Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/08/reading-in-the-age-of-constant-distraction/ <comment><USER3> I've come to love books intensely. Not only because I enjoy learning--before I read books, I found blogs to be great educators. I love books because they create time and space to be alone with a thought. It gives me time to consider things that I normally have no space for.

I remember Seth Godin saying once that every business book can be summarized in just a few pages but the book itself is a story. I think it goes beyond just that idea and is The Exercise in reinforcing ideas. Yes, you don't need to spend 10 hours to memorize an idea: _move fast and break things._ Yea, I get it.

But what does that actually mean? How do you actually implement that philosophy? How do you internalize it? How do you navigate situations where you will revert back to your old habit or philosophy? I think you have to spend 10 hours thinking about it and then taking actionable steps to implement it in order to make it useful. Teaching and writing are similar exercises that I have found helpful as a learning tool.

I only just stumbled upon why I like to read. It is likely very personal. But I have found that removing the distractions and habit of "horizontal reading" makes me happier. I'm looking forward to reading the referenced book by Birkerts.

(Aside: At times, I have found reading to be an excuse for not getting things done on my projects. _I just need to know more about x, y, and z before I start_. Ironically, the quest for knowledge can be distracting itself.)

<comment><USER4> I've recently been shown a lot of ads for a service called "blinkist" where the idea is to provide short summaries of non-fiction books and I think your comment captures why that is a very bad idea. Reading and capturing an idea takes time; it can't be properly substituted by a few minutes of "listening to crucial insights from leading thinkers while you're on the go."

Their business model is in a way the complete opposite of the ideas in the article (although there is admittedly a difference between fiction and non- fiction books):

They show pictures of very busy business people that can't fit a book into their tight schedule; one of their ads said something along the lines of "80% of successful managers read at least 20 books per year" (which is probably just completely mixing up correlation and causation).

<comment><USER5> I don't think fiction can be shrunk down, but I think lots of non-fiction books can.

I'm thinking specifically of some books that I've read in the past couple of years that include:

      * Deep Work
      * Influence
      * Thinking Fast and Slow
      * Predictably Irrational
      * Getting Things Done
      * How to Win Friends and Influence People

I think all of these books suffer from the common pattern of present an idea then a bunch of examples that demonstrate the idea. I don't think you lose anything by ditching the examples. The core ideas are usually well stated and don't need clarification or demonstration.

<comment><USER6> I agree completely about non-fiction books.

There are certainly some fiction books that could use some shrinking down (For Exhibit A: Crossroads of Twilight -- book 10 of the Wheel of Time)

<comment><USER5> Now that you mention it, when I was reading Snow Crash I started skipping all the parts about ancient Sumerian language. All that he needed to do was establish that it worked as some kind of low-level system of the brain that could be tinkered with. Instead it felt like he spent 4 months researching ancient Sumer and by God he was going to not let that work go to waste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm actually working on an app specifically to address this problem.

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

It builds on the idea of 'bookmarks' and we have a new take on them called 'pagemarks' which is basically a box that spans multiple pages.

This way you can keep track of the parts of the book you've read and jump around.

I like reading multiple textbooks, articles, etc and go back and forth often.

This allows me to easily suspend and resume.

I worked on a proof of concept about 6 months ago and I've been expanding it in my spare time.

You can read about it here:

[https://getpolarized.io/incremental- reading.html](https://getpolarized.io/incremental-reading.html)

Polar is free and Open Source btw.

It blew up on HN a few months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960)

I'm about to re-announce as we're just in the process of porting it to the web to make it more accessible to people (mobile, tablets, chrome OS, etc.).

It goes FAR behind this though and supports document management, offline, and supports capturing web pages for offline usage and archival.

Additionally it supports annotation so you can take any page and add highlights, comments and flashcards.

<comment><USER8> Very cool! At least for me, so much of my reading is done on my mobile devices (e.g, iPhone, iPad) that not supporting those via an app is pretty much a deal killer for me. But if I could have one place to read PDF files, saved websites (e.g., like Pocket; btw, Pocket integration would seem to make a lot of sense for Polarized) where annotations/highlights are also stored in the cloud (say, in Dropbox), and I could access this on the go on a mobile device, I would certainly use your service.

<comment><USER7> Mobile + web is coming... I'm also working on different ways to read while mobile which I think will be amazingly valuable.

I'm going to keep these a surprise though.

I like to read on my laptop and not mobile though... but maybe that will change.

<comment><USER9> Awesome, thanks for the share! Would be great to integrate functionality from Zotero

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As I read this story, some moving advertisements start along the top and sides. After ten seconds, a floating bar covers the text. After a few more, a modal dialog. Then the 'share me now' buttons, obscuring the text. Then I leave.

Too few websites offer an experience for someone to read the content, and so we will see "Reading Online Content in the Age of Constant Distraction" in HackerNews.

<comment><USER11> How can you live in 2019 without an ad blocker? I'm on that page and never got any ads/intrusions.

<comment><USER12> Maybe they are using an iphone or something. Adblockers don't resolve the root of the problem!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I joined local book clubs to help combat this. The book clubs help me get motivated to read books. I don't always finish them, and sometimes work or other commitments prevent me from going out and discussing the book, but it does help motivate me to sit down and read a book again (often when I'm in line waiting for things is a good time for me to make progress on the book. I try to do that instead of checking Facebook updates, but I also read before going to bed also).

The main problem with this, is they often choose books that I'm not that interested in reading. Sometimes I plow through it anyway and sometimes I just skip that month. That's why I'm in multiple groups, so I can see what each group is reading and pick the one or two books that look the most interesting from those.

But sometimes the books I'm really into. Like I got excited when The Devil and the White City was one of them, and one of them is currently reading the Deep Work book, which I'm finding interesting and wanting to incorporate some of its ideas in my own life.

<comment><USER14> _I joined local book clubs to help combat this._ There is no need to be so adversarial! There is absolutely nothing wrong with checking your Facebook/Reddit/Twitter/HN/Register/./G+(lol) feeds. Reading a novel is not mutually exclusive to that, in the same way that your work and home lives are intertwined but still separate (probably).

It sounds to me from your comment that you need to break away from your book club and go your own way and do your own thing. They have piqued your interest and pointed out _a_ way but that way is now yours. I have no idea where you are in the world but if you have a local lending library within reach, that might be a good place to consider visiting. I'm from the UK and what little is left of our library system after much cutting of budgets (generally outside Laaaaaandon) is still legendary but sadly being diminished by London/Cardiff/Edinburgh/Belfast focused knob-ends.

There is no greater pleasure to be had than from a damn good book and very few books are not damn good. OK, there are one or two other things that are quite fun ...

<comment><USER13> I also read plenty of Facebook/Reddit/HN feeds still, I'm not trying to eliminate them. Combat was kind of a hyperbole I guess. I'm not declaring war against reading articles online.

But I have found that for all the interesting articles online, if I reflect back on them after a year, I can remember approximately 0% of what I read, while I can remember at least which books I've read and something interesting about them, so I wonder just how useful reading those articles are. Hasn't stopped me from doing it, but I don't think it's quite so useful (I'm not really counting tutorials in this, where I actually gain tangible skills by following what I read, though).

And I still buy and read my own books. I just wish I could finish a book, go someplace for dinner and discuss it with a few people afterwards like I can with the book club books. It is also harder for me to finish books I want to read, though, because I don't have that looming deadline reminding me. I suppose I could set my own deadlines, but I know from past experience that I don't treat those seriously.

It's the same thing for me with game design. I do still design game in my spare time, but I get a looot more work done when I know there's a looming game convention or a competition deadline coming up. Same with writing. I get the vast majority of my new writing done during the month of November each year, during Nanowrimo. The rest of the year moves at a crawl. It's that comradery and not-imposed-by-me deadline that helps keep me motivated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently discovered I score very low on VVIQ. Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. I don't have full on Aphantasia. But listening to how for other people reading a book is like watching a movie in their heads blows my mind. Being able to imagine with any level of depth sounds pretty amazing. As a kid I never really played pretend or was into fiction. But I'm curious that possibly long form reading is on the decline is associated with lower abilities to imagine in the general public?

<comment><USER16> I mean, the level of CGI and game engine textures we have is almost indistinguishable from real life. Perhaps because we have access to the super high-fidelity, interactive simulations, we've lost the practice of imagining so vividly?

<comment><USER17> I grew up with unlimited screen time starting at age 2 and used the majority of it to play 3d video games. I score very high on the VVIQ.

My story is antidotal, but your hypothesis is also not backed by data. I'd like to purpose a counter hypothesis: spending time in interactive 3d worlds requires building internal maps of the environment. Exercising these portions of the brain improves Visual Imagery Vividness.

There are lots of unforeseen consequences of screen time. I suspect this isn't one of them.

<comment><USER18> I'll second this hypothesis. Also unlimited 3d world time: I have _vivid_ recollections of very large maps, spaces, etc.

I can remember every WoW raid environment, every detail of every CS map I played, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My wife and I recently embarked on the 'Great Books' list from "How to read a Book" [1]. It's a nice contrast to the more scattershot reading that happens online.

If you're interested in how technology might cause self-interruptions that make things like sitting down with a book more difficult, I recommend checking out "The Distracted Mind". [2]

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

2: [http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distracted- mind](http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/distracted-mind)

<comment><USER20> I spent a year at a "Great Books" college whose program Adler helped found. It was a really amazing luxury to be able to spend so much time on it (I left after freshman year, so I only got through the Greeks).

Ultimately, St John's generates a lot of lawyers and humanities grad students, but not a whole lot else without extra pre-grad school to school to get some of the STEM prereqs out of the way. I love that the school generates humanities scholars, but it's not my bag, so I moved on.

If I had the money, I'd love to go back and finish when I retire, but at 40 I'm already not as smart as I was in college, so I'm pretty sure I'll be too dumb to be a useful classmate when I retire!

If you haven't gotten to Euclid yet, do yourself a favor and get the Heath translations with his notes. A few of them are really, really hard for people trained in late second-millennia mathematics to be able to get through without some hints.

<comment><USER21> I attended St. John's College's Graduate Institute, spending four summers (8 weeks each) reading and discussing a shorter version of the undergraduate reading list, and took an M.A. degree in the Liberal Arts thirty years after my Computer Science degree.

It was well worth it for me, at age 54, and for participants who were retirement age. At 40 you may be feel less smart than when you were younger, but you're very likely more mature and a better reader.

St. John's offers week-long Summer Classics sessions, which convey a lot of the same experiences of reading and discussion:

[https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer- classics](https://www.sjc.edu/santa-fe/programs/summer-classics)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think distractions are just the beginning of our issues, a much bigger factor on how much I can read is Time.

As we become adults, with responsibilities Time is incredibly hard to find. Big readers tend to be productive people and as such the more active and busy we are the harder it is to sit down and read. This might sound like a straight forward problem but I find myself bookmarking great articles or writing down great books I heard about only to never really find the Time to go back and read them.

As a little shameless self promotion this problem of not having enough time to read led me to build an App that lets me listen to any article from the web. It converts the article to Audio using some amazing open advancements in AI/ML. Now when I'm standing on the train with a coffee in my hand and holding a pole with the other I can get through a ton of this content from the web distraction free.

You can check the app out here: [https://articulu.com](https://articulu.com)

<comment><USER23> > but I find myself bookmarking great articles or writing down great books I > heard about only to never really find the Time to go back and read them.

Try replacing "can't find time" with "not a priority". It means the same in practice and makes for a huge shift in perception and your own personal feekings towards stuff. Especially in the guilt department.

You have more important things to do and that's okay. When you come across a book that's important enough you will magically have time for it. Priorities are fun like that.

<comment><USER24> Probably a lot of people just get lured in by social media, video games, Netflix, etc and then spend far more time on these things than they would actually like. I doubt many people are consciously prioritizing their web surfing or video game time, but it just turns out that way since these things are designed to be habit forming.

<comment><USER23> I agree and saying "not a priority" instead of "don't have time" helps with that too.

"Sorry reading books is not a priority"

Wait ... then what _is_ a priority? Social media? Screw that!!

And it prompts you to [try to] do better with your time.

Remember when we used to read books a few pages at a time on the pooper instead of scrolling through twitter or hackernews? Good times.

<comment><USER24> Haha yeah, absolutely. I've limited my social media use to HN only for a while now (mainly because I feel it is one of the few sites left where you can just have a civil discussion without things getting too political) and I feel I'm significantly happier and more productive now than I was a few years ago. Of course many other things have changed in that timeframe, but I don't really ever see myself using Facebook or other popular social media again. Quitting all that is quite liberating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While it's not what article is about, but amount of distraction you see even just to read this article is insane: [https://i.imgur.com/xHRmvuJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/xHRmvuJ.png)

</comment><comment><USER26> How apt that this is posted today! I've been tracking my reading progress on the Google SRE Workbook via Beeminder, and today I am derailing my goal because I am far behind. [1]

I started tracking my progress because I wanted to see how much I can actually read in a day on a regular basis without losing focus and abandoning it, I even got a Kindle because it was on sale.

Long story short, 10 pages a day was what I settled on as a reasonable goal, and here I am not keeping up with that.

I actually should mention too that there is a person on GitHub[2] who converts texts to epub/mobi as a hobby, and that's how I saved $50 on my copy of the SRE book and workbook, Kindle edition, which are freely available in HTML format, thanks Google[3]!

[1]: [https://www.beeminder.com/yebyenw/srebook](https://www.beeminder.com/yebyenw/srebook)

[2]: [https://github.com/captn3m0/google-sre- ebook](https://github.com/captn3m0/google-sre-ebook)

[3]: [https://landing.google.com/sre/books/](https://landing.google.com/sre/books/)

<comment><USER27> Ten pages a day is a lot! I'm an avid for-fun reader, and ten or fifteen pages is about what I manage while reading during breakfast, lunch, and sometimes for a few minutes before bed. That's with pretty lightweight pop-non-fiction as well. Maybe it would be better to reduce the goal to something consistently manageable, and don't beat yourself up!

<comment><USER26> I changed the whole strategy today. Kindle reports % done and some bizarre "book location" number which is like an order of magnitude bigger than pages, so it's easier to report on and comprehend my "percent" location in the book.

Beeminder is all about beating yourself up. But derailing is not failing. You don't fail if you set a new goal and start again. I decided that I will get from my current location at 32% completed to 100% completed in about 7 weeks.

This is conservative to account for the fact that I should be able to read other books in this time, as they strike my fancy! It will probably also help that I no longer have to count the number of pages, now that I've switched to tracking percent. I did the math and the new goal is a little less than 10 pages per day now. Thanks for the encouragement!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Something I've found to be exceptionally good at helping with reading (I've been reading ~50 books a year for the past 5 years, on top of a full time job and family) is to use Goodreads - it gives you those short term endorphins when you can mark a book as read and can help it compete with all the other offerings of the world that reward you more hormonally.

Alternatively, if you don't want to use the tool, I would recommend getting a nice notepad to write in some short book reviews, which will give you your endorphins as you fill the book up more. And you get the additional benefit of being able to look back through your notes to see what you thought of various books and how your thought x time ago.

</comment><comment><USER29> Did a small survey last year on this point and discovered that while technology might sound distracting people are actually spending more time reading/viewing stuff they like more lot more than before.

We found that among teens for example very few people read anything from news websites very rarely but almost every single teen had read at least one article in depth on very niche topic that appealed to them. (For example reading about affairs for their favorite pop star). Most teens performed very poorly when they were given 1 hour and asked to prepare a presentation on "any american hero".

<comment><USER30> Totally anecdotal story / corner case:

I was a terrible reader growing up, I had ADD before the days when they diagnosed that.

My son also has ADD and strangely, he is an avid reader. I've caught him reading two books at once (both in his lap) and swapping between them and he was comprehending them (I did some Q&A).

At least on the very surface to me that might mean that reading is not necessarily antithetical to someone who is prone to distraction / lack of focus .... or a distraction heavy world.

We've seen history full of predictions what the phone, or video games, or computers would do to seemingly related technologies, and not been good at predicting the result.

<comment><USER31> This is called hyperfocusing (AKA the zone) and it's a typical characteristic of people with ADD. I have it pretty bad and I almost flunked out of school because I would spend all day reading enormous serial fantasy novels (wheel of time FTW!).

<comment><USER32> OT, but is there by any chance a series similar to wheel of time, or that captured you in a similar way, which you would recommend? Havent found anything quite like it, but that might be because of nostalgia and my fond memories of reading it as a teen.

<comment><USER33> If you are looking for sheer scale, can recommend Steven Erikson's Malazan family (around 36 novels set in the same world; starting with the Malazan Book of the Fallen) though the atmosphere is much bleaker.

Another recommendation would be Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere multi-series (Mistborn, Stormlight Archive), currently in progress, closer to WoT thematically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This article resonates a lot with me. I have always found great pleasure in reading but lately my computer and phone steals all attention and I genuinely feel less smart because of it.

It's a big reason why we're launching [https://mypapermag.com/](https://mypapermag.com/) It's an app (web only for now: vue/django) where you select great long reads selected from our partners, but the important thing is that you actually get them _in print_ in your personalized magazine every n weeks. This way you get the distraction free experience of a regular magazine, the freedom of choice of the web, the best articles from our partners and the best tech for reading (paper) in one place. It's what we're trying to achieve at least, still in private beta and only in France for now but please let me know if you want to try it out or if you have any feedback, firstname.lastname@example.com </ShamelessSelfPromotion>

<comment><USER34> I forgot to add that if you're interested in how our reading is changing, Maryanne Wolf's research is great. Her book 'Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World' gives a great overview of a diverse way of looking at reading. (I haven't read 'Proust and the Squid' yet, by the same author, but I think it touches on similar topics)

According to Wolf, our "reading circuits" are changing on a neurological level, affecting reasoning, critical thinking and even empathy.

On the other hand were getting better at skim reading, quickly sorting through mountains of lower value information.

This article in the Guardian gives a great summary: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-r...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim- reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf)

Another good article on the topic, if you happen to prefer French, from Usbec & Rica: [https://m.usbeketrica.com/article/a-plus-vous-lisez-en- diago...](https://m.usbeketrica.com/article/a-plus-vous-lisez-en-diagonale- plus-votre-cerveau-reclame-de-la-rapidite)

(Disclaimer: Both The Guardian and Usbek & Rica are supplying articles for our platform)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> For me, eInk readers, and especially smartphones, boosted the amounts I've read (which were substantial to begin with).

For eInk, it was mostly because I could take it to more places, stuffed with many books. When you can get through a book in 2-3 days, a 2-week vacation needs quite a few!

But smartphones were the real gift. Now I have _all_ my books right there in my pocket whenever I go, so in any situation where I have to wait (lines etc), I can just whip it up and continue reading. Even if it's 10-15 minutes at a time, it all adds up. This doesn't work well for technical books because of interruptions, but it's perfect for fiction.

Another nice things about phones for reading is OLED screens. Because they're "perfectly black", I find it to be the best low-light reader for night reading in the dark, before sleep.

<comment><USER36> Being able to change the font size, the screen brightness and to a lesser extent hue (bluish <-> amber) has led to the death of physical books for me. That and a kickstand phone case.

<comment><USER35> Oh yes, I totally forgot about that part for low-light reading. Blue light filters are awesome when properly done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've largely stopped reading fiction books for the opposite reason. I can't put them down until they're finished or I fall asleep at 4am with book in hand (and alarm set to 6am for work).

Long form news articles and technical books consumed in pomodoro-sided is what I have to get by on.

</comment><comment><USER38> I would finish reading this article, but first let me scroll the Reddit front page once more.

<comment><USER39> Looks like an interesting article. Lemme check out the comments first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Last year I cancelled my Audible subscription for much of the same reason: when listening to an audiobook it is too easy to get distracted, but reading a book is different. With an audiobook you feel like since your hands are free, you can go do something else like gym or household chores, and finding yourself no longer catching up with the audiobook. And that's not to mention you don't feel like you are in control: the narrator decides the pace, not you. But with a book, it's much harder to get distracted and thus easier to get into "the realm of duration."

Since cancelling Audible, I started buying paper books on Amazon and I have experienced much better focus, and much greater enjoyment from the books I've read.

<comment><USER41> I never understood audiobooks to begin with. To me, reading is an intimate, personal thing. Listening to some narrator is more like being the spectator in some piece of performance art. When I read, I want to be left alone with my thoughts. I don't hear a voice when reading (like some people do, apparently) and I definitely don't want to hear some guy or gal actually speaking the words!

More importantly, I want to read at my own pace, not someone else's. I often go back and re-read recent paragraphs, for example.

<comment><USER42> It's very interesting to me that you read without hearing a voice in your head reading each word. I tried to read your comment without requiring the voice in my head but I wasn't able to do so. Can you elaborate a little more on what reading is like for you with no voice in your head?

<comment><USER41> I do not speed read, unlike what the other comment mentions. Your assumption is correct: this is my standard mode of reading. I'm actually not a very fast reader (though I used to be when I was a teenager!), and I like to re-read paragraphs and sometimes even go back a few pages and re-read something I liked. This is also why e-readers, as convenient as they otherwise are, are not my preferred medium when reading novels: they make it uncomfortable to go back and forth. A printed book actually has the best UI for me :)

I can't explain what it feels like to read like this. I don't hear a voice _except_ when my attention is drawn to this, like right now: I'm definitely hearing my voice when I type this, but that's because I'm thinking about it. As soon as I forget this discussion, I'll go back to silent reading mode.

Also keep in mind that right now I'm hearing my own voice, not some narrator's. I'd find it extremely distracting if it was someone else's voice, e.g. if it was a woman's voice if the writer was a woman.

<comment><USER42> Ah I see! I also only hear my own voice when reading (I think this is the norm). When I'm really absorbed in the book I forget that I'm "hearing" it but I no doubt am actually hearing it so it's interesting to see that isn't the case for everyone :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The thing I find is hardest about sitting and reading a book is the quietness and being essentially alone with my own thoughts.

If I'm sitting watch a film / netflix etc, there is noise and that seems to distract my brain from going to dark places.

It's like I'll be reading a page and then by the end of the page I've taken nothing in and my brain is forcing me to think about stuff I don't want to think about. Intrusive thoughts like you suck as a person,you're fat, you're ugly, why do your friends like you? You suck at your job etc.

I think this is the same reason why I struggle to sleep, just being alone with my thoughts trying to sleep ends up putting me in a bad place.

It sucks because I used to love reading.

<comment><USER44> Yes, this sucks. It can be quite hard to see and understand, that these thoughts are your own activity, you are enabling these thoughts.

You can't control if thoughts pop up, but you have control if you are following these thoughts, if you continue them.

It might be very difficult to see the difference between the pop up of a thought and its following, because if you always follow a thought you get used to it, it just automatically happens.

It can be quite hard to get rid of this habit, it takes time and energy, but the more you try to not automatically follow thoughts - but only if you really want to - the less thoughts will randomly pop up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I read on the train when I commute to and from work. The train is frightfully busy, rammed full, noisy, uncomfortable, but as soon as I open my book it's just me and the page. It's my favourite part of the day, my own little world. The only problem is the trip seems too short, I lift my head after what seems like a few minutes and I'm already pulling into my station.

</comment><comment><USER46> I definitely agree with most of the points in the article. I've always been an avid reader and I find that this has enriched my life and my ability to think and reason about the world around me.

However, I find that the dig at amazon and e-books is definitely unwarranted(Or at least overblown). As a denizen of the third world, Amazon and the Kindle have been a lifeline to me. It's pretty much impossible to find anything that isn't bestseller trash in bookstores where I live. The selection is limited only to what might sell to the largest possible audience/lowest common denominator. Being able to get books on demand, electronically and cheap has been the only way I've been able to keep up my reading habit in the face of tightening time and budget constraints(2 kids, a job, etc...)

</comment><comment><USER47> My approach to this is to make peace with the fact that I don't need to nor can read every interesting thing out there. So I choose 2-3 articles which seem promising (mostly based on a hunch and how people here react to them), send them to kindle using this website[1] during work and then reading on my way home. Personally, I have noticed, reading a few articles around topics are also better for retention compared to reading just the discussion around the same topics and 10 more. Still haven't figured out how/when to read books, but we'll get there some day :)

[1]:[https://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/](https://fivefilters.org/kindle-it/)

</comment><comment><USER48> Medium matters. For in-depth, "digital" reading the only thing I have which works for me is my Kindle.

It's distractionfree by design, and that's why I love it. It's definitely not just another redundant screen.

<comment><USER49> Yeah but Kindle != web. And that is huge bummer for me! I generally prefer reading everything online, or not read at all.

<comment><USER50> I don't know if this addresses your issue (whether it's about the content, or about e.g. being able to use hyperlinks), but Kobo ereaders come with a version of Pocket preinstalled, so when you see an interesting web page on your computer, you can send it to your ereader with the press of a button. Apparently there's something similar for Kindle: [https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/)

<comment><USER51> Instapaper integrates with the Send to Kindle feature and will mail you a "newspaper" with all of the articles you've saved to Instapaper in the last week. It's fantastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I've been an avid reader since I was seven years old - I stopped in college (almost completely), but it was during my internship and job that I started reading vociferously again.

Nowadays after I finish the book, I try to review the books I've read on Instagram in the form of a post or a story - some people go to the extent of unfollowing me (seeing it as a stupid use case for the service), but some people I know IRL have also started reading the same books I finish.

Not every distraction is a force for evil.

</comment><comment><USER53> i think you can find "deep time" on the internet. the internet is just a medium, and its speed is only one of many factors that make using it distracting. i've read things blogs or wikis that have taken hours of intense focus to grok. my point is that the dichotomy of books and the internet doesn't seem particularly valuable, while "deep time" vs "shallow time" is.

<comment><USER54> I would argue that while you can find deep works on the internet, it's still a medium that encourages shallower works than the printing press did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Isn't it ironic that an article with this theme should be published on a site that - if you allow scripts - has not one but two horrible animated pop-ups (slide in from right - trying to get you to sign up for their newsletter - <USER2> centred overlay trying to sell you their t-shirts).

The author certainly appears to have chosen their title well. <sigh>

</comment><comment><USER56> I read more books on paper now than I ever did pre-internet. Because of the far greater ease of requesting a library book now.

Now anytime I hear of a good book, I look it up on the online catalog and, because all the libraries in the county are linked, the choice is bigger than ever. I just request a few books and have them delivered to my local library.

</comment><comment><USER57> I have different experiences with reading than most. When I'm reading and notifications come in, I ignore them as distractions, much like one would shake off and ignore an annoying fly. I don't know whether the fact that I'm usually listening rather than reading (I use a screenreader) makes any difference.

</comment><comment><USER58> If this interests you, there is a book-length treatment of the same subject:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9859899-the-pleasures- of...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9859899-the-pleasures-of-reading- in-an-age-of-distraction)

</comment><comment><USER59> Constant distraction happens only if you chose it. Chose it to not happen.

</comment><comment><USER60> Lately, I have been finding the physicality of reading a book especially pleasing when so much of my daily work, communication, and distraction are spent in front of a screen.

</comment><comment><USER61> Literally have a book in one hand and my phone to type this.

<comment><USER14> Literally? (left eyebrow raises slightly/right eye twitches slightly, almost imperceptibly)

I presume you mean that you have a book written (a tattoo perhaps) on the palm of your hand. It is either a very short book or you have one of those new fangled micro-fiche-tats.

8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> In this case, social media directly makes reading difficult due to the share icons obscuring the left side of the text.

Seems a window resize event fixes their positioning.

</comment><comment><USER63> I love audiobooks. I can do other things while I hear words. No worrying about being distracted, because being distracted is part of it.

</comment><comment><USER64> I stopped reading the essay at paragraph four when the boilerplate Marxist horse-hockey kicked in. Does that count as being distracted?

</comment><comment> good-idea Does anyone have a TL;DR?

<comment><USER14> Reading books is good for you (obvs.) The author is easily distracted. Distraction causes less reading of books ... internets ... Facebook ... _handwringing_.

OK, I am being a bit unfair but I've just seen the word: "surficiality" and actually want it to not be a speling mistak. It looks like a word that really should exist on its own merit without "pe".

If you can't be arsed with the whole piece, the final para is worth reading and actually does a pretty good job as a precis of the thesis. Give it a couple of goes and roll it around on your mental tongue. A sentence like this is either bollocks or insightful: "We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times,"

Anyway the entire article is not too long and worth a few minutes, in my opinion. The penultimate para is stuffed full of sentences designed to get you thinking. The author likes to play with words and sounds (Mairead Small Staid is a poet, critic, and essayist living in Minnesota.)

Read it backwards, para by para. It still works.

<comment><USER65> I think they were going for irony.</comment></comment></comment>


Cooking as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://alexdanco.com/2019/05/09/cooking-as-a-service/ <comment><USER2> An interesting aspect of this is the social role of restaurants in the US and abroad. In the US pretty much every restaurant I've been to hands me the check right after I finish my last bite. Lingering in restaurants to socialize is not so much the norm. If you go to a very popular place, you and your party may end up spending more time in the line to get in than on your table. So the tradeoff between going to a restaurant just to eat and getting food delivered is fairly small.

In other countries (e.g., Mediterranean region), it is perfectly normal to linger for a couple of hours after finishing your dinner. The social experience is the point of the restaurant visit, the food and drinks are just a catalyst.

<comment><USER3> As a counter point I frequently linger and chat at restaurants. They do often bring the check but don't force you to leave immediately. None of my friends have ever been in a rush to leave either.

Waiters are judged by the promptness of their service and it's less risky to bring you the check than make a wrong call and annoy a table that's waiting. The better ones tend to leave you alone.

<comment><USER4> Believe me, they are dying to get you to leave. Restaurants and servers make their money by doing as many turnovers as they can in a night. If you're blocking a table the whole night, that's money they are losing, and they desperately want you to leave. They're just trying to be polite and/or don't want a bad Yelp review. When they give you the bill and say "no rush", they're lying.

<comment><USER5> Only once the restaurant is at capacity. If there's at least one other of your type of table open, then the restaurant loses zero marginal dollars by you being there (and arguably gains slightly by looking busy and more attractive).

I'm very conscious about leaving a full restaurant as soon as I'm done with my meal but that's maybe only 10% of my dining experiences ever. I'm perfectly happy to linger at a half full restaurant for as long as I want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm interested in how the data splits across demographics other than class. One anecdotal observation I've made is that men often do not even consider cooking or learning to cook, while women actively decide not to cook or not to learn. Quite a lot of my female friends either cook or have actively rebelled against any attempts to teach them how to cook. While my guy friends do not cook by default.

It's also quite interesting seeing cooking as a service phrased as "is this exactly what I want, yes or no?" Because that's not wrong, but part of the reason I cook is to get exactly what I want. I like to eat healthier, spicier food with certain restrictions (no dairy, less wheat, etc). But that just makes me an outlier.

I've noticed a trend towards going to a restaurant, picking up food, and eating it somewhere else, which frustrates me endlessly. Not only is there more waste from the extra bag, the extra containers, etc., but also the food gets cold, soggy, i.e. worse. I don't think there's the necessary financial incentives for this, but a delivery service that used something more sustainable (dabbas?) and optimized the food for delivery would be fantastic.

<comment><USER7> All of my male friends (and myself as I am male) all cook, and some of us even enjoy it. That said I still eat alot of take out because I work 10-12 hours a day and tend to just pick something up on the way home instead of spending 30-60 mins in the kitchen when i get home. My lack of cooking however does not in anyway equate to my inability to cook.

<comment><USER8> Maybe it's a cultural thing? I know there are places where men refuse to cook, but most men I know enjoy cooking.

That being said I've noticed men usually pick a few dishes and become really good at cooking them, whereas women will generalise.

<comment><USER9> Anecdata. My experience is opposite.

<comment><USER8> Yeah it's all anecdata, that's the point. We want actual data because our experiences differ.

<comment><USER10> Wasn't the comment he was replying to anecdata as well?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a great analysis. One giant missing factor: households with children. It's both difficult to match dietary needs and extremely expensive to feed a bunch of dependents with takeout! A lot of folks I know establish entirely new habits as parents.

Perhaps someone will successfully target that demographic, but I expect the social minefield of early parenting will be way harder to penetrate than the easy consumption of young professionals.

<comment><USER7> It is not really missing. People are not having children and the ones that do are having a single child on average.

I think it is one of the reasons to take out trend is so high. Of the people under 50 that I work with exactly 1 of them have children, and 1 of them wants children one day (but not now) the rest of us, including myself, have no children and have zero desire to have children. Looking at population data we are not alone in that.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps not alone, but very very far from the norm. If I may ask, How old are you all? What else about your demographics/work environment could set you so far apart from the average stats?

<comment><USER13> > How old are you all? What else about your demographics/work environment > could set you so far apart from the average stats?

They are young (not yet 40 years of age), have above-average incomes, and live in urban areas. If you cross-reference this population with desire to have kids, you will find them dragging the reproduction rate in this country massively downwards. The opposite is true about... every facet of what I just said.

EDIT: Many people have pointed out why this is a terrible trend, for reasons that are obvious.

<comment><USER14> > Many people have pointed out why this is a terrible trend, for reasons that > are obvious

Are they? I am not sure I see the obvious reasons. Considering the future, maybe its a better idea to not have children.

<comment><USER15> That's a little cynical isn't it?

The world is improving by many, many metrics. Absolute poverty isn't just going down, it's accelerating towards zero. We're also hitting a point where everyone who can be, is connected. Online education is better than ever (for those who seek it). I could go on.

<comment><USER14> Its defintely cynical. Yes, the world is improving in many ways. Poverty is getting pretty better, diseases are fairly easier to fight, and infanticide isn't a thing. However, its also clear that governments have seemingly no interest trying to fight climate change and a large amount of the world is going to be suffering from the consequences of that in the future.

<comment><USER15> My personal belief is that humans are bad at seeing into the future, but are great at mobilising around here-and-now problems. And I believe the next generation will be the ones to start tackling it while seeing the effects.

I think 100% irreversible processes like microplastics in oceans is something that much more urgently needs dealing with. Repairing the climate is easy compared to filtering trillions of molecules back out the ocean.

<comment><USER14> Well, maybe but the time it takes for the next generation to get in power, and actually start making changes, it might be too late for many many cities of the world. In times like this, isn't it more responsible to not have children?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want to see the future of cooking as a service, no place better than to check out the night markets of Taiwan. Every kinds of cuisine, from Taiwanese to Japanese, Italian to Mexican. Every kind of meat from oyster to crab to lamb. Every dish is bite sized, and can be had for $0.50 to $2. You can try out 20 different dishes in a trip! Young people rarely cook at home (they usually live in a small apt as well), instead buying quick dinners at these night markets or 7-eleven.

Check out the markets: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi6f41Tq_J8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi6f41Tq_J8)

Unfortunately, there's no such thing in the big cities in US yet (New York, SF). Anthony Bourdain was trying to start a night market up in NY though....

<comment><USER17> I imagine between stricter heath codes and higher wages and taxes and all the other costs involved, there's no way to realistically get Asian style street food in the USA. Seems like the closest I've seen if food trucks, but those are often more expensive than traditional restaurants in my experience (San Francisco and Atlanta).

I love Chinese street food, but I'm not holding my breath to see it in the USA. I cook more nowadays in order to save money since eating out is so insanely expensive in USA cities compared to Asia.

<comment><USER18> I believe it is entirely possible, but the food trade culture in the West is the issue. There's an attitude of "my competitors' price their food at this point - they likely know better as they were here first so I should price my food at this point too". My father works in the trade and he's said that food could be price at a fraction of what it's currently priced at - and they'd like make even more money - but it would mean a lot more physical labour; something most food vendors aren't willing to do, as it's a hard enough job already.

I lived in the North of England for a while (one of the cheaper places in the UK), and to go out for lunch would pretty much cost £6-£10 for a 'street-food sized' meal. One day, a street food stall parked up in the middle of a high traffic area and started selling massive burrito sized spring rolls for about £3 a pop with meat and £2 without. Pre-chopped veg, meat fried in massive woks, pancakes rolled fresh. 10 or so staff meant they were basically handing them out as fast as the card machine could take contactless payments (no cash). It was like the whole city damn near shut down. 1000's seemed to congregate to that one spot. People would queue for an hours (thankfully the English are good a queuing); any other alternative for lunch simply didn't make sense. They were open for about 6 months, queues hundreds deep, then all of a sudden they shut up shop overnight just like that.

Coincidentally it turns out the owner was actually a guy a played rugby with. I interrogated him Spanish inquisition style. Basically he saved up enough money to buy 2 commercial fat-fryers, 2 burners and woks, a chest refrigerator and a generator to run them all; all second-hand, all super inexpensive. Lighting, marque, prep stations and the like were all sourced on things like freecycle and gumtree. He bought a permit from the local council to set up shop on the high-street, found a team of part-timers, gave them all course in food safety and he was good to go. No marketing, no branding - just a chalk board that said "Spring Rolls £2 - add meat for £3". All in all it cost him just shy of £8k to start, with which he got a loan for half of that. Apparently a month in and he was turning over £5k gross in a DAY.

He told me he stopped because he had saved up enough money to call himself a millionaire, and didn't want the stress of standing behind a searing hot burner with a 300 deep queue in front of him anymore. He paid off his loans, his kids loans, got an extension on his house and put the rest of his money into some real estate.

I think the demand is there. It's just a case of vendors actually attempting to take the risk and breaking that mould when it comes to price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This really assumes the only point of cooking is sustenance. I think reality is much more complicated. I'd argue that the tradition, culture and craft of cooking is equally important. Having people prepare food on your behalf isn't exactly a new concept.

<comment><USER20> I think you're tacitly agreeing with the original statement. Cooking (outside a professional seeing) may become one of those things that only some of us do, for tradition, culture and craft, as has become of gardening or sewing.

<comment><USER19> More that I think (or hope) that it will continue to be widespread because of these things. It may be right, but I like to think it's not the case. That said, I do care much more about the culture of cooking than your average joe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great deck from a former Uber Eats employee on food delivery: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63B...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v9ifaW1Sxy_oVUtzn63BrqXKGcpMJ_eKrqb59BXjjXA/edit#slide=id.gd5b15f0a3_5_26)

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty shocked how open consumers are to paying more money for a worse product via delivery. Foods travel poorly when steaming in boxes. Hot sandwiches (like burgers) and anything fried are especially notable examples (though most foods become worse in some capacity). Something this deck doesn't mention is that online ordering of pickup is a tiny, no-profit market in comparison. The convenience factor of delivery outweighs the rest for some set of people, for sure.

Big note from the deck though:

> No DSP has been able to prove consistent profitability with their existing > business model

Also not mentioned in the slides - a ton of delivery jobs from small neighborhood joints (in the US) are paid under-the-table. This is a cost differentiator that DSPs can't legally compete with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think an interesting comparison is baking. Buying bread from a bakery or supermarket has become standard. It's even gotten to a point where baking your own bread might not be cheaper than buying it.

Not everything fits that mold, but I'm sure a few other categories of cooking will end up in that state. But not all things. For instance, rice/beans are just so cheap when dry. I can't see how a prepared version is going to bee cheaper than preparing your own.

<comment><USER23> All of this seems to be merging toward how things work in Paris (for example).

Your apartment is so small that you do everything outside and you mostly replenish things almost daily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The author of the tweet that inspired the post lives in Japan, and as a first generation Taiwanese American and occasional traveler to Asia one consistent observation is that it's much more common to eat out than cook than here in the US. Kitchens are tiny in most stereotypical "big Asian cities" and eating out is cheap and options plentiful.

Point is this trend has been the case in Asia for a long time, and the only reason why I don't think it's really the case in the West is because the cost of operating a restaurant or even food truck is high enough that the cost of eating out isn't as economical as it is in Asia.

<comment><USER25> Why is it cheaper to operate a restaurant in a big Asian city than in the US?

<comment><USER26> This is just guessing, but I'd think population density plays a major factor. I'm just eyeballing this list here [1], but Japan is roughly 10x as dense population wise as the US.

1 - [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_popul...](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density)

<comment><USER27> Surely that makes the fixed costs of opening a restaurant significantly higher, not lower?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I believe the social implications are way more complex.

While TFA compares cooking to sewing or gardening, in terms of a declining in both popularity and personal imperative, beyond the arguable claim that food trumps both those, is the social component.

Not so much that eating can be - let alone is necessarily - more social than pastimes such as gardening, but it's one of the few remaining opportunities to _be_ social, both in the cooking and the partaking.

Of course, the erosion of shared meal times and the likely impacts are already well studied.

In his 1994 book 'The Doubter's Companion', John Ralston Saul observed:

"Restaurants, until recently, were places of refuge for people excluded from the mainstream or seeking to escape it — poor students, aging unmarried men not rich enough to have themselves fed at home, richer men seeking sex not wives, and the proverbial artists leading their irresponsible lives. Over the last half-century, restaurants have risen in importance to fill the void left by the decline of the old public celebrations. They now provide the leading forums of public participation."

</comment><comment><USER29> Cooking as a service has been happening for awhile - canned goods, baked goods, boxed goods, frozen or pre-chopped veggies, pre-marinaded meat. At this point the vast majority of products available at grocers have had some sort of prep done to them. It's really just a matter of degrees.

<comment><USER30> This misses the nuance of the write-up. In fact i think the author even agrees this is well established already. But the nuance here is the ways about which people are optimising for this kind of industry - specifically designing their businesses for delivery, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> On Saturday I fed a family of 4 (2 adults and 2 kids) in a Zizzi Restaurant for £50.70+ tip. On Sunday I bought the weeks groceries for same family for £53.76 from Aldi. Sometimes I spend as much as £90 at Aldi, but then, we didn't have desert at Zizzi either.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why doesn't the article mention ready meals? It may not be new, but that's 'CaaS'.

It'd be interesting to see the same graph with ready meals either broken out as a third category, or included with takeaways.

<comment><USER32> Ready meals will play a big part, I agree.

In the past they had problems with quality/taste and healthiness.

But new home technology(instant pot,combi-ovens, new microwave tech) combined with better frozen food, or different logistics that would enable chilled meals - could offer healthy, restaurant quality meals.

And there's also a chance that the cost difference between ready meals and cooking at home will become very low.

<comment><USER27> Oh I'm not saying they're not awful, and I don't buy them - just that it seems weird to discuss how we're going to not have kitchens and someone else will cook our food, without mentioning that a lot of people already live like that with ready meals. A microwave needn't have it's own room called a 'kitchen'.

I particularly thought of it because the graph shows the same change across income groups, except that it's time-shifted so that it really got big in the top bracket earliest, in the '70s, then the middle income group in the '80s, and finally the bottom bracket in the '90s.

If ready meals were included, I suspect it would look more level, or at least bring up the lowest income group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder. Say in one of these rediculously priced costal cities, you convert kitchen into a sleeping room. Would the saved rent (because it can be split more ways) pay for FaaS?

<comment><USER34> Older apartment buildings in Helsinki didn't have kitchens in the apartments when built. Instead, there was a central kitchen in the building.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nice article, and good data find. I think a point missed at the end about how we can potentially avoid "healthiness" as a premium/luxury option is by setting a base-line, with canteen style food. Here is an HN discussion about "canteen-style dining": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19792674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19792674). India also instituted a similar program at their Aganwadis: [https://www.akshayapatra.org/anganwadi- feeding](https://www.akshayapatra.org/anganwadi-feeding). In addition, there was no coverage about the environmental impact of "Cooking-as-a-Service". It could be worse because of having to transport the goods (and keep them warm or cold), including the packaging that may be disposed, or it could be better if the packaging was re-usable (sent back somehow? everyone uses identical swappable packaging?) or it turns out that scheduled deliveries is more optimizable than N houses all driving to the same restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER36> Pushing it a bit further and forgetting about regulation for a second... Do you think people will feel comfortable eating food cooked by "strangers"? I can see the efficiency coming from an on demand market for food where anyone can cook anything for anyone and broadcast it in an app (especially in ethnically diverse cities where I'm sure a lot of people know how to cook amazing dishes), I just don't know if our norms and mental barriers will evolve fast enough for us to see that happening in say the next 10 years. It's one thing to enter the car of a "stranger" for an Uber ride, but maybe it's a different thing to eat some food cooked by a stranger?

<comment><USER37> Almost all of the food that I eat is cooked by strangers.

<comment><USER36> Sure. I'm talking about changing where we are on the "stranger" spectrum from say the professional cook of the restaurant you order from to... Maybe some guy with 2 5-star reviews living 5 blocks from you who apparently makes great burgers and who has been loosely vetted by the app... Will you feel comfortable enough to order? I'm sure some people will. But it seems to me that the mental threshold is higher than say taxi->Uber.

<comment><USER38> I think you have a romanticized notion about who the line cooks are at your local restaurants...

<comment><USER39> That may be partially true, but there is a grounded sense of accountability in any case. I'm sure you can find issues and your occasional booger eater with any restaurant but, in my experience working in such places, typically those jobs are micromanaged in the sense that the entire routine is choreographed from start to finish to save costs and reduce liability.

We can see egregious examples of displacing any form of accountability in the gig economy to the point that they are already immediately met with distrust and disdain when they encroach on another market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The older example of FaaS would be communal kitchens and dining rooms, e.g. college dormitories or kibbutz lifestyles. In these cases, people arrive to where food is being prepped for them; there is no delivery cost.

Particularly in the case of families, the notion that food delivery will ever become cheap enough to be a default relies on negating delivery costs. It may be so cheap to prepare food in bulk as to offset the cost of labor to prepare it; however, that says nothing as to the cost of labor (and energy) to deliver it.

If we ever do develop some kind of solar-powered delivery drone whose cost amortizes out to practically nothing over the life of all of its deliveries, then maybe yes.

<comment><USER41> > Particularly in the case of families, the notion that food delivery will > ever become cheap enough to be a default relies on negating delivery costs.

I live in Italy and delivery cost is like 2,50€. And it's the same if I order food just for myself or for 4 people. So I would say that the delivery cost is cheaper per person for families than for a single person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Interesting article. Hard to argue that we're going to value convenience more and more. As I heard someone else say, in 1900 it would have been pretty inconceivable athta in 2000 we wouldn't be sewing out clothes.

If you are interested in starting your own cloud kitchen, these folks have written up step by step instructions (disclaimer: I was involved with the company as CTO for a couple of years): [https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/2019/04/30/how-to-start- your...](https://www.thefoodcorridor.com/2019/04/30/how-to-start-your-own- delivery-only-food-venture/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Are there tax implications to explore here? Cooking for yourself is tax-free (in terms of labor, you're paying sales tax or VAT on the ingredients). Cooking for others is taxed.

<comment><USER44> Here (in the UK) food is generally zero-rated for VAT if you're cooking it yourself, but not if you're eating it at a restaurant or getting (hot) takeout.

[https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different- goods-...](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/rates-of-vat-on-different-goods-and- services#food-and-drink-animals-animal-feed-plants-and-seeds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> How about Cooking-As-A-Service but you have to use my tiny NY kitchen and it's barely sufficient utensils/ware.

</comment><comment><USER46> Is this new? Food courts and beer gardens that I go complement their sales by using lots of delivery services, and in some days you will see more delivery than local consumption.

There are four major delivery companies that dominates the market here in this city: iFood, James Delivery, Rappi and lastly Uber Eats. A couple of these companies also do supermarket shopping for you - no Amazon in Brazil for everything shopping.

</comment><comment><USER47> +1 for "cooking healthily" rather than "cooking healthy"

</comment><comment><USER48> Home cooking is too personal to be out sourced as a service.

When you cook yourself you optimize for YOUR health, YOUR taste, YOUR budget, etc.

Restaurants and personal chiefs exist for those who would rather trade some of these benefits for convenience.

</comment><comment><USER49> Just think about all the dust bunnies and body hair that gets in your meal when somebody else cooks it, though.

</comment><comment><USER50> > _Cooking will, by 2040, be a niche activity like e.g. gardening or sewing_

This is one of the dumbest things I've read in a long, long time.

Most families simply do not have the money for prepared food to feed their family regularly, and there's no evidence that this is changing at all. Grocery store ingredients are _vastly_ cheaper than anything prepared, and food prep is fundamentally labor-intensive no matter what. The limits of cost advantages from scaling have _already_ been reached: it's called the freezer section, but at most it's a moderate convenience for some.

Further, the graphs show for all income levels that "away" food increased substantially from 1965-1994... and then has stayed mainly the _same_ , actually _decreasing_ from 2004-2007 across _all_ income levels, so there's _zero_ evidence for any trend between now and 2040.

So... a third of meals are "away" and that's been _stable_ over the past _25 years_? Sounds to me like people eat lunch out... and that's it.

<comment><USER51> Everyone individual needs to cook thrice a day (or at least once a day + be damn good at packaging it) while gardening or sewing are far from essentials. Definitely concur.

<comment><USER52> No. Not everyone eats three times a day.

<comment><USER53> This is a silly semantic point and you know it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> This whole service economy model just seems to me like a way to concentrate wealth (and, therefore, power) even further. It's like we've decided it's really inefficient to have the working population's wages tied up in houses, cars, cookware etc. when we could just have them funnel that money directly back into the coffers of the corporations that own more and more of everything.

Do we need to revisit the definition of a company town?

<comment><USER55> The whole service economy model is premised on wide availability of cheap fossil energy. Once that is gone [1], collapse is inevitable.

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

<comment><USER56> Why does it matter where the energy comes from? Between natural gas, nuclear, and renewables, I see no reason to believe that energy costs will increase</comment></comment></comment>


Xiaomi, a Chinese Technology Darling, Slumps After I.P.O - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/08/business/xiaomi-hong-kong-ipo.html <comment><USER2> Good for xiaomi. A 4% slump means they priced it about right.

I don't know why journalists like to write about a big increase after an IPO as success... it's literally a failure. It means the company gave away money.

</comment><comment><USER3> Blackmoon tokenizes Xiaomi IPO. So now, what would be the lockup period?</comment>


GraphQL API Name Conventions - <AUTHOR> https://tomasalabes.me/blog/graphql/2019/02/10/graphql-conventions.html <comment><USER2> please stop the blogspam. [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=talabes](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=talabes)</comment>


AI websites that design themselves - <AUTHOR> https://thegrid.io/#53 <comment><USER2> The website is doing stealthy user-referral tracking. Note the end of the url: [https://thegrid.io/#53](https://thegrid.io/#53)

Other links on Twitter have the same #<user_id> schema.

From the FAQ:

> _How do referrals rewards work? We offer rewards for referring new paid > Founding Members. Every Founding Member is provided with a unique referral > link that we use to track people who have signed up through referrals.

When you purchase a Grid Founding Membership, well give you a unique referral URL to share with your friends. For every person who purchases a Grid Founding Membership using your referral URL youll receive $32 of the proceeds refunded toward your order, until your Founding Membership has been paid for. That means if you get three friends to purchase, youll get your membership free._

<comment><USER3> Well spotted, that's a cool trick---it is almost hidden.

Any recommendations for passing referral ids in a fully stealth fashion between domains, e.g., by reading the referrer attribute of the GET request? A django app?

People comping to mysite.com/refID could bypass the referral program and re- visit the base url mysite.com. I'm fine with this, but it's not cool from refID's point of view. The main problem is the person visiting via the referral link might wonder whether the refID really recommends mysite.com wholeheartedly, or out to make a buck.

<comment><USER4> That's really that problem with every recommendation system that actually offers you something of worth, isn't it? When I wrote the referral system, I wasn't aware of the fact that people might read something into it. I was basically coding away and thinking: "Well now that I used the referral code, I might as well remove it. Nobody needs it anymore."

As people started complaining that their links didn't work - which in fact, they did all along - we decided to leave it in the URL from now on. Such is life ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this an art project or self-parody? The site is completely broken and unusable in Chrome.

<comment><USER6> AdBlock for Chrome completely destroys the layout. If I disable it for the page, it looks fine.

<comment><USER7> Had that same hypothesis, works great in Chrome for me; installed adblock, it explodes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another Sandwhich Video. I'm starting to group all these products featuring Adam Lisagor together, and it's not necessarily a positive association.

<comment><USER9> To their credit, this video doesn't feature him as prominently as in many other Sandwich videos and mostly just uses his voice and some static images (which I did immediately recognize however).

It also spends most of the time showing the actual product instead of just Adam doing 'funny' things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ponzi 2.0? I can't see any reference to domain mapping, migration of the existing websites and heck, links to existing websites on "the grid". UPD: multi language support, hey, I want Hebrew/Arabic dual-language e-commerce shop for SCAD schematics. Can you help?

</comment><comment><USER11> It says they have a github and says "here's ours" but theres no link, and github doesn't appear anywhere else in the page source.

Looks nice in firefox (doesn't work in chrome)

<comment><USER2> GitHub appears to be the where the rendered sites are deposited.

<comment><USER12> A little bit more than that. We both

* Store the normalized content of our users to per-site repos in Jekyll-like Markdown + Front Matter documents

* Store the actual pages our engine designs

This means users have full access to their content on both levels.

<comment><USER13> Example: [https://github.com/the-domains/the-grid](https://github.com/the- domains/the-grid)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I honestly think that if executed correctly, this will completely replace squarespace, and then possibly wordpress.

</comment><comment><USER15> Best of luck, looks promising.</comment>


Show HN: Whales Report – spot paying users in mobile games - <AUTHOR> http://soom.la/whales/ <comment><AUTHOR> At SOOMLA we're very nerdy about community products. We stated originally from an open source project which evolved to a the SOOMLA framework for mobile game development. Now we're taking community to our latest product - the Whales Report. This report shows you users who've paid in other games, hence highly likely to pay in your game. This becomes possible with our cross-game data sharing network, which analyzes anonymous user behavior across games and spots the VIP users, who are likely to generate your future revenue. With this crowdsourced knowledge, developers can tap into user-level insights once those users enter their game. The product works on the premise of data sharing. Developers opt-in to share their game's data and get access to user data from other games. We'd love your feedback!

<comment><USER2> >which analyzes anonymous user behavior across games and spots the VIP users

You are identifying users by anonymous user data? That doesn't sound so anonymous...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Me and my friend like to bet on games of Miniclip 8 Ball Pool, because of that we don't mind spending money on the best cues to gain an advantage. It's really funny seeing how the game starts treating you differently once it identifies you as a "whale". I was just thinking the other day about how that data would be so valuable if it was able to be obtained before a player outed themselves as such. One problem I imagine a data-sharing platform like this would have though is games lying. A game publisher has more to gain from taking data and giving nothing back than following the rules of the platform. How do you ensure publishers are being honest with you?</comment>


What Bullets Do to Bodies - nappy-doo https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/opinion/virginia-baseball-shooting-gun-shot-wounds.html?_r=0 <comment><AUTHOR> "This is in contrast to expanding bullets, especially if shot from an assault rifle, which can discharge bullets much faster than a handgun."

Ugh, Not sure why 'assault riffle' needed to be used here instead of simply riffle. A bolt action can shoot at the same or higher velocity.

If by 'discharge bullets much faster' the author was instead referring to the rate of fire I'm still not sure what the point is as a semi-auto riffle and Semi Auto pistol can be shot equally fast.</comment>