when I was in grad school in neuroscience, I asked around for advice on reading papers and the surprisingly universal response from other grad students was that it took 2 years to become reliably able to read and evaluate a research paper well. And this is 2 years in a research environment with often weekly reading groups where PIs, postdocs, grad students, and some undergrads got together to dissect some paper. These reading groups provided an environment in which you had regular feedback on your own ability to read papers by seeing all the things those more experienced than you saw and that you missed. A paper that took me 3+ hours of intense study would take a postdoc a good half hour to get more information out of.

I feel like this article makes reading articles well seem a lighter undertaking than it really is. It's really no wonder we see studies misinterpreted so often on the internet, where people Google for 5 minutes and skim an abstract.

<comment><USER20> > it took 2 years to become reliably able to read and evaluate a research > paper well

This completely coincides with my experience. When I started grad school, it took me a few hours to read one paper, and I probably understood only 50% of the materials even though I had some foundations in the research area from my undergrad studies.

Reading textbooks is a great advice. Then one can start reading some review papers in the area to get some more depth in his/her knowledge. I think the difficulty is that it is hard to find good textbooks and review papers for the subject that one is interested in, especially when the subject is in a niche field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a student who needs to read research articles for my project, this article gave some new ideas on how to approach those long boring and cryptic pieces of text that just take days to understand. Thanks to the person who posted it.

</comment><comment><USER22> A couple things I try to do when reading research papers, inspired by these two amazing [b|v]logs. [1][https://blog.acolyer.org/](https://blog.acolyer.org/) [2][https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz](https://www.youtube.com/user/keeroyz)

I try to paraphrase the paper into a Acolyer like 'morning paper' blog post on evernote while mentally I am directing a 'two minute paper' video on the paper :)

</comment><comment><USER23> I would like to have a digest or an overview written for a IT practitioner. I did go SC/IT conference and enjoyed the talks and I noticed 2 things: 1/ You learn new things and new approach that can bring value to our job 2/ It seems that the research sector discover stuff that are already known in the industry.

I think it would be great to have a journal/blog that would construct a bridge between the industry and the university.

</comment><comment><USER24> This suggestion by Michael Nielsen is also very good: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=666615)

</comment><comment><USER25> What's odd to me, is that lots of professors have blogs in which they write quite a bit in plain language that doesn't require an instruction manual in order to be read

</comment><comment><USER26> Why don't the authors do these 11 steps for us?

<comment><USER27> Because they are not writing for non-scientists.

<comment><USER25> all scientist were non-scientists first though, correct?

Look, I get that there's some natural professional context and lingo that goes into these things, but for all the angst that goes into what esteem that population at large holds up the science community

making their work more accessible to both novices and interested outsiders would be a nice step in the right direction

<comment><USER27> I agree with you. To put it simply, papers are optimized for the scientific community and making them "more accessible" to outsiders has a cost. I'd settle for better writing and presentations within the scientific community for now. If you ever find researchers that blog about their research in simple terms, I think it's safe to assume they're using their personal time to do that (I know of very few; Andy Ko [1] comes to mind).

[1] [https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior](https://medium.com/bits-and- behavior)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd like an answer to: how/where to ask the relevant community a question about a scientific paper.

</comment><comment><USER29> this is a great guide. i wish more writing on the Internet has this blend of substance, message, tone, and grit.

</comment><comment><USER30> Sensible advice overall, but I completely disagree with these:

> Before you begin reading, take note of the authors and their institutional > affiliations.

and

> Beware of questionable journals.

Institutional affiliation and journal imprimatur should have no bearing in science. These are shortcuts for the lazy, and they introduce bias into evaluation of the paper's contents.

Even more than that, dispensing advice along these lines perpetuates the myth that scientific fact is dispensed from on high. If that's the case, just let the experts do the thinking for you and don't bother your pretty little head trying to read scientific papers.

If the author's approach to reading a paper only works by checking for stamps of approval, maybe the approach should be reconsidered.

<comment><USER31> They aren't shortcuts for the lazy, they're shortcuts for non-scientists who aren't capable of fully evaluating the science alone. If you're capable of objectively peer reviewing a paper, you're not the audience of this article.

<comment><USER30> > They aren't shortcuts for the lazy, they're shortcuts for non-scientists who > aren't capable of fully evaluating the science alone.

It's a shortcut fraught with potential for deception, as even a casual glance through a site like Retraction Watch will demonstrate:

[http://retractionwatch.com/](http://retractionwatch.com/)

I'm not sure what you mean by "evaluating the science." A scientific paper should present a hypothesis, the author's best attempt to disprove the hypothesis, and an interpretation of the evidence gathered in the processes of testing the hypothesis. There's going to be a back-story, and it's likely to be quite involved.

The article does a good job of presenting a method for navigating a paper on this basis. I don't see what checking credentials adds to the process. On the contrary, it may do harm.

<comment> semi-extrinsic While we may find the high profile cases featured on Retraction Watch mainly in high impact journals, that's precisely because unscrupulous people deem these journals _worth it to cheat to get into_. Nobody cheats to get their paper into the International Journal of Architecture, Engineering and Nursing Science - because it and it's ilk are utter pieces of crap that will accept anything, up to and including randomly-generated text and pro-Sri-Lanka- highly-racist-UFO-conspiracies (real example). Teaching laypeople to avoid these is a very good idea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you keep your stable GitHub repo active? - <AUTHOR>

Perceived Problem: People glance at a repo and see that it hasn't been updated in several months.  They decide it is not actively maintained and either find a similar project that has been updated recently, or use the one they found with the worry the maintainer might not ever get back to them if they find a bug or submit a PR.
Example: I maintain a small repo which doesn't require many updates since the API is small and stable.  The last update was 5 months ago.  I am happy to see the random person star the project, but I don't want future people to skip over it because it has no update activity.
What does everyone do to show project activity?  Artificially update the README?
I really want a "check in" button I can display in the project README which basically says "yup, the maintainer has actively been here!", assuring me that a seemingly unmaintained project is in a stable state and being watched over. <comment><USER2> If your README states the software is complete, stable, and has all required features implemented, no one should expect updates. Vanity metrics, like artificial activity, would do more harm than good. One of the problems with "social coding" environments like github is people tend to be influenced by the wrong things, like vanity metrics, rather than the right things, like useful code. The only way to win that game is to refuse to play.

<comment> Warewolf-ESB Yes I would agree. A simple, real note on your README should suffice. You can't fake this stuff!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This may not apply to your language, but some projects could be maintained by making sure the newest compilers don't throw warnings. In my experience every once in a while when I try a new version of clang on my project, there will be some new warning showing up due to improved diagnostics. Even if not, grab some new tool and check your source - then say you've done it. Some ideas: (for a C project)

\- warnings under GCC, clang

\- valgrind (commit suppressions of needed, note there are no issues left)

\- clang static analyser

\- fuzz inputs, commit a note about what was tested

\- does it already compile under Linux? Each main distribution? BSDs? Windows? Mac?

\- does it include init scripts? Upstart config? Systemd?

\- apparmor and selinux profiles?

\- have you tested new versions of all your dependencies?

I'm sure not all points will apply to your project, but just be creative with those ideas :-)

Just do something useful. All of those points being some benefit to the project, even if tiny.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depending on the software, testing in new environments and adding information about this, e.g. testing server software under current distributions. If you get user reports about this, there isn't even a need to do the tests yourself.

Maybe clearly say in the README: "This project is considered stable and therefore has less activity, but is not abandoned. I promise to remove this notice if this ever changes."

<comment><USER5> I actually just encountered this yesterday on a project. It had a disclaimer that said something like "This project isn't abandoned, we just maintain 0 bugs in the bug tracker. It's stable and ready for use, and if we get a bug report we'll fix it as soon as possible"</comment></comment>