What Is a Game? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/what-game-2018-06-04 <comment><USER2> > A game is something that you opt into doing because you want the experience > of playing it. Labeling every obstacle you run into in life, a game quickly > robs the term of any meaning.

This strikes at the heart of the pernicious trend 'gamification of all the things.' Those tools have nothing to do with games and everything to do with dark patterns.

> part of playing a game is taking on a responsibility that you weren't > required to take.

Gamification is the opposite - pulling you into an engagement you wouldn't otherwise choose (for better or for worse).

<comment><USER3> I disagree that voluntariness and lack of real-world relevance are very central for games.

I often find that a task that I put off for a while turns out to be fun and gamelike once I get into flow and find that the problem has interesting structure to learn.

In general, finding an _appropriate level of challenge_ is usually the limiting factor in making a good game. Our brains love learning new patterns and making new discoveries. But most tasks are either too mundane to provide any challenge, or too difficult that we can't make progress. Even games that start out as very fun generally become boring once we master the easily learned patterns and our skill plateaus.

This is where most attempts at gamification fall flat. The problem is not that the goals are meaningful to our lives, the problem is that there's just not any interesting structure to learn, so the game feels hollow.

<comment><USER4> It's useful to remember that this story is a blog posting.

Games are tools that humans use to learn about reality by performing pattern recognition to optimize in an artificially constrained environment. This can include your own arbitrary personal constraints. Gamification of things is putting arbitrary rewards and restrictions on activities. Involvement with reality (eg Pokemon Go) is orthogonal.

I believe there are actual whitepapers on this subject (what is a game?) from decades ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is Mark Rosewater talking about a useful model for what it means for something to be a "game", as distinct from an "activity", an "event", or a "toy". Rosewater is a chief designer of Magic: the Gathering, and has a lot of great stuff to say about game design.

<comment><USER5> > a useful model

Please explain the usefulness of a taxonomy that has "game", "activity", "event", and "toy" as discrete entities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Rosewater is a game designer; it's his job to distinguish fine details in his area of expertise. I find it interesting to hear an expert dive deep into things, especially into things which I'm familiar with as a complete layman (like games).

Anyway, if they were genuinely exactly the same concept, why would we have so many different words for it? Synonyms pretty much never carry exactly the same meaning as each other; they have different colour or shades or whatever.

<comment><USER5> I'm not arguing that all of them are the same thing. I'm 1) wondering why we need to distinguish between them in the first place; and 2) saying there's way to much overlap between the concepts for them to be presented as distinct.

<comment><USER6> The point isn't to build categories for their own sake, the point is that categories allow us to group and exclude concepts based on whether they have similar "rules" or "feels". If you're designing a new thing or analyzing an old thing, it's useful to be able to sort through which heuristics and rules will likely apply to the thing you're examining.

In other words, if we have generally good advice about how to make a game fun, and you know that advice is predicated on a certain definition of "game", it is easier to figure out whether or not that advice applies to the thing you're building.

Rosewater's categorization of Minecraft as a toy rather than a game is a really good example:

If you're a game designer, and you think of Minecraft as a game, there are a lot of game rules that Minecraft breaks. Its progression system is wack. It has a lot of design elements that don't really feed into its core loop well. And part of understanding why those "flaws" don't matter is understanding that Minecraft is working under a completely different set of design rules than a game like Doom.

So one of the things we do as designers is we add distinctions between different types of experiences that allow us to make rules that are more consistent and predictable. If you're able to split computer experiences into different categories and say, "Minecraft and Doom are fundamentally different", then it's easier to come up with rules around flow, and progression systems, and difficulty curves, and unity of theme.

As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make good games. Without narrowing a design space or coming up with heuristics to filter out good and bad ideas, designing games is just too stinking hard. There are always going to be exceptions to those rules, and that's fine. But the goal is still to give us mechanisms that in most cases allow us to talk about why an idea does or doesn't work.

This is the same reason why games build player archetypes. Basically no one fits into a single player archetype, and there's heavy overlap between them, and there are players that defy all of the archetypes we come up with. That does not mean that player archetypes aren't extremely useful as design tools. People think about classification systems like they're some kind of moral or philosophical separation between objects. They're not, classification systems are entirely pragmatic, practical tools.

All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate. But game design is an extremely fuzzy field, and it's hard to figure out what makes "good" design when your subject is so broad that literally every rule you come up with has exceptions. As a designer, I have multiple classification systems that I use for games and players, and some of them outright contradict each other. But all of them are useful lenses that I look through when I need to think about design decisions.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the elaborate reply! There's a lot of room for thought there!

But while I'm here... Minecraft is a quintessential roguelike game. You arrive, naked and alone, on a hostile world. You then build yourself up by the skin of whatever. You mine and farm and build, and you acquire food and clothes for yourself. The only rule Minecraft broke is the one that says you can't code a financially viable game in Java.

(I guess there's no ascension, but at that point you've built heaven on earth anyway, so there's no reason to leave.)

> As to why we need those rules in the first place? Because we want to make > good games.

I'm sorry, but super no. No game designer has ever feared that they would end up with a good toy, or a great activity, rather than making bank on Steam.

> All categorizations are wrong. No maps are completely accurate.

That's right! "All models are wrong, but some are useful." I was merely wondering what the use of the model presented by GP was.

<comment><USER7> > I was merely wondering what the use of the model presented by GP was.

For my money it's just a clarity of thought thing. The author and people that like his model can use it to guide their work. Similar to using design pillars but at a higher level.

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, but that means nothing to me. I have no idea what "clarity of thought" means in this particular instance. Same for "design pillars", regardless of whether it's used at a high or low level.

<comment><USER7> Sorry.

For clarity of thought I mean if you decide to make a game you might want to work out what a game is to you. Like a mission statement that you can use as a razor to judge your subsequent ideas.

Design pillars are similar but about specific aspects of a game. A set of principles you can use to guide development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> A game is a thing with a goal (or goals), restrictions, agency, and a lack of real-world relevance._

I think there is a simpler definition that subsumes the first three points. When I clicked to this definition, I think it gave me a better understanding of not just games, but many of the pursuits humans choose to sink time into:

A game is a thing with _bounded consequences_.

"Consequences" means you can make choices and those choices matter. Relatively good and bad things can happen in response to them. Good things subsumes Mark's "goals", bad things covers the "restrictions", and "agency" is implicit that in order to have consequences, you must have actions.

But the part that makes games _games_ is that the scope of those consequences has an upper. Bad things can happen, but they can only be _so_ bad. And, importantly, you have a good understanding of how bad they can be _before_ you make the choice.

The reason we actively seek out and play games is because we know the average result of our choices in the game is significantly better than the worst possible result. Therefore, it's a safe experience to opt into. This is what makes games _feel_ like games. It's the sensation of a free lottery ticket.

Looking at games in these terms raises some interesting questions around the fringes. A stock trading simulation where you invest and win fake money is clearly a game. Trading your actual retirement savings on the stock market is clearly not a game. What about a "game" that trades using virtual money but lets you convert that to real money afterwards? What if you have to buy in with real money to play that game? What about trading on the real market but starting with a small enough fixed pool that you can safely afford to lose?

What if you are a professional poker player who needs to win in order to pay your bills? Conversely, what does it mean to hold a regular job with performance reviews if you happen to already be independently wealthy? Is your job now a game? What if you sink thousands of hours into an MMO in order to gain some powerful item only if you beat a dragon. Given the large opportunity cost of that time, is that boss fight still a game?

My claim is that the structure of the activity itself doesn't tell you whether or not it's a game. You need to know the context of the player because that's what determines the severity of the consequences. Chutes and ladders is a game. Chutes and ladders with a mob boss who will murder your family if you lose is not.

Something I've observed in my own life is that when it feels like too many things are not fun, it's often because I'm in a place where the negative consequences of them are too severe, or at least I perceive them to be. In particular, when I'm really pressed for time, then few recreational pursuits feel fun because the lost time itself is too high of a consequence.

<comment><USER9> > In particular, when I'm really pressed for time, then few recreational > pursuits feel fun because the lost time itself is too high of a consequence.

Thanks for articulating this idea that I so often experience and wasn't aware of.

<comment><USER8> It took me a _long_ time to realize that this is what was going on in my head.

Even after figuring it out, I still struggle with it. Because it is, obviously, important to unwind and do things just for fun. But doing so now requires me to as an act of will decide to treat my time as less precious, which is _really_ hard to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll never forget the moment of realization I experienced when I was about fourteen, and it clicked in my head that all video games were essentially just sets of cartesian coordinates being drawn on the screen, and pressing the controls was just changing numbers.

It was actually kind of a shattering moment, realizing there was no magic. After that, every game I played with friends, I struggled to enjoy the magic because all I could think about was "holding this button is just increasing or decreasing a number".

I stumbled upon this moment of realization by accidentally opening a debug overlay in what was probably a NES emulator. Naturally I had a look around and stumbled across a set of numbers that consistently changed as I moved my character on the screen.

<comment><AUTHOR> "If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives will be empty indeed."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> a friend of mine recently asked a related question: what's the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools? what's the line there - and has anyone written philosophy about this

<comment><USER12> I love this question, and will spend quite a lot of time thinking about the ramifications. An adjacent question that I wrestle with a lot is:

\- What's the dividing line between a game and a task?

This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box" games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash of Clans.

I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and seeing how much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all costs. I figured there was a good chance whatever psychology at play captured their attention would likely capture mine as well, and it didn't seem like a fulfilling use of my life. Later, I generalized this to quickly identify any games that felt more like a "task" than a "game". An example of one that I played for awhile but then identified as such is "Link the Dot"[0] (a classic "Pipe drawing, connect the dots" game).

I started getting somewhat worried about the validity and generalization of my mental scheme (game vs. task, avoid tasks) when I realized that some "good" games end up being mostly task-based. I played through Monument Valley all the way through. At first it felt very game-like, but after the first 2-4 levels, I had fully grasped the concept. After the learning phase, the rest of the dozens of levels were essentially just performing rote tasks again. As both the Pipes game and Monument Valley are at their heart "puzzle games", I started to wonder if all puzzle games could be construed as "tasks", hidden behind varying layers of obfuscation. That didn't sit well with me, and I felt something may be off about the "task vs. game" model.

Over the next several years of paying attention to this, I started noticing that so many games that I love at least have some aspect of "task". In Starcraft (Gold/Plat/Diamond), the first 2-4 minutes of every game is essentially just completing a rote series of tasks according to a rigid flowchart - and success is greatly determined by how precisely you execute those tasks for 2-4 minutes.

4x games like Civilization become exceedingly bogged down in tasks in the late game. Space Trader games like Escape Velocity have me flying cargo back and forth for hours between two systems dozens of times to farm enough gold to buy a good ship/weapons.

For now, I've decided that the "game" part of any game are the novel aspects of it. This can change over time. Tic-tac-toe is a competitive game when players are naive about strategy, but becomes a task once you learn its rules and nuance. Creativity and freedom of thought is the essence of something being "play", and IMO the requirement for being a game. But what is a game to one person can easily be a task to someone else, or even to the same person after they learn enough about the game.

I also now believe that shallow time- and grind/diligence- domain tasks exist in otherwise deep games to hook into human psychology to provide a heightened sense of accomplishment. This may be a necessary aspect for many games, for example open-world RPG's. It may very well be an essential part of good, honest game design to include some aspects of skinner-box mechanics as part of a much larger universe. If so, maybe that's driven by the imperfection of the human brain, and is somewhat of a constraint for game design. Or it may be that it's purely a crutch for imperfect game design - maybe games really can achieve high accomplishment through creativity of play alone and eschew all monotonous tasks. I think there's TONS of room for future games to utilize advanced AI's like AlphaStar to enhance gameplay by removing 99% of the non- intellectual actions - and this is one of the most exciting developments I see coming in the eventual future.

I came across this article[1] which explores some of the relationship between skinner boxing and game design, and thought I'd link it here. It also goes into some of the pitfalls of overly classifying everything as a skinner box.

I also have some thoughts on Factorio, Cities: Skyline, fighting games, and twitch FPS games as well that I don't have very well structured yet. Loot boxes certainly are another aspect lately which may not directly lie on this continuum but may be another dimension.

So for me:

>the difference between a plaything and a tool? when do you play with tools versus when do you work with tools?

My answer is that it's a spectrum from full creativity of thought to a purely rote repetition. Likely all things lie somewhere between the extremes.

0: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindone...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gookindonesia.linkthedot) 1: [http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful- distincti...](http://keithburgun.net/why-skinner-box-is-a-useful-distinction/)

<comment><USER8> _> This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box" games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash of Clans. I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and seeing how much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all costs._

It's interesting to look at those games from a business/economic perspective.

Imagine you create a mobile game called "Data Entry Crush" where the game would send players an image of a document and they would carefully type in the text for it. You give the game to players for free. On the backend, you sell this as a service to companies needing data entry where they pay you to turn their images into text.

In other words, like Mechanical Turk, without paying the Turks.

Of course, this would never fly because people don't find data entry very fun and it's pretty obvious to them that they are being had. They know they are providing something of value to you and won't do it for free.

What Candy Crush and friends did was find an exploitable loophole in human pyschology. It's hard to get people to do something that clearly looks like valuable work for free. But it turns out people aren't good at realizing _their own attention itself has value_. So what do you do? Make a game that's a little fun to play to keep people going, and then pepper it with ads. Those ads take some of the player's attention but since humans seem to undervalue that resource, the players allow it to happen without getting irate or expecting compensation.

And then, as before, you make all your money on the back end. You let companies pay you to put those ads in front of people. It's like an arbitrage opportunity where human attention is more valuable to (A) companies than it is to (B) the individuals who have it, so you take it from B, sell it to A, and keep the profit.

<comment><USER13> This reminds me of an episode of the old Clerks cartoon show. They were playing an arcade game about pushing blocks around to build a pyramid, which turned out to be a Last Starfighter type qualification exam. Except, of course, what winning qualified you to do was be enslaved and forced to push actual stone blocks to build a pyramid.

But you've sort of just rediscovered the business model of all advertising? All kinds of media are in the business of attracting attention. Then, if you want, you can sell that attention to someone else in the form of advertising. The trick with candy crush etc is that the content attracting attention doesn't actually have to be "good" in the way that honest creators intend, just addictive.

<comment><USER14> Some time ago I realized, while standing in the midst of the Oakland Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, surrounded by old game boxes, this:

"Most of these games are all marketing."

That is, if you look at the art, and look at the back of the box bullet points, you'll see something like "Go on an epic journey", or "Choose who lives or dies", or "Build an empire to stand the test of time".

To the extent that these games express these things, it's through clever rearrangements of stock tropes: Your typical murderering and looting game protagonist, able only to communicate down the barrel of a gun, is now justified through the plot and given many new backdrops so as to make the journey "epic". A scripted choice is added here and there, but not everywhere, to make "choosing who lives or dies" feel consequential, but without ascribing particular meaning to the choice either(since all choices should be gratifying for marketing purposes). Empire-building is signalled through various reports of legible progress in gaining territory and developing cities and armies, but nothing resembling the actual political structure or dynamics of an empire - the fantasy is simply one of a "rise and further rise".

And so in playing these games, you get an aesthetic impression, but not something with a solid grounding to it that you would spend time thinking about afterwards or relating to your real-world experiences. When a speedrunner sets out to conquer these sorts of games they look for software vulnerabilities that short-circuit the impression of what is going on and attack the underlying data model and logic.

In that way, video games have been pushed through industrialized practice quite a ways away from the natural state of games as a tradition, which is to fully and honestly explore simple concepts. You can't speedrun basketball, because you're playing within the laws of nature and against opponents who do the same. But if you go to market a basketball video game, you are trading on the impression of basketball, not its reality: and so licenses for professional players, superlative simulation techniques, etc. come to the fore.

So as I see it, games like Candy Crush are further extensions of industrialization: The game concept is simply a tool for the marketing framework, which in this case has been designed towards metrics-optimized microtransactions and customer retention. If a particular level is failing to retain players or to induce a purchase, it gets reworked until the metrics line up.

Despite all this, good work in games does tend to shine through. Nintendo's franchises, for example, are all built on "honest explorations" of their basic themes, and the play concepts tend to have something intrinsically interesting going on. And the breakthrough indie hits usually have this quality, too. The games that get buried, in contrast, usually aren't achieving the same degree of cohesiveness and direction - even if they're huge AAA productions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ha I think every game team I was on debated this at some point. It's almost a running joke. Navel gazing is not part of the industry that I miss.

</comment><comment><USER16> I lost.

<comment><USER17> I didn't until I saw your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Lacks real-world relevance"

I strongly disagree. (even though he relativates it a bit) And rather think the opposite. All games ultimately have real world relevance, by training a certain or many skills, useful for the real world. (some games of course more, than others)

Or they even have direct realworld relevance, as the winner in a competition, for example the olympic games, gets real fame and reward. (also in e-sports)

But for example the olympic games were created, to get the young greek people to train certain skills, so they would be better warriors in a real fight.

Now, most computer or card games, do not have that intention, they are intended to be fun.

And why are they fun?

Because they provide a challenge and everyone enjoys mastering a challenge. Because that is pro evolution. And we as a species, we were very successfull, because we could adopt to very different challenges. And traditionally trained for that as childs with various games, like "catch". A game that trained many important skills for hunting or fleeing from a predator. (reflexes, speed, evade, sneak, timing...) Not so important anymore, in civilized, policed rich societys, still important in poorer areas.

So the traditional idea of a game is, training a real world scenario in controlled and save setting. But theory is dull, so kids do it, because "it is fun". (and it is fun, because of various success during the game, that makes the brain releas happy hormones, along with other hormones from the movement itself)

Now sadly, that idea got messed up along the way and games today are often played for compensation for lack of joy at boring jobs, which do not give the rewarding feeling, or as time killing for those who lack a meaningful occupation. So quite some games train a not so relevant skillset. They trick the brain in thinking what it is doing is pro evolution (you get more powerful, you evolve, you make friends, join a strong tribe, you slain powerful enemies, ...), while in reality, it is not. At least not doing it as a main purpose, which many addicted gamers do. (Apart from that, also hardcore gaming can of course lead to real world benefits, making real friends, learning organizing skills, time management, communicate effectivly, using the right tools, etc. but I am talking about addiction here. When the game becomes the purpose and the gamer exists for the game and not the other way around.)

So ... games are awesome. They can teach you various things. They can take you to other worlds, inspire your creativity, let you find people you lack in "real live", blow of steam, finding reward - but they are bad, if they become your main purpose of existence.

Anyway, I believe, much more of learning in schools etc. should be in the form of games. When you play being a roman soldier, (wheter it be in a computer game, or theater, or reenactment) you will much more understand about that time, than reading facts in a textbook. If you can play with a lego mindstorm robot in class, you will understand much more about robotic, than reading about it. And so on ..

</comment><comment><USER19> Save me from prescriptivists in all things. We should just accept that all taxonomies have weak boundaries and move on with our life. "I know it when I see it" is a fine answer for something like this.

Is there ever a situation that you'll have to deal with where a matter of life-and-death hinges on a definitional absurdity like this? Is there a situation where anything at all hinges on this, except someone says "let's play a game" and you suggest Legos and they say "technically that's not a game" and then you stop talking to that person?

<comment><USER20> The seems specifically to be an exercise in descriptivism. The point seems to be to build a vocabulary, not to draw hard boundaries.

<comment><USER19> There is no reference here to common usage or to any sort of establishment of standard practices, etc. This is just naval-gazing to put hard boundaries on something that is intrinsically not well-defined. In particular, all of the things that are explicitly excluded from "games" are things that some people would argue are games, that the author is arguing is not, which is an explicitly prescriptive practice.</comment></comment></comment>


Making the World's Data Computable - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2010/09/making-the-worlds-data-computable/

<comment><USER2> Stephen Wolfram is a clever chap.

But it's very annoying the way he puts every sentence into its own paragraph.

As if he thinks his audience is too stupid to understand any train of thought longer than a single sentence.

Perhaps he just does it that way to remind him to pause enough while speaking.

But I don't think so -- I'm fairly sure I've seen material of his written that way that was never the content of a lecture or address.

Whatever the reason, it makes his stuff unnecessarily hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its hard to differentiate between Wolfram the intellectual and Wolfram the Mathematica peddler.</comment>


Show HN: One-Stop inbox for customer communication. - <AUTHOR>

You use Twitter, Facebook as well as email to communicate with your customers? With all these different services, it has become very hard to manage and keep track of all the conversations happening.
My co-founder and I noticed this some months ago and asked people how they would like to handle this. And so we have come up with a new solution. We launched into public beta about two weeks ago.
The problem was: We had a very hard time explaining to people how we help them and why that's relevant. We were too technical and nobody really understood exactly what it was that we did.
So we took a few steps back and really worked hard on how to explain what we actually do. We launched our new website that (we hope) does a better job at telling people what we do.
What do you guys think? Can we explain well enough what we are doing? And how do you like the video?
The new website is at http://suplify.me
Thanks, Sebastian <comment><USER2> Personal opinions - first impressions ...

I hate video - I far prefer a single, elegant diagram with a small amount of text:

        +</comment><comment>---+
        | Twitter | </comment><comment>.
        +</comment><comment>---+        \
                            \                           Something here
        +</comment><comment>----+         \                          to show that
        | Facebook | </comment><comment></comment><comment>-> Suplify Timeline    you can easily
        +</comment><comment>----+         /                          search or index
                            /                           in the timeline
        +</comment><comment>-+          /
        | Email | </comment><comment>--'
        +</comment><comment>-+

I don't care why you did it - I really, really only care about the pain you will take away. Is this an aspirin? Or is it a vitamin? Will you take away pain? Or will you help me work stronger and faster?

Try not to say "Both" - try to be more focussed.

I've not watched the video, and you may answer this there, but how can I find things quickly and easily? Do I search with a text box?

These are my instant reactions, those were my immediate questions, and from your landing page I can't see how to get them answered. I can watch the video, but I have no idea if that will answer my questions. I'd like to see from the page a link or graphic that makes it clear that clicking there really will answer my question(s).

Hope that helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! This are some very good points you make. We will definitely add a diagram like that to our page.

Regarding your questions: We take the pain away of managing all these different channels. All the incoming messages are stored in suplify and you and your colleagues can reply right there. And you can see what your colleagues wrote.

<comment><USER2> Is that immediately clear from your landing page? Is that your main message? Shouldn't your landing page shout:

        Overwhelmed by input channels?

        Manage them simply with Suplify!
        Combine - correlate - instant access.
        Control and manage your information
        flow from email, twitter, facebook,
        and more.

Or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://suplify.me>

</comment><comment><USER3> Sebastian,

I couldn't see any pricing information. Without that I wouldn't normally sign up to try it out.

<comment><USER4> 15 € per user is the current plan. But we'll add it :) Thank you! How you don't see the trees if you live in a forrest.. (German saying)</comment></comment>


Stop Reading News (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://fs.blog/2013/12/stop-reading-news/ <comment><USER3> Ezra Taft Benson: "One must select wisely a source of news; otherwise it would be better to be uninformed than misinformed."

My own view is that you should reduce consumption dramatically, but still read some publications. And realize that in software, we have our own form of "news" that this missive applies to.

Here's my media literacy guide:

[https://github.com/nemild/hack-the- media/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/nemild/hack-the- media/blob/master/README.md)

And one just for the tech industry (including HN):

[https://github.com/nemild/hack-the- media/blob/master/softwar...](https://github.com/nemild/hack-the- media/blob/master/software-engineers-media-guide.md)

<comment><USER4> Very cool. Thanks for sharing.

FWIW sharing my primary global non-tech news source while we are at it: The Financial Times to me is all the important news without the fluff and very much worth the subscription price. Obviously there is a heavy focus on economic news (but not exclusively).

I especially like the News Briefing which I can listen to conveniently with a "Hey Siri, play the FT News Briefing" while doing my morning routine. These podcasts as well as Alphaville ([https://ftalphaville.ft.com](https://ftalphaville.ft.com)) are actually free.

I delved into FT last year through exploration of the Media Bias Chart for the US: [https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/08/Med...](https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/08/Media-Bias-Chart_4.0_8_28_2018-min.jpg)

I probably should read more widely but I had been disappointed by traditional outlets like the BBC or The Economist for a long while now. It also feels like the world's balance of power is shifting heavily at this time so I'm not sure where I can get high quality global news without our natural western bias (our perspective increasingly feels like wishful thinking to me).

<comment><USER5> FT is fine as far as it goes, but it ignores most of the world's news except for business/finance stuff and the same mostly-useless "headline" stories you see everywhere else. Unless all you care about is the finance markets, it doesn't have much to say that is important your life and the world.

<comment><USER6> That filter is exactly what makes it valuable to me. Financial news still has to report political news if it has real-world impact on the economy, or a company or a politician of sufficient import.

So watching CNBC, for example instead of NBC Nightly News, you'll still know all about the government shutdown or the possible resignation of the governor of Virginia or a winter storm shutting down half the country, but you won't have to endure endless, excruciating segments about a kid smiling at a guy beating a drum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When I realized that "the news" have much more influence shaping mine and my friends opinion, I was shocked. It passively or they actively distract you from things that really matter in your life [0] (availability heuristic [1]).

And given that 80% of its content is written by PR agencies [2] you can be sure, that every possible cognitive bias will be applied to keep you busy.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad- ro...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli)

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

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/nov/17/mondaymediasec...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/nov/17/mondaymediasection3)

<comment><USER8> > Given that a (conservative) estimate of 75% of entertainment stories and 50 > to 80% of news and business stories emanate from public relations

She doesn't cite any sources to back up those figures. Do you have any available?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One piece of anecdata: I subscribed to the Economist briefly last year and it was one of the best things I've done as far as advancing myself as a person. While the vast majority of what written about wasn't immediately relevant to me (compared even to a random programming-related blog post), it did a _lot_ to enlighten me on the value of good journalism and broaden my world view as well as keeping me reasonably informed on happenings in the world. I stopped subscribing to the Economist because I couldn't find time to read every edition cover to cover, but I plan on starting again this year.

I also subscribe to [https://lwn.net](https://lwn.net) which brings up another thing -- supporting the organizations that make the news is important if you want news that is good (even if it's irrelevant _right now_ ) from being produced.

<comment><USER10> It is hard to find time to read The Economist from cover to cover. I try to at least look at each article, and read at least half of them. Even The Economist has some articles that seem ephemeral: for example, a discussion of whether a particular merger will or won't happen.

<comment><USER11> The same could be said of keeping up with the front page of HN. I imagine most of us pick and choose which items to give attention to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This article is right on.

\- Avoiding the daily news likely will NOT make you any less informed.

\- Avoiding constant media consumption will NOT give power to a central authority and reduce your rights.

A lot of the counter arguments here are seemingly from individuals _defending_ the amount of time they spend consuming content.

To those who read the news religiously, what was the last news item that you, _personally_ , took action on? Can you remember it? Ok. GREAT!

\--> Now, be objective with yourself. What % of news items did YOU take action on? Did it give you a >0 return on invested time?

<comment><USER13> If you avoid the news long enough, eventually you will find that your rights have been reduced without you noticing.

You absolutely can take real action with financial implications for yourself from news items - I made £1k from a single Telegraph article on how the Royal Mail IPO was grossly underpriced. I've adjusted my pension allocation on the assumption that the pound would fall against the dollar and done quite well on that too.

But for much news it's not so much "achieving a positive return" as avoiding a negative. It's the Arthur Dent effect: one day you wake up to find aliens about to bulldoze your planet, and they tell you that you were warned and should have known about it. There's a _lot_ of that these days. I'm surrounded by people who have taken Brexit-related actions of one kind or another, especially all the Europeans who suddenly have to register to avoid deportation. I factored it in to my job change, not as a major factor, but it's convenient to be working for a US multinational rather than a company exporting or importing physical goods from the EU.

I don't even seek out that much news any more, it just keeps leaking in via social media. I should make more effort to follow local news, because that really is the place where I can find out if someone's going to put a bypass through my house or disrupt my bus route, _and_ have a chance of stopping it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Vide "I Hate the News" by Aaron Swartz [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews) (news as an overvalued distraction) and recent "The Welfare Effects of Social Media" [http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf](http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/facebook.pdf) (on average, quitting Facebook makes one a bit happier... and much less up-to- date with news; maybe it is not just an irrelevant correlation).

</comment><comment><USER15> For the last 4-5 years, Hacker News has been pretty much my only source of any kind of news outside of the topics that I work with on a daily basis. This is true.

Before that, I did not read newspapers or follow any kind of journalism. I still recall being around age 12 or 13 and making a conscious decision not to watch TV anymore. It has been around just as much time since I last saw a TV news report.

Maybe it has something to do with mentality? Is the new generation reading news? I highly doubt it. I think the new generation is caught up in quizzes that stir up emotions, and psychological tests that determine whether a giraffe is your spirit animal.

I'm not even sure if that makes sense, but I know that newspapers don't make any sense whatsoever; despite it being the livelihood of so many folks.

How can anyone justify reading news that only talk about negative things? I don't have time for that kind of nonsense in my life. I know the system is broken, corrupt, beyond repair -- why remind me about it every day?

<comment><USER8> > I think the new generation is caught up in quizzes that stir up emotions, > and psychological tests that determine whether a giraffe is your spirit > animal.

Given the activism they're showing in, eg, the US, I think if you read the news, you'd be surprised how wrong you are.

> How can anyone justify reading news that only talk about negative things?

To be aware of them in order to help fix them?

<comment><USER16> A lot of that activism is more performative than practical, judging by voter turnout.

<comment><USER17> Didn't the last US election have the largest turnout in the past century? See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_elections](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_elections)

<comment><USER16> It did, the activists lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would like to add the Wikipedia portal Current Events to the list of alternative news sources in this thread.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events)

<comment><USER19> I like how it's short, to the point and reflects events worldwide uniformly

<comment><USER20> and the word "Trump" isn't anywhere to be found!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The beef I have with journalism is that every time they write on a topic I have good knowledge of, I find their coverage to be lame and lacking depth. Which leads me to a more generalized assumption that this is probably true for any given subject, except perhaps politics. Most notable example I can think of is how the media covers A.I. issues. I don't expect newspapers to have book quality analysis but at the very least I expect some kind of integrity. If I have to wonder every time whether the journalist knows what he/she's talking about then I'd rather not read them at all.

<comment><USER22> This has a name: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell- Mann_amnesia_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect)

Although I think it bears saying that journalists really might be doing a better job of reporting on the politics that is their own main interest than on the science stories which are far outside their own interest and expertise, and which they may well regard as lower priority for accuracy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can only consume so much information, and most of the news is presented as low-quality information or information pollution.

The 24/7 news cycle makes the quality problem even worse.

Here are two more similar links:

[http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice- when...](http://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-when-you- quit-the-news/)

[http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news- diet/](http://www.dobelli.com/en/essays/news-diet/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't like the binary choice to either read the news or ignore it. We just need to be mature enough to curate what we read, hopefully striking a healthy balance between our personal lives and what's going on in the world outside of that.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you want to understand better than 99% of the population where the world is heading, you could do a lot worse than reading a few of the titles in the Economist's books of the year list.

Even better, read Machiavelli, human nature hasn't changed and it will help you interpret the news.

Also watch the documentary "The Century of The Self"; most news is propaganda, and this will help you spot it.

And, if you must read the news, aim for a bit of diversity (i.e. both media from the right and the left, and events in your country as seen from abroad, and triangulate), otherwise you will easily get brainwashed, censorship in dictatorships tries to block media it can't control for this very reason.

Headlines are clickbait more often than not, don't believe them, and "breaking news" is abused so often that it's become a meaningless tag.

Don't use social media as a news source, it's abysmal, even worse than tabloids.

</comment><comment><USER26> After spending well over two years all over Africa (and previously 2 year all over Latin America) I've come to the conclusion that "news" today is no such thing.

What is sold as "news" today is just whatever dramatic world events some producer thinks will get ratings which is important so they can keep their job.

In no way does it give people a well-rounded or informed position about _anything_ as the word "news" implies.

<comment><USER5> Drop the "today", it's cleaner.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Regarding Brexit, I got so fed up with all the media spin around it, that I set up a TVHeadend[1] server on my network, and started watching (rather listening to while I work) BBC Parliament live via a small window on my screen using VLC. Once you start hearing the de-facto source for news events, it's amazing how brazen the mass media are in the manipulation of how they reported those events to support their own agendas.

I've been doing this now for about 1 month, and although some of the coverage is mundane, most of it is quite interesting. It's also good as background 'noise' as I work from home, which can be too quiet at times.

For technical news, I follow HN, and a few other sources. I tend to cross reference the reporting and try to see through the manipulation.

Beyond technical and political news (both of which can affect me directly), I no longer have an interest in other more 'general' news. Sure, an earthquake in Indonesia may be newsworthy for example, but as it doesn't affect me directly, why waste my time with it?

We've all been conditioned to suck up all world news as if it is _important_ \- Most of it _isn 't_, and only exists to fill airtime and/or sell adverts. Calculate how much time it takes for you to consume your daily news, and then ask yourself if that was time well spent. My guess is that it probably isn't.

Finally, depressing news sells, and good news doesn't. People want to feel that they have a better life than the sad people shown on the news. The same thing goes for Soap Operas, they trade on this effect to keep viewers. In fact the absolute reverse happens - over time, people get more depressed watching depressing news, than they would if they didn't. The effect is more pronounced in people who 'catch up' on the news just before bedtime.

\---

[1] [https://tvheadend.org/](https://tvheadend.org/)

<comment><USER28> >started watching (rather listening to while I work) BBC Parliament live

Sounds like compiling a list of sources like this, Oyez, and others (for people who just don't know these things can be found if one looks) could be of immediate practical benefit to society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I buy the bit about being critical about what news we consume, but I just don't see a complete avoidance of news as being a good solution. To me, not reading news would remove more value from my life than reading too much.

My personal fix for news media was to identify exactly what I wanted from a news paper and then identify the one which suited my needs best.

This turned out to be a paper, which at the time (2017) only had a printed version. No online version at all, they do now, but I've never visited it. It's a high lixcount paper with a heavy focus on society (as in statecraft not cocktails), culture and arts/literature. It's basically the perfect paper for our cultural elite. I'm not really part of that, and I always skip the book and arts sections, so you could say the paper isn't exactly a perfect match. It's underlying political philosophy doesn't even align with mine.

The thing is though, it only comes out on Fridays. This means the paper only focuses on the stuff that's actually relevant. It also means the articles have actually journalistic depth. The combination of this means I get to stay informed without being bothered by all the irrelevant noise in the regular news cycle.

It's been truly awesome, and if something critical happens I can always turn to internet news.

<comment><USER30> What is the name of this paper?

<comment><USER29> Weekendavisen, it's a Danish paper though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> He could have written a much longer article on this if he wanted to; there are deeper issues related to this subject. The characterisation of this should be news-news (company releases a new wossname, generally not a problem) and politics-news where society decides what is happening and what should be done about it. The big question is really: How does "the societal discourse" handle complicated issues?

I don't see much evidence that society at large can take an interest in a subject and maintain a sophisticated position like "there isn't enough evidence here to form an opinion". The closest that seems to be achieved in practice is two interest groups completely at loggerheads, preventing any action due to their strident opposition of each other.

In game theory terms, is there a system where a consensus opinion and a focused group of crazies can coexist without compromising in the direction of the crazies? Because the power of a focused group of political extremists is so great that it distorts political action and has significant flow on effects to journalism as political forces vie for control of the public discourse. The type of discipline to deal with something like that is clearly beyond most citizens.

<comment><USER32> I think society doesn't purposefully handle it at all currently, issues are solved by accident through simply waiting for new technologies to make all the old problems disappear. Sometimes a problem is so gigantic that no amount of spin and delusion can deny it and then things do tend to get fixed but usually with a few new problems in there as well. Regarding your game theory question: One group being immovable in thought inevitably leads to either that group gaining more members or new immovable groups forming to fight that contender at the same level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I, for one, would love a monthly email newsletter that summarizes the top ~100 news stories of the past 30 days. Things that turned out to be irrelevant would be ignored, while things that turned out to be important would be included and briefly commented upon.

Magazines like _The Economist_ sort of fulfill this role, but they are often a little too detailed for the high-level overview I'm looking for.

<comment><USER34> I think of something similar but less "news" lead - for example a backlog of the most "important" global issues (yes we can out climate change at number one) but it's things like "water shortages in southern sudan" at number 18 and so on that really will give perspective - when we see things like Brexit at number 67 that we know we have a proper balance.

I would start with a metric like "estimated number of excess human deaths from this issue in next year, five years fifty years" and have open transparent ways to assess the metric

<comment><USER35> How do you apply discrete metrics to topics that people value differently?

<comment><USER34> the same way newspaper editors do - they apply a set of curated values - <USER2> people buy the set of values they think matches theirs most closely.

at least this way we are transparently surfacing the issues and there is ability for people to apply different curation criteria

Basically I would love to get the weekly report from the US national security advisor - that's basically what I think Inam trying to create.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The 2 principles of anonu apply here:

1\. Moderation in all things

2\. The devil is in the details. There's a bit more nuance to the situation.

Your attention is yours. What happens in the media, Facebook, etc... Is an attempt to take your attention. For the most part your allocation is spent where the biggest dopamine hit can come from. If you start valuing your attention based more on an ROI calculation where your return is "did I learn something useful from a balanced source that can help form my world view?" Then you quickly start to cut out the BS.

Here are my tips for high ROI consumption:

Read long form articles about a subject. Skip over them if needed so a as not to waste time.

Call BS early. Poorly written books or articles should be nixed immediately.

Avoid the sugar: low ROI stuff like Instagram, Facebook, Reddit

</comment><comment><USER37> Do not stop reading news. Be selective with your sources. Be a discerning news consumer.

An uninformed populace is a malleable one. Controlling and limiting information has long been a strategy for despots or worse.

> The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless

Don't read that then. Read sources you believe are important to you and deliver information that is important.

Be a discerning news consumer.

> Being well informed isn't regurgitating the opinion of some twenty-two-year- > old with no life experience telling me what to think or how outraged to be.

This isn't news, it's opinion. Don't read this.

Be a discerning news consumer.

> Read from publications that respect and value your time, the ones that add > more value than they consume.

In other words, be a discerning news consumer.

> Read fewer articles and more books.

This is a weird argument.

Look, people hate the media, so an argument like this is an easy sell. But rejecting information from the media is a concession to power.

<comment><USER38> I don't read news, don't use social media. I find it working fine. Although hacker news kind of works like a news source to me.

I find almost everything in news noise now. Don't following any of that on purpose makes me feel calm.

Now if there is something that I should really know, it comes to me. I meet people all the time and then they tell me if something important is going on. I don't have to go after news. I adopted this after going through all the political bs in last few years. It works like a filter and I enjoy it.

<comment><USER39> This quote from Thomas Jefferson seems relevant:

"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier." [0]

[0] [http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/280](http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/280)

<comment><USER40> Jefferson was 80 when he wrote that, so the context is a little different than what people are discussing here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Although not directly mentioning it, the post seems to imply that things were better in the past. I like this 2013 article from the Guardian better because it goes deeper into fundamental issues with news, independent from the "internet age".

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad- ro...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli)

Key points for me:

 _News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non- stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists ' radar but have a transforming effect.

[...]

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news._

I stopped reading news around 2011, while I was working at a big news site, within a building complex of about half a dozen more publications including online, print, paid, free, weekly and daily. Seeing how the sausage is made has overall increased my respect for journalists, but decreased the one for the process of publication and the business behind it. It easy to blame corporate overloads, but the pressure for almost real time news comes in part from the readers.

At first I sought to solve the potential problem of being uninformed of not reading news technically. Thinking about building an aggregator with a more objective way to judge news-worthiness and relevancy than the existing ones and news sites. But then I realized there is already a good enough solution in place: If something is important for me to care about, it will eventually reach me in some way or another trough social interactions (mostly offline since i don't use social media much). And because of the delay of information getting to me, I'm way more likely to get actual useful insights when I then dig deeper than when trying to keep up with everything live.

</comment><comment><USER42> If you didn't read anything about the Panama papers or pfas, etc.. how will you know who to vote for in the next primaries and elections? Or will you vote how you did the last time?

</comment><comment><USER43> There is an amazing book written in 1925: A Heaf of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. And there is just as an amazing movie based on it. There is an exchange about not reading soviet newspapers if one cares about digestion.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOE_3_Ws4y0&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOE_3_Ws4y0&feature=youtu.be&t=1718) (English subtitles are available).

</comment><comment><USER44> A surprising percentage of what is up as news is placement. You'll see an interesting article about the Boer War, then a couple of days later you'll see another, which is a bit strange, and then a couple of days later you'll see an ad for a movie with a couple of big name stars that is set in the Boer War. Then you realize that you've been tricked into an ad campaign. That's discouraging.

<comment><USER45> What's discouraging me more is that people that do this find it harmless. It says a lot about the state of our society: we still think a little bit of bad is ok, forgetting what happens when everybody is doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> As an uneducated ignoramus, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I only recently discovered JSTOR Daily ([https://daily.jstor.org/](https://daily.jstor.org/)). Marrying current events / open policy debates / political trends to hard research is really doing it for me lately.

Surface level "on the ground" reporting of who farted 15 seconds ago in the White House has its use, certainly. But I much prefer to read a thoughtful piece on the frequency at which people have historically farted in the White House. That way I can contrast it with the behaviors of the current ruling party. It can also be supplemented with analysis into how society's view on White House farts has evolved in tandem with the so-and-so Revolution or the such-and-such cultural shift. All of this being sourced from research steeped in hard evidence.

Aside from JSTOR Daily, what other recommendations can people provide for this kind of quality journalism?

</comment><comment><USER47> As far as TV goes, I made a choice about a year and a half ago to stop viewing any news on TV and haven't looked back. I like to think I'm informed, I will read certain things, or pursue things I think necessary or interesting, but I have abandoned all the nonsense on TV.

</comment><comment><USER48> If I just want to catch up, there're River5[1] and NewsBoat[2], or build-your- own-aggregator apps. The latter is a console app with a UI like Vim's; I like its fast filtering with '/'. The downside of apps is there's no grooming in comments.

[1] [https://github.com/scripting/river5](https://github.com/scripting/river5) [2] [https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat](https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat)

</comment><comment><USER49> Takeaway line from this article (for me): _" The only thing it's really doing is altering your mood and perhaps your behavior."_

</comment><comment><USER50> A neat way of getting a high-level view of current events (news) is the wikipedia page. The headlines here change much less frequently that most news- outlets.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events)

It's also more of a log of what's happened instead of political headlines.

</comment><comment><USER50> This Freakanomics episode is what got me thinking about this: "Why do we really follow the news" ([http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-really- follow-the-...](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-really-follow-the- news-a-new-freakonomics-radio-episode/)).

</comment><comment><USER51> Part of me feels kind of bad about this when I think about it too much, but I have substantially improved my well-being by drastically cutting down my news consumption. It's not about time management per se, but so much of the news either makes me feel sad or angry.

On the other hand, what news I do consume these days, I do consume more deliberately.

</comment><comment><USER52> If you don't read the news then how are you supposed to make a judgement about who to vote for or understand current trends or be alerted to issues with products recalls or where the great bargins are?

I stopped reading newspapers very a long time ago too, haven't watched TV in several years, and because of this i miss out on most of the above.

</comment><comment><USER53> [https://www.allsides.com](https://www.allsides.com) is a good news site to get news concerning America from more than just one (presumably biased) side. It is interesting to see how various news sources spin news using catchy titles pandering to different types of folks.

</comment><comment><USER54> >The point is, most of what you read online today is pointless. It's not important to your life. It's not going to help you make better decisions. It's not going to help you understand the world.

That's an awfully privileged position to take. I'm going to guess the author isn't likely to have their status as a person invalidated, their religion declared illegal, or their citizenship revoked any time soon. I'm going to guess he's of a race that isn't likely to be a target of a government endorsed hate crime.

\---

I purposefully wrote that paragraph before I looked up the author:

>Shane Parrish has become an unlikely guru for Wall Street. His self- improvement strategies appeal to his overachieving audience in elite finance, Silicon Valley and professional sports.

When a member of an elite class gives you advice, consider if the advice is truly in your best interest, or if it serves to cement their elite status in society. The elites benefit from keeping "the proles" in the dark.

As a member of the elite, trying to sell to other elites, Shane represents the ultimate in privilege: the type of person who is going to be just fine no matter what the government or any company decides to do. Some of us aren't so lucky.

</comment><comment><USER55> teletext for me provides the most informative news per byte. For the Dutch 'teletekst' I use nostt on the terminal (or with geektool on the mac desktop).

[https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt](https://github.com/sjmulder/nostt) [https://github.com/zevv/termtekst](https://github.com/zevv/termtekst) [https://twitter.com/Teletekst](https://twitter.com/Teletekst) [https://nos.nl/teletekst#101](https://nos.nl/teletekst#101)

Listening to the radio news once a day works as well (5 minutes or so). I would like to have a podcast feed for that!

</comment><comment><USER56> It has been a couple of years that I only read news after having my lunch.

My only rule is to not start and finish my day with news. I do it right after lunch because I'm still distracted.

</comment><comment><USER57> Totally Agree. I think everyone should go through a 6-12 month period of not reading newspapers and see how you feel. I did that and I felt much happier, and more knowledgeable (instead reading science,math, literature).

The problem with newspapers (even high brow newspapers) is that they encourage negative emotions (anger, fear, envy), are irritatingly political / full of identity politics or are full of repetitive facts (another uniformed brexit article etc.) or plain old hot air gossip.

Instead of daily newspapers take a long term view and look at the news once every quarter or two from a quality publication such as the Economist/ financial times etc.

Newspapers are bunk

</comment><comment><USER58> Not reading news is like constantly taking painkillers. Yes you don't feel the pain but the problems remain.

Reading news more often than once a day is masochism.

</comment><comment><USER59> If you want to reduce hn time, visit 8hrs.xyz

</comment><comment><USER60> Also from 2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244)

And from Aaron Swartz (2006): [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews)

</comment><comment><USER61> I can't wait for the day that we have AI that can tell whether the user really wants to know X.

</comment><comment><USER62> Ugh, why can't rational people see how this is an instance of "black and white thinking" cognitive distortions?

Life isn't a binary black and white, as much as software engineers would like it to be. One side says "don't ever read the news, it causes negative moods" and the another side says "you should always read the news to keep up to date with the world".

The proper way to approach the issue is to strike a balance between consumption of news or not. The aim is moderation of information and distraction, while still keeping touch with the world.

<comment><USER63> Agreed. The whole point of news providers should be that they're filtering the "new" information down to what's actually important. But because of the engagement economy we've built, the goal is instead to make EVERYTHING sounds like critical breaking news, even when it's not.

I really hope there is some kind of replacement for the 24 hour news cycle, because otherwise society will continue to polarize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Bloomberg terminal is $24K/yr.

Mainstream news is practically given away. The hidden cost--whatever that may or may not be--I leave to the philosophers.

<comment><USER65> Doesn't most/all news on Bloomberg Terminal make it to the public sites, with some delay? The cost of the terminal includes expensive hardware, high quality support, multi-language API bindings, etc.

c.f. [https://www.quora.com/What-is-so-special-about-the- Bloomberg...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-so-special-about-the-Bloomberg- terminal)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> "To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter."

― Aleister Crowley

<comment><USER67> Interesting quote coming from him

<comment><USER68> I heard a very interesting talk on Crowley by Robert Anton Wilson once. Crowley did have some rather far-out ideas. Also, I seem to recall him being in cahoots with the British Intelligence services at the time.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt8TZ0hYHiE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qt8TZ0hYHiE)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I try not to read such self-help/life advice articles, which are just as bad as news. Why are they so popular on HN?</comment>


Homeless Fonts - <AUTHOR> http://www.homelessfonts.org <comment><USER2> This was posted on reddit awhile ago but taken down and reposted several times.

This bio really made me go "wtf?":

> Loraine was born in London. She was an ordinary, hardworking family person, > with nothing to worry about beyond paying the rent at the end of the month > or keeping the fridge full. Until in 2009 she came to Barcelona on holiday. > Soon after she arrived her passport was stolen from her and she had a series > of problems with the British embassy. Somebody had made illegal use of her > passport. So Loraine found herself in a strange place, unable to get home. > She didn't know anyone there and her circumstances meant she couldn't ask > for help from England, either. She had to sell all her possessions and, in > time, learn to speak Spanish. "Living in the street is a wonderful > adventure," she says. In the street she discovered a new city, a new country > and a new culture. "There are lots of people who prefer to sleep under the > stars." She also made lots of friends who helped her in a completely > unfamiliar world.

I'm not suggesting the company is involved but that story is incredibly suspect. They also seem to somewhat glamorize the "street life" in some of their bios.

<comment> UVB-76 I know this is absolutely not the case in large parts of the world, but in many developed countries it does takes some degree of desire to remain street homeless for any significant period of time.

The support is often there for the taking, but some combination of mental health problems, drug dependency, etc. will see a person "choose" to live on the streets.

<comment><USER3> I am really uncomfortable with your statement. I am homeless. Well before I became homeless, I had a class on homelessness. Which is to say this is something I have both studied and also lived firsthand.

Due to my medical condition, I am unwilling to remain in a homeless shelter. They simply aren't clean enough for my needs. I would take real help in a heartbeat if it were available. But the kind of "support" that is available to homeless individuals is often rather sucky, to say the least.

So, yeah, you could say I "chose" to not go into a shelter and to thus remain on the street. That isn't completely inaccurate. But it sure makes my life sound a lot more empowered than I am experiencing it as being.

Let me put it this way: Many people wind up on the street by leaving an abusive relationship. So you could say, hey, they chose to be on the street. They could have remained with the person providing a roof over their head. But it sort of conveniently sweeps their very real problems and challenges under the rug.

<comment><USER4> What is the real help you need?

<comment><USER3> I need help developing an income that doesn't keep me sick. I run various websites. At the moment, I need help figuring out how to get traffic. There are some other things that need work but I think the fact that I don't know how to get traffic is currently my biggest issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find this awful in the typical tone-deaf patronizing upper middle-class computer professional way - but I also really like Guillermo's handwriting and its curly flourishes.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know how I feel about this.

In some way this feels cheap. Fonts? Buying fonts to help homeless people?

Having homeless people create fonts that you can license out?

Is this the best we can do? Seriously.

<comment><USER7> Point taken. We as a society should be doing way more to help these people. But then again.. when was the last time you really tried to help someone on the street?

<comment><USER8> I agree that more resources should be directed towards dealing with the causes of homelessness and helping those who _need_ help. But in response to your question, consider this:

About two years ago, my wife saw a woman in the parking lot of a large retail grocery/goods store holding a sign that said "anything helps". She had noticed this woman before on at least one occasion, and it occurred to my wife that perhaps _this time_ she would do something to help somebody out.

In addition to the things she needed, she purchased everything required for a large spaghetti dinner to include Parmesan cheese, a large loaf of fresh bread, and a box of cookies for dessert. She ensured everything was bagged up separately so all she had to do was hand it to the woman with the sign.

After loading up our car, my wife drove over to the woman in the sign. She got out with the bag and as she walked towards the sign-holder, explained "hey, I just wanted to help out so I bought you everything for a dinner..." to which the woman replied, "food's not really our issue."

My wife told me that she essentially closed her still-open mouth, did a 180 and got back into the car. We had spaghetti that night.

I relate this _not_ to imply that everybody with a sign implying need is a fraud, but to suggest that there may be a non-trivial number of people out there who do not act _because_ they've had an experience similar to the one my wife had.

<comment><USER9> Did you stop to ask what her needs were? If you lost everything except your food supply, would you be all good to go?

<comment><USER8> The sign "anything helps" would imply that .... _wait for it_ ... _anything_ people could give would be appreciated and used.

It's not like my wife was throwing old socks, underwear and car parts at the woman. A meal means at the very least, there's one meal you don't have to _pay_ for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like anything that gets the homeless some help, but that zoom-on-mouseover on the photos is creepy.

<comment><USER11> They've unwittingly recreated a trick used in negative political ads.

Take a photo of your opponent, make it black and white, use a tight crop, and then slowly zoom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "It's better than new. Now it has a story." -David Mamet

Not only are these beautiful and useful fonts, but each one has a story that's as unique as the typography itself. I can't wait to use one of these in a project soon.

<comment><USER13> Nicely said. It might just be my USA-centric views on poverty, but I find the idea of turning homelessness into a story with a contributed artistic element --typography--refreshing in a sense. Maybe it's just because all the people are smiling in their headshots :\

I realize the charity element to it might obfuscate the idea of it being "art," but I think it strikes an interesting balance between the two. Compare that to artists who document homelessness and use their art as a kind of charity, hoping to draw awareness to the issue: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2090360/Lee- Jeffries...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2090360/Lee-Jeffries- haunting-photographs-homeless.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I speak Catalan and Spanish, if anyone is interested I can translate parts of [http://www.arrelsfundacio.org/](http://www.arrelsfundacio.org/) to English. Google Translate gives "good enough" translations though.

[http://www.arrelsfundacio.org/que-fem/](http://www.arrelsfundacio.org/que- fem/) (this translates to rootsfoundation.org/about-us)

> We help homeless people in Barcelona

> We focus on two tasks: Covering the needs of homeless people and supporting > them in their personal itinerary.

> At Arrels we provide accommodation, food and health and social care to men > and women living in poor conditions in the streets of Barcelona, and more > importantly, "we are with them" accompanying them on the long road to regain > autonomy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice collection.

FWIW, the terse title made me wonder if it was a collection of not-used- anywhere (as far as anyone knows) fonts, for times you're looking for a really unique font (say, lest there be an unfortunate association-by-typeface).

<comment><USER16> I was thinking it was "orphaned" fonts that belonged to font houses that had closed and so were released to wander amongst the gutters and margins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Although I'm curious to wonder where the profits go, they seem to be quite unclear about that:

[http://hyperallergic.com/135700/homeless-fonts-are-a-feel- go...](http://hyperallergic.com/135700/homeless-fonts-are-a-feel-good-fail/)

<comment><AUTHOR> From their about page:

"The funds collected through Homelessfonts.org will be used to finance the work of the Arrels foundation for homeless people in Barcelona." [http://www.arrelsfundacio.org](http://www.arrelsfundacio.org)

And the director of the foundation responded in a comment on that article:

"All people who are joining the project with their handwriting were homeless people and now fortunately they have accommodation and receive the support of Arrels Foundation to go forward in their lifes." [http://hyperallergic.com/135700/homeless-fonts-are-a-feel- go...](http://hyperallergic.com/135700/homeless-fonts-are-a-feel-good- fail/#comment-1474044364)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very interesting project, with curious stories and results that can be used by all of us. Very well done!

<comment><USER19> It is interesting. At first I thought these fonts were hideous compared to the ones we know and love, but the examples gave me a little inspiration for them.

Click the photos of the individuals, and they show examples on products or posters, and they look quite nice, original, and have character. They should really place these images on the homepage, instead of the written alphabet.

<comment><USER20> Direct link to one such exemple.

[http://www.pinterest.com/pin/540994973960668020/](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/540994973960668020/)

I think those fonts are really great. I could easily see them on a lot of products and posters. Handwritten fonts give a charm to a lot of products. Wines bottles comes to mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is anyone else disgusted by this?

<comment><USER22> DERELICTE! It is a fashion, a way of life inspired by the very homeless, the vagrants, the crack whores that make this wonderful city so unique.

<comment><USER23> Somewhat related: the Brother Sharp craze a few years ago in China.

[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brother- sharp-%E7%8A%80%E5%88%...](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/brother- sharp-%E7%8A%80%E5%88%A9%E5%93%A5)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh, ugh.

Why not "human fonts" or "people fonts"? (Or "natural fonts" or "handwriting fonts" or...)

The problem I have with this is that if you help people based on the their status of being homeless, then do they stop qualifying once they are off the street? That kind of thing is what keeps poor people stuck. It's why the American welfare system is broken. You first have to qualify as "poor" and often some other thing to get assistance. Countries that just, say, provide national healthcare for all citizens, because you exist, help reduce the gap between rich and poor. Stuff like this helps widen it.

We need to think about how to remove barriers so all people can live well and all that but you need to treat very carefully with programs which are framed such that you are basically rewarded for having a problem. That just tends to promote having that problem. (That's what the American welfare has done: It changed the social contract to reward being a poor, single mom such that it increased the incidence of poor, single moms in the population. Great job, that.)

<comment><USER24> >Why not "human fonts" or "people fonts"?

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the lanes are striped with "person first" language (and all of its mutations).

<comment><USER3> I really don't know what you mean. This is an area I have studied, both formally and informally. How it is framed matters. The history of what went wrong with the American welfare system is deeply rooted in the fact that it was designed to "help poor, single moms" in an era when having a child out of wedlock was scandalous and just not done. It changed the social contract to frame it that way and made it far more acceptable to have children out of wedlock. That framing occurred at a time when most poor, single moms were widows -- ie "the deserving poor" \-- not women who had given birth outside of wedlock.

It was done in an unthinking manner and we are still living with the consequences decades later.

<comment><USER25> If you think having children out of wedlock is linked to US welfare system incentives, how do you explain global trends?

I think it has more to do with female equality and increased earning power. But it's a complex multi-vectored phenomenon not really suited to an off-topic thread here.

<comment><USER3> I haven't studied global trends. Nor am I suggesting that trends in the U.S. have only one factor influencing them.

That's kind of a bogus rebuttal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Turn your handwriting into a font for free... [http://www.myscriptfont.com/](http://www.myscriptfont.com/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Without commenting too much on the narrative aspects of this (because to be honest it sort of feels a bit exploitative and icky), I think these typefaces could be improved quite a bit with the use of some more-powerful OpenType features, and particularly random contextual alternates, which let you supply multiple variants of a given glyph of which one is selected at random each time. It makes handwriting typefaces feel a lot more organic and natural, since as it is, anytime you have double letters the illusion is broken as it's plainly obvious that it's the exact same letter form on the page twice (see, for example, the double L in Guillermo's name).

For an example, see [http://www.graphics.com/news- old/p22-releases-c%C3%A9zanne-p...](http://www.graphics.com/news- old/p22-releases-c%C3%A9zanne-pro-font-opentype-format)

<comment><USER28> It's not random, usually, but dependent on the context (mostly so strokes don't overlap).

<comment><USER27> The typeface I linked to does both, so there are regular contextual alternates and ligatures ("ll" gets ligated), but there's also randomization so that the same word written multiple times looks slightly different. This is a supported feature of OpenType.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> [http://www.artlifting.com/](http://www.artlifting.com/) does something similar with art. Both companies seem incredible.

</comment><comment><USER30> Too bad they use only one glyph per character. Cool project otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER31> holly shit awesome project, a genuinely great idea</comment>


EOS Blockchain – Creating Your First Monster in EOS Jungle Testnet - <AUTHOR> https://steemit.com/eos/@leordev/monstereos-creating-your-first-monster-in-eos-jungle-testnet <comment><AUTHOR> I'm sharing here because I think there's a lot of developers interested in blockchain and I believe EOS is the cutting edge next-gen chain and developer- friendly. The community is awesome and the chain itself allows developers to build amazing stuff! :)</comment>