PSA: Back Up Your Shit - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/01/psa-back-up-your-shit/ <comment><USER3> I think that the beauty of Snapchat is that it frees you from this ridiculous notion that a text, IM, Facebook message, etc, has any value.

In my opinion, it doesn't. Also, in my opinion, I believe that feeling the need to save every single conversation you have fuels an over-inflated sense of self-worth, and that everything you say has value and needs to be saved.

I never, ever peruse through my messages, to reminisce over an old conversation. It's too much navel-gazing to suit my sense of pride. What actually matters is the actual relationship you have with a person, which is built on the BODY of IMs, messages, conversations, visits, dinners, parties, etc, that you shared with that person. Sometimes, it's best to leave good conversations in the blurry past, and just remember that a certain person is funny, a great conversationalist, etc.

I'm doing the same sort of thing with Google now. I will disallow anyone I'm in a conversation with to google facts with their phone. When we talk, it's about whatever resides in our own brains, be it good, bad or ugly. The entertaining part of any conversation is the actual conversation, the passion, the humor, etc. If all we wanted to do was pass around facts, then we can forward each other URLs and be done with it. When I'm talking with someone over dinner, we're not hammering out a contract that requires precision, we're having a conversation over ideas, and as funny as it sounds, facts aren't as important as the spirit of the conversation. Unless of course you're in an argument with someone, and then that isn't very much fun so why even bother starting the conversation in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, a lot of what you have to say make sense, it does... But then I remember that I still have the emails my wife exchanged almost ten years ago when we first met - and occasionally I do look back at those. And I fall in love with her all over again.

And then there are the random musings from friends who have died or any of a dozen other, slightly less big deal reasons to look back -- and I realize that in fact, those old conversations do matter, to me, often in unpredictable ways.

Your mileage may well vary, but I'd be truly sad if I lost those bits of history. Moreover, I wish I had access to that sort of an archive from my parents or grandparents... So maybe it'll be interesting to my kids. Maybe not. But the thing is, I don't know what's really going to matter and when disk space (on this scale especially) is a so cheap, it seems foolish not to save it.

<comment><USER5> Agree with this completely. My father died when I was 23. Being a digital packrat, I have every personal email I've ever sent or received. He wrote me quite regularly throughout college and I have all of those emails. All the life lessons and little bits of encouragement. My kids will never know their grandpa, but someday maybe we can share these together and they can learn a bit more about the kind of man he was in his own words, without my filter. They might also like some of the historically interesting ones like:

"Mike, check out this new store: [http://www.amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com) I think it's going to be popular. --Dad"

<comment><USER6> People may or may not tend to hoarding stuff. For those who do, though, hoarding bits sure is a lot easier than hoarding physical possessions.

<comment><USER7> That is one of the points from a book I read recently. His tech advice other than digital archiving was questionable, but all in all, a good read:

[http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Minimalist- Life/dp/144955...](http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Guide-Minimalist- Life/dp/1449556825)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this. The SMS export from iPhone is something I've been looking for. One of the most important relationships and experiences of my entire life has been documented (trapped) in my phone and it's backups ever since.

I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works, specifically whether it can pull photos/videos as well. If it doesn't yet but it wouldn't be too much trouble to add, I'd be willing to literally pay you to add that.

[Edit: Since a lot of the other comments are questioning the value of saving this stuff I figured I'd share my use cases. It turned out when I thought about it I have at least three:

1\. I effectively met my wife on myspace (believe it or not a pretty nasty software bug led to our relationship) and an enormous amount of our initial friendship and courtship ended up documented there. Years ago I painstakingly clicked through for hours and copy-pasted the conversation to a text document.

2\. I had a close friend die very suddenly and at a young age. My memory generally kind of stinks and I hated that there were conversations with him that I half-remembered. I went back through social media conversations with him (again, mostly on myspace) a lot in the years that followed. It helped me piece together memories that are very important to me now.

3\. This past year my wife and I adopted our daughter. Our relationship with her birthmother has primarily been via SMS and the months that followed were a really exhausting and beautiful blur. It's really important to us that we're able to share that thread with our daughter someday.

In none of these cases did I see it coming that these services would end up having such valuable content in them for me. I didn't know I'd meet my wife. I'll never know when the last time I talk to someone is, and I would have never guessed that one of the most important things I'll have to give my daughter about her birth story is an SMS conversation.

So yeah, having access to this stuff is important to me. Thanks to jwz for pulling these resources together. ]

<comment><USER9> I lost my iPhone (had it stolen?) a few weeks ago along with several years of text messages, voice recordings, and notes from my best friend I had known since 5th grade who recently passed away. I had always planned to back it up or record it somehow but was only starting to get to it when I lost it. My greatest regret of 2013 is not backing up those texts, notes, voicemails, etc.. Back it up as soon as you can and don't put it off or you may regret it. Thankfully, I had backed up all our pictures over the years, and backed up that back up, but I would pay a lot of money to have that phone back.

<comment><USER10> As long as you plugged your iphone into your computer regularly with backups on, or joined your home wifi network while your computer was on the network with wifi backups on, it should still be in the backups, which would get loaded to your new phone if you loaded the new phone you bought from the most recent backup.

<comment><USER9> I had an iPhone 4 with iOS5 and an extremely old version of iTunes. It hadn't synced it in a long time as iTunes had stopped recognizing my phone. Further, windows on the computer I used to back it up on is now not booting at all. I have assumed that all my iPhone data, if any, would be on that computer unless it was saved in the cloud. Is that correct?

EDIT: I also unregistered my iPhone because I bought an S4 and couldn't receive texts from those with iMessage turned on, as their phones were still iMessaging me. Am I doomed?

<comment><USER10> You could potentially remove the hard drive from that computer, then put it in an external casing and hook it up to a new computer. Then research software to pull messages out of your old backups. You could potentially still salvage the messages, it sounded like they were old ones

<comment><USER11> If you can recover the iPhone backup files that iTunes created from the hard drive (such as via an external enclosure like unepipe mentions), you should be able to recover the messages contained within. Messages are stored in a SQLite DB within the backup (this is how jwz's script reads them).

Looks like iTunes on XP stores backups at this path: \Documents and Settings\\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\\. That's the directory you need to recover from the hard drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "You don't just throw your letters in the trash. You might want them some day."

Maybe it's just me, but I actually /do/ throw my letters in the trash. I /do/ treat Twitter, etc. as ephemeral and passing. I don't care about saving those messages. Am I the only one?

<comment><USER13> It's not just you. My fear is opposite to the one the author describes: That by using these services, all these messages that I treat as ephemeral are actually being recorded forever, and 20+ years from now something I said offhand to a friend or a stranger will be used to embarrass or discredit me.

<comment><USER14> Unless you are a very prominent politician or on track to become one what do you care? I don't know... I more or less stand by what I have to say or I can honestly say that when I said it I was "young and stupid".

<comment><USER15> Social media account activity materially affects the prospects of many people who aren't politicians, especially if you engage in any controversial discussion. It's common for employers to name-search you and peruse your social media history, especially in careers that involve children like teaching, where naive new teachers are often terminated for putting child- inappropriate content on their public profiles, or getting linked to something they thought they'd shared anonymously.

"I was young and stupid" only works if the content in question is trivial or unimportant. If you happen to be on the opposite side of a political debate long since settled, you may end up getting yourself pwned pretty hard, even if you're not a politician.

<comment><USER14> Sure. However, then either watch what you say when using your real name or use a pseudonym. I don't always succeed, but I try to only say things online that I would say to the person IRL. That makes me think twice about it. I like to think that if someone was to look back through my comments or sites like HN where I use my real name, they would think that I am a reasonably reasonable human being.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> PSA: This guy's nightclub makes a really mean meatball sandwich.

Make sure that recipe is backed up.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hate to be that guy who plugs his own crap everywhere, but I actually wrote my own blog post recently about backing up my stuff on Linux.

My setup is fairly rudimentary, and I had the help of a friend on IRC, but here's the link if anyone is interested in setting up something simple for a Linux workstation at home or a VPS you can ssh into (really, as long as you can SSH into it with rsync, my method will work). I'd also love any feedback HN can give regarding my mechanism. Hell, if you wanted to fully back up a phone and sdcard on your desktop, you could probably do something similar with "adb pull" or the like.

[https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/posts/howto-encrypted-backups- in-...](https://thatgeoguy.ca/blog/posts/howto-encrypted-backups-in-debian- linux/)

That out of the way, I'm often surprised by how often I have to remind either myself or others to make good backups. Phone's aside, there's been enough times where I've nuked my system that backing up all my files should be secondhand at this point. Thankfully, I have a decent system set up now, but I still consider it rough around the edges (especially considering how long archiving backups takes).

<comment><USER18> Any idea how to mount and open additional encrypted drives automatically, just like an encrypted /home partition at user login? I asked this ages ago on AskUbuntu [http://askubuntu.com/q/103835](http://askubuntu.com/q/103835) and by the time I got a good answer I'd already moved to a more complex set-up that was incompatible.

I'm okay with setting up rsync and grabbing everything I want backed up, then pointing it to a target drive. My issue is having to manually intervene by clicking on the drive (in Nautilus) to mount it - or having to type the password at boot.

I'm still looking for a good solution to 'automagically' mount encrypted drives at user login.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Accessing your own data and storing it is great, but there's still the matter of backing it up. jwz wrote a good guide for that as well. It's linked in the article, but not in a way that makes it obvious. Thought it would be good to mention it here:

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html)

<comment><USER20> In that article, jwz wrote:

 _That third drive? Do a backup onto it the same way, then take that to your office and lock it in a desk. Every few months, bring it home, do a backup, and immediately take it away again. This is your "my house burned down" backup._

If you work for someone other than yourself, it might be safer to keep that drive at the home of a trusted friend or relative (or a safe-deposit box) rather than at your office. One day you might suddenly get fired and escorted out of your office, at which point your employer might want to inspect that hard drive to confirm that it doesn't contain proprietary corporate information. However, it may contain sensitive _personal_ information that you don't want anyone else to see. Treating your office space as your personal space (or your work e-mail as personal e-mail) can backfire badly.

<comment><USER21> Encrypt your backups.

<comment><USER20> Then your employer could just refuse to allow you to remove the drive from their premises, since you'd have no way of proving that it doesn't contain the employer's data. Which may not be so bad, if you have another copy of the backup somewhere. The worst-case scenario would be that your primary backup drive fails on the day you get fired.

<comment><USER22> The IT staff wiping the drive to their satisfaction should obviate that concern, I'd imagine.

And the worst-case scenario would be that happening, and your primary backup drive failing, _and_ your running drive failing, on the day you get fired. A failed primary backup drive just means you're out a backup; it takes a failure of the drive you're backing up for the situation to achieve disastrous proportions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear tomorrow, and I would be OK with it. Maybe there's value in my accumulated Facebook connections and history, but most of the value today comes from current content.

Now email, that I value for archival.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "Honestly, my Twitter feed, Facebook, and SMS records could all disappear tomorrow, and I would be OK with it."

I use these services heavily yet I completely agree. I actually had a Twitter account I used for 3/4 years, sent thousands of tweets and had several hundred followers. Deleting it was a 'scary' moment (kind of like formatting a hard drive and making sure you haven't forgot to backup anything) but I don't miss any of the content from it.

SMS likewise. I recently switched phones and didn't go through the hassle of bringing my SMS's with me. I miss nothing.

Facebook is slightly different. I do enjoy going through my timeline occasionally but the thing I would miss most is the photos. I don't take a lot of photos but my friends do so most of the photos on my Facebook are ones I'm tagged in so don't have a local copy. I would hate to lose those so every now and then I back them up (Facebook has an export tool for all your data).

You make a good point about value coming from current content. Years ago people perused old content nostalgically. We still do this BUT we have vastly more new content appearing in our lives every second. This means less time to go back and peruse old content especially if you have to filter it all for the gems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Remember: if it's not on a drive that is in your physical possession, it's not really yours."

So, if we store our data in "the cloud", it's not really ours?

<comment><USER25> Well, it's 'yours', insofar as you have access to it (or should, barring outages and downtime).

But it might be accessible to someone else. And it might be lost by those hosting it.

Nothing is perfect or guaranteed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Chat history serves one purpose for me, the file size quantifies how much I spend talking to a particular person, and I use that to sort people on my contact list.

</comment><comment><USER27> I want to have some record of some things but not everything by far. For example, I wouldn't want a record of everything I ever did recorded, but my dad used to walk around once in a while with a video recorder on special times when everyone gathered (birthdays, holidays...) and looking at those artifacts of life from almost 30(!!) years ago is priceless. Many people in those tapes have died since then, and I'm glad they exist. I save a few letters and emails, but not all or even many. I was going back and reading an email I sent a friend about getting together with an ex and seeing the perspective I had on things back then was... weird. When I was in high school (before cell phones or text messages) people passed notes in class, and some of my friends still have a box full of them. They are relics of the past. They take up space, and you probably won't want ALL of them, but I think it is worth keeping a few. I wish I kept one or two. I can't imagine the vacant things mine would have contained. I mean, I still have my yearbooks, I didn't throw those out... same kinda thing really.

</comment><comment><USER28> _These conversations aren 't ephemeral and disposable, they are your life, and you want to save them forever._

Yes they are, and no I don't. I highly doubt JWZ carries a portable recorder to immortalize all his in-person conversations; I certainly don't, even though recording people (for movies) is what I do for a living. Funnily enough, far more of my important memories involve real-life conversations than exchanges on IRC/Facebook/HN.

Yeah,. it's good to have a method of backing this stuff up if you do need it, eg for business communications or any number of other use cases. But most digital chatter is eminently disposable I _wish_ there was a way to have emails expire and self-destruct automatically, so that things like time- sensitive sales offers would quietly vanish once the actionable date had passed unless I made some special effort to retain them.

</comment><comment><USER29> I do throw away letters. I'd rather not live in the past or cling to ephemera for emotional reasons, thank you.

<comment> hippee-lee Do you plan on having children? Will your grandchildren's grandchildren wonder where they came frome and what it was like?

If only I could query the daily activities and conversations of my great grandparents or query thousands of photos and movies for people, places and moments that my have been talked about when I was a child. I could understand my family better. Educate my daughter more fully and with better context other than telling her: well part of your family comes from the abruzzi region in Italy and another part comes from Germany, I think. And your mother, I don't know much about her grandparents let along great grandparents.

It's not always about us, or right now, that is important in the scope of life a cross generations. We don't always know which of the ephemeral things in daily life are worth passing on to the next generation. Sometime they ( the next or several generations on down the line ) identify or rediscover our best moments long after we are gone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm on Gentoo Linux and had my Skype settings set to never delete chat logs. After a couple of months these logs were in the tens of gigabytes. The strange thing is that I rarely even chat on Skype. This should be tens of gigabytes of just text chat. Well it's not any format that I can understand (and Skype lags badly and becomes pretty much unusable if I type /history to look at the logs) so I've had to delete them and for a while now Skype only stores the last month of chat. I can't think why the logs got so big. Perhaps Skype trys to optimize them for quick searches or something?

Anyway, does anyone know of a way to back up Skype text chats? They shouldn't have to use up this much space. (And ideally I should actually be able to load them up and read them too!)

</comment><comment><USER31> Pictures are the worst for backing up, actually no backing up someone else's pictures is worse.

Parents for example, my mom takes a lot of pictures she wants to keep I take lots of pictures I don't care about.

Semi-wheneverly when I manage to get the card from the parent's camera or cellphone to back up it's usually a mess of I backed up 63% of these so which ones are new. Is IMG0003.JPG the same as IMG0003.JPG I saved already wait no one is 2MB and the other is 3.25MB.

Meld helps but it's the same thing what do I have and what is new and what is different with the same name but is different which I just happen to notice due to the file size.

So I end up dumping it all onto something or multiple somethings and swear I'll figure it out next time. Goto step 1.

<comment><USER32> Most pictures nowadays come with EXIF data with the date. I just (automatically) rename them to {date}-{counter}.jpg and let git-annex deduplicate any repeated files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I delete all email after 90 days, unless I explicitly moved it to an archive folder.

I've never event thought about saving IMs, texts, Twitter, etc. Civilization has survived a very long time without a written record of every conversation ever. It will continue to do so.

<comment><USER34> Civilization survived a long time without penicillin.

<comment><USER35> I know that this isn't Reddit, but I can't resist: nick relevant!

(sorry, had to get that out of my system - am aware (AFAIK) that the black death was never treated with penicillin, given the dates involved)

<comment><USER34> Better than the racist/overtly-sarcastically ominous comments I usually get concerning my name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence The SMS backup tool for iPhone doesn't seem to work for me. I have encrypted backups turned on for my iPhone, will this not work because of that?

</comment><comment><USER36> Backup personal stuff and code to Tarsnap. Videos would be too expensive, but downsampled home videos might be worth saving too.

</comment><comment><USER37> Totally off topic, but the I can read the site fine, but if I switch back to white color site (like HN, or just staring at a wall), my eyes still see the lines of the site for awhile.

It physically affects my vision for a few minutes, albeit just a little bit. Is this normal?

<comment><USER38> Your eyes have a kind of 'image retention' built in. Some optical illusions make good use of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It drives me nuts that pidgin and adium use different logging interfaces - <USER2> made switching from Windows to OSX more painful - as I still use finch on Linux, and use file syncing to sync logs and config files across platforms.

</comment><comment><USER40> I view this as no different than backng up phone calls. And most people don't care to back up their phone calls. Just because you can doesn't mean it's always worth it...

</comment><comment><USER41> Inspired by this, I went and downloaded all my tweets last night.

Then I looked through them. I can assure you that tweets may not be ephemeral, but they are most certainly disposable.

</comment><comment><USER42> Always back up online chats so you can blackmail the participants with embarrassing or incriminating statements they made.

</comment><comment><USER43> On android you just mount phone partition and query SQLite tables.

</comment><comment><USER44> along these lines i'd highly recommend: [http://socialsafe.net/](http://socialsafe.net/)

</comment><comment><USER45> PSA: It is not 1999, please don't use neon green text on a black background as your color scheme for text.

<comment><USER46> I was once walking with a friend through the university library. We walked past a kid using irc on his laptop with neon green and purple on black text, font size as high as it would go, all in Comic Sans no less. Epitome of tackiness.

I made some idle snide remark about it. My friend points out that he knows the guy, who turns out to have significant visual impairment.

Cue feeling embarrassed for the rest of the afternoon :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Social media is just excreta of human activity on the internet. Why back that up? Lame.

</comment><comment><USER48> I want to use this opportunity to thank email@example.com for helping me get my lover back after he left me few months ago. I have sent friends and my brothers to beg him for me but he refused and said that it is all over between both of us but when I met this Dr. Stanley, he told me to relaxed that every thing will be fine and after three days and contacted him, I got my man back......Caitlin</comment>


Civil War interactive site by Fi and the History Channel - <AUTHOR> http://www.history.com/interactives/civil-war-150

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a case study about the whole endeavor too: <http://www.f-i.com/infographics/civilwar/></comment>


Ask HN: Has Google's "Farmer Update" affected your sites - <AUTHOR>

So far, I've seen a pretty significant drop in traffic on one of my sites (around 25%), while my other site that is essentially a clone is doing fine (first is jobs focused and the second is internships focused). These sites aren't content farms, and they have really strong, clean link profiles (I've always played by the rules).<p>I'm trying to figure out what signals Google has used for this update, and so far I'm a bit stumped. I'd love to hear what the rest of you are noticing. <comment><USER2> Two of my site's traffic dropped by 40%. One of them is 6 years old.

Both have original content. I never even thought about gaming the system. I couldn't figure out what triggered this.

One of the site has the perfect landing page that user is looking for the queries. I don't understand how this change could improve the quality.

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the sites I used to work on has dropped from a consistent #1 (for the past 7 or so years) for its key terms to bottom half of page 1 in the past couple of days. Traffic is down maybe 20%. I can only assume it's related.

The higher results now though are Google News for things totally unrelated and lots of ticket websites (which are _kind of_ related).

The site itself is hardly spammy and has several well-written articles posted per week. It's practically the go-to site for this area (local tourist office points people its way for instance).

Not my problem any more but coming so soon after I leave, it looks a bit like a FU I left behind!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm looking at a 40% drop. Just like you guys totally by the rules and all original content. In my niche, I noticed eHow beating everyone for terms that their articles aren't even relevant for. Their results got much worse in general. Alot of people that scrap my content are beating me in rankings now.

I would have posted my resume to find a day job, but then I thought somebody would scrap it and google would get them hired first.</comment>


Deep Learning for Symbolic Mathematics - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01412 <comment><USER2> Facebook released a blog post [0] about this as well!

[0]: [https://ai.facebook.com/blog/using-neural-networks-to- solve-...](https://ai.facebook.com/blog/using-neural-networks-to-solve- advanced-mathematics-equations/)</comment>


As L.A. ports automate, some workers are cheering on the robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-11-07/port-automation-dockworkers-vs-truckers <comment><USER2> It's hard to root for the ILWU. I grew up in San Pedro, where many of the long shoremen live (near the port of L.A.). Once you've known these people for a while, you start to understand that the problem is not only a strong union but also a stubborn and incompetent people.

The workers there are known for working doubles while on meth/speed. There are horror stories of crane operators high while operating machinery. Every so often a worker is flattened by a container.

Outside of work, the longies act like royalty in San Pedro. I grew up with their self entitled kids who would refuse to study in high school because they knew their parents would get them into the union. They drive around in jumbo SUVs like maniacs around town.

The longshoremen are still living off the karma of bloody Thursday, but one day that karma will wear off and the port will be modernized.

<comment><USER3> > they knew their parents would get them into the union

Ironic that union membership would become just another form of heritable wealth.

<comment><USER4> it's not wealth, it's advantage. once you get the job handed down to you, you still _have to do the work_ to get the money, unlike wealth.

not saying jobs should be doled out that way, but it's quite different to get a chance at future income vs. having it mounded in your lap without lifting a finger.

<comment><USER5> That's just as true with wealth. Sure, you _could_ spend your wealth down, but that's like eating your seed corn; very few actually do that, because it means you're not wealthy anymore afterwards.

<comment><USER6> Uh, the money grows by itself if properly invested. Investing in an index fund hardly counts as working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > On one side are well-paid union members, many of them third- and fourth- > generation dockworkers.

Which highlights one of the dirtier parts of the history of union jobs: the rampant nepotism and exclusionary culture it develops in local communities. Valuing who you know in a community over your merits as a worker. It had a long history of being used to keep black workers out of white jobs: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646](https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646) and the note about workers taking "2hr lunch breaks" is unsurprising in such a culture.

</comment><comment><USER8> Note that Shanghai and Rotterdam's ports are already leagues ahead in terms of automation.

<comment><USER9> On of the consequences of low union rate and very low wages is that the op ex of having an employee in the US is cheaper than the cap ex of automation. This is why you see such a high level of automation in Europe, Australia etc: cost of labor is higher.

I think the US has made the wrong tradeoff, but this factor has gone back decades.

<comment><USER10> > On of the consequences of low union rate and very low wages is that the op > ex of having an employee in the US is cheaper than the cap ex of automation.

Are you saying that ports in China have high wages AND high union rates compared to US? Because even if that was true, it didn't stopped them automating the ports.

<comment><USER9> Good point I was talking about OECD countries, basically.

China has a different problem, though related. Of course unions are illegal there ("not needed -- the communist party represents the workers"). But they have a large pool of uneducated very low cost labor they are trying to keep out of the cities (e.g. via Hukou system), trouble with controls on things like "shrinkage" (containers help a lot here) and yes, relatively high wages for the workers who are in the port cities (working in factories and white collar jobs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From the complaints of the trucker they interviewed, it sounds like Maersk has a management problem. Crane operators have long breaks because the work is taxing. But having an operator on break shouldn't mean the crane stops. Two hour breaks are basically split shifts. So five operators for four cranes should cover you. If the don't all work identical split shifts.

Robots are a pretty passive aggressive way to get rid of bad management.

<comment><USER12> Other way around, robots are a way to get around the consequences of bad management while the managers keep their jobs. Was middle management slashed too when the robots were rolled out?

<comment><USER13> Middle managers don't typically keep their jobs for long once all their direct reports are gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surprisingly, there is no mention in the article of how the truckers feel about the threat of automation to their own jobs.

<comment><USER15> Pretty much every single truck driver I've talked to on the subject is in deep denial. They believe that the weird layout of the loading dock at some warehouse could never be navigated by automated system or that them handing documents to someone at the point of delivery cannot be automated. They don't seem to understand just how much capital businesses are willing to spend to get rid of reoccurring labor costs.

If there are any bright spots in all of this, it's that trucking has a high turnover rate already so few will directly lose their jobs and that trucking in general is rough on the body and the mind. The difficult question to answer is where will all of the people who would have gone into trucking going to go instead?

<comment><USER16> My guess is that the "death of trucking" will come in two parts.

The part they say is 'hard' \- is definitely a hard nut to crack - but maybe only a few percentage of the time they spend trucking.

The "endless trips down thousands of miles of interstate, whilst remaining alert" \- well that definitely sounds like something robots could do better right now.

If I were "Lord of all truckers", I'd be negotiating right now. Build some idiot-robot-proof lots near major cities that their new robot overlords could drop off/pick up from, and then focus on just the difficult short trips from these lots to drop-off/pick-up points. Nobody else seems to be working on building these hubs, and truckers themselves could send a day working to/fro and then sleep in their own beds.

<comment><USER17> Truckers are fucked because of motor carrier regulations that were changed to bust unions in the 80s.

There's no organization going to happen because distance trucking operates from labor hostile states.

That said, the automation story is overplayed. Trains are the threat to trucking as fuel goes up.

<comment><USER14> What about electric trucks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Large corporations pit worker against worker," said Joe Gasperov, president of ILWU Local 63, which represents the clerks. "I feel sorry for the truckers. They're exploited. They're paid by the load, not the hour, so they assume all the risk of terminal delays. And some companies care more about saving a buck than servicing the trucks."

Let's not pay by what you produce (number of loads), but by how much time you take, and drivers will not care about the delays, and the ILWU will not care about delays, and you will have a more efficient, egalitarian system? Yeah, right. Then you will get ILWU types driving trucks and taking their time is all you will have in the end.

<comment><USER12> Should developers be paid by the lines of code they produce?

<comment><USER19> If lines of code were a useful commodity in themselves? Yes it would be reasonable. Now we know that is not the case and any attempt to do so would ens in foregone disaster.

The reason not to do things like that is if said metrics can do more harm than good. However freight is pretty commodity by definition. Aside from not doing damage to goods and people, throughput is basically the only things that matter in that context.

Employees demanding a "standby base rate" would also be sensible if they were required to wait while lacking work to do.

<comment><USER12> What about by files of code they produce? Or webpages or assets? I imagine some contractors work this way.

Why can't what developers produce be commodified?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting to see that one group (truckers) are welcoming automation since it will boost their take home pay and the another group (longshoremen) are resistant because automation reduces their job security. I wonder if the truckers know that in the foreseeable future the activity of hauling containers in and out of port will be automated as well.

<comment><USER21> Most assume it's too hard to automate any time soon.

But most people driving to work assume we are nowhere near automating that either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Automation will come sooner or later for many, if not most of the jobs that we have. Better to get prepared. From my POV, a lot of those jobs out there can already be 100% automated with human watch, we simply keep them for employment.

<comment><USER23> It's useful to look back in history: the automation of most of the work in agriculture over the last 10,000 years turned out to be mostly great in hindsight... but it was a lot slower than the pace of change today.

<comment><USER24> There also wasn't necessarily displacement.

Much of the agricultural automation that occurred in the 19th century was a response to labor _shortages_ as people moved to industrial centers for jobs that were more attractive than farm labor.

<comment><USER25> In the UK people didn't move because the jobs were more attractive. They moved because the enclosure movement stripped them of land and they had nowhere else to go. They hated working in factories.

There are pamphlets by early industrialists who advocated this as a way of dealing with labor shortages in their factories and the natural idleness of peasants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> My one experience with the port directly - I dropped off a car for a friend shipping the vehicle overseas. A complete logistics nightmare, and when it arrived in Europe, the plates had been stolen. Which port is to blame? Impossible to say, but the European port would have less use for stolen US plates.

</comment><comment><USER27> TL;DR:

Truckers are all for automation at the port, as it makes their job better as there will be fewer queues and delays in loading their cargo. Their job security is not affected and they can deliver quicker.

Port workers are against automation, as it replaces their job descriptions.

Many of the port workers are also unionised and have more influence over the politicians and port authority. Truckers and immigrant port workers are not unionised and less effective at being heard.

\--

Luddites will always resist technological improvements that reduce their job security. Everyone else will be for it as it improves their interaction with whatever that job delivers.

<comment><USER28> Just about everyone (not just Luddites) will tend to resist technology changes that reduce their job security.

Automation is certainly not always a net improvement for users of the technology though. For example, self-service can certainly be good--ATMs, provisioning servers, even scanning one or two quick items in the store. But self-service for non-barcoded, awkwardly shaped, or just for large quantities is mostly a regression relative to a cashier as are all the automated phone systems that mostly try to keep you from actually reaching a person.

<comment><USER29> Self serve will improve to the point where scanning each item won't be required.

<comment><USER28> Assuming everything is tagged for the scanning system which, for example, fresh produce often isn't. (Some chains get around this by packaging the fresh produce so it doesn't need to be individually weighed. Of course this generates additional packaging waste.)

But, yes, in general I expect self-serve checkout will get better/easier over time.

<comment><USER29> Upscale stores all package the freshest looking biggest produce and sell as a package for slightly more. Meat is similiar. Could be implemented right now in some places.

<comment><USER28> Whole Foods is pretty much unpackaged today for produce and much of the meat and fish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Very cool that management can get an anti-union piece in the mainstream media. The bulk of the article is about sowing division within the working class, and then there's some reasonable points by the union below the fold about how the reason the truckers are salty is in part because they are getting screwed by their management in a way that places them in opposition to the dockworkers by being paid per load instead of hourly.

<comment><USER31> Or maybe using laws to prevent technology from making the port more efficient has downsides that affect not just management and shipping companies, but working class people as well.

<comment><USER30> How would keeping things exactly the same hurt working class people? Making the port more efficient helps business and consumers, but not workers who are continuously ground into the dirt, commanded, and deprived of basic necessities. These workers have a decent job because they have banded together to challenge management through their union.

Unfortunately, making things efficient on management's terms means that workers are fired rather than sharing in the fruits of a more efficient company. Only democratic ownership of the companies by the working class can change this equation. Then improved efficiency would be enacted on the workers' terms and would actually improve the lives of ordinary people.</comment></comment></comment>


The more senior your job title, the more you need to keep a journal (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-more-senior-your-job-title-the-more-you-need-to-keep-a-journal <comment><USER2> I'm a software engineer, and I've been keeping a "lab journal" on and off for the past decade or so. A single markdown file per day, with the date as filename. First thing I do every day is copy the previous day's entry, give it a once over & remove what's no longer relevant. This helps me remember what I've been working on, and it's a track record of sorts.

There's a todo list at the top of each day's entry. But the rest is mostly free-form. Some days don't contain anything. Others contain meeting notes. Design ideas. Results of experiments. It's all plain text, so it's easily grep-able. Sometimes I look back at them to answer "why did I do that"-type questions. Sometimes $manager wonders what I've been working on or why it's taking so much time. I can just point at the journal and say "I've been doing 3 meetings every day and I've been onboarding people so I haven't had time to work on XYZ".

It's not much effort. And imho it's definitely worth it.

<comment><USER3> I do the same-ish thing. Main highlights on mine: 1) I start off the day with things I should be working on (samesies) 2) I use ### to demarcate different "working sessions" ... one for each meeting, etc. 3) I struggle with finding something that lets me: encrypt, search, big notes, and use multi platform easily :( Closest I've found was google keep so far .. but i hate relying on it like that. I'm pretty sure "something" plus encrypted sqlite will work once i find it. 4) I name it Today.YYYYMMDD ... I'm trying to get into the habit of retroing once a month, creating a Month.YYYYMMDD to try to be more reflective and understand high level impact I had and systemic issues I'm running into.

The number of times this has saved me time figuring out "Oh .. i saw that error before .. how did I fix it?" and "who did i talk to about X and what did they say" months to years later has proven to be super helpful and I will be continuing indefinitely.

<comment><USER4> Standard Notes is my Google Keep replacement. Fully encrypted, straightforward business model, works great, apps available on iOS and Android.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for this suggestion. I hadn't heard of Standard Notes before and had stopped using Evernote in 2016 to switch to just Markdown files on disk w/ Git. I've migrated everything into it and this looks pretty much perfect for what I need (better tag management would be my only ask).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I still use paper as I find the act of writing down is more useful than search. About once a year I dig into my stack of pocket paper moleskine notebooks to look something up.

I make entries for each meeting, date, participant, notes, incoming and outgoing tasks. Also adding in sketches, designs, and other stuff that I wanted to write when I didn't have a computer near.

I started this because I found having a laptop or phone out during a discussion with someone off putting. People would open up if I was jotting small notes but would not if I had a laptop open.

I can keep the notebook in my front pocket. Started out with hardcover moleskines but am not trying out rhodia, leuchtturm, and others.

Each one lasts about 3 months and I have a stack 4 feet high so probably 10 years or so.

<comment><USER7> Paper logs are critical for ideas.

One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank dotted- grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot V5s.

Anything important can be digested into markdown, but with a note to the journal page where the magic actually happened.

(It's too bad that _magic_ usually turns out to be gibberish thought spam.)

<comment><USER8> > One just cannot be as expressive in markdown as one can be on a blank > dotted-grid page and a pen-pot of Tombow double ended brush pens and Pilot > V5s.

Counterpoint: Yes they can.

There's this weird fetishization about paper notebooks. It's like the people who say that vinyl is unequivocally better (it's not).

For some people the end result of digital notes is _vastly_ superior to anything they can scribble in a notebook.

<comment><USER9> Do you have a good system for drawing diagrams and plotting graphs in Markdown? Maybe some hybrid of dot, octave, and latex?

<comment><USER6> I use mermaid.js for graphs and charts in markdown. It takes a long time, related to pen and paper, so I don't use it for note taking. But it's really nice for procedural documentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who "recently" (couple of years or more) switched from "senior developer" to architect and at the same time got handed responsibility for 5-10 independent software systems, i completely agree.

Before this switch i would default to using memory. It was easy, it worked, and i have a rather good memory. Most things worth remembering somehow just "sticks" without any mnemonics.

After the switch, i got 10x the information i used to get before, and while i initially settled on using my inbox as a "todo list", flagging items that needed attention, this also became rather inefficient after a while.

I started keeping a journal. Every meeting i go to, i jot down notes, every agreement is written down. I still keep my todo list, but it's in Emacs org- mode now. Notes are handwritten.

As the author also hints, handwriting helps commit things to memory, so the times i actually consult my notes are rather rare. Instead, by simply having written them down, my brain somehow accepts that "it's under control", and focuses on something else, but still remembers it.

<comment><USER11> For this reason I try to write everything down twice. Once roughly by hand, and then a day or two later tidied up and put on the computer.

<comment><USER12> How do you find time for that?

<comment><USER13> I have a personal "shut down" period at the end of the day where I close out my browser tabs that are no longer relevant, and review all the scribbles I've written down in a notebook, transfering the few important ideas to the relevant longterm storage, or to the appropriate project file's todo list, etc.... I also write down the first thing I'm going to do in the morning (because I don't believe the first thing to do should just be "catch up on Slack" or "read email").

Helps me clear my mind, and it saves me a lot of time in the morning, because I can start work and have some wins for the day within 15 minutes...and that momentum carries me through....

Also, the shut-down period is nice, because when I'm tired at the end of the day, it doesn't take a lot of energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not expert in meetings, but increasingly I feel like the modern approach of "everyone invited to the meeting is there to say something" doesn't work.

Someone who has nothing to directly contribute to the meeting needs to be present to keep the goal of the meeting in focus and ensure a single shared outcome at the end. Yes it's slower, sometimes less efficient and sometimes deep subject matter knowledge is important, but six people leaving a meeting with their own accounts of what happened is almost worse than no account. Wherefore art thou minute takers?

Once that is in place, then many of the comments in this thread about needing personal notes to remind them about what to do and when, or what the team agreed to do next, surely are no longer necessary?

When everyone can rely on that, then by all means keep personal meta-meeting notes about emotional response, etc. for reflection. I think that's something I would like to work on.

<comment><USER6> I've tried that but find the minutes have too much and too little. They do help me mix in my own notes.

I've experimented with having a meeting wiki where everyone keeps notes in a single file, that was pretty good. But suffers from "open laptop syndrome."

I heard someone suggest, and want to try, assigning the note taker at the end of the meeting. I'm not sure if it's cruelty:effectiveness ratio may be too high.

<comment><USER15> For now, I simply email my notes to everyone each meeting.

According to Roberts Rules, the #1 order of every meeting is everyone agreeing that the previous meeting notes are correct. Only after the previous meeting's minutes are finalized do you proceed with the current meeting.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>----

A surprising number of people do not know how to run meetings. As such, most meetings wander off unfocused. And since most people fail to solidify meeting notes, action items from previous meetings are "lost".

It takes work to ensure that meetings are worthwhile. And very, very few people seem to know the secrets (despite them being very obvious and well documented).

</comment><comment><USER16> Keeping a journal is important to anybody trying to realize something new. There are tons of senior positions that don't require a lot of creativity. And there are tons of low level positions that do.

Habit is the main journaling challenge, a fact barely touched in the article. There are two habits that need developing simultaneously: taking notes and reviewing notes. It's true that simply writing something down leads to better recall, but that's not what the article is about. The article is about creativity.

To make something based on your past observations you have to review and synthesize. That skill is much different than taking notes to remember stuff.

I agree with the author that there is nothing better than pen and paper. But There are scenarios where all I have is my phone and I still want to take notes. This leads to another can of worms: how to organize all the notes you generate on a daily basis.

I built a general purpose note-taking tool [0] to help me develop the habit of taking and reviewing notes. It has also become my repository of snippets of information generated from my phone.

I use the snippets I create to inform writing I do elsewhere: documents, outlines, letters, etc.

[0]. [https://www.tatatap.com](https://www.tatatap.com)

<comment><USER17> Tatatap looks like a really nice straight-forward/utilitarian tool, thanks! As an aside, as someone interested in building similar (focused on solving one problem hopefully well) tools and earning some modest income from them, would you mind sharing (roughly) what your distribution of free/paid users looks like?

<comment><USER16> Around 3%. There are people that use it a lot and the rest aren't that engaged.

<comment><USER18> Taptap looks really cool and I would like to use it, unfortunately my workplace doesn't allow 3rd parties to store the information that would be in my notes. Have you thought about a self-hosted version?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Highly recommend reading the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll. This book started as a journal by Cliff when he worked at Berkeley Labs in the late 80's. He was an astronomer-turned-IT, and in science I guess they are just in the habit of writing things down.

A few months and teletraces later his journal was thick enough to publish into a book, so he did exactly that.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg)

<comment><USER20> When my dev team started at a company that was basically run by biochemists (we were all hired to start up a specific product), they gave us all really nice lab notebooks, I guess out of habit.

Ten years later, I had used about 5 pages of mine. My two teammates wrote more, but none of us went past page 50 or so. OTOH, the scientists we worked with had gone through multiple books by that time.

It's not an easy habit to get into.

<comment><USER21> Lab notebooks can be important for patent purposes. No surprise the chemists are meticulous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Independently of the title I suggest keeping private employment journal. I had so many situations when one wanted to do scapegoat out of me. But I had meeting notes made few months/years ago and could defend myself very well. Of course, there is this productivity topic too, but I treat it as a secondary benefit.

</comment><comment><USER23> A while back I fell out of love with Evernote and migrated all my years of notes out to txt files which are synced to Dropbox. Huge nested folder structures but easily searched via grep or whatever. And then I have a folder called "Captains Log" and I make txt files for as many things as I can during the day. Code snippets, reminders to buy eggs at the store, urls to some dumb thing I want to remember to read later on but can't bother with right now. Often the only content of the txt file is the title and no content if it was just a quick jot. And now you can use the Dropbox app edit txt files directly inside it which makes for easy note taking when mobile. Been using this method for years now, still going strong.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am considering getting a Remarkable tablet just to be able to have the best of both worlds: hand writing and searching. Has anyone used Remarkable extensively and want to share their experience?

<comment><USER25> I use the Remarkable. I love it for marking up documents and writing brief notes/sketches. Also (you may already know this if you've researched it) it exposes ssh and you can get root, so you can pretty much put any program you want on it. I've used [https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable](https://github.com/canselcik/libremarkable) to write some basic apps for it.

One thing I'll note is that the hand-writing -> text converter never really worked that well for me. I have messy handwriting so YMMV. I would still recommend it, but if that's the killer feature for you it's something to keep in mind

<comment><USER26> I'll second this; I love mine, but have written off OCR and searchability completely.

I bought it to be an e-reader, but ended up taking a ton of notes in it. I have notebooks for projects, for recurring meetings, a single-page "task list" and a page-per-week notebook tracking what I plan to do, what I did, and what I learned, which I use to inform my part of weekly standup meetings.

I prefer to keep most notes ephemeral; if it matters, I should be transcribing it elsewhere (preferably to something typed; I have some shame about my handwriting quality). I do keep all past weeks of my standup notes, and I expect to draw on them heavily to inform performance reviews and promotions, but I can go through them in order, so even there searchability is not a big loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just want to recommend [https://jrnl.sh/](https://jrnl.sh/) which is a neat little terminal tool for keeping journals. I am sure most here could built it them-self over the weekend, but why reinvent the wheel. It works great with tags, dates (both displaying journal entries from date or date ranges and making an entry for a date or a time "yesterday"). It also support encryption and has a wide range of export options.

Funnily enough I actually love notebooks, but I cannot for the death of me keep a neat and nice design when keeping notes using a physical notebook, which means that I loose all motivation. However, having a minimalist tool like jrnl helps me to actually write, not just collect blank notebooks.

</comment><comment><USER28> Vscode has a nice journal plugin that uses a simple year month day directory structure, has convenient actions like open today, tomorrow and yesterday.

Defaults to markdown which is ideal.

There is also a nice insert date time plugin so you can time stamp your entries more easily.

It's a fluent setup.

<comment><USER29> Do you know the name of the plugin?

<comment><USER28> Vscode-journal and vscode-journal-view I think, not at my PC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A large whiteboard in my home office, on wheels. Two sided, one is blank for brainstorming, the other always full of things I have up in the air. Some lines remain there for months, some for days, until the subject is done.

I use the blank side during calls to jot down notes which I transform into meeting summaries and email later. Then I clear it.

I find whiteboard writing very satisfying and the the fact it's always out there in the room with you - can't minimize it or just not open it - keeps you always synced to your tasks. Space is limited so it's always relevant. You're at some point forced to take care of things to make room for new things - can't scroll down.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been using Apple Notes for the past several years. I create a folder for the team I'm on and then a new note for a new project or task I'm working on at the moment. Search works pretty well and it automatically saves and syncs with my phone. I also maintain a TODO note that I update with what I'm working on, usually on a daily basis, and things I need to look at.

I used to use Evernote, but it got unwieldy and Apple Notes did everything I needed it to.

</comment><comment><USER32> File a ticket. I file so many tickets for work I do. Sometimes after the fact ("oh... they'll wonder why I ..."). A journal is good, but using whatever institutionalized knowledge system your company relies upon (usually some form of ticketing and documentation system). The tickets are good for timelines/notes, and if they need to become something recurring, that's when you document it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Something that I didn't see called out in the article is who owns your journal.

Very likely, if you write down notes about work-related activities they are the property of the business.

So, who has physical journals from current and previous jobs at home, and how many people have electronic ones on systems other than corporate approved/internal ones!?

I'm not judging, just saying!

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a great idea / application for writing.

Last year I took a senior manager position at a fairly large company. I am also building a side project (not competing, totally unrelated). Between those 2 things my mind is constantly full.

I depend on my project plan to move through time / between tasks. But I still depend on my memory and a high volume of unstructured notes to move through small increments of time. You simply can't plan every single sub task.

I have noticed when things get really busy and I start getting tired, everything around me speeds up. I really like the idea in this article that writing a journal by hand slows life down.

I'm going to try structured journaling. This year's Big Project is about to go live, and I need a way to slow it all down for a few minutes each day.

</comment><comment><USER35> My journaling habit started with Ohlife.com way back in 2014. I found the idea of quickly recapping my week to be therapeutic., plus it was great to see entries over time.

I ended up building a product ([https://www.friday.app/](https://www.friday.app/)) to make this easy and automated. While it's built for teams to share updates and reflect (think weekly updates, retros, etc), there's "single-player" mode available too.

I like the digital journal format because I could never start the habit with paper. The automated reminders were critical to establish the habit. I still keep a regular notebook where I'll document thoughts, but it's more ephemeral.

</comment><comment><USER36> Not specifically because of job title, but I've found that I've tended to keep notes during the first few weeks/months of any new job/engagement. There are always curveballs and stressful moments, and writing them down has helped me calm down a bit and 'step back' from the situation (not a lot, but it helps some). I am not diligent/daily about it, nor do I keep it up for more than few months at the most, but as another tool to keep notes while getting to know people, it helps to be able to double check my recollection of their behavior, our interactions, etc outside of whatever corporate note-taking system is in place.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have to say that when I was working in biosciences I did this and it was very helpful for me and I'm sure for my successor, but the culture of working around scientists was more conducive of it and I find the corporate world less open to it or more likely to use it in ways it shouldn't be, so I've not been doing it.

At the time I was using raw yaml, but eventually transitioned to emacs org- mode.

I still do it personally and find it invaluable. I still heavily use moleskins, but regularly sit down to transcibe them into digital form, but don't throw the physical notebooks away, just in case.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm now in technical sales working with clients, meetings, deliverables, etc. I've migrated from paper to Evernote, to emacs, out of emacs, and now journal and take notes in emacs with org-mode and org-roam, and use evernote for reference material. Searching notes is now a snap, and I can trust that my reference material is indexed. I'd like to quit evernote, but the OCR, web clipping, and mobile application are still working well enough for me. (although I do monthly exports from evernote and import _what_I_can_ into emacs and file system)

</comment><comment><USER39> I got a 5 dollar Wordpress droplet on digital ocean for my work journal. I also use it to keep up with Wordpress, even tho I don't actually extend it

The most feature thing for me is I can use my tablet. Dealbreaker otherwise. I've been looking at Notion but their iPad app was trash last time I used it

Besides don't hunch and don't get fat, "keep a journal" is what I would tell my younger self

</comment><comment><USER40> Shameless plug: [https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh](https://github.com/Aperocky/termlife/blob/master/diaryman.sh)

This is how I get to keep journal, by having it as a 5 letter command in the terminal.

</comment><comment><USER41> My title's never gotten higher than "research scientist", and i've more or less fastidiously kept a lab notebook for as long as i've been working.

For the past several years it's been in the form of a git repo of text files, more or less by date append only.

I can't imagine not having one now.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's worth noting that journals can and will be subpoenaed as evidence during civil cases in certain jurisdictions. If you don't want something coming out in a court then don't put it in your journal.

</comment><comment><USER43> I've been using oneNote for about 10 years now at work, one page per week.. the ability to search is really helpful.

OneNote is also now free.

</comment><comment><USER44> On Linux, i use rednotebook for that.

It started as a simple Todo/done log, but then I started using for notes and general scratchpad.

</comment><comment><USER45> I use a combination of sending myself emails and the Calendar system in outlook.

</comment><comment><USER46> Great Article on journaling.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm... the most important "paper skill" at my work is learning to "promote" papers across the tiers of journals.

1\. Loose-paper and Whiteboards -- Sketches and concepts that rarely last longer than 5 minutes before being erased or trashed.

2\. Short-term journal -- When a concept needs to stick with me for 1-day or so, I write it down into my short-term journal. This is a tiny Field Notes journal I keep in my pocket, always accessible. This journal is extremely tiny, and thrown away on a regular basis (Well... more like thrown into a bin. I don't think I've re-read any of my old ones, but I do keep them just in case). I rarely visit anything aside from the most recent 3 or 4 pages.

3\. Long-term journal -- Some concepts need to stick with me for more than a day. These I copy into my long-term journal. Anything in the Long-term journal is indexed... yes, documenting your documentation. If its important enough to be long-term archived, its important enough to be thoughtfully organized and categorized for quick recall. I suggest a journal with multiple bookmarks and pre-numbered pages, such as the Leuchtturm1917.

My first "long term journal" was a standard $1 80-page spiral notebook. If you manually number all the pages, then you're going to be well organized. Once you're familiar with an organizational scheme, upgrade to a Leuchtturm. (Moleskins don't have numbered pages...). Some people prefer dates instead of numbers: it really depends on what organizational scheme works for you.

4\. Team Activity -- Anything requiring coordination with others becomes a team event. Usually an email, but it could be a note on a desk, or a message left on their whiteboard. Or a formal Jira issue ticket.

\</comment><comment>---

The important thing to note is the hierarchy... from ephemeral whiteboard all the way up to formal team coordination.

Generally speaking, your notes should traverse the tiers up and down as needed. This means copying notes over-and-over.

As computer wizards, we are often familiar with the computer automatically copying our work for us. In the paper world, you must copy notes manually. Despite its tedium, copying notes from one tier to another is extremely important.

Writing a note directly into your long-term journal probably means getting the concept wrong. You should get a first-draft figured out somewhere else first (whiteboards). Or, maybe a concept isn't "deserving" of a slot in your long- term journal yet. Keeping it in your short-term journal first helps "reduce the noise" found in your long term journal. Even if you know something is important enough for the long-term journal, keeping it in the short-term journal first can help you figure out how to properly organize it.

Finally: Copying notes within the tiers is a form of meditation that helps solidify and memorize ideas. If something is truly important enough to traverse the tiers of organization, then its probably something you want to store into brain-space.

\</comment><comment>-

Teammate communication is simply another tier. You definitely want to get your thoughts and concepts figured out before communicating.

<comment><USER47> I sincerely appreciate you writing up your thoughts about notes and paper hierarchy.

I tend to use a lot of paper for notes as well, and this hierarchy is interesting.

My biggest issue is I do not regularly review my notes. And I know that there are valuable pieces in my notes.

And I hate copying notes over, because of the time taken.

Your post is giving me pause and I am reconsidering the value of rewriting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The biggest issue for me as a frontline developer is the backroom decisions that get made by seniors and architecture, that are subsequently poorly documented or communicated.

Every meeting should have a TLDR summary of what was accomplished that is shared with everyone that needs to know.

<comment><USER49> I agree, and maybe to help you out here, I'll suggest that whenever you use the word "should" as in a value judgment, ask yourself what footwork you need to do in order to make it happen. Merely suggesting it as as a value judgment however is not footwork. Fully define the problem and bring them something they can use, and I guarantee it'll facilitate way more than just getting you what you wanted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Isn't it also because of ageing?

<comment><USER51> You mean losing memory over time? Not in my case. I switched from doing things in memory to keeping a notebook at the ripe old age of 24. For two reasons.

The first is that I simply couldn't hold everything in my head anymore because I had to track 5-10 different projects at any time, and context switching without something written down sucks when you have to context switch multiple times a day.

The second is that writing things down was a great way to force myself to clarify my thinking. I became more articulate across the board, not because I got better at bullshitting, but because I was now reserving time in advance to think through open issues in a structured way.

<comment><USER50> But with age come more responsibility and stuff to take care of.</comment></comment></comment>


Nassim Taleb on Small Probabilities and the Crisis in Japan - <AUTHOR>

142 Time to understand a few facts about small probabilities [criminal stupidity of statistical science]
(I've received close to 600 requests for interviews on the "Black Swan" of Japan. Refused all (except for one). I think for a living & write books not interviews. This is what I have to say.) The Japanese Nuclear Commission had the following goals set in 2003: " The mean value of acute fatality risk by radiation exposure resultant from an accident of a nuclear installation to individuals of the public, who live in the vicinity of the site boundary of the nuclear installation, should not exceed the probability of about 1x10^6 per year (that is , at least 1 per million years)".
That policy was designed only 8 years ago. Their one in a million-year accident occurred about 8 year later. We are clearly in the Fourth Quadrant there.
I spent the last two decades explaining (mostly to finance imbeciles, but also to anyone who would listen to me) why we should not talk about small probabilities in any domain. Science cannot deal with them. It is irresponsible to talk about small probabilities and make people rely on them, except for natural systems that have been standing for 3 billion years (not manmade ones for which the probabilities are derived theoretically, such as the nuclear field for which the effective track record is only 60 years).
1) Small probabilities tend to be incomputable; the smaller the probability, the less computable. (Forget the junk about "Knightian" uncertainty, all small probabilities are incomputable). (See TBS, 2nd Ed., or Douady and Taleb, Statistical undecidability, 2011.)
2) Model error causes the underestimation of small probabilities & their contribution (on balance, because of convexity effects). Any model error, just as any undertainty about flying time causes the expected arrival to be delayed (you rarely land 4 hours early, more often 4 hours late on a transatlantic flight, so "unforeseen" disturbances tend to delay you). See my argument about second order effects with my paper. [INTUITION: uncertainty about the model used for calculation of random effects causes a second layer of randomness, causing small probabilities to rise on balance].
3) The problem is more acute in Extremistan, particularly the manmade part. The probabilities are undestimated but the consequences are much, much more underestimated.
4) As I wrote, because of globalization, the costs of natural catastrophes are increasing in a nonlinear way.
5) Casanova problem (survivorship bias in probability): If you compute the frequency of a rare event and your survival depends on such event not taking place (such as nuclear events), then you underestimated that probability. See the revised note 93 on αδηλων.
6) Semi-technical Example: to illustrates the point (how models are Procrustean beds): [see http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm]
Take for example the binomial distribution with B[N, p] probability of success (avoidance of failure), with N=50. When p moves from 96% to 99% the probability quadruples. So small imprecision around the probability of success (error in its computation, uncertainty about how we computed the probability) leads to enormous ranges in the total result. This shows that there is no such thing as "measurable risk" in the tails, no matter what model we use.
<comment>---
Nassim's full blog/notebook here: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.htm </comment><comment><USER2> The philosopher regurgitates a tired old argument that convexity always leads to bias in probabilistic assessment; and that this bias is always in the same direction. This is why you can bet on long-shots all day long at the races and make lots of money (what are on Earth are you waiting for?).

It is just possible, of course, that Taleb has confused "mean" acute fatality risk with the probability of at least one fatality.

[http://quantapology.blogspot.com/2011/03/nassim-taleb-has- me...](http://quantapology.blogspot.com/2011/03/nassim-taleb-has-mean-mildly- idiotic.html)</comment>


IsoHunt Forced to Shut Down in the US - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/isohunt-forced-to-shut-down-in-the-u-s-100522/

<comment><USER2> I guess people will just have to use one of the many other BitTorrent search sites with similar features and torrent coverage. This sucks for the IsoHunt folks, but for the people actually sharing files, it's more of an inconvenience than a crippling blow.

<comment><USER3> Or just:

[http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon- www.cgi/http://isohunt.co...](http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon- www.cgi/http://isohunt.com)

And pretend that nothing happened...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This could be bad news for me since I've been one of the people involved in working on the "lite" version of IsoHunt. At the same time though, I'm pretty excited, since I could be coming into a lot of free time to work on my startups.

For other people, may I recommend: <http://btjunkie.org> <http://piratebay.org></comment>


Show HN: Posce, a note-taking toolkit for your command-line - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/posce/posce <comment><USER2> I don't agree with the assumptions baked into the tool (eg env vars over config, new vs edit, no deletion), yet I like it being opinionated. Keep coding :)

<comment> em-bee i like the 'no deletion' attitude. so much can go wrong when writing custom code to delete stuff. as deletion here is trivial to do yourself using whatever preferred method and policy (like moving stuff to trash) you have to delete stuff, i do appreciate the decision to stay away from that.

for the env vars, i hope there are defaults that make even setting the env vars optional and not needed unless i want to change the defaults.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _The last thing you or I need is another configuration file clogging up our home directories._

This is why the XDG spec exists. Use XDG_CONFIG_HOME, not HOME.

I don't feel strongly about config file vs env var for just 2 settings, but seems worth noting. Dropping a dotfile right into your home directory is old school and needs to go away.

<comment><USER4> To me filling HOME with dotfiles doesn't feel much tidier than filling XDG_CONFIG_HOME with stuff, but I'll take everyone's word for it (even though most people can't seem to explain why they prefer it, can you?).

<comment><USER5> I'm assuming that you accidentally got that statement backwards, because otherwise it doesn't make sense to me.

Would you still feel like dropping things in HOME was tidy if hidden files weren't a thing? You can also back up XDG_CONFIG_HOME without grabbing garbage like cache data.

<comment><USER4> Yes, sorry I got it backwards.

I don't look at my HOME directory often, I usually start from a subdirectory of HOME that has what I'm looking for. Is that why people prefer XDG_CONFIG_HOME, because they look at HOME a lot? I guess I can understand that.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I usually start my shell sessions in $HOME. I also have shell aliases set up so I always see hidden files, and it would drive me crazy if I weren't able to tuck most config files into another directory.

<comment><USER4> I think Emacs has been shielding me from dotfiles. I usually start a shell in the directory of the file I'm looking at. I hardly ever see $HOME. I also have dired (Emacs' built-in file explorer) show me hidden files by default, but there aren't that many (basically just .git and .gitignore) outside of $HOME.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who still uses a `birthdays.txt` file in their home directory... i fail to see any advantage to this setup. And a significant disadvantage would be losing the ability to tab-complete the note names.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use a single notes directory and I prefer disambiguation to tab-completion, which I why I built it this way. I guess its advantages aren't universal, but then again what is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually want something like this. currently I just use Gnome Evolution for this since it syncs with my corporate EWS automatically.

However, one thing I think must be required from such a tool is a full text search engine. The find subcommand appears to only use substrings or regular expressions which can be very limiting when trying to find that note you made about server xyz and some service abc on it. A regex that would sufficiently find that escapes me, if it's even possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you give me a concrete example? I'd like to implement this capability, but I'm not sure what you're asking.

<comment> em-bee a search term or a regexp only matches on a single line. i think what op is asking is the ability to match multiple terms across multiple lines.

eg. i want to find all notes that contain the terms "linux" and "webserver" in any order anywhere in the note.

it may be possible to write a multiline regexp to do that, but it's not trivial, and this would be a common use case

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see what the point of this is. Every single command can be mapped to an existing Unix tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote about that in the FAQ: [https://github.com/posce/posce#why-use-this- instead-of-lsgre...](https://github.com/posce/posce#why-use-this-instead-of- lsgrepwgetetc)

## Why use this instead of ls/grep/wget/etc?

Posce is one app using one system on one directory. It's a very focused app, and that focus gives it a level of stability and uniformity I enjoy. Also, by using a single notes directory, you can use disambiguated names and get incredible brevity when entering commands.

<comment><USER9> I still don't see the point. I can just "cd ~/notes" and use normal commands in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is anyone else getting a "Error 401 UNAUTHORIZED" on this github repo?

<comment><USER11> Funny, I started seeing 401 errors intermittently when trying to download some releases some hours ago, but it went away after a couple of minutes. Seems GitHub is starting to have some issues today but [https://www.githubstatus.com/](https://www.githubstatus.com/) shows nothing, maybe they haven't noticed yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since you use a text editor anyway, why not use a text editor and a text file to, uh, take notes? Your tool runs in an interpreter and needs a dependency maintenance workflow.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't one note, it's dozens at least. I wanted a centralised way to organise them, and I wanted to try making something myself. Working on all these files by hand would be tedious and error-prone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> If someone calls it a "command line" I usually ignore them. If they call it a "shell" I am more inclined to take note . . .

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, well I'll keep calling it a command line to avoid snobs like you. Thanks for the tip!</comment></comment>


Hackers, is publicly viewable code good or bad in terms of employment? - <AUTHOR>

Maybe somebody has written quite a few programs that work great, but they were just hacked together. The code may not be the prettiest, it may not have proper comments and it may not be robust capable of handling everything thrown at it. It may have a few known bugs, it may not even be fully complete. In such a case is it still good to put these products up in public view even though they are not of amazing quality(maybe not even your best work)? or is it better to keep them private? I ask because I see it both ways. Employers would likely want to know you have done something, but then once they see that they can read your code, see you didn't handle every exception to perfection and write you off as a lazy idiot. <comment><USER2> I can say from the perspective of hiring at Twilio that we often look first for a github or projects link in a cover letter or resume. Fairly often we decide to give someone an interview based on that. The opposite is often true as well. Without seeing code, a candidate who is on the fence may get passed over.

Ultimately we are looking for creative hackers, and public projects are crucial in determining the inquisitiveness of a potential candidate. Other employers may have different priorities, but I think most startups are looking for similar types.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think as long as you contextualize what the goal of the project was, then it can only be a strength (it shows that you're not afraid to have some of your uglier code glimpsed by the world). We all write ugly code now and then.

My biggest fear when hiring someone is that they're so image conscious that every commit must look perfect... I know this ads about a 20% time overhead onto everything and not only is it extremely vane, is typically part of a quest to get job offers, etc. In general not things that are valuable to the current employer at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points. I never thought about pedantic programmers being a waste of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My first step when determining whether or not I want to talk to a candidate, is finding any code they've made available online. I'm much more willing to talk to someone who has published bad code online, than someone who hasn't published anything.

It's great if I'm impressed with their code, but bad code isn't necessarily a negative. I'm much more interested in why they wrote it a certain way then looking at their code with no context. Everyone out there has written bad code, it's understanding the decisions made behind the code that's interesting to me, in regards to whether or not a candidate will make a good employee.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that certainly is good to know. I just worry though that compared to candidates who have no online code, those who do will have more to criticize. Maybe not by you but I am sure there are some managers who would be more willing to hire somebody with no online code than somebody who did have some online code who maybe made a few mistakes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its a huge plus. We are in the process right now of hiring and that is one of the first things we ask about. Do you have any open source code we can view? This tells us several things about the person

1) They are interested in coding. This was done on their own time, away from work. This means they actually like to code.

2) A lot of work is done to learn a new language/technology. This often shows desire to learn and the ability to at least hack together something that is new to them. This is important because we will be asking them to come up to speed quickly in our code base.

3) You can look at the code and get a feel for how they code. We are a small team and each developer will have the ability to have a big impact (for good or bad). Getting an idea of how they think, how they solve problems is a huge plus.

I don't think you need to have a lot of code available. Pick your favorite project, or 'best' project and make it available. I see very little downside.

<comment><USER6> This is good to know. I am currently in the process of leaving my current job and looking for work in a different country(UK). I have been hacking away at a side project that will help fill a particular need but mainly because:

a) I wanted to expand my skill set and work on a language and environment that I don't get to explore in my current job.

b) I want to have something to show potential employers to let them know that I am passionate about development and more than just a 9-5 programmer.

The issue I currently have is that the code is ugly and there are lots of things that I feel I could refactor and clean up. I might always feel this way as I am sure I will never have anything "perfect". I am wanting to get it live within the next few weeks and I think that I will have to accept that I just need to get it live and then focus on improving it after I have had feed back from users etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As is often quoted, "real artists ship".

If you publish code, even if it is buggy, you have proof that you can code (which is pretty important). However, I'd ensure that it works. If you are aware of bugs, document them in the code.

Would you buy clothes at a store that didn't let you see them until you bought them?

<comment><AUTHOR> well probably not, but people do buy clothes online all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's good in terms of employment. I'm currently looking for work and some companies advertising positions / the recruitment firms advertising positions for some companies are now asking for github accounts along with cover letters and resumes.

(I've only seen this for Ruby jobs though... Java is tending towards 'Are you using these libraries in your current position? No? Thanks for your application but...'.)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's very good.</comment>