The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill - <AUTHOR> https://azeria-labs.com/the-importance-of-deep-work-the-30-hour-method-for-learning-a-new-skill/ <comment><USER2> The author references Cal Newport's Deep Work [1]. I recently read this book and I can't recommend it enough. It's not just a productivity fluff piece about the importance of focus. He brings an academic rigor to the debate and backs up his claims with legitimate evidence. Best of all, the book is not just theory, it's 100% actionable.

I used Newport's recommendations to reclaim 4+ solid hours of deep focus and it's had a tremendous impact on my productivity and general quality of life.

Here are a few strategies I found successful:

* Create a TODO list each day and separate tasks into shallow and deep categories

* Block off each hour of the day and and fill it with one of the TODO items

* Restrict shallow work to 2 hours (after 2 hours, say no to everything shallow)

* Create a scorecard and track the number of deep hours each day (this number should increase)

* Experiment with Newport's recommendations for two weeks and see which ones increase your deep hours

* Become comfortable saying no

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success- Distracted/...](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success- Distracted/dp/1455586692/)

<comment><USER3> >Block off each hour of the day and and fill it with one of the TODO items

Generally agree with the points but I'd like to note that this point is the most likely failure point in the method. Organizing the day by hours doesn't work for a lot of people. Most productivity books in the old days (60's) recommended it. They generally don't anymore due to the low success rate. That was one of the first things I tried as a student and it didn't work.

I find time and productivity management similar to dieting. It's not about which one is theoretically or objectively the best. It's about which method you personally can stick to. What works for one person will not for the next guy.

<comment><USER4> This is addressed in Cal's book. He acknowledges no plan will survive the day perfectly. Basically, you just re-prioritize your blocks throughout the day. The goal is not to break the day into hour long blocks as much as it is to always have a priority and to maintain focus on that priority. Things happen and no plan survives contact with reality. I have found this method to work well and fit with a modern knowledge worker's work patterns for the most part.

<comment><USER5> +1

"No plan survives contact with the enemy." \- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Some clarification for readers: this generally doesn't mean that a plan is scrapped entirely; it means that changes are normal and anticipated (i.e. NOT an automatic sign of failure) that as new information comes to light and circumstances shift, those executing a plan should be adaptable enough to make adjustments where prudent. In fact, decentralized command was developed in order to allow highly-functioning teams to actively exploit unforeseen advantages which develop as a battle/campaign unfolds.

Although these concepts were forged on the battlefield, they are 100% relevant to civilian 'battles' as well - in this case, time management.

<comment><USER6> Fwiw I prefer Mike Tyson's:

"Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth."

Or something like that. Life and work are random and sometimes chaotic. That's never going to change. Plans __and (personal) expectations__ should be recalibrated to align with reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I cannot understand is why we have both:

(a) a long history of research proving to us that principles like "High- Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)" are accurate and highly related to extracting the most economically valuable outputs from knowledge workers.

(b) open plan offices.

Maybe the tech industry is daunting for newcomers because we cram people into a sardine can, give them a ping pong paddle and a craft beer, and say "don't go home tonight until you've Disrupted Everything."

<comment><USER8> I've worked both in private offices and in open plans. And my experience is that private offices are good for those occasional long deep work sessions but overall the team in total is more productive and happier in open plan. Not everything is about your personal productivity and it's all too common to see separate team members deeply focused on non-aligned items which makes the joined work much much less than the sum of the parts.

<comment> B-Con I've worked in private offices, private cubes, and open office.

As much as I personally prefer isolated offices/cubes, the last 4 years in a mostly open office have definitely given me sympathy to the argument for them. I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments. There is something pragmatically useful about having people be able to jump in with their feedback or expertise.

The more isolated people are the more you have to go out of your way to ensure information dissemination and feedback channels are available and utilized. It certainly can work, but I haven't seen it work as well.

Open rooms promote teaching, spontaneous design discussions, etc, that just doesn't happen in the same way over e-mail, chat, stand-up meetings, etc.

There are arguments to go both ways. I used to hate open offices, now I'm sympathetic to them.

A key to making the open office tolerable is that it should not mean no isolation. There are ways to address their concerns. eg, headphones are essential. Obscuring line of site is very helpful. My current situation has me in an area of "open rooms", where rooms with ~11 desks are arraigned in an open office-esque fashion. It's pretty decent. Not super-open, but people can "share space" with the people relevant to them.

<comment><USER7> > I personally have noted a level of collaboration and information sharing > that just didn't happen in the more isolated environments

I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

In my experience, information sharing has plummeted after moving to an open- plan layout. People are forced to use noise-cancelling headphones to avoid impromptu exchanges, because the impromptu exchanges are value-destructive in the first place. And when someone gets co-opted into an impromptu discussion, they try to keep it superficial and share less substantive info, to get away from the unplanned distraction as fast as possible.

Not to mention the huge increase of totally not-work-related or irrelevant distractions, like loud sales calls, product discussions that don't affect anything for my team, discussions about weekend plans, etc.

It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

As I mentioned elsewhere, this horribly misguided idea that somehow constant, real-time audio communication == sincere collaboration or information sharing, this idea is really destructive and doesn't map very well to how engineers actually work.

<comment> B-Con > I think it's important that we don't overly focus on one isolated experience > point like yours, because empirically this is highly disputed.

I'm not saying my experience generalizes, I doubt every environment would see the same benefit. My point is that even though I started exclusively preferring one side, I can see value on the other side.

> It's a very shallow notion of information sharing, which could happen > asynchronously through code, documents, email, or with a scheduled video > call, or a short scheduled meeting, etc.

Far from shallow. Technically anything can be communicated in any environment, that's not very interesting. What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and what it's real life pros/cons are.

<comment><USER7> But an open-plan office layout assumes that all communication happens most effectively with only _one_ possible type of communication: real-time, constantly preemptible audio streams.

It's shallow to say that "information sharing" happens this way, since for many people it obviously impedes or completely prevents information sharing.

> "What's interesting is how pragmatically an environment actually works and > what it's real life pros/cons are."

I agree on this, which is why it only requires such a short analysis to see that open-plan offices fail so one-sidedly. They are empirically shown to be widely disliked, to lower morale, to lower producivity (both individually and overall), to lead to more superficial interaction and less deep communication, to lead to more defects in knowledge work outputs, to increase communicable disease transmission and negatively affect sick time and vacation time habits, all while entirely discounting the most pragmatic working styles of at least one huge group of people (introverts) and, when all is said and done, they don't even save money except in the shallowest, short-term sense, and often companies spend on opulent luxury features in order for the workers to appear essentially as decorative office furniture for when investors or upper management walk by.

It is more than fair to call this phenomenon shallow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really like his example at the end - step-by-step deep dive into a specific topic. 30 hours of learning, direct links to resources, come out the other end as informed and aware of the topic at hand.

I usually find it difficult to wade through the mountains of possible (often outdated) resources on a topic I'm unfamiliar with - At one point I was thinking it'd be useful to crowdsource those kind of step-by-step guides across a variety of verticals. Kind of like an online class, except pulling from the best up to date blog posts and specific resources from around the internet, instead of relying on a singular POV of the guy who made some videos and called it a course.

Anyone know of anything like that? How do you approach deep diving into unfamiliar spaces?

<comment><USER10> I'm building this right now actually. Superclass [1] is a place to submit online learning resources by topic, then upvote/comment on the most helpful ones.

The goal is eventually something just like you described, kind of a crowd- sourced curriculum builder.

This version is rough and buggy, but would love everyone's thoughts/feedback (email@example.com)

[https://superclass.co/](https://superclass.co/)

Edit: sign up for occasional email updates here: [http://eepurl.com/dwgBnP](http://eepurl.com/dwgBnP)

<comment><USER11> Hey, I just checked your project out and it's awesome. One thing id like to see is a way to filter submission types. Specifically it would be nice to filter out products likes apps and books.

<comment><USER10> That's a great idea, I definitely plan on doing this soon. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the big challenges that I've always had is creating this habits. I recently discovered an interesting thing:

* I use email everyday. It's important that it is clean and not full of shit. I _care_ about it.

* At my startup (Happy Scribe), we recently implemented a small feature where the tech team gets emailed/called/sms every 10m if there's any user with a problem, or for wired 5xx request (Stripe style [1]).

* With this simple conditioning, because no one wants to have a bloated inbox, we solved 95% of the issues our customers had in the past 3 months in just a week.

With this observation, we thought it had potential, and we abstracted the concept. It would be great to add to ourselves arbitrary recurrent tasks, where you're forced to do them. Much like if you were a computer doing CRON jobs.

So that's what we did. We built a super simple prototype at [https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/](https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/) where:

* You can add tasks with recurrence (CRON style)

* It has an Email interface that integrates with our actual workflow.

       * You get emailed once per task with a link to take action

       * If you don't take action, 3h later you start to get emailed/sms/called every 10m.

And so far I've sticked to daily jorunaling, and planning the day in the morning, for 2 months. The journaling also has been pretty interesting, as I'm using google forms, and I have a couple of scalar parameters (like ranking the day 1-5) that I can correlate to the most used words. If anyone is interested in trying it out feel free to create an account and send feedback :)

[1] [https://youtu.be/nnllRegL_NI?t=14m29s](https://youtu.be/nnllRegL_NI?t=14m29s)

<comment><USER13> BEWARE. This app is severely insecure. Nothing against the creators but they clearly don't have much familiarity with web security. I can list things that are obviously wrong with it that they haven't spotted, but even if they fix those, they still are not qualified to store sensitive data, and you should not put sensitive data into this app.

Now, most obviously: go to [https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/activities](https://headfocus.herokuapp.com/activities) and go ahead and view every activity that is active, by any user of the site. It appears you can also delete or edit them without authentication, though I didn't try.

Again, to the creators of the site: It's a cool idea, I have nothing against you, but you're clearly not qualified to work with other people's data, and I recommend that you stop at once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It makes an interesting reading but I have problems with a few things.

I don't think that "to be good at something", through practice, it's conceptually the same that understanding something new. The article doesn't make a clear difference.

About flow state: it seems that the reason flow state is difficult to achieve is (and I believe Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explain it in its book) because the task have to be in the proper level of difficulty.

Too easy and it's a boring task, too hard it's a frustrating one.

When we are leaning something new, it's very difficult to find a practice that it's just at the proper level. In fact, I would say that it's one of the most important things a mentor can do for his/her pupils: to find the perfect practice for the level of the trainee.

<comment><USER15> because it's a given that without the effort of practice you will not come to understand the unknown thing to you as you will not seek to understand it, effort must be put first then the understanding comes after one two three many repetitions, this article is just explaining a more finite path of reaching that knowledge by turning off outside distractions and deep concentration, by concentration i mean centering the attention to the subject in question. If you are a fighting a battle with a katana, the first time you hold it would probably be just like any stick in your hand, then with practice you would come to understand many subtleties that improve on perfecting it, like that you hold it with two smallest fingers on hand, how to put your torso, how to set your eyes, and other things i don't remember from the Book of Rings by Mysashi Miyamoto. When it comes to intellect, mathematics or so, you still just keep at it and it comes. But as someone here explained that frustrating helped him to understand the formula he tried to understand, it helped him focus, because of him now I understand a quote by i think Al-ghazali "there is no gaining knowledge without discomfort" , and the article helped also, meaning mindless efortless comfortable repetitive tasks just keep you at the same level. So pretty much this article is like a teacher, and the guy who wrote it is also like a teacher and it helps, but you must not instinctively just argue the opposites but rather try to understand it. Now how do human beings come to understanding of new things, meaning how do we gain knowledge, of course you will not find this in this article as this is beyond our limits of intellect, but you may seek to try to understand, for instance how is it that humans recognize the letter A, and i don't mean the shape, i mean the contrast between the brightness, and the limit of the edges where the day and night meet, black and white in this case, and this edge goes around the letter and the shape of it and we understand it as a letter A. All I know that knowledge comes from Allah, One source, He teaches humans the language, the writing, now as for how that happens I don't think we're capable of knowing as we don't even know how is it we learn to recognize symbols, I mean the workings of the mind, sure we can take a brain scan and learn about neurons and as the article mentions repetitive tasks become almost imprinted and easy to do, like driving, but we don't get better at driving we just drive the rest of our lives the way we drive, most of the times, because we don't focus on learning to drive, we just focus on driving to work and smoking a cigarette or eating a burger. Now driving a car would be like learning a mathematical formula and knowing to implement it without actually understanding what it does, while you still can pass the test and not understand the workings of it, so yes surely practicing singing and sword fighting is different as practicing something intellectual which you have to understand, but even with many intellectual things we just have to learn how to implement it and not actually what it does, we know a high level process and not the processes below it. .... so like what article was talking about is that there is no natural talent, and word naturae meaning in-born, or by-birth, aka genetic, while there are those that are born with say eye sight and others are blind, but regardless, if you're born with a slightly better working brain you still have to put the effort, that deep concentration to understand the new thing and if that new thing is say part of a bigger thing, learning a new formula you become better at math, learning a new stance you get better at holding a sword.... so it is the same thing, to be good at something and to learn a new thing, because you had to learn it first to become good at it, and possibly udnerstand it also, only now we take it for granted as we are at this level, that's why the article doesn't differentiate that, learning two different things is still learning and learning to understand two totally different concepts, in the end it's one same process in our mind, learning a new thing regardless if one is playing soccer and the other physics. So being good at something is actually knowing understanding and learning more and new things about it, only linguistically your mind might play a trick and make you believe this is somehow different. Now if you want to pursuit and seek knowledge of how humans acquire knowledge, how do they learn, and how do we learn how to walk,and how is it possible for us to retain information, hacker news will not teach you these things you must seek this elswhere, key word being seek, just like in the article is 'work' or they call it deep work, both the key word is action. You know that sensation when learning something new and it finally just comes in your head and you now understand it, it's nice isn't it, well learning it might be more important that knowing how it actually happened, although it wouldn't be bad to know how, only today you might do a google search 'how humans recognize symbols' or something, and you will see that we know as much about the subject as we know about how monkeys do the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having a baby will really flip this on its head. I used to "geek out" like my wife would say for a few hours on the weekend, sometimes an entire day, uninterrupted. This is all over now. I barely get 3 hours block at best, once or twice a week (rarely).

Thing is, there is hope, I can still get some really big things done. I realise now how much time was wasted in the past, clicking around the web, diverging. When you're on a deadline of productive time, focus goes up 300%.

Because you'll come to hate that feeling of being forced to stop as you were just getting into it.

<comment><USER17> > focus goes up 300%

I agree with everything you said, except perhaps this - every day is an early morning with young kids, and often I'm so tired that when I get the opportunity to work on side projects in the evenings, I just can't focus at all :(

<comment><USER16> It gets better as they get older.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm amazed at how much this person's philosophy for learning mirrors my own. Even down to the details, building habits, pushing yourself to the edge always, deep focused flow based work.

What I would add is you should feel a little bit of stress from the difficulty of the task. As an example, recently, I did research and in an unknown field both for the first time. I was a little tense, it forced me to focus every minute. If I didn't know what a formula or term meant in a paper I had to figure it out, because I had to be able to evaluate and possibly implement it.

I had to look at papers and evaluate them on their quality b/c I was using those to mold my own. I made many,many mistakes and failed hard many times. It was often very unpleasant (like running when you're fit but still not quite getting enough air on the last leg). But I kept pushing through. At the end, I learned more on this project than I had in a very long time.

Anyways, hope my experience can help someone else to push through and see the light on their project.

<comment><USER19> yeah, it's not really that special, I suspect a lot of people share this knowledge from innate sources. I always looked up derivations in Discrete Mathematics(again, innately as my primary-mode of understanding) and to this day... Anyways, not very special at all.. I bet you too love office hours to discuss the professor's dissertations and enjoy long distance running too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pomodoro helps me to stay focused when i'm trying to sustain concentration. I recently discovered this "group pomodoro" virtual study hall [0]. Somehow, committing to doing pomos in a virtual room with strangers committed to the same often gives me just that extra little bit of motivation/accountability I need to stick with the current task and not let myself get distracted.

Disclaimer: No affiliation with Complice nor Less Wrong.

[0] [https://complice.co/room/lesswrong](https://complice.co/room/lesswrong)

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree one hundred percent with this. I quit my job a while back to hack on a project and it's insane how much shit you can accomplish in a good week. I recommend it to anyone questioning their current employment situation. Hit me up (email is in my profile) if you want to explore this life style.

The crazy thing is that even if you fail, you'll be ten times the programmer as when you left.

<comment><USER22> I'd love to do something like this, but without any kind of income I'd probably be homeless in a few months

How do you bring in money while hacking on your passion?

<comment><USER23> I'd call it investment. If you invest time into a new skill that you can use to switch jobs or get promoted, it's very worth putting in the time even if it has no direct monetary value at first

<comment><USER21> I agree one hundred percent. There isn't really a failure mode to this. Worst case you lose some money, but like when you rejoin the workforce you'll be somewhere else. Right now I'm like 20x the programmer I was when I quit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is delusional. And to be honest I thought I need the same deep and in the zone kind of work/situation. Until I took this Course which is based on real science: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

You can get stuff done, learn very sophisticated topics on a highly distractive environment (though you'll probably need short periods of concentrations here and there).

The trick is not to force yourself to work on something, close doors and stop calling anyone. The tricks is simple boring repetition, zooming in and out of complexity of the subject, occasionally jumping through chapters.

You can do it in multiple ways. Say you are learning Crypto. You can be reading a book at home, doing an Online course at school, reading HN related crypto topics while on transportation, coding on some lang/crypto library while on Starbucks, etc... and achieve great levels of mastery.

And boring repetition/testing is the most important here. If you are interested on why this works, check the course.

<comment><USER25> For me, the whole point of college was learning how to learn. Everyone is forced to learn through traditional academic models and everyone tries their best to efficiently digest everything for exams. That said, I sucked at learning in an academic environment, but I learned what did not work for me.

<comment><USER24> You didn't suck at learning in an academic environment. You just realized that what your friends are doing is not learning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "The problem most of us, especially newcomers, encounter is that we don't > know what to focus on. Even when we find a topic to focus on, we seem to get > stuck in the vast pool of resources that are available to us."

Very true. But deep work does not address the din of "Am I learning the right thing? The right way?", as well as "If I ask a question on a forum am I going to get assaulted and insulted?"

Fear is the opposite of learning. Fear will also demotivate. While it's true that we all have access to extreme amounts of information, and that deep learning is a great hack, there is still fear. How can that be mitigated?

</comment><comment><USER26> Be very cautious with some of these approaches in a corporate environment. Shallow work can be much easier to measure than deep work. It's easy to be burned if you push the "monastic" approach too hard and neglect the shallow

<comment><USER27> Yeah a couple of things. They try to map their equation to productivity, but really it's just level of effort. In corp theyd prefer to see max results with min effort, so this intensity times time is not the thing you want to maximize. Alignment with the end goal is more important than intensity. And ultimately this article is about training. Corp is about execution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I created a formula that i havent used since i was 13 but worked amazingly well. (Talk about hard to believe stuff eh?)

The trick was to use sleepyness as a resource.(even more hard to believe!)

You simply focus as hard as you can on the thing you wanted to learn/study/memorize. You dont actually focus on the work but you focus in general. As if pointing the eyes at the self. Make large eyes, keep some muscle tense like your jaw. Breath heavily. The idea is to wear yourself out in 20-30 min. Then go to bed and sleep 20-30 min. And repeat!

I dont know how it works but information is proccesed during the powernap.

After doing some 20-30 cycles of this you are starting to mis out on actual sleep and some trance like state with laser like focus activates. It seems the body gets used to using up all the powernap energy as fast as possible.

The blob of memories becomes self referential by lack of other activities.

The partially parsed modules are organized further when you finnish of with 8 hours of proper sleep.

I think the formula skips the 30 min you normally need to get into something and it consumes just the good part of the 3-4 hours that one can normally focus during a day.

</comment><comment><USER29> this article really hit home for me. With all of the cbt/lynda/udemy/YouTube/blablabla content out there, I'm usually exhausted after the info gathering phase. Putting a time constraint on that is smart.

Like another commenter said, finding the perfect difficulty level to attack is really the hard part. I've finished info gathering just to get bored or frustrated by said info.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't understand where people in the security industry find the motivation to learn about exploits. It seems to me that those exploits are something highly transient, and not of fundamental value.

<comment><USER31> It's about training your brain to spot the type of systemic holes. You can understand the general concept of, say, a side-channel attack but still fail to see a new opportunity to use it in a domain you're highly familiar with if you don't pour over the details of an attack like Spectre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have been following learning to learn on Coursera. The course instructors lay a strong emphasis on deep work, but teach you how to learn. Prior to taking this course, I was getting into periods of deep work on and off but didn't learn anything substantial. What I mean by learn is that I couldn't transfer the learned skills easily.

Now, I spend a lot more time learning a topic, and follow the course methodology of chunking. 2 days in and I can already notice the differences. I woke up this morning realising there is a bug in my queue implementation.

</comment><comment><USER33> An underrated phenomenon to explore in productivity research: so called "supertaskers", or the ~2.5% of the population who are able to multitask without cognitive impairment: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/PBR.17.4.479](https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/PBR.17.4.479)

</comment><comment><USER34> There is any relationship between Pomodoro Technique[1] and Deep Work? Using a tracker to force you to concentrate on the specific task could help to archive the goal?

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

<comment><USER35> I have been using the Pomodoro Technique with good results for a while now. What it helps me with is to get started. I noticed that my reluctance to get started increases proportionally with the complexity/difficulty of the task. However knowing that all I have to do is just spend half an hour on TRYING to make progress makes a big difference. This concept of trying instead of the pressure of solving the problem outright made a big difference in my motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I recently reviewed the Deep Work book myself here: [https://anantja.in/deep- work-c4a1b7232482](https://anantja.in/deep-work-c4a1b7232482)

The post has a collection of some of my favorite observations and quotes.

Can't recommend the book enough!

</comment><comment><USER37> There's no references to the statement that we have a finite amount of willpower per day. This is unfortunate to read as it has been discussed before that the willpower is something that's fluctuating and can be triggered by different things.

</comment><comment><USER38> Josh Kaufman's book The First 20 Hours seems relevant here: [https://first20hours.com/](https://first20hours.com/)

(You May recognize Josh as the author of The Personal MBA, which is an excellent book.)

</comment><comment><USER39> " dedicate a few consecutive days (like weekends, or a Sunday, for example)" \- who's parenting the kids? Note that about 86% of adults end up having kids.

<comment><USER40> In the grand scheme of life, if you have 2-3 kids on a typical age distribution, the years in which at least one needs to be taken care of the majority of the time is 10-15 years. You'll likely have 2-4x as much time where you're both lucid and not responsible for childcare.

Incidentally, that ~decade will likely be the most precious of your life; don't miss it. [1]

1\. [https://avc.com/2010/06/being-present/](https://avc.com/2010/06/being- present/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The advocates of open offices are always non coding managers.

</comment><comment><USER42> What a post. Really very inspiring and very useful in a college student's life.

</comment><comment><USER43> Click bait.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm worried this is nothing more than intellectuals showing pretty severe selection bias.

Take the archetypes listed. There are non famous failures in each. Selecting the successes is a bit of a sleight. Worse, the logic of, "if it isn't working for you, you should try a different method. It is you that is incompatible, not the methods."

I mean, I want to think that Poirot's "little grey cells" are a thing. And I know I have solved problems by thinking about them. The same problems colleagues were busy trying to solve.

I also know my colleagues have probably done more busily solving things than I have thinking about solutions. More, I know they also think. It is not an either or.

So what is to be learned? Keep trying? Change strategies. But stay away from goto statements. There is not true way, but your way is probably wrong. Or at least, you are wrong for that way? :(

<comment><USER45> I think what they are trying to convey is that mindless practice simply reinforces current skills.

We've all been in that state of high performance where suddenly its 2am and you think "ok 5 more minutes" then its suddenly 4am.

I would liken a lot of what he is saying there to a kind of trance state, similar to self hypnosis, where there is only the work in front of you.

I get into this state most often when I sit down to produce any kind of art, I spit and spat around starting but then after a while settle into it and can spend hours working on something, its a whole different feeling to just regular doodling, its all encompassing.

<comment><USER44> I get that they want to convey that. But prove it. There have been some studies into this, I am sure. Show some of the replications. (Specifically, do not show the initial studies.)

Appeal to the times I've been focused for a time gets me to ignore all of the times I did the same and produced _nothing_. Not only produced nothing, but consumed nothing, as well. Both have happened. I do not keep a solid journal to say that one happens more than the other. One certainly made me happy, so I can remember it better. But that is the definition of selection bias.

<comment><USER46> > _Appeal to the times I 've been focused for a time gets me to ignore all of > the times I did the same and produced nothing._

Were you really focused then? Not having distractions but still staring blankly at a screen, is not the same as focusing.

Worst case, even if you try 100 things and none of those works, you know that these 100 things are not the solutions to the problem -- something that you didn't before. And you didn't just reject 100 random things, but 100 things that you legitimately could consider as solutions.

I've never not had at least partial results when I have been focused. I've had nothing too many times when I was distracted.

<comment><USER44> This is just the true Scotsman fallacy, though. I have been plenty focused before and not accomplished anything of note.

More, I've had plenty of brief diversions into a topic that produced more learning than some deliberate attempts I have made.

<comment><USER46> > _This is just the true Scotsman fallacy, though_

I think the "true Scotsman fallacy" is often used as a way to dismiss actual classification mistakes.

What one calls focused might not actually be focused -- humans are easy to deceive themselves.

Besides, I don't see what other possibility would there be. That being focused is not important? That people can just as well achieve the same (or even more) things when unfocused vs when focused? That we need special statistical studies to be able to tell that working focused on that work is better? None of these look plausible to me.

If what you're saying is that sometimes non-deliberate attempts can work too, that might be so, but by definition those are non-deliberate, happy accidents.

You can't program these. What you can program is actual work -- and that better be focused, than, "I'll fool around for weeks with other things until inspiration strikes".

<comment><USER44> So what are you arguing? My point is that "not deliberate, happy accidents," as you call them, likely number in similar magnitude as the result of deliberate focused work.

So, why then don't we encourage more practices that encourage happy accidents?

I accept that the one argument is more appealing to emotional logic. I am highly suspicious of arguments that speak to that form of plausibility.

<comment><USER46> > _So what are you arguing? My point is that "not deliberate, happy > accidents," as you call them, likely number in similar magnitude as the > result of deliberate focused work._

Then I'm arguing that you're an outlier in that.

And I'll add that for most people, even those happy accidents come when they're engaged in focused work -- not when they're having distractions all the time. Do you really get happy accidents while some colleague annoys you with questions every few minutes, or while checking your Twitter and Facebook and not doing anything specific?

<comment><USER44> Most of my happy accidents are while I'm biking. When playing with things. When jumping quickly through all the details with a co-worker.

(Twitter and Facebook? Yeah, not so much.)

Do, could I be an outlier? Certainly possible. But I don't think it is a safe thought. More likely, I am a near average person. Which is why I would love studies actually demonstrating this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A vision of Middle-earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/a-vision-of-middle-earth/ <comment><USER2> I was hoping for some images of the illustrations!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, the best I could find were at [http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/1147-tolkien- calendar-20...](http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/1147-tolkien- calendar-2015-art-mary-fairburn.php)

It seems that most of them have been lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me, growing up an avid fan of these books in the early 70's, it was the paintings of the brothers Hildebrand (that is how they signed their work) that perfectly captured what I felt was the atmosphere of the tale.</comment>


Ask HN: which NoSQL database engine is better to use with Common Lisp? - kung-fu-master

I want to find NoSQL database engine which has integration with Common Lisp. I want to use it on one server environment. The main point: easy of use. I like Redis approach with abstract data types (lists, sets, hashes) which is familiar to every developer. <comment><AUTHOR> Then use Redis (perhaps via cl-redis), if that's what you're comfortable with and it meets your use requirements. Most of the major NoSQL databases have CL bindings. Most of them are also easy to use. It really depends on what your specific data persistence needs are...? All of the db engines have different strengths and weaknesses.

There's cl-mongo (MongoDB), cl-tc (Tokyo Cabinet), de.setf.cassandra (Cassandra), chillax and clouchdb (CouchDB), etc. etc. [Some are more complete and performant than others, but you can find a usable CL binding for almost any NoSQL db. Use a search engine and/or ask on IRC or comp.lang.lisp for pointers.]

</comment><comment><USER2> That surely depends on your application's requirements?

NoSQL is a broad category containing many data persistence strategies and access characteristics; there is certainly no single tech that will fit every application best. I'm not any kind of cl pro, but the first step is always to work out what performance and persistence characteristics you _need_.</comment>


The Flex 9 – an 18-foot flexible RC plane made of 9 smaller planes - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWGqs3zqttA <comment><AUTHOR> You can see it in motion here.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrJgoQz5wSU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrJgoQz5wSU)

The major challenge for this aircraft seems to be control, accomplished by some clever programming of the flight controllers. None of the planes have a rudder, so yaw control is accomplished solely by differential throttle. They also have no ailerons - each plane uses its elevators, with its own response direction and magnitude, to control the overall aircraft's roll.</comment>


Show HN: I made a conference call soundboard for remote workers - <AUTHOR> https://conference-sounds.netlify.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's based on the DrumKit exercise from Wes Bos' excellent course JavaScript30. Be sure to check out the other exercises if you're looking for a fun way to improve your frontend skills: [https://javascript30.com/](https://javascript30.com/)</comment>


Maps feature request: Next gas station in traveling direction - <AUTHOR> HN readers on Google / Apple maps team, it would be very nice for your app to tell us what the next gas station if we kept going in our direction on the road. No new app needed for this (incremental improvement) but this would be great to have! <comment><USER2> While there are lots of apps to find nearby _gas_ stations, I wish there was more information available on which stations have diesel.

I literally have to street-view every gas station, or make lots of phone calls, in order to find a diesel pump, especially when travelling through small towns. Granted, larger (highway) stops are pretty good for having diesel on account of the trucks they service.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish there was a way to search along the current route for all queries.

<comment><USER4> This is my #1 biggest feature request for all map apps. I would also like to select a start and endpoint and search for anything along any of the possible routes. I need to go from X to Y but I'd like to stop for ice cream along the way back - what are the best routes that have ice cream shops near them, and which ice cream shops are they?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like Google Maps has this on Navigation Beta ([https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/165392?hl=en](https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/165392?hl=en))

</comment><comment><USER6> Already exists... and has for years.

[http://www.gasbuddy.com/GasBuddyiPhoneApp.aspx](http://www.gasbuddy.com/GasBuddyiPhoneApp.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER7> And a "pause" button, so it would stop yelling at you when you stop to get something to eat - gas - bathroom.

</comment><comment><USER8> Apple Maps does this. "Siri, find me a [gas station|in-n-out|RadioShack]."</comment>


Spades and Men - <AUTHOR> http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov6/01.html

<comment><USER2> Some background: This was written by a defected Soviet military intelligence officer Victor Suvorov: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Suvorov> .

Suvorov wrote a lot of books exploring WWII and demonstrating large amounts of evidence for his "Icebreaker" theory, claiming that Stalin intentionally led Hitler to power, planning to occupy Europe after Nazis and the Western countries were both weary and weakened. The theory has a lot of vocal opponents, but Suvorov never misses a chance to point out that most of them are (paid by) Soviet political/military figures, who are obviously biased and would never admit such a plan. It's a shame that these books are not all translated to English.

He also wrote two memoir books, (Tales of a) "Liberator", describing his service in the Soviet regular forces, and "Aquarium", covering the period after he got noticed by and accepted into the intelligence forces. The first one contains some rather fascinating stories of everyday Soviet life and dogma, well worth a read if you can find it. The second one is also good, even though it lacks those everyday stories.

Summa summarum, the book OP linked to is an interesting view into the old Soviet thinking. Might be an eye opener for those who believe the Soviets were anywhere near as humane as the Western countries.

<comment><USER3> "Operation Barbarossa Saved the World" is one of the strangest and most interesting articles I've read about WWII. I don't buy the whole theory, per se, but it's methodical in listing German and Russian armaments, soldiers, aircraft, and positioning. It draws heavily from Suvorov and argues that the the Nazi pre-emptive invasion of the Soviet Union saved all of Western Europe from Soviet conquest.

The basic premise is that Stalin was geared up for a very fast sweep through German territory and following through immediately into Western Europe, but all plans had been made with first strike in mind. It was all first strike aircraft, shock troops, paratroopers, and offensive battleplans without defense or contingency. By violating the Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact first, Germany overran the forward positions of the Soviets quickly, destroying their first strike capability, many aircrafts, logistical details, depots, fuel supplies, and other things which the Soviets weren't prepared for. The author argues that if Germany didn't do that, Russia might've conquered all of Europe, and with the combined might of a Soviet Europe, conquered the world.

Interesting idea. I'm not sure I buy it, but it was a fascinating article.

<comment><USER4> Oddly, the _conventional_ argument--that the Soviets destroyed the bulk of the German army and hence saved Europe from German domination--shares with this theory the odd consequence that liberal democracy in the West was saved from brutal, absolute dictatorship by another brutal, absolute dictatorship.

<comment><USER3> > Oddly, the conventional argument--that the Soviets destroyed the bulk of the > German army and hence saved Europe from German domination--shares with this > theory the odd consequence that liberal democracy in the West was saved from > brutal, absolute dictatorship by another brutal, absolute dictatorship.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, definitely look up "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," or at the very least go read a summary. Also fascinating stuff.

Basically, PWFPP's argument is that Nazi Germany would've been very weak and able to overthrow easily by resisting the Nazi conquest of Czechoslovakia - the Czech army was a decent fighting force, and with allied support could've dismantled Nazi Germany right there.

France and England do nothing there, but then declare war on Germany after Germany and the Soviet Union sign a peace treaty and jointly invade and divide Poland, _and then inexplicably France and England don't attack_. That was the stupidest possible way to declare war. You could've backed the Czechs, but declaring war without an invasion while giving Hitler nine months to plan and let him have first strike/blitzkrieg against France? Totally stupid.

The Western front of WWII was _gravely_ mismanaged until Winston Churchill took over in England. Like, ridiculously so. They had quite a few opportunities to smash Hitler before he became a problem. When they finally did declare war, they just kind of skirmished a little while letting him build and prepare more, and letting him determine the time and place of battle (they overran the totally ineffective Maginot Line in one spot, spread quickly, and conquered France in three days).

Anyway, I do buy that theory. Germany wasn't so strong when they invaded Czech, and the Czechs are strong, tough, proud people. Declare war there and WWII basically doesn't happen. As an added bonus, the Soviet Union couldn't have absorbed Poland, East Germany, and the Baltics as a result. Man oh man WWII was grossly mismanaged in the start of it...

<comment><USER4> Obviously, France and Britain could have just launched straight across the border into Germany then and there, but then wouldn't _they_ have to face the entire Soviet army? Having just taken out Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and half of Poland, the Soviets were as clear a threat as the Germans. I guess the question then becomes what would have happened if western Europe stopped Hitler at the soonest possible point of advantage and WWII was against the Soviets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Buy a fairly serious recreation of the Spetznas spade here: <http://www.coldsteel.com/spshovel.html> Be sure to bring it to your local startup party to impress your investors and mutilate your opponents.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of a scene in "All Quiet on the Western Front", where the young recruits are told by a veteran to sharpen their shovels' edges and use them instead of bayonets. The strike he preferred was, IIRC, between the neck and the shoulders.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is a live demo, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b60OZhrTB6o>

<comment><USER8> Article specifically says the Soviet spade was NOT folding.

<comment><USER9> That's not a folding shovel. It has a rotatable spade head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> spades were very effective when "unarmed" soldiers were used to pacify civil uprisings, for example in 87-89. It worked like Rome soldiers' short swords in the crowd of the battle.

</comment><comment><USER11> Holt sh!t I read it all. Do I get a cookie?

On a more serious note, seeing that the author is not exceptionally trustworthy (apparently), how much of it is real and how much isn't? Seems plausible to me at least, but I wouldn't know for what to look out.</comment>


RIP Jeff Goff (a.k.a. DrForr) - <AUTHOR> Our dear friend Jeff Goff has died in a scuba diving accident. He told me and many others about how he looked forward to learning more about scuba diving, getting more experienced in it, during the JoCo Cruise ( https://jococruise2020.sched.com/jeff_goff.1zitf4ff ). Apparantly, something went horribly wrong.
We have learned to know Jeff as a warm, loving man, with a great sense of humour, wonderful ideas, and always helpful. Last time I saw him when he took over from me at the Perl & Raku booth at FOSDEM in Brussels.
The Perl & Raku communities will miss him dearly, as he was one volunteer who has done a lot of things to make things happen, to make things better.
Please do not contact his mother or other family with requests about how the accident happened. Please wait for more information about what actually happened, it will be presented when we have it.
If you want to send condolences to the family, please do so to the following address: c/o Family Goff PO Box 118 St. Ignatius, MT 59865 USA <comment><USER2> I've known Jeff for many years, both as a friend, an employee, and a fellow presenter at conferences. I've hung out with him drinking beer in numerous countries around the world. If there is one thing that I think sums up Jeff it's his beautiful, and sometimes dark, sense of humor.

So while it grieves me, I'll make the joke that Jeff would make were he still with us: "I was just trying to figure out how to avoid the corona virus."

He was brilliant, quirky, and fun to be around. I can't even begin to describe my grief right now.</comment>


Millionaire Crypto Kid says Bitcoin is just getting started - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/27/millionaire-crypto-kid-says-bitcoin-is-just-getting-started.html <comment><USER2> Everyone involved in Bitcoin says it's just getting started - they are all depending on the continued supply of 'greater fools'</comment>


Ask HN: What is the rationale behind USB stick makers "cheating" customers? - <AUTHOR> I get it... the manufacturers assume 1,024 bytes per megabyte while most every computer in the world assumes 1,000 bytes per megabyte.
I don't mind that my brand new 64GB USB only has 62GB of usable space, at least as far as my OS sees it.
But most customers are not as computer savvy as me.
The end result is that most customers probably feel cheated when plugging in their brand new product, while the manufacturer "saves" 2.4% of extra memory they did not have to put into the usb stick.
Is the USB stick manufacturing industry really that cut throat? Does +/-2.4% in costs really make that big of a difference? And does that 2.4% savings affect customer retention at all?
Are there any manufacturers out there forgo the 2.4% cost savings and give the customer what they expect to see?
The backside packaging of the 64GB kingston USB I just purchased dedicates approximately 50% of the packaging real estate to explain that "Actual available capacity for data storage is less than as listed on the products..." (in about 10 different languages).
It all just seems to petty. <comment><USER2> It's all shits and giggles until you realize that on the day you decide to keep off premises backups of your production environment on the day off and you realize you short sided on that. It might not be the case with an enterprise-y budget, but when working with SMB's/start-ups, so small shops think photos, videos, music, even accountants, and healthcare. It's more of a gotcha that people need to plan and forecastfor, as you said people should be more computer savvy, but sometimes when you order tomatoes, you don't tomahtohs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two reasons:

1.) The "actual available capacity" is likely referring to how it needs to store information about the filesystem on the device, so you can't use it to store, say, a 64 GiB file on it.

2.) There's been confusion as to whether a kilobyte, megabyte, etc is a multiple of 1000 or 1024. Because of this the same file will show a different size depending on whether you're using Windows or Mac. kilo- as a prefix denotes multiplication by a thousand, but tradition has made it necessary to introduce the kibibyte, mebibyte, etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nobody cares. The OS use some part for the FAT table or whatever equivalent thing, the USB may came with some "free" program to have a fancy ico (why?!) and other stuff like that. So 64GB means more than 60GGB or something.

</comment><comment><USER5> I thought you were referring to those $15 1Tb sticks.

</comment><comment><USER6> 1000 bytes is a KiloByte

1024 bytes is a KibiByte</comment>


Fear of public speaking – online practice - <AUTHOR> Hello - public speaking is one of my biggest fears - I have been to a few toastmaster sessions but it's hard to find the time to go regularly.
So I was thinking, it would be cool to write a website where anyone can practice public speaking anytime via webcam. (I'm planning to build it rapidly so it will be ready by the weekend).
Video Chat technology has now reached the stage where it can work from inside your browser (so no software to install). This is how it could work:
- Choose how large you want the "table" to be (4, 6, 10 people) - Click on a seat (while you wait for the table to fill, you can say hello to the others)
- When your table is full, the event begins
- The first speaker is chosen randomly and moves to the center
- A random challenging question appears and the speaker has 30 seconds to answer while the others listen - The next speaker is then chosen and another random question appears
That will be it for version 1 but version 2 could include constructive feedback from the audience and perhaps a winner could be voted for (so it becomes a kind competition as well).
I know this wouldn't be quite the same as speaking in real life but do you think that people would learn some skills from such a system? Interested to hear your thoughts. <comment><USER2> very interested in this and if I may hazard a guess, I think techies who are mostly introverts will find it useful

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah that's good to hear. I posted this same message on Reddit and YCombinator and both posts did not get much attention.

If I can get 6 people interested, then that will give me the inspiration to get to work on it.

Anyway, you've given me enough motivation to register a domain so I'll do that now.</comment></comment>


The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-of-happiness-debunked-nick-brown <comment><USER2> From the article it felt like nobody had called BS because they didn't understand the math at all, not because they were afraid of their careers or something. It is extremely rare that a researcher tries to debunk an article because they realise they don't understand differential mathematics.

This is actually almost a bigger problem! Being scared of debunking others can be somewhat easily corrected if there's enough will, but if the bulk of psychology researchers don't understand enough mathematics to design unbiased studies and interpret data, the results are random at best.

<comment><USER3> But debunking aside, why would a paper allow such amazingly precise claims (5 significant digits, and a precise ratio on "happy thoughts"?!?!) without having independent mathematicians review it?

<comment><USER4> Because the social sciences are not sciences and many (not all) of its practitioners, especially academics, have science envy.

(I say that as someone who got an undergraduate degree in the humanities, so I don't look down on them).

The sad thing is that if psychology were considered a research discipline in the way physics was 500 years ago, it could still help people! Up through the era of Newton and the Royal Society physics didn't even a specialized name -- it was still observational ("butterfly-collecting"); theories were mostly simple and non-predictive. That didn't mean the people were dumb, they were simply busy building the foundations of an edifice without any blueprints.

A few years ago I read a bunch of Sanskrit & Arabic mathematics papers from about 500-1500 BCE. None of them contained a proof; they were essays and (in particular the Baghdad ones) collections of observations. But they did eventually help lead to a field of mathematics. There is no shame in that -- there is glory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The original article:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3126111/pdf/nihm...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3126111/pdf/nihms305179.pdf)

Browns debunking:

[http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/complex_dynamics_final_clea...](http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/complex_dynamics_final_clean.pdf)

There doesn't even seem to be much of any math in it. Rather they collect some data on the one hand, use this set of differential equations describing some random system on the other hand, and then combine the two and look at what the system does, yielding the magic number.

That seems as sensible as normalizing my "feelings" onto a scale and putting that into a Nest as the room temperature input.

(Edit: I see the PDFs are also referenced in the article. I'll keep them here for easy access and anyone else who has learned to ignore links on newspaper sites for they rarely lead to anywhere except that newspaper)

</comment><comment><USER6> "Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic number in human psychology."

This quote being so prominent in the support says a lot. Assuming she even meant Celsius, there's nothing special about the freezing point of water at an arbitrary location's pressure, and 0C isn't even that number because of measurement error.

</comment><comment><USER7> This speaks volumes to the entrenched interests in the so called academic- industrial complex. No insider, or very few, are willing to speak up against questionable claims and shoddy research. Making a mockery of academic rigor. As he said, you realistically have to have no skin in the game in order to be able call out questionable conclusions. To do so while having skin in the game quickly arrives at career suicide.

</comment><comment><USER3> > "Just as zero degrees celsius is a special number in thermodynamics," wrote > Fredrickson in Positivity, "the 3-to-1 positivity ratio may well be a magic > number in human psychology."

Statements like this are why science types look down so much on the softer studies. And perhaps why Daniel Kahneman got a Nobel in economics, despite being one of the best and most breakthrough psychologists in recent times. (His pop sci treatment of his and Tversky's seminal "Heuristics and Biases" came out a couple years ago, "Thinking Fast and Slow". If Heuristics and Biases is too long/dry/boring, read the pop sci version, as it's the best model (that I've heard of) for how human brains actually think.)

This also impacts public policy and health. If psychologists are so unscientific and not rigorous, they'll get the wrong results at best. And at worst, the field will just be manipulated for political reasons. Also, it gives people and excuse to not take psychology seriously. Hell, some people still refer to Freud reverently. (Sadly, the author of "Flow", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi seems to fall into this category and I'm sad to see he supported the nonsense in this article.)

There's great book called "How to Think Straight About Psychology" and I wish more psychologists would read it (it's a great general read, and the 9th edition is cheap). An interesting note on it is that a lot of the book is just basic critical thinking, rationality, basic science. The fact this needed to be pointed out specifically for psychology seems a bit unsettling. But perhaps that just reflects on people overall - if psychologists, who are supposed to be scientists, are so far off mark, how much worse the general public?

</comment><comment><USER8> I hope Nick Brown signs up for an economics class next.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps an army of Mr Browns (and Ms Browns) organised through a well designed Web site somewhat akin to the typical open source project bug-tracker?

There are plenty of un(der)employed skeptics around with spare time.

<comment><USER10> Do you mean crowd-sourcing an army of skeptics in the way of Mathematicians?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" There was Flow: The Psychology of Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who with Seligman is seen as the co-founder of the modern positive psychology movement;"_

I recollect that Csikszentmihalyi's book is based on introspection and quotations of experience rather than any attempt at statistical analysis or modelling by differential equations. I suspect many here will recognise the experience of 'flow state' and may accept it as a phenomenon worthy of investigation. The OA seems to me to describe a bad case of 'premature mathematicalisation'.

</comment><comment><USER11> Mathematical talent is so useful, and so few have it. I hope genetic interventions will help in this next century.

<comment><USER12> It's true that it's useful but its the same mathematical talent that was (ab|mis)used by Losada, according to the article. What was useful here was Brown's scepticism, borne by him being an amateur(having no bread to lose over it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's to those brave enough to whistle in the church of science! Even if, in this case, the science in question avoids the scientific method like the plague.</comment>


Hacker News Rankings - <AUTHOR> http://hnrankings.info/ <comment><AUTHOR> I once saw this some time back, but forgot the URL. I had a hard time finding it again 'cos Google keeps showing me articles on HN ranking algorithm. Probably 'cos the site is non-https?

Previous submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058277)</comment>


Live Stream from Van Halen's performance at Cafe Wha - <AUTHOR> http://www.vhnd.com/2012/01/05/live-stream-from-van-halens-performance-at-cae-wha-via-ustream/

<comment><AUTHOR> 15 more minutes to go.</comment>


Ask HN: If we had to start over, would computers be fundamentally different? - <AUTHOR> Here's a hypothetical to help frame my question:
Imagine all computer hardware, software, and anything that could be considered a "blueprint" for computer hardware/software/architecture disappeared overnight. The best computer and software engineers in the world come together to build the best computer they can from scratch with no precedent and no previously established standards.
Would the computer they made be fundamentally different from the computers we have today? If so, in what way? Would they be better?
Or to put it differently: Is the computer architecture we have today adhering to any decades-old precedent and/or concept and/or standard that, in hindsight, was mistaken or ill-advised? If so, how much potential/productivity might we losing? <comment><USER2> I'd like to hear more on this, have you raised the question on Reddit too?</comment>


Vue.js 2 - <AUTHOR> https://vuejs.org/ <comment><USER2> The benchmarks[1] make me intrigued, along with the perceived ease of use. It seems well maintained as well, but I think that Angular or React will get a bunch of these improvements, given the sheer amount of contributors they have, and that they are backed by large companies.

The blog post[1] in general is quite intriguing, recommend giving it a read.

[1] [https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-2-0-is-here- ef1f26acf4b...](https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-2-0-is-here-ef1f26acf4b8)

</comment><comment><USER3> Current discussion (12 hours ago, 51 comments): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614681](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12614681)</comment>


NYC to put new restrictions on bars, restaurants and entertainment venues - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/487726-nyc-to-put-new-restrictions-on-bars-and-restaurants-shutter-entertainment <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22589241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22589241)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it even possible for NZ developers to get a US work visa? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to make my first trip to San Fran (full story at http://startupbus.heroku.com/) which has reignited my dream of being able to work in the US.
I'm a developer currently founding my first startup. I don't have the PhD that appears to be required for the top US immigration visa, and unlike the Australians, New Zealand doesn't have any working holiday agreement with the US (hardly anyone does). I've done lots of searching, but never found a reasonable path to follow.
Has anyone through first or second hand experience known of any New Zealanders working in the US? <comment><USER2> Take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt as I'm not 100% sure on this and you should consult an immigration attorney for all the details.

The only background information I do have is from talking to an immigration attorney myself for when I tried to hire someone from NZ two years ago. Things may have changed since. That said, each case may also differ greatly.

As far as I'm aware, you can try to apply for a HB-1 VISA which will allow you to work in the US if a company sponsors you for that VISA and the requirement is you must have a degree that applies to the position in which you were hired for until you can apply for and receive your Green Card status (separately), which can take up to 5 years. I didn't hear anything about a PhD requirement. I believe a bachelors is sufficient but you might want to double check on that.

Your toughest challenge will be finding a job relating to your degree and a company willing to sponsor you for the whole nine yards.</comment>


73,000-Year-Old Hashtag Is Oldest Example of Abstract Art - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/73-000-year-old-hashtag-is-oldest-example-of-abstract-art/ <comment><USER2> Painful headline... "#" is only a "hashtag" on Twitter and other social media. It's also used to abbreviate "number", "pounds", a "sharp" note, part of hash- bang to indicate a runtime (#!), and in drawing, to shade an area lighter than the black graphite, ink, or charcoal be applied.

[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-is-the- name-o...](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-is-the-name-of-the- symbol)</comment>


A comprehensive (and occasionally good looking) GitHub profile summary  - <AUTHOR> http://nischaalc.github.io/committed/

<comment><AUTHOR> Feedback is much appreciated :) Thank you!</comment>


Ask YC: Any good online resources on the Linux kernel? - <AUTHOR>

I've recently made the transition from the Windows world to full-time Linux usage and am finding myself increasingly curious as to how it all works. Are there any good primers on Linux kernel design or historical accounts of how the OS came together? I'm primarily looking for things that are available in digital format, as at the moment I'm not able to acquire additional paper products. <comment><USER2> Kernel Newbies (<http://kernelnewbies.org/>) has a lot of information on kernel hacking. There's a list of recommended books on kernel internals:

<http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelBooks>

Including an online book on writing Linux device drivers:

<http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/>

And on the Linux virtual memory subsystem:

[http://www.phptr.com/content/images/0131453483/downloads/gor...](http://www.phptr.com/content/images/0131453483/downloads/gorman_book.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> _Worse is Better_ is a good discussion of the philosophy of Unix, which definitely plays into the development of Linux.

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> The best beginning to end book is probably Understanding the Linux Kernel, 3rd edition (you can buy it online at . It covers a lot of operating system concepts and how they are implemented in the kernel. At some point you'll want to look at the source code, and the best way to do this is using the Linux Cross Reference, found at <http://lxr.linux.no/> .

</comment><comment><USER5> For the OS, there's <http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/>

For the kernel, Wikipedia seems to have a good introduction and external links: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel>

<comment><AUTHOR> Browsed through the wiki article, but it is difficult to find (anywhere?) structured comparisons of OS design philosophies.

<comment><USER6> If you want a good discussion on OS design, get Andrew Tanenbaum's book "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation". He's the MINIX guy, and that book is pretty much the de facto standard text on operating systems. It's expensive, so see if you can find an international edition. I picked mine up for the equivalent of USD $10 in India.</comment></comment></comment>


When Algorithms Think You Want to Die - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/when-algorithms-think-you-want-to-die/ <comment><USER3> Interesting article, though I find some of the reached conclusions somewhat unexpected:

> _The issue is not just about making graphic content disappear. Platforms > need to better recognize when content is right for some and not for others, > when finding what you searched for is not the same as being invited to see > more, and when what's good for the individual may not be good for the public > as a whole._

> _And these algorithms are optimized to serve the individual wants of > individual users; it is much more difficult to optimize them for the > collective benefit._

This seems to suggest that the psychological effects of recommenders and "engagement maximizers" are not problematic per se - but today are simply not used with the right objectives in mind.

I find this view problematic, because "what's good for the public" is so vaguely defined, especially if you divorce it from "what's good for the individual". In the most extreme cases, this could even justify actively driving people into depression or self-harm if you determined that they would otherwise channel their pain into political protests.

If we're looking for a metric, how about keeping it at an individual level but trying to maximize the _long-term_ wellbeing?

<comment><USER4> As the popular quip on HN goes, _' The majority of mobile web tech fortunes have been built on avoiding the costs of consequences and regulation, while retaining all the profits.'_

> when what's good for the individual may not be good for the public as a > whole

Is as good a summary of what Facebook has done wrong as anything I've read.

The problem is not that Facebook and its ilk are inherently evil, but that they seem willfully ignorant. Ignorant that past a certain scale they have an obligation to the public: an obligation very different from the laissez-faire world The Facebook started in.

The internet majors seem to be _gradually_ awakening to this, but I'd argue that only Apple (with their stance on privacy) and Google (with their internal privacy counterparties) really grok the change. And to be fair, both have business models that can tolerate having principles.

When you've got a recommendation algorithm that could push someone to suicide or change an election outcome, you have a responsibility to optimize for more than corporate profit.

<comment><USER5> if thats the correct interpretation than it should have been written as:

"when what's good for the _business_ may not be good for the public _both as a whole and as a set of individuals_ "

<comment><USER4> I guess a clearer analogy is via environmental economics and externalities.

The byproduct of dominant market share in an industry where you influence people's thoughts is toxic responsibility.

And currently, some large companies are avoiding and externalizing the costs of that responsibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Instagram thinks you want to starve yourself to death when you search for #fasting and offers help... but has no problem with #bingeeating or #meth...

Maybe it's not only algorithms that have a problem: I think it's our very belief that Instagram should do something to curb certain ideas and push others that's wrong.

<comment><USER7> I think there is good and important reasons for unfettered social media and internet in general, but no one should knowingly serve graphic content to kids, specially when they're actively targeting them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Similarity and suitability are two radically different scores. But for various reasons - including, but not limited to, the ease of calculating a similarity score - we end up conflating the two in a lot of cases.

While calculating similarity scores is getting easier by the day across a lot of content formats (think image classifiers, sentiment scores, etc), the same is not true for suitability scores.

Technically, I'd think calculating suitability would need more than just matching patterns based on some selected criteria, which is how essentially all recommendation engines work today.

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds of the Person of Interest episode "Q&A" where a software company was specifically targeting people with mental illnesses and debt to satisfy their advertisers. Some serious effort needs to go into preventing algorithms from suggesting this stuff, lest we risk a few negligent developers threatening the lives of millions.

Then again, that course of action could be a slippery slope: what happens if the algorithms start censoring things that could potentially upset us? We could end up in bubbles, completely unprepared and unwilling to face the hardships that life presents.

I think the problem with personalized advertising is that it often isn't personal, since the algorithms base their assumptions on data gathered by observing people who haven't lived through the same experiences. I mean, yes, we can average things out and disregard outliers in the hopes of maximizing our finances, but by doing so we'd be neglecting the individual circumstances befallen a person.

I suppose this is the million dollar ethical dilemma that advertising companies are struggling with right? Too much moderation makes content stale, but a lack of it makes things dangerous.

<comment><USER10> I would think that the impact of this content is overrated. You aren't not prepared for the hardships of life just because you are in an algorithmic filter bubble. People don't kill themselves just because they see graphic content. This reminds me of the discussion in the early 2000s about first person shooter games. You don't turn into a school shooter because you played those.

There's a life outside the internet.

<comment><USER11> >People don't kill themselves just because they see graphic content

This was never the point. The article describes how people who have a predisposition to self-harm get an above-average amount of content related to that, which just compounds the negative feelings they may already have and thus possibly accelerate them actually making the step of harming themselves. Respectfully, but you seem very insensitive to the subject matter.

<comment><USER10> Is there research on the matter? Can displaying graphic content actually nudge somebody into committing suicide? While this may sound insensitive to the matter, I'd rather opt for having data than join into the generall HN hatred of algorithmic optimization of content.

<comment><USER12> Yes, there is ample research that shows suicide and self-harm feature elements of contagion and suggestibility. See eg "werther effect"

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

eg this example of media reporting guidelines that appear to have reduced deaths by suicide: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18082110](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18082110)

> In Austria, "Media Guidelines for Reporting on Suicides", have been issued > to the media since 1987 as a suicide-preventive experiment. Since then, the > aims of the experiment have been to reduce the numbers of suicides and > suicide attempts in the Viennese subway and to reduce the overall suicide > numbers. After the introduction of the media guidelines, the number of > subway suicides and suicide attempts dropped more than 80% within 6 months. > Since 1991, suicides plus suicide attempts - but not the number of suicides > alone - have slowly and significantly increased. The increase of passenger > numbers of the Viennese subway, which have nearly doubled, and the decrease > of the overall suicide numbers in Vienna (-40%) and Austria (-33%) since mid > 1987 increase the plausibility of the hypothesis, that the Austrian media > guidelines have had an impact on suicidal behavior.

<comment><USER10> Interesting, thank you! Is this effect specific to suicide or are other behaviours such as mass shootings also related to this?

<comment><USER13> It seems quite likely that the inevitable publicity of mass shootings encourages copycats. Occasionally the shooters even leave a note / manifesto explaining this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's Matt Hancock's letter to IT companies: [https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528](https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528)

He's current secratary of state for the department of health and social care. He's by far the most tech-orientated SoS we've had for years, doing a lot of work to push digital in health. He's rampantly pro-IT.

Sometimes when politicians make requests like this (make it harder to access images of self harm) people dismiss them as "think of the children". That would be a mistake here. He's not asking for all images to be removed; he is asking for the malgorithmic pushing of self harm content to vulnerable people to be fixed.

People sometimes complain about laws that appear out of the blue. His tweet above is the start of a long slow proces of building a law. It's a clear warning: get better at self-regulating, or we'll regulate you.

The lead for suicide prevention in the UK (Professor Louis Appleby) has this to say: [https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089528954158043136](https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089528954158043136)

"Self-harm images on Instagram just part of problem we need to address. In our national study, 1/4 under 20s who died by suicide had relevant internet use & most common was searching for info on methods"

and this: [https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089525522084884480](https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1089525522084884480)

"Important change in political/social attititude. Just a few years ago, internet seen as free space, no restrictions, complete lack of interest in #suicideprevention from big companies. Now mood is for regulation, social responsibility, safety."

Finally, here's my example of malogrithm ad placement. I've mentioned this example before, and I think it got fixed (so thank you if you fixed it!) but I search for suicide related terms for my work, and sometimes the ads are terrible.

[https://imgur.com/hhOYUJb](https://imgur.com/hhOYUJb)

<comment><USER14> > People sometimes complain about laws that appear out of the blue. His tweet > above is the start of a long slow proces of building a law. It's a clear > warning: get better at self-regulating, or we'll regulate you.

You're absolutely right! One reading is that it's a request. Please fix this problem, before we have to regulate you into fixing it.

Is it possible that there may be an alternative reading? A cynic might suggest that humoring such a plea is a great way to demonstrate that content problems like this can be solved! Then regulators can require those very useful tools be applied to whatever they please in a much more general way.

The odds of whatever Secretary Hancock gets to solve the very real, pressing problem he has so wisely pointed to being _completely inapplicable_ to literally anything else are virtually zero. I can think of a few places where safety and social responsibility means things like never disagreeing with The Party.

As technologists, it's on us to think through the consequences of our choices where we can. It's often not plausible - nobody thought TCP/IP would lead to malgorithmic ads! But tools designed to enforce arbitrarily defined social mores?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Social media seems to blur the lines between fantasy and reality for many individuals in a way that they don't seem able to deal with.

In times gone by we'd generally expect that children realise what happens in a movie or a videogame is fantastical.

By contrast, social media is treated as a set of interactions with real people, whether those be your friends or whoever else.

Even posting here on HN is an example. The platform guides me; my (and I assume your) viewpoint of what the development community thinks about things is swayed.

I don't think the platform creators are to blame as much as, well, the entire society we're in. We really need to push organic interactions with the communities we're in, the people around us, not online bubbles with incredible bias that aren't even necessarily made of real humans.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's the same exact thing where YouTube is promoting pedophilia. These systems are content agnostic and will give you what it thinks you will click on. If somehow people really really liked videos about the number 27, then if you click on one video it will start showing you more. It seems to me that it's a fundamental part of what these systems are. It's nigh impossible to say "do this but keep the bad stuff out" unless you have human moderation. I'm certainly not saying these companies aren't culpable. It just seems weird to talk about individual cases in abstraction like Instagram is going out of it's way to promote self harm.

<comment><USER17> > nigh impossible

Couldn't these same systems be trained on moderator censorship to learn what to weed out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Algorithms are brutally efficient and this is what happens when their creators don't have any incentive to think about the end result of their work beyond "user engagement" or "more clicks".

<comment><USER19> I think time and time again the creators do end up understanding these things, it's just by the time they do their ultimate owners don't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As much as I don't like the whole 'blame the algorithm' movement that's been going on I think it's pretty clear this is a large part of the issue for me.

I know that I've been trapped into YouTube's reccomendation trap before - <USER2> luck getting out without deleting all previous history etc. whilst I'm 'wise' enough to notice this fact and clear all YouTube history etc does this option even exist for Instagram and would kids/ those vulnerable think to do this?

</comment><comment><USER21> Information systems are a force multiplier on gaining knowledge. They don't magically stop working if what you're interested in is not what "society" thinks you should think.

<comment><USER22> Maybe they should.

<comment><USER23> \- Hey Siri, don't think about a pink elephant.

\- Okie, I won't be thinking about a pink elephant.

<comment><USER21> I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't not do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ethical AI is a serious business opportunity.

Machines are getting more and more intelligent. They find content for us, summarize things, generate speech and text.

Look at how complicated human sosiety is. Trying to directly program questionable and socially unacceptable behavior is next to impossible since border is way too thin.

There are loads of unwritten rules about minors, for example, that vary from culture to culture. About what is ok for what age.

So anyone who uses machine intelligence opens himself to liability. Filters are needed, and everyone needs same set of filters

</comment><comment><USER25> We wanted platforms that connect the world - now we've got them. We've given everyone a voice: the pedophiles, the self-harm fetishists, the terrorists. Now we're reaping what we'd sown.

<comment><USER3> I think that misses the step inbeteewn, where the platforms that connect the world started to prioritize "growth hacking" and keeping the user glued to the screen as long as possible above all else.

You do not need agressive autoplay, recommendations plastered everywhere and "we miss you" emails every few hours to organise the world's information.</comment></comment>


Bangka Island: The WW2 massacre and a 'truth too awful to speak' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-47796046 <comment><USER2> In my late teens, in the late 90s I attended university in the United Kingdom. In my first year, the Japanese Emperor visited the Queen. And was met by British WW2 soldiers on the Mall, who in photos in the papers, were respectable old men, wearing their regimental berets and ties, and stood with their backs to the royal procession, Japanese flags burning. They were protesting Japanese atrocity, still without apology.

My great uncles had fought against the Japanese during the war, and I grew up listening to stories of their time in Burma. In fact we had a number of war souvenirs at home, including samurai swords pulled from the bodies of soldiers who had committed suicide rather than surrender.

Airbrushed from history is the fact that the battles against the Japanese were won by soldiers from around the world: Kings African Rifles, Rhodesian African Rifles, Karen militia who fought the Japanese whilst living in trees.

I don't know why we don't tell these stories more often.

Here is a rarity, an Al Jazeera documentary about a Nigerian boy soldier, left for dead and nursed back to health by locals. It's an excellent documentary for anyone interested.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BREOezfAJSU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BREOezfAJSU)

</comment><comment><USER3> Horrifying, but atrocities like this were known to have happened in quite a lot of places and were pretty much condoned by the Japanese high command. I'm also not sure what the HN specific angle is?

<comment><USER4> Rape of Nanjing, invasion of Manchuria.

I believe the notion that states are driven to war by resources seeking, which can result simply from incompetent government, poor tax collection, or natural catastrophe. So global prosperity is the best deterrent to war.

The notion also guides which states you should assess are security or war threats -- the ones with that have economic capacity to meet their own growth, or the failed ones, with a large dissatisfied population easily roused to anger at a fabricated external scapegoat.

Genghis Khan neutralized his powerful competitors by making them rich. Perhaps, and this is possibly quite a reach, Japan's war mongering was driven quite a lot by its self-imposed trade isolation that depleted the state coffers, than by inherent expansionist rhetoric which was simply mobilized to motivate.

<comment><USER5> [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/955570...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9555708/We- mustnt-fall-for-The-Great-Illusion-again.html)

Economic prosperity and co-dependence is absolutely not a barrier to war. This line of thinking was an extremely popular explanation of why something like World War I couldn't happen.

And then it did,

<comment><USER6> Is it possible for something to be a barrier but for other factors to overcome the barrier? One shouldn't call it an absolutely unbreakable barrier, but there are less absolute barriers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Ms Silver now wants the Australian War Memorial (AWM), which already includes the story of the massacre, to tailor its tours to include this account of the alleged sexual assaults._

I wonder how much this matters in terms of shaping contemporary public perception of Japan especially in comparison with China?

<comment><USER8> I would hope that most folks are smart enough to realize that the people who perpetuated these atrocities are all (almost?) dead now. Modern Japanese folks had nothing to do with it, most of them weren't even born yet.

<comment><USER9> I doubt it. You have people in the US pushing the atrocities of slavery on to others even though that was several generations ago and who may not even had relatives in the US at the time due to the massive immigration surge of the late 1800s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The identity of sexual assault victims is still often kept secret, is this also an awful government cover up?

Why does everything have to be an outrage/conspiracy theory?

The media does still self censor, ask a cop for real stories compared to the media reports if you want a downer of a day. Avicii killed himself with a broken wine bottle, most media have not reported this for instance, this is a nice story compared to what no media will report.

In this case, I also see little purpose in telling this story.

It's not even clear to what extent it's true. Some obscure bullet through a shirt shows they were raped? This is a troubling 'fun' who-dunnit.

It's also a pointless exercise, since there's no reason to think the weren't raped, there's documentation it happened elsewhere. Besides which tens of millions were killed, the war was horrific, we already know this, what's the story here other than salacious tabloid material?

Sells books I guess.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my app - FourIt 1.01 (Promo Codes) - <AUTHOR>

Clean and fast Foursquare client with a focus on UX.
Feedback is much appreciated.
Promo codes: 7XLNWWFF9R3F 3Y6NMFXYMKAK 33TN4Y4E3YYY JHMK4LTXF7KE 4YY7EEFPX6T9 6JF9LEPR6J9X MLYR9AYJEEHT 4MYE437NJRL4 YRFXXK367KPW KTHRYXR4FWLW <comment><USER2> I've been playing around with it for a week now. Loving it. But on the places page where I can check in, I would love to get some feedback that my checkin succeeded. Maybe changing that button label from "checkin at ..." to "you're checked in at ..." would help.

</comment><comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/fourit/id392204436></comment>


Cortex: a multi-tenant, horizontally scalable Prometheus-as-a-Service - <AUTHOR> https://www.cncf.io/blog/2018/12/18/cortex-a-multi-tenant-horizontally-scalable-prometheus-as-a-service/ <comment><USER2> Looking at this architecture, I wonder if it would make sense to replace Prometheus itself with something simpler? Normally Prometheus pulls metrics, evaluates rules against them, stores them, and answers queries on them. It looks like in Cortex the latter three functions are handled by other services, and Prometheus is just pulling and forwarding metrics.

Also, the article says Cortex "completes" Prometheus. While it does fill many of the gaps, there is still a big one: First-class support for pushing metrics. This seems especially important if you want to offer Prometheus as SaaS. Your customers won't want to run their own Prometheus installs (that's what they pay you for, after all), and asking customers to open their firewalls so that your Prometheus can discover and scrape their infrastructure is probably a non-starter.

<comment><USER3> Prometheus is winning because push-based metrics are the wrong approach. Integration with service discovery to tell if your metrics are operating or not is, in my experience, the #2 or #3 preventer of outages.

<comment><USER4> I love Prometheus but in some cases push-based metrics have they advantages. E.g. I'm using push based system in my home automation, where apart from metrics (stats of temp and humidity) it also works as a state machine (door open, switch off) so that I can build logic on top of that by listening to changes. I think having realtime data helps in evaluating some server problems too. Obviously everything depends on use case and not every solution scales well.

Re having downtime indicator that's really a few lines of code, if no event received in the last X seconds then the host is down or busy enough to need attention. With websocket connection you can react to such downtime pretty much immediately instead of waiting for the next poll.

I know there are workarounds but I really wish Prometheus would support some push based system out of the box. It also helps with tracking simple scripts that only run occasionally etc. And yes, I know, they provide workarounds, the docs are really good.

It seems to me that having a realtime system with push based metrics is cheap enough that we should have it already. Imagine ideal monitoring system of the future. Does it poll and refresh data every so often or are you able to see everything as it's happening?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off topic, but Cortex is bad name.

There is already an amazingly popular tech usage of Cortex, you almost certainly have one either on your person or feet from you night now.

For SEO reasons alone it makes no sense to call your new service by a well known name belonging to someone else.

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the current state of the art for space-efficient long term Prometheus storage?

PromHouse looks very promising: [https://github.com/Percona- Lab/PromHouse](https://github.com/Percona-Lab/PromHouse)

<comment><USER7> Thanos ([https://github.com/improbable- eng/thanos](https://github.com/improbable-eng/thanos)) or Cortex are both great projects depending on your needs.

I would be wary of PromHouse since at a glance it seems to be storing each timestamp in a separate row, which will not be as space efficient as either of the above options.

Full disclosure, I am a maintainer of the Cortex project.</comment></comment>