Google, the Stupidity Amplifier - <AUTHOR> http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html <comment><USER2> Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan is complaining because Google keeps showing photos of other people called Greg Egan while claiming they are him.

As a Facebook user, I thought the problem of face recognition was pretty much solved. Even if not, it seems peculiarly stupid of Google to show photos of several completely different people under the label "Greg Egan is an Australian science fiction writer".

A partial solution would be to post several authenticated photos of the real (in this case) Greg Egan, but if I search Google on my own name, I see several other people's photos come up as well...

</comment><comment><USER3> Egan makes it clear on his web site that he has chosen not to publish any photos of himself online. Any human who speaks either English, French, Italian, Spanish or Czech would know this after reading [http://www.gregegan.net/images/GregEgan.htm](http://www.gregegan.net/images/GregEgan.htm) ... and there are some human-curated sites where the message has clearly been understood and repeated (e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan) and [http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32699.Greg_Egan](http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/32699.Greg_Egan) ).

But apparently Google's algorithms don't allow for this possibility, so in the absence of the kind of signal they're expecting, they faff around amplifying noise. But even if it's beyond their ability to understand the simple declarative sentences on sources like Egan's web site and the Wikipedia article that say there are no photos, there are at least three things in the current sidebar results that are obvious bugs, and would be trivial to fix.

1\. They have used photos from primary sources that are pages related to someone called "Greg Egan", but have nothing in their content, or context, to suggest that they are about a science fiction writer of that name. If a web page does not contain the words "author", "writer" or "book" at least once, then it is not about a writer. The pages they've taken images from include a lawyer, a painter, a random Twitter account, and a random Flickr post, all of which would be eliminated by that simple test.

2\. They have used photos from secondary sources of extremely dubious quality, mainly script-generated regurgitations of Wikipedia or Wikiquote which mash up the original source material with results from Google image searches, and throw in some ads for, err, "Hot Young Single Girls Seeking Older Men". Google knows full well that these are junk sites; they don't appear in the first twenty pages of an ordinary text search for "Greg Egan". So why rely on them as sources for this sidebar?

3\. They have a photo of Vernor Vinge, in a sidebar that's meant to be about Greg Egan. Google "knows" it is a photo of Vinge, in the sense that if you do a Google image search on exactly that image file, it says "Best guess: Vernor Vinge." So as with (2), if they took their own judgements and resources seriously, they would not be using that image here.</comment>


Mac Mini colocation - <AUTHOR> http://www.macminicolo.net/ <comment><USER2> 3 OS X machines gave me more trouble than 100s of linux boxes. They kept locking up, hard, whenever load got above "looked at severely." We had remotely controllable PDUs, so we could power cycle over ssh, but it was still a pita.

No matter how much you love OS X on the desktop, I would stay the hell away from it in the server room. Apple just doesn't care enough to fix the problems, and/or there aren't enough people using it that way to get all the kinks out.

I'm also pretty sure mac mini's don't have ECC memory. And ECC is not optional on a server: <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess (as a linux junkie) I don't see the draw of using a Mac as a server. Anyone care to share their likes/dislikes of OS X Server?

<comment><USER4> As a hacker who had 3-4 xServes for several years, do not run OS X Server by choice. If you need your server app to run on OS X because you are making some crazy decisions in your life, use the standard client OS X. The Server version adds bullshit and pain, and doesn't remove any of the standard Desktop bullshit. The only bad thing about xServes is that Apple doesn't support running the standard OS X on them!

If by hook or by crook you find yourself as a developer running OS X Server, do not use the built-in Apache or any of that shit. Compile it all yourself with MacPorts, and manage it as if it were just another unix box. The only Apple provided services you should use are SSH, NFS, SMB, and NetBoot.

I was mostly running them for NetBoot (doable from Linux, but it's already enough of a PiTA on big heterogenous networks), and because it was the most politically viable means to have root on some non-CS servers at my school -- otherwise they'd be Windows or old RHEL, domesticated into the domain, with storage on an anemic SAN, and probably virtualized to death.

As a sole server for a small business, it would not actually be too bad, as long as you weren't trying to host real webapps from it using the included Apache, and didn't really try to use the OpenDirectory stuff. The file sharing stuff works, Mail/Calendar/Contacts server stuff is pretty well done, and the Wiki server is fucking fantastic -- I saw it demoed at a Leopard tech talk in December 2006 and still haven't seen a better rich text editing interface in a browser. Unfortunately nobody used it because they stuck with 10.4 Server as the core OS in 10.5 Server was riddled with regressions (I've heard 10.6 Server is a _brand new day_ )

<comment><USER5> I had an app that needed to take snapshots of web pages, and the client was very picky about the image quality. OSX exposes WebKit in such a way that I could get very nice snapshots, and I could never get anything close on Linux so a mac was the tool of choice. It sat there doing absolutely nothing besides running a web service that would occasionally take a pic of a web page and hand it back to the real linux server, and it did that fine for a long time.

I think the main issue I had was with software update. Apple provides an interactive command line interface to their update program so you could write some scripts to do it but in practise I just did it manually every once in a while. A couple of times it didn't reboot cleanly and got stuck on a firmware update or something so a manual power cycle was in order.

I also had a couple of weird problems where the machine would become unresponsive if it hadn't been rebooted for a long time. Never really got to the bottom of that but it would be something to consider if you were going to use them "seriously".

<comment><USER6> WebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform.

Or did I miss something?

<comment><USER4> The Qt version (and Chrome's version) uses the platform to do the font rendering, which on everything but OS X and Windows would be freetype.

If the client wanted Apple's particular font rendering, they'd have to use their version of Webkit. The least-shitty way to do that is to write a Webkit app for OS X (there's also the Windows version of Safari, but that would involve a lot of bullshit)

<comment><USER5> Yep, that's exactly it.

Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool: <http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I completely forgot about these guys but I think they have been doing this for a while. I can think of a number of reasons you might want to do this and one of those would be to use the Apple HTTP video streaming software that was released last year.

It is also interesting that GoDaddy just released OSX hosting although at a higher cost using XServe boxes and Parrallels. <http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/mac-hosting.aspx>

</comment><comment> matthew-wegner They also regularly post "The State of the Mac Mini" with details and opinion on hardware refreshes. Their last one is here: <http://www.macminicolo.net/state2009.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> I've had my Mac through these folks for a while; I was unwilling to give up the idea of owning the gear (so VPSes were out) and was pretty happy with the thing in general. I run Linux on it.

</comment><comment><USER9> The bandwidth pricing is extremely expensive -- for comparison, I pay $60/mo for a VM with 1500GB/mo transfer, yet they'd ask $250/mo _just for bandwidth charges_ for 1000GB/mo.

<comment><USER10> I'm looking into getting a Mac Mini for some screenshot production and iWeb is offering them with 1500GB for ~$120 a month. That includes the actual machine though, so isn't colo exactly.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, that looks _much_ better -- they do colo too, and with a year contract they appear to offer for $44/mo what macminicolo wants $155/mo for. (500G transfer.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if Linux on the Mac Mini can address 8GB RAM? (I know it didn't work on versions of OS X pre-Snow Leopard, so I'm wondering if there's some incompatible special sauce that makes it work there, rather than something simple like turning PAE on.)

</comment><comment><USER11> ECC memory is a must for server applications, and Mac Minis--including the "server" model--do not come with or support ECC memory.

<http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html>

</comment><comment><USER12> What is the advantage over a VPS?

<comment><USER9> By up-fronting the cost of the hardware, you're going to get many times more CPU and RAM and faster disk I/O than if you were one user of many on a VPS. If you priced out a VPS with 8G of RAM and a dedicated CPU, it would be many hundreds of dollars per month.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts on this?

<comment><USER13> No personal experience, but manybooks.net is a popular (mostly public domain) ebook site that has been running well on macminicolo.net for several years now.

<http://manybooks.net/about/>

<comment><USER14> I run manybooks.net -- only have good things to say about macminicolo; they're responsive to tech queries, have decent pricing in my experience (and have been very good about switching my plan when bandwidth usage spiked), and I haven't noticed any bottlenecks in their setup. They're also notable, in my experience, for not CAUSING any trouble with my server or the network itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cool idea but a rather expensive way to go (if you consider hardware + colocation fee) compared with a VPS. Although the mac mini is dedicated its laptop parts make it on par or worse than a good VPS performance-wise.

Id be more inclined to use a mac mini as a server on a local network as opposed to colocating. Another interesting application is a cluster of mac minis-that a whole other area.</comment>


Ask HN: Are We Seriously Done? - <AUTHOR> I mean, look at the state of the SW industry. Startups and everything.<p>You know? That's it. I've seen more than 20 YRs of it. I'm still current but for what? Where does it lead? I'm no oldschooler. There was an ideal of future - 10 years ago maybe? Let's reflect the state that led us to ... What? We don't even know now. Where do we head now? Current gens (Gen Z) have no idea. Do we? <comment><USER2> I was thinking about that over the weekend and it crossed my mind that the software industry doesn't the "blue-collar buffers" that other industries have.

This may sound elitist, but it is just the contrary. We are systematically raising the bar to those who wish to join our industry. As a result, a mass of (apparently) highly skilled workers, some of those eager to explore the frontiers of human knowledge, is now responsible for the conduction of less exciting chores.

__Provided we make sure that those with no academic degrees can be offered dignified work conditions__, that must go.

You don't have an Electrical Engineer do you home's wiring.

You don't have a Mechanical Engineer fix your car's fuel injection system.

You don't have a Civil Engineer lay bricks on a construction site.

Is that the sole reason those industries seem extremely mature in comparison to the software industry? Honestly, I don't know, but it is certainly an indicator. The artifacts they produce, and their body of knowledge, is so reliable and powerful that everyone could attend a six-month course on it and make a decent living afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER3> It'd be interesting to hear more detail on your concerns here. Is it just a general feeling of lack of forward progress by the discipline/industry?

In general, the quote "history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme" speaks to me on this. Modern programming languages and OSes are slightly nicer, but at the end of the day, your odds of hitting a bug while using a program are about the same as they were in the 70s. Management still often has no clue. Etc. Nothing new under the sun.

</comment><comment><USER4> Time to Reboot

<comment><AUTHOR> That'd be actually lovely. Not a bad idea. Start from scratch. Rethink everything. Like in the 70s. Create stuff like UNIX, etc. There's a lot that needs fresh thinkin'. But ... there's nothing like that happening at all. Seriously. Gen Z are not picking-up at all, have no idea, depend on us. And that's real bad (for the future).

<comment><USER5> Are you being age-ist here? Do you remember how you were at their age? What did the older generation say about ours... and now we say the same?

<comment><USER2> My impression is that he meant Gen Z did not have the chance to witness the alleged deterioration of the software industry, hence, can't tell how bad is it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Start.hover.in - library for embedding hoverlets into a webpage with just markup - <AUTHOR> http://start.hover.in/ <comment><USER2> That sounds like a nice technical achievement, but even the Snap plugin never had the balls to _adjust the scroll position of what I was reading_.

<comment><USER3> i'm assuming it's a bug since it's changing the anchor of the page which is why it adjusts the scroll position. setting the anchor also adds a page to the history and makes the user have to click back a bunch of times just to get off the page.

the code is probably just not returning false from the onclick handler.

on another note, why are these called "hoverlets" when they require a click to do anything?

<comment><AUTHOR> since the URI is the API , there are two events possible right now.

onhover onclick

<http://onhover.hover.in/hoverlet/hover.in/crunchbase/yahoo> will trigger the link is hovered <http://onclick.hover.in/hoverlet/hover.in/bookmarks/> will trigger the link when clicked

the other fun hack is that that in case you have an image inside the onclick anchor element, the event will be triggered when it is clicked since it is a child. this works great when you want to create a badge / share this implementation.</comment></comment></comment>


Understanding Infrastructure as Code - <AUTHOR> https://cloudonaut.io/understanding-infrastructure-as-code/ <comment><USER3> [Terraform]([https://terraform.io/](https://terraform.io/)) is a great tool for representing infrastructure as code, plus, it's provider agnostic.

</comment><comment><USER4> The translation into a linear flow of commands is an oversimplification - <USER2> assumes that the graph is a specific type of tree, when in fact any directed acyclic graph is valid.

Also, I personally find it way more interesting what happens when you update existing infrastructure, not just deploy new infrastructure, with an arbitrary dependency graph. But probably that's just me.

Shameless plug: you don't have to use a proprietary cloud! OpenStack provides the same thing via the Heat project.

</comment><comment><USER5> Luckily AWS already has CloudFormation is their closing? There's no content here.

</comment><comment><USER6> just use ansible</comment>


Std::shared_ptr's secret constructor - <AUTHOR> https://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk/cplusplus/shared-ptr-secret-constructor.html <comment><USER2> Interesting, but in most circumstances I think this falls into the "too clever" category. As with most of C++'s weirder features, you really only want to use them when you absolutely have to.

std::shared_ptr is already something that should only be used sparingly. Not because refcounting adds a tiny bit of overhead, but because it can easily lead to confusion about who owns what. If you use the aliasing constructor, it's even more confusing.

<comment><USER3> The idea is to use shared_ptr when your semantics are such there can be no clear owner. A good example of this is inside a class where you're implementing copy-on-write. Imho, you should always endeavour to avoid using shared_ptr in public APIs. It works especially well where the target is const.

<comment><USER4> > Good examples of this is inside classes where you're implementing copy-on- > write.

Or functional "persistent" datastructures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Boost.Python (and Luabind which descends from that) has a similar concept they call Custodian And Ward. There, an object can extend the lifetime of another one, often for the same parent and child rationale in this article. It doesn't come up often in application programming, but in library development it certainly does.

That said, this constructor is not a secret. It's obscure yet occasionally useful, like half of C++.

</comment><comment><USER6> So the two shared_ptr instances just share the same (heap-allocated) reference counter?

</comment><comment><USER7> std::shared_ptr<void> is also very interesting, you can put any object in it and the destructor will be called when the shared pointer is destroyed.

I never use it until now but I can see some possible use for it.</comment>


JQuery is for Noobs - <AUTHOR> http://bobremeika.com/2011/03/03/jquery-is-for-n00bs/ <comment><USER2> Apparently, keeping your server running is for noobs.

Anyone have a cache?

<comment><USER3> jQuery is for n00bs

Posted on March 3, 2011, 10:23 am, by Bob Remeika, under Uncategorized.

So the CEO comes to you and is all like "I wanna build the next Facebook killer", and your all like "Fuck ya! I've been waiting for this chance ever since I learned PHP!". So forget the massive backend infrastructure and that you didn't even know what graph theory was until they hired that PHD who kept talking about O-n-squared like it's a bad thing. Your job is to build the front end.

So how do you do it?

Well John Resig and Doug Crockford are your Jesuses (or Jesusi? How do you pluralize Jesus… the guy is a fucking God), so you're all like, "Well jQuery worked on awesomepetsbyphilandphillis.com… so $(function(){}) this bitch". So you start coding like a bat out of hell. Before you know it, you've got a login form and a dialog box and shit is all peaches and cream. You are a God! All you had to do was grab a plugin here and there… you didn't have to do shit! And then BLAM! BETA!!! Valleywag is now following your CEO on Twitter and Michael Arrington is pleading with you to enter the Techcrunch 50. You are going to be RICH!

So now you're feeling pretty good about yourself and that PHD is thinking, why the fuck did I spend $150K on college when I could have just read "Javascript the Good Parts" and been the next internet hero? Not so fast sparky.

The Rails Developer

You're a startup so you are inevitably going to be a Rails shop and you will hire a "Ruby Rockstar". Don't argue with me on this.

So like I was saying… you hire this "Rock Star" and then all of a sudden he's dissin' your shit. "What the fuck is this inline Javascript?" and your response is "Dude, I'm gonna clean it up, we're a startup YAGNI… Agile… _cough_ _cough_ ". So you start cleaning up your Javascript and then you realize "Oh, there's some common patterns here". So you start making some classes, cause that's what Doug said to do. Then you're like, "Wait, Javascript doesn't have classes" (or inheritance…. at least not the kind you read about in Learn Java in 21 days), but dude it's cool. Class.js

So you add class.js into your growing number of dependencies and off you go again. You have classes now and life is starting to make sense, but your app continues to grow, and all of that shit that was starting to make sense is now falling apart. jQuery UI will get you an awesome fucking date picker but the CEO is talking about going international and adding some consistency to the user experience. You want to be everywhere… mobile, desktop, web and beyoooooooooooooooond! The CTO is annoyed about the lack of keyboard controls in the FriendPicker plugin you wrote, but that'll take a week… and then another week. "She just doesn't have the power, Captain" you say, but if you don't get the fuck out of this Romulan tractor beam then you're fucked. Wait… whaaaaa?

So now what?

Your job was to build a full fledged app, but there's no way you could have seen this massive shitpile of shit coming down the ephemeral pike (is it pike or pipe? People disagree). Your solution is to build a widget rendering system, some core Javascript utilities, some abstactions upon abstractions (he said mobile didn't he?). All of a sudden you have a directory tree that looks like this:

public/javascripts/app — Rails BRTCHES!

\- application.js — Rails BRTCHES!

\- prototype.js — Rails BRTCHES!

\- core.js

\- core.seriously.js

\- util.js

\- jquery.1.4.2.js

\- underscore.js

\- mobile.bitch\\!.js

\- plugins/

\- lightbox-0.5.2.js

\- thickbox.js — Cause lightbox didn't do everything

\- gallery-1.1.1.js

\- rating-1.23.4.js

\- carousel-1.23324234354354353453453453.23.js

… eight hundred or more non-interconnected files

\- widgets/

\- base.js

\- FriendPicker.js

\- NosePicker.js

… blah blah blah.. who cares.

What's missing?

Aside from the fact that you now have dependency galore and that your rating plugin requires underscore 1.0.4, but your awesome gallery plugin requires underscore 0.6.0, you have no fucking tests. Every time you deploy to production your CEO finds out that NosePicker throws an error when he actually picks his nose and eats it, but not when he just picks and flicks.

Your godly status is now tarnished, that PHD is feeling pretty good about his $150K investment, and the Rock Star thinks you're a douche.

You should have used Dojo you fucking n00b

I'm sorry if I hurt your n00b feelings but because jQuery is so ubiquitous now, I feel like this needs to be said. Remember what Rails did for Ruby? It made it you so you didn't have to think about your directory tree layout and you didn't have to nerd fight about what was business logic and what was display logic. You didn't even know that tracking your database changes should go in source control, but Rails taught you that. You never thought about writing clean, readable, testable code because you were the only one touching it. Rails started doing this for you about 5 or 6 years ago and you didn't fucking appreciate it. Maybe you didn't learn it because you cringed at the thought of agreeing with a loudmouth Dutch asshole, or maybe you were just trying to get shit done. I don't care. Rails brought a lot of design patterns and good coding practices into the webdev world and you should at least look at rails because it will make you a better programmer.

Dojo does this

Dojo does this for you too (and it's been doing so since before Rails was a gleam in DHH's eye), and honestly, go ahead and use jQuery. Dojo sucks at marketing whereas jQuery kicks total ass, but when you invent your brand new shitty jQuery plugin don't post it on your blog like you invented something new. Dojo has a full-fledge i18n widget system complete with keyboard controls theming and a11y. It has a ton of core widgets that you need all of the time and it has a framework for creating custom widgets when you wanna do something crazy. Your whole UI lifecycle is taken care of for you and you don't have to think about it or debate it with the new Javascript Guy. You don't have to worry about dependencies because Dojo has everything you need to build that next great Facebook Killer.

But the Learning Curve for Dojo is too High

So is learning curve for building a stable performant RIA (is that term passe?). jQuery gives you an awesome API for querying the DOM (thanks John for "Thinking Different") and providing cross platform consistency, but it does nothing for you when you want to build some bad ass computer shit or maybe just a thick client. You have to do that yourself. I'm not saying its impossible n00berson, I'm just saying it's hard. Now I will give you the fact that the docs just "aren't quite there" (hint: they never will be) or that when you download the source bundle it's extremely terrifying at first glance. But I guarantee you that you won't you won't see the Dojo community oohing and ahhing over something simple.

Fine, Use jQuery, but You Will Need Dojo

I understand that 90% of people just want to add a single lightbox or add a drop-down menu to their navigation. I'm not saying that Dojo is for everything. jQuery and it's plethora of plugins and community support will handle the simple shit for you. I'm talking to all of the n00bs out there that think they are going to get away with writing 5000 LOC and don't realize that it will become a mess. You people… YOU! are the ones that need Dojo. You need guidance, because nobody has ever written the app that you're writing. You're unique, just like you kindergarten teacher told you. I'm just saying that maybe you can learn something from people that have built some crazy shit.

Before you reinvent the wheel… give Dojo a look… because Dojo already did that. TM

Full disclosure… I sat on this blog entry for months before I posted it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think this post is neither trolling nor calling on people to blindly switch to Dojo. It is pointing out a thing I see over and over and over again: people choosing jQuery for tasks to which it is simply not suited. Yes, if you know what you're doing you can make it work -- Alex Sexton makes this argument quite well in his post "On 'Rolling Your Own' Large jQuery Apps" (<http://alexsexton.com/?p=106>).

This post asks developers who blindly choose jQuery, based on its popularity and an often-misguided sense of self-assuredness, a straightforward question:

"Tell me how, exactly, you plan to solve these problems you haven't even _thought_ about yet? If you proceed blindly with jQuery, then by the time you think about them, you will be effed. So, maybe you ought to ponder, for a solitary moment, that there might be things you haven't thought about yet, and consider a toolkit that's thought about JavaScript app development questions for _years_ , rather than a library whose competencies are still and painfully limited to DOM, Ajax, events and effects."

I applaud the people who answer this question competently with jQuery as a base. What I take issue with is the people who aren't willing to consider for a second that, for all its popularity and simplicity, jQuery might not be the right tool for every JavaScript job under the sun.

</comment><comment><USER4> Summary for those in a hurry: "fuck this, fuck that shit, dojo has better i18n and a11y plugins, fuck jquery, The End" The tarantino writing style weakens his argument, IMHO. More scientific arguments and less passion please.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps these will be sufficiently dispassionate for you:

\- <http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/on-rolling-your-own>

\- <http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/on-jquery-large-applications>

\- [http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/2009/11/12/dojo- confessions-o...](http://blog.rebeccamurphey.com/2009/11/12/dojo-confessions- or-how-i-gave-up-my-jquery-security-blanket-and-lived-to-tell-the-tale)

<comment><USER5> Rebecca, thank you for posting these. I'd categorize myself among the n00bs the OP refers to, and your reasoned articles were very beneficial. I hadn't considered Dojo in the past, but I'm planning a very client-heavy JavaScript application in the near future, and I'll definitely check it out.

<comment><USER6> I would look at MooTools, their approach to OO JS abstraction keeps your JS heavy web apps lean and mean!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ignoring the Zed Shaw tone, he makes an excellent point. Part of why I work on Faux is that jQuery isn't a framework. It's a library. I try to explain to people that Faux is to Backbone as Rails is to ActionController/ActionView and Active, and now that I think of it, Faux is to jQuery as Rails is to ActiveRecord.

Well maybe not exactly those comparisons, and it isn't nearly as good as Rails 3.x, but certainly that's the right scaling, and it would be a tremendous mistake to start a rich SPI application and think that jQuery is a framework, just as it would be a mistake to start a web application and think that ActiveRecord is a framework.

</comment><comment><USER8> Strictly speaking, it sounds like Dojo is the one that's "for noobs". I mean, all the stuff that "happens" when you use jQuery are rookie mistakes:

      Including multiple libraries/plugins to do the same thing
      Not being ready to handle i18n/l10n
      Not having tests

Point being, if you know what you're doing, these aren't things that are going to blindside you or that you're just going to forget about.

We have apps that have well over the mentioned 5k LoC of JS that even our Ruby programmers have no problem cracking open and working on if needed.

(And for God's sake, just because they're Rails apps doesn't mean they have to depend on Prototype.)

<comment><USER9> _> We have apps that have well over the mentioned 5k LoC of JS that even our Ruby programmers have no problem cracking open_

Why the "even?" What is it about your ruby programmers which means you find it unusual that they can understand your 5k line JS app?

Not trying to be snarky or pedantic, I'm genuinely curious. I see the two languages as being relatively similar, with their common emphasis on closures and functions-as-objects. Obviously the object models are very different...

<comment><USER8> I work in a big shop. By and large our programmers don't venture outside their specialities (their choice). You could rephrase what I said as "even people who don't know anything about the code and have very limited experience with JS..."

I can see how what I said may have made the wrong impression. I don't think there's anything Ruby-specific that makes people good or bad at JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> "So the CEO comes to you and is all like "I wanna build the next Facebook killer", and your all like "Fuck ya! I've been waiting for this chance ever since I learned PHP!"."

Ha!

As for the content of the article...

Yes, if you know that you're going to be building some sort of rich Javascript app, then start with a richer framework. This doesn't mean that JQuery is for Noobs, it just means that it's for lighter weight uses. Different strokes for different folks.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. When I started a new job that required me to use MooTools, I went looking for the philosophical differences between it and jQuery (which I was familiar with). I found this wonderfully-written overview: <http://jqueryvsmootools.com/> .

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The link seems to be down; content is here in the meantime: <http://j.mp/hdgrtL>.

</comment><comment><USER11> TL;DR: if you use jQuery and PHP, you are noob, everyone who disagrees is a noob. Rails ohhh yeah it's the best, fuck yeah. If you don't use Dojo, you are a fuckin' noob.

For some reason I can't take this post seriously, it's like a typical troll post, it claims a lot of things but doesn't even try to back them up properly.

</comment><comment><USER12> Friendly reminder: this post does not appear on classic HN.[1][2]

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/classic>

[2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke>

<comment><USER7> What are you trying to say and why do you call it a reminder? Are you reminding us to do something specific?

<comment><USER12> I think you know what I mean. If I'd just said the article was immature and silly and doesn't belong on HN because of its outrageous tone my feeling is that I'd be downvoted, as it's happened before, so I made my criticism more oblique.[1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-censorship>

<comment><USER7> I didn't know what you meant. But that's by the by. A larger question has to do with HN changing as its userbase changes. Things change. Sometimes for the worse:

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eternal_Septe...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eternal_September) [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters- ope...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door- heal-or-die.html)

And sometimes for the better. There was a time when the PC web was all about the newcomers, the barbarians beating at the gates of the establishment. The web was the same way. I can't rule out the possibility that if HN is flooded with newcomers, some of them might be vandals wrecking everything, but some of them might also be ushering in a new age, the new new thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great article and very funny.

I use JQuery for the simple stuff and Flex/AS3 for RIA. JQuery is pretty cool but I could see how all the plugins help paint you into a corner.

If I did heavy-duty JS development I have no idea what I'd use. I'd probably just spend wy time bitching about no Flex/AS3.

</comment><comment><USER14> _Dojo sucks at marketing whereas jQuery kicks total ass_

Evidently.

</comment><comment><USER15> Before reading the post, i was thinking "dude, this is a troll post."

after the first 5 paragraphs i was thinking, "dude, he has got a point. i think TL;DR is : 'tools doesn't make you a good programmer use whatever you want."

but after the "dojo" section, now, i'm thinking "this blog post is for trolling."

there is no god damn one tool to make you a good programmer. not a web framework, not a ide or anything. the tools are nothing to do with your skills.

you have to learn programming without program anything at the early stages. learn programming fundamentals, algorithms, design patterns, best practises and so on.

i'm not giving a shit about which tool you use. if you are using MongoDB because "it's new and everybody talks about it" i will kill you. use a tool only if it does the job.

</comment><comment><USER16> jQuery is for websites, while Dojo or Prototype is for applications. The architecture of the library/frameworks are extremely different, and if you can write jQuery then it isn't too difficult to switch to another library or framework. It's all javascript. I don't see why people like using tools for unintended use cases. This is like using Rails to build a 3 page static site. Wrong tool for the job.

</comment><comment><USER15> here is the cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fbobremeika.com%2F2011%2F03%2F03%2Fjquery- is-for-n00bs%2F&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1)

</comment><comment><USER17> Sigh. It would seem that Hacker News now rivals Daring Fireball and others in its ability to take a site down with a single link.

<comment><USER18> I, for one, consider that a positive.

Now, we have added HN to the list of communities which can slashdot a site.</comment></comment>


Submit locations of all ten balloons and win $40,000. - <AUTHOR> http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil

<comment><USER2> See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=911119> where there is already much discussion.</comment>


Genetic Test Led 7 Women in 1 Family to Have Major Surgery–Then the Odds Changed - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/seven-women-in-a-family-chose-surgery-after-a-genetic-test-then-the-results-changed-11576860210 <comment><USER2> The women used the information they had, and what science knew at the time, to try and make an educated decision to protect their health. More information has since been learned stating that they may not have needed to be as extreme as they were, but ultimately they've still protected their health.

<comment><USER3> Precisely. This shouldn't be taken as an indictment against genetic testing and acting on those results. Only that preventative actions and their consequences should be balanced against the uncertainty present in this fairly new field.

<comment><USER4> How aware of the uncertainty were those "experts" who recommended they have surgery? Was that uncertainty effectively communicated to this family? Surgery carries risk and costs as well. And it's becoming more likely that the risk assumed by these women might have been needless. Is there no accountability to be assigned at all because all is well that ends well?

Throughout my life, and ESPECIALLY in medicine, there has been constant change in understanding but never a shortage of confidence by "experts" assuring me we got it right _this_ time.

<comment><USER2> I'd bet the surgery was not recommended for some of them. BRCA isn't a death sentence just because you've tested positive (assuming you haven't presented with any symptoms). If you're in your 20s or 30s the "experts" usually tell you to stay proactive on monitoring/medical appointments (self breast exams, ultrasounds of ovaries/uterus, etc) until you're done having children. Once you're done with having children you should consider a double mastectomy and possible hysterectomy.

But we live in the age of Google. Our ability to search the Internet tends to result in patients making horrific decisions. My wife is a breast cancer surgeon and has a late 20s BRCA patient that presented with a significant breast mass six months ago. She refused any of the advised treatments because she was breast feeding at the time and stated to my wife, with a straight face, she would simply cut out sugar because she read that helps. Obviously my wife told her otherwise. Same lady came back in recently to finally seek treatment and she has a 30cm mass now. She's not even a candidate for surgery anymore because you wouldn't be able to close the wound post-op. But hey, imagine what it would have been like if she had kept eating sugar, right? Silly "experts".

<comment><USER5> Hysterectomy makes much more sense than double mastectomy. Breast cancer is detectable and in most cases treatable, whereas ovarian cancer can't really be detected until it's already fatal.

<comment><USER2> Mastectomy is the preferred treatment for a lot of breast cancers, particularly BRCA. Otherwise the woman or man is likely to just be back in a few years for treatment when they develop the cancer in a different spot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing that might surprise people is how little we know about human genetics and what individual mutations do. The main problem is that there are many different variations, with so many of them being quite rare, that it's very difficult to estimate the effects of individual mutations.

Luckily, there are a lot of good research projects that should help us identify more variants more effectively: [https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/](https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/) and [https://allofus.nih.gov/](https://allofus.nih.gov/) are the two most prominent ones. Hopefully those two projects should enable us to get a greater understanding and help us better risk profile patients.

For those who are interested: [https://www.omim.org/](https://www.omim.org/) and [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/clinvar/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/clinvar/) are the two main public databases for storing information about genetic diseases. If you ever get yourself sequenced, they can be quite handy.

<comment><USER7> Yes, this is the first question that jumped out at me when I saw this article. How accurate are these genetic tests? Can they give us a confident assessment of reliability so as to allow us to meaningfully do a cost benefit analysis of surgery

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the second article in two days on Hacker News about the topic of people taking genetic testing too seriously.

It's really sad to realize how much damage Americans have done to themselves based on junk science.

Science works, but it appears most people are in no position to figure out how to respond appropriately to scientific findings.

I don't know what the solution is, but the pattern is tragic.

<comment><USER9> A year or so ago my sister took a dna test. Some other family members have also taken the test. The results showed an inconsistency in mitochondrial dna. My sister had a different kind than our cousins.

When she first found out she could only find 2 explanations. A super rare, basically impossible, random mutation or my sister and cousins had different female ancestors.

My sister hoped for number 2. She imagined our grandpa having an affair that resulted in our mom. To avoid shame our grandma raised the love-child as her own. my sister and I have always felt out of place so this would certainly explain everything.

Turns out the dna test is just not great at distinguishing mitochondrial dna.

<comment><USER10> Cursory reading of the mitochondrial DNA test indicates there is a European gene set bias built into some versions of it, and there is a non straightforward hereditability with mtDNA (conceptually like chimera?) [https://isogg.org/wiki/Heteroplasmy](https://isogg.org/wiki/Heteroplasmy) Did yall eliminate those?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When we got my son tested to see if there was a genetic cause for his hearing loss, there was an incidental finding that he had a mutation that could lead to Long QT Syndrome (an arrhythmia that can cause cardiac arrest during exercise or emotional stress).

His particular variant was marked as "unknown significance," but the doctors recommended he go on beta blockers immediately. We wanted to hold off and examine if there was actually a problem, since his EKG was perfectly normal and we had no family history of issues.

My husband and I both got tested, and it turned out I also carry the mutation. I did a stress test which turned out normal, and based on that info, the variant was reclassified to "likely benign."

It seems like there's a tendency to jump to conclusions that any variant in a gene where pathogenic mutations have been found is going to also be pathogenic, but that's just not the case. I think the more people who get this testing done, the clearer this will be. For a long time, people have only been tested if they already have symptoms, which means they will be biased to identify pathogenic mutations.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://archive.is/7S89q](http://archive.is/7S89q)

</comment><comment><USER12> 7 women in 1 family learn that option value [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_option](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_option) is a thing, and that simplified risk assessments should be evaluated with some care.

</comment><comment><USER13> Surgeons are like a three year old with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://archive.is/7S89q](http://archive.is/7S89q)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm trying to sort out the reality of a closely related question. What are the statistics around actual damage done by false positives from discretionary screening? This is clearly a potential case, but obviously we won't ever know for sure.

My immediate family has two cases in which discretionary screening did or could have potentially have changed outcomes.

First case, I had purchased a $20 glucometer off of Amazon to just test my blood sugar. Device was stuffed in a drawer only to be found a year or two later. I gathered the family 'round to make a blood offering to medical science, and it turns out my youngest was over 2x the standard range. Follow up the next day and same, take her to the endo and she has Type I diabetes. The fact that it was detected before she went to the ER in full diabetic ketoacidosis was so unusual that I bet we told the 'discovery' story 20 or more times to nurses, two endocrinologists, her primary care physician and the folks at Medtronic. What the hell? This is a $.50 test that has good specificity and selectivity for something being wrong. +1 for discretionary screening.

Second case, my wife was complaining of abdominal pain for a few months. Her entire family hates going to doctors, but after much urging from me she heads to urgent care. They send her away with basically nothing. She develops a cough, goes back a month later, says the pain is from the cough and here is some cough medicine. Another month goes by and we end up in the ER because urgent care is closed. They do a CT and find softball sized masses on her ovaries. Two days later she is diagnosed with stage 3C ovarian cancer. Had someone taken the time to do an ultrasound or do her CA-125 tumor marker early on, this could have been detected sooner and possibly before she was stage 3. Two years later we're now probably a million dollars into medical treatments and she's still in the thick of it. Again, in my estimation this is a +1 for discretionary screening.

The part that confuses me is that if you look at articles, papers and interviews with doctors, you'll find what seems to be a prevailing attitude in the medical community that discretionary screening causes stress, over- treatment and negative outcomes. Not only that, it happens so often that the benefits really need to be studied closely before any action is taken. Then, of course, these studies fall behind treatment studies in priority and as far as I can tell, don't get prioritized or completed.

My pet theory is that, in the US anyway, the medical community has an innate sense that there isn't nearly enough capacity to handle all of the incoming cases that would result, and because you can't blame a doctor for someone getting diabetes or cancer, they are off the hook. I'll stop short of saying it's a conspiracy, but in my opinion there is clearly some parallel thinking going on.

Happy to be proven wrong, though.

Edit: Here's an example. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3873201/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3873201/)

Summary of four large scale ovarian cancer screening trials >20K participants starting as early as 1987. Universal findings that TVS + CA-125 reduces staging at detection, which is one of the best predictors of outcome in ovarian cancer. Where is the clinical implementation? Reading through this it seems the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it's extremely frustrating. At $40 per TVS and $50 per CA-125, my wife's treatment so far could pay for 40 years of screening for 250 women.

<comment><USER16> I think the absolute biggest issue is that the feedback loops in diagnosis and treatment are often insufficient, especially when patients are going to urgent care clinics and ERs for their problems. Patients are constantly passed off between nurses, doctors and specialists. When doctors diagnose and treat, unless patients go out of their way to follow up in detail, they have no idea whether or not their diagnosis and treatment plan was correct or not. The effect is compounded because people are less likely to go back to a doctor that misdiagnosed them, or failed to treat their problems adequately.

<comment><USER15> Definitely a need for some kind of open standard for EMR federation and exchange as well as some kind of universal registry for patients to pin their data to.

If your hospital is running Epic/MyChart, full records can be exchanged with other hospitals electronically. No? Faxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article is paywalled. There is a summary on reddit:

> An extremely sobering story about overtesting. A family was found to have a > particular, rare BRCA mutation which led to the women (including those that > wanted to have future children) to have have radical mastectomies and > oophorectomies. A few months ago their particular BRCA mutation was > downgraded from harmful to undefined -- moving one woman's lifetime chance > of breast cancer from 86% to 20%. The laboratory that reported both the > initial and follow-up numbers has 33 cases of this mutation -- 11 from this > extended family.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://archive.is/7S89q](http://archive.is/7S89q)</comment></comment>


The Future of Computers as Trucks - <AUTHOR> http://connortomas.com/2013/02/the-future-of-computers-as-trucks/

<comment><USER2> The answer is Surface Pro [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft- surface-pro-rev...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6695/microsoft-surface-pro- review)

QUOTE: "Even listening to Intel's description of Haswell you can get a good idea for where part of the industry is headed: everyone is working towards delivering a platform/device that has the battery life and portability of a tablet, but with the performance and flexibility of a notebook PC. Apple has remained curiously quiet on this front, but I suspect that too will change in good time."</comment>


Why was the Windows File Transfer so bad at predicting transfer time? - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/709842/why-was-the-windows-file-transfer-so-bad-at-predicting-transfer-time <comment><USER2> The funny thing is that moving and copying files got _EVEN WORSE_ in Vista. And when they made things worse than XP, it stayed that way even with Metro, but now it's a more elaborately decorated form of even-worse-than-before.

In Vista, suddenly, even just to move a 1KB plain text file from the Desktop to the Documents folder, you might suffer a wait time of 15 to 30 seconds. God knows why.

Perhaps you just saved a 30KB JPEG file to your downloads folder, but now you'd like to drag and drop it into your My Pictures folder. Guess what? You just earned yourself 12 seconds of indeterminate progress bar. And no one can tell you why.

With Vista, came the belief that it is necessary to present the user with an indeterminate progress bar for no less than 5 seconds, if they ask to go to the bathroom. Is it User Account Control? Is it because of disk I/O wait time, when writing to the event log? Is it because checking system policies? Is it because of graphics rendering overhead? Is it because we have to wait for a programming bug to trigger an infinite loop exception?

No one knows.

But, even in Windows 7 and Windows 8, animated, flashing progress bars everywhere, probably because _User Interface Design_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Silly answers to the question. The answers basically apologize for the choice to show a time estimate.

</comment><comment><USER4> because of 'sliding windows'. (pun intended)</comment>


My year with a distraction-free iPhone - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jakek/my-year-with-a-distraction-free-iphone-and-how-to-start-your-own-experiment-6ff74a0e7a50 <comment><USER3> As someone who owns a dumb flip phone, it's funny to read someone's enthusiastic account of their life-changing experience of... living exactly the way I do.

But on the other hand, I get it. This sort of thing (facebook, hacker news, freaking _imgur_ ) sucks up so much of my time (albeit on the desktop), and for what? Occasional interesting tidbits, and frequent annoyance and frustration? Some of it is straight-up bad for me, no way around it, but the amusing little bits keep pulling me back. imgur is the worst one for me... the community is unmoderated and uncoordinated, it's a pile of least-common- denominator bs that's as bad as anything on reddit ever was, and yet the only way I've been able to break away from it is to block myself from viewing it.

<comment><USER4> A stripped-down smartphone has quite a few advantages over a dumbphone. Notice which apps are installed: Google Maps, subway maps, Rdio, Uber, Instacart. As he says, these things are like living in the future.

<comment><USER5> Dumbphone plus a GPS device, mp3 player could so the same. I still prefer my Sansa clip to my phone for music (I never even set the phone up for music). Small, battery lasts a while, and I basically don't need to worry about it. I even put one through the washing machine and it worked after a couple of weeks.

As a side note, I find my Android phone a serious step back in usability. I would say I hang up rather than answer close to 50% of the calls. Can't I just get a physical green answer button back, rather than stupid swipe gestures.

<comment><USER6> That's terribly awkward to carry around. Also, a GPS device doesn't tell me when my next bus is due (there's about 45 minutes between my buses). I also now only require one charger for my GPS and MP3 player. I can also look at cat pictures on the bus.

<comment><USER7> > I also now only require one charger for my GPS and MP3 player.

microUSB?

<comment><USER6> Well, my MP3 player is my phone. No, it's a 30piin (iPhone 4S)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I've gone the other way: everything that is distracting (fb, twitter, reddit, ideally HN but android apps suck for this) is on my phone.

Then, my computer is for work, and my phone is for being bored. That way (in theory) there is no reason to be logged into timesinks on my computer, so I can use it without distraction.

<comment><USER9> I think this also makes a great use case for an iPad. I have hosts-blocked all time sinks on my Mac, and unlike on my iPhone, I don't even have much time to use my iPad.

I do miss the convenience of a physical keyboard in FB discussions, though...

<comment><USER10> That's exactly what I use my iPad for. It's the perfect device for frivolous web browsing, YouTube watching, Twitter/Facebook, etc.

<comment><USER11> But every visit to the bathroom takes around 30 minutes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I take a harder tract - I used to force myself stay away from my cellphone and put social interactions first. I also stay away from installing many apps intentionally. My phone is always on silent out of politeness - <USER2> call/email/etc. is important enough to mandate my attention if I am already preoccupied.

I think it's a good way to live. Your friends/acquaintances/etc. that you are with should be the most important people in your life at that moment. When at work, your work is your most important point of focus (unless it's your wife/kids/etc. - family or friends of great significance). It also is generally good to try to control addictions.

In a way, it's about controlling your life, and not letting the phone control you.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have a now 4 year old iPhone 4. It is incredibly slow, crippled by ios 7.1, so slow that Facebook is useless and I only use safari when I really need to look up something. I call it my Comm, because that is what I use it for, communication. iMessages, Whatsapp, FB messenger, hangouts all work relatively well. My iPhone is essential distraction free because it is too slow to distract me, ill look up while waiting, talk to someone, even meditate while waiting for my iPhone to load.

<comment><USER14> How is your battery? I figure at four years it's got to be pretty bad. I have an old iPhone 5 and my biggest blocker is the fact that the battery can only last a few hours at most with minimal usage, which makes it an absolutely pain to travel as one is away from charger most of the time. In fact, the only reason why I'd upgrade to a new phone is because I can't stand having it die so easily.

<comment><USER15> Many old iPhone 5 batteries are covered under a no cost replacement. Check your serial number here. [https://ssl.apple.com/support/iphone5-battery/](https://ssl.apple.com/support/iphone5-battery/)

Both mine and my daughter's were covered. Our run time had suffered and our battery gauges had become mostly insane.

<comment><USER14> HOLY CRAP. Thank you! I am eligible and I suffered the exact frustration you've mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> (Posting using a throwaway as I changed my noprocrast settings in HN as mentioned in these comments and ironically blocked my account for the day!)

Somewhat related, I've come to a similar conclusion myself recently but via app fatigue instead. I've been running a Windows Phone for over a year now, and although I loved the OS, constant remarks regarding the app gap made me wonder if I was missing out on the full smartphone experience.

Thus I obtained a Samsung Galaxy and logged into my old Android account, eagerly anticipating all those exciting apps I'd soon have access to at my fingertips. Going thought the Play Store was a great experience - Instagram, SnapChat, Yo, etc. - I installed every hyped app like I was on a crazed shopping spree. This included apps that simply replicated a web experience, e.g. Amazon Shopping, Quora, and even Go Daddy (in case I ever wanted to check my domain renewal status while out and about!)

The first week or so was exciting, I was in thrall of all the things I _could_ potentially do with my phone and how (by some unknown means) these apps would help me live my life. However as the weeks went on I found that even though I had all these apps, I simply didn't use them. I realised that just having the technology available isn't enough, you have to have a want and need for it.

From this experience I've recognised what I personally need from a smartphone. For me it's about a good camera, music player, calendar, and a way to directly and privately communicate with my friends and family. Add to this a few key apps, covering transport/maps, gym, ebooks, podcasts, etc., and I'm good to go.

I now have a Nokia Lumia on its way to me in the post. I won't have the latest hot apps, but that's okay. And when the next big app does come around, hopefully at some point it will come to my platform, and if not I'll happily just get on with my work.

<comment><USER17> That's an interesting idea. I'd never considered Windows Mobile before, but since I, too, don't really need much in the way of apps (just the ones you mention), maybe I should look into it.

Any idea how well a Windows mobile phone can integrate with a household that's predominantly Mac?

<comment><USER16> Works well for me!

I guess most integration would be fine - email, calendar and so on. There are WP alternatives for most services, i.e. OneDrive for cloud syncing, etc. - however iTunes, iCloud and so on could be an issue.

It could be MS's new marketing angle - "come to Windows Phone, we don't have any apps, and that's a good thing" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In a similar vein, I almost always have my phone set to silent without vibrate. This small change has made a huge difference in my interaction with my phone. I reach for it less and just generally think about it less.

The downside is people are sometimes annoyed at me not reacting to calls/messages immediately. I should probably experiment with the iOS Do Not Disturb feature, but it hasn't been too big of an issue so I've put it on the back burner.

<comment><USER19> Same here. I set my main ringtone to silence and only a few contacts can actually ring my phone. I disable almost all notifications and my phone's on do-not-disturb from 10-7 every night.

Maybe my laptop needs a hosts file to block "infinite" sites. Of course, I'm on one right now...

<comment><USER20> The inability to selectively _enable_ (rather than individually blacklist) contacts, and specify a do-not-disturb block, are two of the most significant disadvantages of going to a flip phone I've encountered.

My compromise is to simply leave it off much of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A tip I got from Perry Marshall was to put productive apps on your home screen, and throw apps like Facebook, Instagram etc at the back of your phone.

For example, by only leaving apps like Kindle, Audible, or Bible on my home screen, I'm much more likely to do something productive when I'm looking to fill in a few minutes waiting somewhere, rather than checking Facebook which will be a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER22> My strategy is to disable notifications. Thus, I only open the apps when I choose to (WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.). Apps that are specially addictive belong to the second screen, in a folder (Twitter, etc.). This way I have much more control over my phone habits.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think the biggest problem with the smartphone are the PUSH notifications. Disable them and your life becomes instantly better.

If deleting apps is a big leap for you then I think disabling _all_ push notifications is the second best thing you can do.

<comment><USER24> Push is great for messages that are both timely and relevant. A lot of app- makers don't seem to get this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I haven't gone as far as this guy, but I recently removed Facebook and Twitter from my Android phone and it's been a breath of fresh air.

I still use both apps via their websites when I've got my laptop out, but not having them in my pocket all the time is really freeing. You don't realise how much of a slave you are to these things until you force yourself to let them go. I waste a lot less time on my phone now. Wouldn't go back.

<comment><USER5> One of the reasons I refused to get a smartphone a few years back, was because all I saw people do was use them as a distraction. Facebook at the bus stop. Facebook in a seminar.

I now own a smartphone. Refused to put Facebook on it. I also make a point when going on holiday not to use internet, unless I need to. I have been to some stunning places in the Hymalayas, with scenery like nowhere else, and you see the internet cafes full of westerners, updating their facebook status. Did you really need to pay for the flight to do that?

<comment><USER26> Maybe not. But having maps in unfamiliar territory (like Bangkok Chinatown) which also works as a camera and can replace sketchy internet cafes for booking tickets and contact people home ...

As with fire, smartphone is a great servant but terrible master.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have some eye complications like dry eyes and due to this my doctor advised me cut down use of smartphone as much as I can. My first thought was to just get a feature phone and dump smartphone altogether. But there are few things about smartphone that I can not really give up now.

1\. Maps - maps come in very handy at times when you are stuck in some unknown area and want to find way home. 2\. Browser - to be able to check anything on the web is also very important to me. 3\. Access to online storage and email.

Basically I gave up all social media, all smartphone gaming and other unwanted apps and use smartphone for basic internet access device. I have cut down my smartphone usage from 3 hours a day to about half an hour a day.

</comment><comment><USER28> You know what would make my life really distraction-free? Ban Hacker News on every device I have access to for a prolonged period :)

<comment><USER29> I haven't found HN to be a particularly bad offender. The front page doesn't change quickly enough to require excessive attention.

<comment><USER30> That doesn't mean that you can't switch to it between every line of code and hit reload, just in case there is something new.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Up until 6 months ago, I used a flip-phone because I didn't want the distractions that I noticed with friends (constantly checking Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

I finally gave in when I moved and would constantly get lost (I needed maps).

I really like this article, but I see opportunity in short digital breaks. The truth is that the majority of people won't delete infinity apps. They don't have the self-control to do it.

That's why I'm building an app (Android-only) to temporarily disable distracting apps.

You can check it out, I'd love feedback -> [http://www.digitaldetoxapp.com](http://www.digitaldetoxapp.com)

<comment><USER32> Looks great! Will we be able to choose which applications we are allowed to use? For example, everybody I know uses whatsapp exclusively for messaging so my phone would be pretty useless with SMS only.

<comment><USER31> For the first version, it only allows calling/texting - however, I'm going to have WhatsApp whitelisted because I know it's a popular messenger replacement :)

In the future, I'd love to give people different "packages" (ie. - Uber, Lyft, Instacard, etc) as not all apps are distracting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Today I went to lunch by myself and forgot my phone at home. It was very boring and I really didn't know what to do with myself. It made me realize how terribly addicted to my phone that I am.

I need a break for this always connected world.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Over the last 12 months I've learned to enjoy (or at least, be OK with) moments of boredom. I reach for my phone a lot less often. It's probably just my imagination, but it feels like it's easier to concentrate when I need to get things done or tackle a big project.

Times on the bus when I would've checked email, I listen to music or just look around. I even started meditating on the bus (yes, really! And, uh… please don't mug me) using an app called Calm."

Is this satire? Meditating using an app, the conquest of boredom, the gain in productivity/focus.

<comment><USER5> I had a similar thought, but for begging meditation it is helpful to be "guided".

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Tried this, and one of the big difficulties is that I send email to my todo list manager to create todos ("pick up milk", "Email person about important_thing").

I don't want to give this up, but can't find an app that only sends email. So when I opened Mail to send a todo email, I'd see all the new emails that were begging to be read. I could create a new email account that I use for sending only, but that seems like a pain.

Anybody seen an iOS app that sends email, but doesn't check it?

<comment><USER36> Couldn't you use a dedicated todo app like Remember the Milk?

<comment><USER35> I use Goodtodo but emailing in todos is faster than using the native app.

Couldn't find any apps that worked so ended up creating a receive-only account that gets no email and using that as my incoming account. My outgoing account is my normal Gmail account. Will be interesting to see how things go without email on my phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Or just turn off mobile data and Wi-Fi. Re-enable when you have time to kill for social media.

</comment><comment><USER38> During my visit to South Africa and Zimbabwe, I realised that we take internet for granted In Europe and America. All my colleagues who work there generally have 3 to 4 (maximum) applications on their smartphone and they never constantly look at their phone all the time. Data is ridiculously expensive there and watching Youtube videos regularly is a non starter. Unlimited internet is pricy because its still new so everybody purchases bundles. Just using you smartphone there teaches if you really want to spend x amount of data on a short video clip.

It made me realise that I had to make a change. I depend on the internet/technology and I personally think that's scary. I'm gradually cutting out applications, I think the big shift from being connected to not being connected would just cause a relapse. Right now Twitter,Facebook, HN are not on my smartphone anymore and I feel much better already.

I have a lot more time now and its quite shocking how people are still productive these days with the _insert next trending application_ coming out every week.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think going so far as to disable Safari outright and deleting email accounts is too extreme but I definitely agree that most Apps are counterproductive.

It's important to moderate use of addictive services that provide a stream of instant gratification like facebook, twitter, reddit, 9gag, pinterest, etc. The first step is being conscious of excessive use.

<comment><USER28> Instead of disabling the browser completely it would probably be more prudent to use a white-list of websites which the iPhone allows as well:

Restriction -> Websites -> Specific Websites Only

<comment><USER39> or just exercise some self control! I don't have to hide the kitchen knives in case I stab guests... It's not that's hard to ignore an icon.

<comment><USER28> It doesn't work for me - I've tried. Self-control works really well for me when the task at hand is really interesting and I want to give my everything to it. I don't know about you but so far those tasks haven't come to me at a regular pace. And I tend to seek out these online distractions as a diversion tactic when the task I'm supposed to be working on is really boring or uninteresting. So it's all about one's personality.

<comment><USER39> It sounds like even if you removed these distractions, you'd simply seek out others. As in replace one addiction with another, a very common behavioural characteristic.

The only way to deal with this is to better understand your own personality and try to learn how to get self control. There are lots of cognitive therapy based behavioural modification techniques. Self control only when it's interesting isn't really self control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is cute. Anyways, I've adjusted my phone so it's less of a pest as well. Mostly in two ways:

1) Downloaded Silence for Android ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.epsilonlab...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.epsilonlabs.silence.ads&hl=en)). This let's me adjust triggers for putting the phone in silent mode. For the weekdays, I set it to be silent from 10pm until 6:30am.

2) At work, I silent my phone as well. No need to get Facebook notifications during thinking time.

This leaves my phone with a few hours each day to yell at me. The mornings, and the early evening (but I put my phone away for dinner anyways). It gives me a few moments each day to check notifications from services like Facebook, see Google Now reminders, and that's about it. When friends need to contact me, they text, call, or chat me. If my phone is silent when they do, such is life.

</comment><comment><USER41> I used to work for a mobile company, I used to get new phone every other week, it drove me crazy... Now I carry no phone with me at all. But I don't go around telling people that I am better than them, because I have no phone or that I have a "distraction" free iPhone, an iPhone is still a hell of a distracting gadget.

<comment><USER42> Funnily enough, your comment comes off as more self-righteous and more of a humble brag than the original article.

<comment><USER41> Yes, I realised it myself as I was typing my remarks. But this is third time I have come across this guy and his experiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I did something similar.

All I had to do was use a Blackberry 9900 as my primary phone.

I did not have to disable anything. I primarily use it for emails, calls and SMS. Those are also the only things that seem to work.

When travelling out of town I usually carry my backup devices as well(iPhone/Nexus)to find directions etc.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have partially made my iphone more distraction free.

I have a script that runs at 5:30 pm and then at 6 am that disables email and enables email again in the morning before work.

The script uses phantomjs to log into my webmail and change my password, then changes it back again to enable email.

</comment><comment><USER45> I was away at a friends cabin about a month ago. Sitting on a lawn chair on their dock I shifted and my Nexus 4 fell out of my pocket, bounced off the dock, and into the lake.

When I got back home I popped the SIM card into my old iPhone 3GS and have been experiencing a similar smartphone underload. I updated the apps I needed to, mostly 2-factor software tokens for VPN and my Google account, and realized that I wasn't missing much of my Nexus 4.

I did try to save the phone with a couple handfuls of dessicant packets but it never successfully got past the bootloader screen. But that's fine with me, I am in no hurry to replace it.

<comment><USER46> I acquired a Nexus 4 from a friend after it had fallen into a (clean) toilet. She sent it to me to attempt to fix, and I too started with silica gel, moved onto placing it near the boiler, and eventually set it beside a dehumidifier. After a couple of weeks the phone appeared bone dry, but I couldn't get past the boot screen.

Fast forward six months of the Nexus 4 sitting in a drawer forgotten about. I took it out and charged it. Amazingly, the phone now works 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> We are doing our small part to help.

I sometimes post about my company working on the next big "social platform". And we are trying to do things RIGHT - open source, fully distributed (while respecting CAP theorem), people own their own data, etc.

So when it comes to notifications, like in every other area we want to encourage the apps to use "best practices" and only notify people of what they really WOULD want to know about. That means turning down the "slot machine" factor and handing over control over notifications to the people. To do this, we needed to design a standard, expressive interface and "language" that people could use in any app across the platform to quickly indicate what they want.

And here's an overview of how it works withte rest of the system:

Every piece of data in Q ([http://platform.qbix.com](http://platform.qbix.com)) is typically stored in a Stream. Which means things like access control (privacy), real time updates (like chat), offline notifications (delivered to any endpoints), etc. are all implemented by the system and available to the app for free.

The user can fine tune notifications settings for any stream or type of stream, and each app can provide Rules with configurable settings and thresholds. For example, a "Groups/activity" published by a user who is in my contacts under a "Friends" or "Family" label and matching my interests would accumulate enough weight to bust through my notification threshhold for sending me an in-app notification, or an email, or an sms. At certain hours of night, my notificaion threshold goes up. When I get into my car, and start moving fast, my notification threshhold goes up until I get out of the car, so only the most urgent things distract me.

And that red badge on the icon? It should earn your trust, like all interface elements it represents a relationship and shouldn't cry wolf. It should NOT show the number of messages waiting for you, but rather show the number of streams with "important" messages posted since you last checked that stream on ANY device.

In short - there are lots of things to solve but they only have to be solved once. That's what we have been working on for over 3 years.

</comment><comment><USER48> I had my iPad replaced recently, had some issues restoring it as my backup state was inconsistent and ended up going for a full 'clean' device. It was interesting, for the first 4 weeks I had barely any apps on there outside of Kindle, Instapaper and Tweetbot. I used it about the same amount of time, but generally I'd focus on one thing for longer periods of time. I'm tempted to go down that route when I get a new iPhone this month, sounds like it's worked well for other people.

</comment><comment><USER49> I have a feature phone that comes with a crappy enough Java ME based Google Maps that is just enough to save me from trouble when I really do need directions yet none of the things on the phone is something I could just play with.

Thus, I just use it for calls and texting, and for Google Maps if really needed. I need to charge it once a week and for all I care it just works.

My employer provides me with a smartphone as a work benefit but I mostly use it as a small tablet for reading stuff in bed. The battery is often out of juice, too.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm usually at my desk at home or the office, or in bed, or some other place with a real computer, or doing something I actually want to be doing, or driving. In none of those situations do I want my phone.

In the remaining cases of "waiting for something but not equipped with a full sized computer", I'm quite happy to use the phone.

The greater problem is "spending time doing less-productive stuff on the Internet" \-- I just prefer doing so with a real computer.

</comment><comment><USER33> This world of having a computer in your pocket with an always on Internet connection is still new to us, even 5 years in. I wonder what our culture will choose as an acceptable and healthy way to deal with this new world. As it stands now people are way too hooked to theirs phones, and cannot even concentrate without them.

I don't Facebook, Instagram, twitter, or any of that nonsense, but I'm still hooked to my phone and need a break. I might give this a shot.

</comment><comment><USER51> _"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."_

\-- by social scientist, Herbert A. Simon.

Keeping our phone distraction free will definitely make us attention rich and free us from the information pollution that we're getting used to. If not a distraction free smartphone, we should probably make better decisions about what information we choose to spend our attention on.

</comment><comment><USER52> Bloggings like these come up semi-regularly, and I sometimes wonder if they're just designed to troll people into deleting all the apps from their phone.

<comment><USER53> I rather think they are from people who finally realized living for your phone is a worse living experience than just living and using it when needed - or in other words, don't stretch the meaning of 'needed'

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I've done the same thing with my Android but I didn't consider it all that revolutionary. I just like a clean looking phone. Using Atom Launcher I can adjust the 'dock' (around the launcher icon) to slide left and right rather than the home pages. It's a much less distracting experience.

Screenshot: [http://jmp.sh/JZIZ12q](http://jmp.sh/JZIZ12q)

</comment><comment><USER55> I wanted to try a similar experiment, but more extreme in that I'd get rid of my iPhone in favour of a pager. I decided this was probably too much of a hassle and would cause me more problems than it solved. (I use my phone to gain access to accounts on my computer, etc. using two factor authentication so quitting smart phones cold turkey isn't really an option for me after all.)

</comment><comment><USER56> Seems oddly backwards to me, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. If I've bought and am paying for a phone that costs a significant fraction of my computer, it seems like a waste not to use it for that purpose. You can make the argument that disconnecting to a point, or for a period of time, is a good thing, but intentionally crippling your hardware because you can't resist the temptation of having it there seems like it would be better solved by forming better habits in the first place.

It just seems like it would be on par with buying a brand new computer to get your writing done, then installing DOS because the web browser was just too alluring.

All that said, I ended up taking this to the opposite extreme: I've set up my phone to be cross-linked into as many work-related systems as possible, so that I can take better advantage of those little "in-between" moments during my work days. Build's compiling? Get an alert when it's done. Waiting for a coworker to get out of a meeting? Get an alert when they ping your name in IRC/Skype/GChat. Not having to sit in front of my computer waiting for asynchronous blockers to resolve means I can retreat to the porch, or the living room, or the park up the street, without having to worry about coming back to find something's on fire. Additional apps allow for limited on-the-go debugging, interfacing with systems and the like, so that I can continue being away from my computer if the situation isn't severe enough to require my actual physical presence at a keyboard and larger screen.

</comment><comment><USER57> Does anyone find it odd that the author talks about distraction free, removing things and then uses an iOS app to meditate on the bus?

<comment><USER58> No. Meditation is also about controlling distraction.

<comment><USER59> But surely you can meditate on the bus without needing an app.

<comment><USER48> I think the point is it helps make it easier to achieve the desired state, which makes it worthwhile having on his phone in his 'select' pick of apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I actually killed all data and voice on my phone. It's the cool thing to do if you're looking to create something drastically new in the world.

[https://www.techendo.com/posts/how-i-killed-my-cellphone- pla...](https://www.techendo.com/posts/how-i-killed-my-cellphone-plan)

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm going to only allow the use of notepad on my PC. I will have all the productivity. Wait... typewriter.

<comment><USER20> You'd be surprised. There's a reason full-screen / distraction-free editors are so popular:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full- screen_writing_program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full- screen_writing_program)

[http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/write-peace-distractionfree- edi...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/write-peace-distractionfree-editors-si/)

I've found Readability and my own nearly 1200 local CSS hacks for more distraction-free Web browsing are also somewhat useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Just go with OmniROM (Android community build) and don't install the Google Apps. BAM. Useful phone, as free as reasonable doable, useful stuff from F-Droid, but no ginormous bunch of every latest gizmo _and_ you get more freedom and privacy.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if people keep a gazillion time sinks on their home screens is that they've paid $500 to be part of the smartphone club, and reducing its "use" would cause buyer's regret. I think I am somewhat guilty of that on my iPad.

<comment><USER63> Maybe, it would explain why people spend $500 - $1000 on an phone and use it almost solely as camera, gaming, Facebook platform. Honestly, as useful as smartphones are, you'll have a hard time justifing the price, unless you have so special use case.

Luckily my iPad was a gift, otherwise I would feel cheated. I often try to browse the web, but after a few minutes I get frustrated and switch to a laptop. In my mind the iPad is a useability nightmare, it's only good for a few well designed casual games (and may reading, if you don't have a Kindle). For anything else, including browsing and email, it's quicker and more comfortable to just get out the laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I removed Safari and Email from my iPhone a while ago. It's great - I find that I usually just use them as time wasters.

I actually had a flip phone before that, but I prefer the iPhone with distractions disabled.

</comment><comment><USER65> The guy just bought the wrong phone. Nokia 1100 could save him a lot of money and bring a life changing experience - the monochrome screen! I kid you not. And it has superior battery life.

<comment><USER66> If you want an elegant feature phone, I'd recommend the Nokia 515. It's sleek, has 1 month standby time, 5 MP camera, decent antenna/speakerphone, send/receive texts, basic email functionality and ultra-basic web access. It's the perfect "sensible" phone and was designed to fill that need:

[http://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/515/](http://www.nokia.com/global/products/phone/515/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I'm doing this thing...

So, this was the last post I made on HN using my iPhone...

</comment><comment><USER68> I probably should do this. I keep on coming up with strategies for deciding which apps to keep on my phone and which I should delete, but I can't ever stick to one.

</comment><comment><USER69> I love minimalism, but I see having self-control as a better option than spending 500$ in a device you are not going to allow yourself to use.

</comment><comment><USER70> I dropped and broke my nexus 4. Now with a small dumb phone, a notebook and a mechanical pencil. Feels kind of good that the phone broke.

</comment><comment><USER71> I have a brilliant (!) suggestion - don't bother uninstalling anything. Just don't enable data or wifi in the phone!

<comment><USER72> I actually have mail, firefox, etc on my android phone. and data. but i turn off notifications for almost everything.

i rarely ever check mail on my phone unless i really need it (which is like 10 times a year). Same for the rest.

What I use most of the time: \- texting (specially for meeting/bar/etc) \- maps (directions, traffic...) \- booking (plane/train/etc while on the go) \- making pictures \- listening to music (sometimes)

yeah.. thats it. I use the other apps less than once a month...

I do use email, web, etc on the laptop tho (which i do not carry with me unless its work hours)

I find it a lot better this way, and in fact, past the initial experience of having a smartphone some years ago, i never really used it any other way.

i dont get the addiction ppl get with the phone games (they're fucking terrible) and non-stop checking notifications (its horrible)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> I know it's a bit off-topic but has anyone got a link to this wallpaper? It's just beautiful.

<comment><USER74> If I could locate the wallpaper you're describing, chances are I could find a link. What wallpaper?

<comment><USER54> @konole probably means the wallpaper in the screenshots in the original article:

[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/2000/1*8cXiIn88Rzq...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/2000/1*8cXiIn88RzqO0CTHy6T3uA.png)

<comment><USER74> Thanks! Getting a clean image of that might be more difficult than I thought.

<comment><USER54> yeah, GIS comes back with nothing...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> after my samsung galaxy S3 died (DOA) I reverted to an old sony ericsson W810i. Back to when a phone was just a phone. I am absolutely loving it. My next phone will probably be an iPhone 5s, but seriously, having a phone that is just a phone is so great.

</comment><comment><USER76> Why doesn't this guy (or anyone else like him) get a non-smartphone. I have a BlackBerry10 device and rarely use apps. Partly because the platform was missing many big name apps, but mostly because I don't want or need such things. I really don't understand why this guy has an iPhone.

<comment><USER77> As another commenter said, look at the apps he has Google Maps, Uber, Rdio etc... The only thing I'd be completely _lost_ without would be Google Maps, but I had that on S60.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes I end up completely lost because of Google Maps. Or like the other night, the phone decides to run so frustratingly slow its hardly worth using.

Now there was a time in the distant past where we didn't have smartphones for directions. People used maps. Here in Barcelona, every bus stop has a big map of the whole city on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> i dont have an iphone, but have an andriod one. i generally turn off internet. so, i can't browse, and i can't install new apps. i mostly use it for attending calls.

</comment><comment><USER79> The gold standard for smartphones for battery life is all day use -- people use them for that long. For something that you carry that's way too much.

</comment><comment><USER80> I would have commented on this but I made my iPad distration free and now its only good for serving coffe anymore! So I am not really using it right now for reading this blogpost and I am not really commenting on this right now, sorry :(

</comment><comment><USER81> What? this is forth in hacker news, that is the most over rated accomplishment i ever heard.

So you bought an iPhone instead of the old ones, to have the additional features that it provides, and then you don't use it, and call it an accomplishment. That is non sense.

</comment><comment><USER82> The original article from a year ago: [https://medium.com/@jakek/the- distraction-free-iphone-or-why...](https://medium.com/@jakek/the-distraction- free-iphone-or-why-im-happier-since-i-disabled-safari-80f8d525b0d8) (to be perfectly honest, there's not much there that isn't in the one-year-later recap)</comment>