If you're busy, you're doing something wrong (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/11/11/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers/ <comment><USER3> Seems like a bit of a tail wagging the dog situation. How do we know the more relaxed/organized schedule leads to success, and not that success leads to a more relaxed/organized schedule?

This reminds me of some other advice I remember reading: No level of hard work or organization will substitute for talent and opportunity, and nearly all success stories to the contrary are missing key facts. ie Myth: Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Reality: Michael Jordan was put onto the junior team with players his own age/size so he could get more play time, instead of being prematurely promoted to the highest level of play. Myth: Bill Gates is a college drop out who found success in a technical field purely based on personal merit. Reality: Gates' private high school gave him more access to computers than Harvard, and continuing at Harvard would have been a waste of time given his level of experience in the field.

The lesson is that you need to figure out what you're good at and where you have opportunity, and then work hard in those areas. Just working hard is a recipe for failure for most people.

<comment><USER4> > Myth: Bill Gates is a college drop out who found success in a technical > field purely based on personal merit. Reality: Gates' private high school > gave him more access to computers than Harvard, and continuing at Harvard > would have been a waste of time given his level of experience in the field.

In what sense is that a myth? He is a college dropout. Lots of people had access to computers at that time. True, not everyone, but extraordinarily few of the people that had access to computers at that time went on to found multibillion dollar companies. The idea that the fact that he had access to computers somehow debunks the story of his merit is absurd to me.

<comment><USER5> >Lots of people had access to computers at that time.

More or less unfettered access during middle school in the late 60s?: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/24/bill-gates-got-what-he- neede...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/24/bill-gates-got-what-he-needed-to- start-microsoft-in-high-school.html)

"Lots" isn't a scientific term but I still don't think it fits here. He was probably one of a few people at the time to have a few _years_ of in-depth experience before leaving high school.

I'd call it a "myth of omission". It's technically true but the missing details are very, very important to the whole picture. That doesn't mean he didn't work hard or have a knack for it though.

<comment><USER4> Certainly everyone else at his high school could have been doing what he was doing. I'm sure this wasn't the only high school like this, though the number may have been small.

<comment><USER6> I don't think people are arguing Gates didn't do anything to warrant his success, but they are saying that if he hadn't been afforded early opportunities significantly more advanced than perhaps 99% of other high schoolers in the US, or 99.999% of other high schoolers in the world (and I don't think that's an exaggeration - seriously, search for articles about how his HS computer system was networked in with U of Washington ... in the early 70s), that he wouldn't have been nearly as successful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article spoke directly to me! I'm in college right now completing a fairly difficult class, or so I was told.. A lot of my classmates tell me the class is so hard, but I think it's easy so far. I asked most of them how they study, and they all tell me the same thing: They skim through the textbook AFTER hearing the lecture, and cram hard before the test.

I do the opposite. As soon as I wake up in the morning I read the book for one hour, then I stop. I do this every day, weekends included. I also read the chapter before the lecture so it's still interesting, and any questions I have, I can ask the professor during the lecture. Once I finish the chapter assigned for the week, I split this session into 30 minutes of creating Anki flashcards, and 30 minutes studying those Anki flashcards. I score significantly higher than the rest of the class.

I just learned how to do this at the start of the semester thanks to commenters on HN, and it has changed my life. This also deals with my attention lowering after about the 1 hour mark of reading, but the concept is still the same. Before, I would procrastinate on reading, and spend most of my days playing video games. Now, I spend most of my day playing video games, but it's always a very relaxed, guilt free gaming session because I already know I read for an hour. I hope I'm not rambling here.

<comment><USER8> I did this for a few classes because my teachers had such a thick accent that I could barely understand them. I figured out that if I read the book beforehand, I basically knew what they were going to say and I could follow along much easier.

<comment><USER9> Same experience. I use to joke about it; "The more crappy lecturer you have, the more you perform." Understanding that you don't understand is powerful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It does indeed seem like the arrow of causality may be backwards here. Many people I know who are truly naturally talented are relaxed because their work does not subjectively feel difficult to them.

Yes, they push themselves hard and strive constantly to improve. But when the nature of your work matches the contours of your mind perfectly, it's not really work – it's purpose. In this zone you can feel yourself excelling and striving with a sort of effortless ease. You needn't force yourself to study - on some level you _want_ to sit down and practice. The feeling of being truly excellent is addicting and propels a virtuous cycle of growth and achievement. So yeah, of course you're relaxed. Winning feels great.

<comment><USER11> This doesn't seem to match what the article says. It's not saying that the elite players _feel_ relaxed, nor is it saying that they don't need to force themselves to study.

Rather, it's saying that they studied exactly as much as the lesser players, and that they did so with more discipline, both by spending more time on deliberate/hard practice, and by strictly scheduling their practice sessions.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure thatvthe same principal doesn't apply. For example, by the time I take advanced calculus in college, if I already know a huge chunk of the material and have strong mathematical maturity, I can spend more of my time on "the hard parts" without it stressing me as much as if they were harder for me.

<comment><USER11> That's true, but I'm not sure it's analogous. In sounds like in the study, by "hard parts" they meant the parts that were hard _for the students_. So it's relative. There were no universal "hard parts" that were actually easy for some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cal honestly looks at a study of 6 violinists and makes sweeping generalizations to outside the musical realm?

1\. Music is inherently a technical, movement exercise, especially violin with the bowing. If you are not relaxed, if you are not muscularly efficient, if you're tense from overwork, you're going to play less well. So, those who are busy may simply be less good due to that residual tension and stress....and this is much less relevant to coding or purely intellectual work, which simply requires typing and not muscular fluidity.

2\. Deliberate practice is extremely hard to measure by looking at someone's time journal...it's a modality of practice, a time journal is not going to gather that information. Just because the talented ones practiced in huge chunks of time, versus spaced out shorter chunks, how do we know they were drilling the hardest skills and analyzing their weaknesses?

3\. Looking at students who have promise (according to their professors) is vastly different than looking at actual professionals. Many pupils were not esteemed or had mixed reviews from their professors, and then went on to great things. I'm thinking Debussy and Valentina Lisistsa, both of who did not succeed initially but whose great talent was revealed later on.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think this might be somewhat tangential to what the article has to say, but I think there is a fair amount of mindset to the "busyness" thing.

Some people seem to think that "busyness is next to godliness", so they make sure never to let anyone see them idle. They don't so much focus on what they are doing, just that they are doing _something_.

I've always taken the opposite approach. I go out of my way to make it look like I'm never busy. "Make it look easy." It's just a different sort of personality quirk.

It's fun to come across people from the other camp. We find each other very peculiar... :)

<comment><USER15> You are the embodiment of one of my favorite words. Sprezzatura "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it" and also more briefly "studied carelessness".

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

<comment><USER16> > Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens > underneath.

\--Michael Caine

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not sure how how legit it is, but I saw there was a follow up study where researchers couldn't reproduce the deliberate practice finding to the degree the original researchers did: [https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190327](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190327)

<comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing this, with reproducibility being an important topic in science I think this is an excellent contribution.

I think we should all try a bit harder to disprove our conclusions as advocated by Karl Popper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good job the violinist works in the music industry not the software industry, or he might find after all his sessions of focused deliberate practice that now no-one wants to hear the violin anymore, and he must in future focus his efforts on the upcoming disciplines of both xylophone and clarinet.

<comment><USER20> And then he finds that the xylophone works in hall A and not hall B, and for the latter he has to get a slightly newer xylophone with more keys. Oh, and he has to learn a new scale invented by the xylophone's makers.

<comment><USER21> All the while taking instruction from someone who would struggle to knock out a few notes on a ukulele.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My fiancé is an elite opera singer. I'm a programmer/founder.

She has spent years and years perfecting the way she practices, sleeps a ton, and hustles hard for gigs. She's highly systematic as to how she memorizes her music, learns how to pronounce words in different languages, practices technique.

Less successful singers in our network can't be this efficient. They struggle at sight reading despite years of practice. They take hours to learn new music as opposed to minutes. My fiancé takes minutes to learn music and hours to perfect. They work their ass off practicing their Italian accents but are never quite perfect.

My fiancé works hard but all her work has compounded over the years because she has an incredible talent for memorization, languages, and likely perfect pitch.

I'm a good programmer, not great like John Carmack. I get stuff done but I have to work to the point of exhaustion at times. Personally I don't think this sort of elite relaxation is available to everyone and may be just specific to musicians.

</comment><comment><USER23> People are focusing on this term "busyness", but what I see resembles more "deliberateness".

It's like... Let's theorize that the underlying mechanism of excellence is "strength of focus", in the same way that weight lifting is "strength of muscles". The elite player's practice schedule then resembles HIT vs the average player's aerobics.

It's similar to how work/life balance isn't just about leaving the office, but about having something to _do_ that is for your life (instead of your work).

<comment><USER24> That reminds me of this, "seemingly non-sensical but rings true upon reflection" quote:

If you want something done, give it to the busiest person

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think as usual Cal raises important points. But this feels a bit like Malcom Gladwell's proposals were he goes out looking for data that aligns with his initial conjecture.

As a man of science, I am sure Cal appreciates the weakness of a study with self reported journals, collected at a single site, in a single problem domain (Violin players).

My point is that it's ok to propose this and clarify it is your opinion or your proposed approach to work. But I often see with a lot of life/work advice, that we somehow try to prop up opinions under this "evidence-based" umbrella when we know full well that the scientific strength of this evidence does not fully support our initial claim.

<comment> dawg- Keep in mind that this is just a blog post. I don't usually follow Cal Newport's blog but in general, academic blogs are meant to be more informal and just exploring different ideas without the rigor of a peer reviewed journal. If he put this stuff in a published book I would agree completely. Sadly it's par for the course for pop science writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think what these people are doing, focussed practice sessions for hours on end is really hard and requires exceptional willpower and concentration. These are not common qualities. Remember that the average attention span is 15 minutes. Nothing close to four hours. Of course, the most elite students or professionals can go on for much longer. Personally, i can't force myself to do this and end up being average or worse. despite dedicating most of my life to programming. such is life. i have tried methods to combat this and eliminating distractions is key, however most of the time it is impossible. i do know i can come up with some amazing work when i'm not distracted.

</comment><comment><USER27> Key factors that separated the elite players from the average:

\- one morning and one night period of very deliberate practice

\- an extra hour of sleep

\- leisure time was rated as more relaxing

<comment><USER28> But but but... When I do one morning and one night period of very deliberate practice I wind up getting one hour LESS sleep

:(

<comment><USER29> I think there's a certain degree of privilege that helps with success. Someone born into money that gives them more time to pursue interests is going to have certain advantages.

<comment><USER30> Both groups spent the same amount of time though, the difference was how they spent the time.

<comment><USER31> Maybe the difference is one of the groups is talented, so the gap in time amounts for the talent. Not the other way around as the article suggests.

The two groups are not comparable, because the talent is a non-negligible difference, so the experiment is flawed (few samples, different groups....)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Er... These guys are still practicing 50 hours per week. FIFTY. That's _a_lot_ of violin.

So assuming you take one day off per week, you still need to pack 8 hours and 20 minutes of practice per day. So, we stack these hours in 2 sessions of 4 hours and 10 minutes per day. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. So what does it look like? They work from 8am to 12.10am, then take a break until 2pm, then work from 2pm to 6.10pm and then be done with the day?

Sounds like a typical workday for a lot of people...

<comment><USER32> The 50 hours likely include other things than just practice, like analyzing songs, reading about music e.t.c.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'd think the key point here is focus. Short periods of very focused work is much better then a whole day of unfocused work. I guess that's true. And since you can't work hard and focused for eight hours, the elite players split it up in two time periods with some relaxation in between.

<comment><USER34> Short-term focus is why I fell in love with and still use Leo Babauta's GTD- related idea of MITs (Most Important Tasks). See links at bottom.

Each morning I set 3 tasks (sometimes 4 or 5 if I absolutely have to and they're small) that would make me feel good about the day if I finish. I write them in an otherwise empty text document, order them by importance, and start working on the first one.

These tasks can be large or small, sometimes even just "send this email" that will take 15 minutes to write, but is really important to send off. This also works great when working from home, because even if the environment is different, I can still feel productive if I at least finish those 3 things.

If I finish the 3 things early, I assess my energy level and either finish the day with organizing emails or reading up on stuff or other low-effort tasks, or I tackle one last MIT if I feel up for it. The point is to prioritize short-term focus of the 3 MITs instead of looking at the potentially endless list of todos I could keep picking from all through the day.

MIT: [https://zenhabits.net/purpose-your-day-most-important- task/](https://zenhabits.net/purpose-your-day-most-important-task/)

Zen to Done: [https://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple- pr...](https://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-productivity- system/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think anxiety is the key here. Everyone is capable of deliberate practice, but the degree to which one can sustain it for an extended, discrete session varies a lot by how the stress people feel from outside sources or from the process of mistake-making inherent in practice intrudes on and interrupts their focus. It could be that some subset of average players would be better if the stressors could be dealt with.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think Cal Newport, and the study discussed in the article, are right on.

By most measures I have had a very successful career developing software and doing research.

My deliberate practice has been learning new languages, solving very difficult problems both on my own, and for work, and for most of my career averaged about 30 hour part time work weeks (even when working for large companies like SAIC).

I work very hard for a few periods during the day. The exception to this was my last job before retiring this year where I really had three jobs in one, so I had very few breaks in my work day except for a couple of long walks.

Deliberate practice is the way to get good at things and achieve success.

</comment><comment><USER37> One possible issue with this article is that its focus is on students - <USER2> 'job' being to learn as opposed to producing or delivering something, which is the aim once their skills are learned.

Learning is often done best in small chunks e.g. when learning to rock climb it is usually best to climb no more than 6 hours a day, every other day. But when the skills are learned the climber may spend 15 hours a day, 3 days straight to climb their dream route and they may well sleep hanging from the side of their wall too.

I'd be interested to see how much time the elite players devoted to their work when on tour as professional musicians in later life.

</comment><comment><USER38> The title is a bit misleading. In my experience, people have very different ideas of what being "busy" means. Regardless, an interesting read to invoke an even more interesting ponder on one's own habits.

</comment><comment><USER31> Correlation does not imply causation: Are they talented because they are "relaxed"? or are they "relaxed" because they are talented?

The relax of the talented amounts for the gap in talent, not the other way arround. That's the definition of talent, they can achieve more with less effort.

There is a very big bias in the study, the reference team are average violin players. Obviously, the try to compensate with training the gap, to achieve the same result. On top of that, as other comments say, the sample is too small and narrow in time.

</comment><comment><USER39> Can't see any confounding variables here! /s

> Hard work is deliberate practice. It's not fun while you're doing it, but > you don't have to do too much of it in any one day (the elite players spent, > on average, 3.5 hours per day engaged in deliberate practice, broken into > two sessions)

Let's not pretend like 3.5 hours a day of practice is not a lot. I completely agree that this is what it takes to be good, but try doing anything for 3.5 hours a day and then say that you "didn't have to do too much of it".

</comment><comment><USER40> This feels familiar.

I went back to school at age 48 and it amazed me how younger people could do so much and so well. I'm amazed at how people can be so efficient. Those same people some just 10 years younger than me worked full-time jobs and went to a full schedule of classes.

I'm terrible at time management. At school I tried to start every assignment the minute it was assigned. Yet I was still working on it five minutes before it was due.

Eventually I figured I needed time to relax so I created a block of time only for school. I do better when it's evening or night so I blocked off 7pm to 9pm. That also allowed me to eat first I found eating later didn't work since my mind didn't work without food younger me could have plowed through the hunger (I'd often go days without eating as a 20-something).

From the article the two practice-time peaks make sense. Maybe I may do just as well in the early morning as I do in the evening. That would free up a large part of my day. At school I found things like laundry, grocery shopping, any small task was sacrificed to make up study time.

</comment><comment><USER41> What this article IMO lacks is the impetus for work?

I can imagine myself well organized and focused when I largely work according to my schedules and according to my aims. Some else putting more goals into my system might effectively reduce my drive to get stuff done.

In this special case the aim and reaarding system of an artost is likely to be quite different to Hacker Average.

</comment><comment><USER42> Go into each training session with a goal. To set a goal, think about what you need to train right now.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't believe it's related to being-busy. It's more about discipline in their life. Elite player's life is more organized, hence they seem less busy.

e.g I work out every day from 7 to 8 pm. I may be sounding less busy. But if the routine is the same, but I decide to go to the gym at random schedule, I will be more unorganized, will look busier, might be less productive, and yes I'm doing something wrong.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think many of us like being busy because we use it as an escape. If you are not busy then the mind chatter will start about that side project you have been ignoring or that career move you have been planning. There is a huge dopamine hit in staying busy in your work and ignore more important things.

Btw if you have not read his boom "deep work" then I would really recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER45> I know two person, in the similar business, one is doing project after project, and is high rich now, not big but in 5-10 million range, with life time of hard work. The other person, did only two big projects in similar life time. Both retired now, the other one has about 15-20 million. Waiting for the right opportunity paid off really well, along with hard work.

</comment><comment><USER46> I have filled my schedule with study time, working out, cleaning time, full sleep time, cooking time, etc. The result is that I am a super efficient, productive employee that gets absolutely nothing done outside of work, has not learned anything past canned employee skills, and has no life.

Looks like there is a huge benefit to leaving some waste time in the schedule.

</comment><comment><USER47> The article brings about some really good points. I find myself sitting down and studying without deliberate intent, which leads to countless wasted hours in my life. I think this is in part because you need to have some fundamentals down in order to actively learn, but mostly because it's just that much more work to actually do the core work.

</comment><comment><USER48> Excellent counterpoint resource on Tiger-styled learning [https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph- Specialized...](https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized- World/dp/0735214484)

</comment><comment><USER49> Hard work is essential to success - the question is it _your_ success? ie who is your hard work benefiting!

For example, working stupidly hard in a startup where you're stake/potential upside is either very limited or unlikely is working hard for _other_ people.

</comment><comment><USER50> _If you're chronically stressed and up late working, you're doing something wrong._

Or you have an infant.

</comment><comment><USER51> >but they're not dedicating these hours to the right type of work (spending almost 3 times less hours than the elites on crucial deliberate practice)

What are these "average players" doing in their 50 working hours, then?

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't get the title. How is 50 hours a week is not busy?

</comment><comment><USER53> Maybe the elite players were able to get into flow state easier/more often than the non-elite. This would explain the longer chunks of time.

</comment><comment><USER54> Unpopular counter opinion: If you are not busy, you (or the ones orchestrating you) are doing something wrong.

<comment><USER55> I'd say it depends on the type of work. A builder who is doing manual labour laying bricks? Sure. A designer following a creative brief to produce a new full page ad? I don't think you can force that type of work, so putting pressure on them to feel busy may actually have a detremental effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> So my question now is: what would be "deliberate practice" in the field of computer programming?

<comment><USER57> It's an old topic, see, e.g. 'Etudes for Programmers', Charles Wetherell. Code dojos, code katas, code retreats, I suppose I should put together a list.

<comment><USER58> But I highly doubt that the best programmers we can think of got good by doing code katas and code retreats. They seem more like things mediocre programmers do, or people only do to prepare for interviews. I could be wrong though - have any great programmers expressed their love of katas?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> "... which divided each 24-hour period into 50 minute chunks"

28.8 chunks. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER60> my only regret is not reading his books before loss of opportunities.Based author,

</comment><comment><USER61> TLDR; don't burn yourself out

<comment><USER62> It's more about not dispersing your focus and attention throughout the day, instead concentrate your efforts in deliberate and focused sessions.

Either of these approaches can result in burnout.</comment></comment>


Uber Turned a Promising Bikeshare Company into Literal Garbage - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dz94x/uber-acquisition-jump-bikeshare-destroyed-thousands-of-bikes <comment><USER2> the idea of a 'Promising Bikeshare Company' is a myth, such thing never existed. [https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share- oversup...](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply- in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/) Its all a big VC scam.</comment>


Cash: an intro - <AUTHOR> http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/forget-cygwin-cash-brings-best-linux-windows/ <comment><USER2> > re-implementing existing Linux utilities using the latest generation of > JavaScript, called EcmaScript 6.

> The Best Of Linux To Windows

No.

Edit:// Wouldnt this start a new node instance for every command i do? So if i pipe a few commands together i end up starting multiple Node instances? How should that be faster than native tools?

Also is it really written from Scratch? Why is it not compiled to JS?</comment>


How software is designed at Wolfram - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/01/ten_thousand_hours_of_design_r.html#more

<comment><USER2> Duplicate of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97521>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, sorry.</comment></comment>


The Emergence – Akasha beta – Ethereum-powered social network - <AUTHOR> https://blog.akasha.world/2018/02/10/akasha-beta-emergence/ <comment><USER2> Too much marketing speak. When your copy uses a phrase like "imagine Ethereum as a synergistic organism", everyone that isn't a venture capitalist or isn't drinking Valley Kool-Aid rolls their eyes.

<comment><USER3> So really it's just well targeted then? After all, you just described a significant chunk of people who seem keen to throw their money into a variety of open flames. Maybe this is the poorly-worded "Nigerian Prince" email of pitches.</comment></comment>


Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-manages-to-make-smartphones-without-american-chips-11575196201?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> The be honest, American companies never had a monopoly in any of the parts needed to build a commercially viable phone. Unlike say in the PC world, where the dominant OS/Software stack has an almost impenetrable reliance on x86, phones were mostly ARM based (in an attempt to prevent Intel's chokehold). And communication standards require FRAND patent grants allowing anyone to build for the spec.

That said, even as recently as a decade back, China was routinely written off as a cheap imitation of US/Japan/Korea in the electronics industry, Huawei & friends have proven otherwise. Their flagships are on par with the Apples and Samsungs, and even lead them on velocity of feature releases, especially hardware

<comment><USER3> > Unlike say in the PC world, where the dominant OS/Software stack has an > almost impenetrable reliance on x86

Huawei also makes its own x86 chips, GPUs, and even FPGAs (e.g. TPU-like systems), and while Huawei Cloud still runs other vendors hardware, it's becoming more and more "Huawei-hardware only" each quarter.

I think the US has not realized yet how good it had it, and how much it has screwed things up. The EU, Russia, India, Japan, and China are all super- dependent on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA's products, and therefore, the US, on many critical sectors. By showing China/Huawei [0] how much this dependence can hurt, the US has forced China to become technologically independent, and if China succeeds, then all other super powers will have a real and viable alternative to US products.

Right now, e.g., the EU is on the "let's ban all Huawei products, China spies on us!" boat, but the wind can change very quickly to "let's ball all US products, the NSA spies on us!" any time - it doesn't matter that the actual truth is that, no matter who you buy from, they are going to spy on you.

I personally think that it's good for another global player to enter the sector. I don't think it will disrupt it in any major way, but it is already affecting prices, e.g., in the cloud sector, where we are finding out how much are customers willing to pay to "avoid" a Chinese cloud, and it isn't that much.

[0] In case you did not know, Huawei _is_ China.

<comment><USER4> > 'Right now, e.g., the EU is on the "let's ban all Huawei products, China > spies on us!" boat'

Really? Citation please.

Mike Pompeo's been going around Europe threatening dire consequences for any country which uses Huawei tech ("We won't work with allies that use Huawei equipment in their 5G networks", etc.), but I haven't heard of any calls for a ban at EU level...

Can you show me some proof that the EU wants to ban Huawei products?

<comment><USER3> There aren't any EU level bans - I don't think the EU government has authority for that.

What currently exist is a lot of controversy around using Huawei in Europe:

* Huawei products banned from being used by all of Spain's Department of Defense projects and personnel: [https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/e4ntuk/huawei_smartp...](https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/e4ntuk/huawei_smartphones_are_banned_by_spains_ministry/)

* Angela Merkel Faces Part revolt over allowing Huawei to build 5G: [https://www.dw.com/en/angela-merkel-faces-party-revolt-over-...](https://www.dw.com/en/angela-merkel-faces-party-revolt-over-huawei-in-german-5g-rollout/a-51372875)

* Germany Intelligence Services argues that Huawei cannot be trusted: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-29/german-sp...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-29/german-spy-chief-says-huawei-can-t-be-fully-trusted-in-5g)

and many more. This is enough to nudge public opinion in one particular direction (Huawei == evil), and politicians sometimes do what voters want over here.

This is obviously a quite brittle status quo, and one or two impactful articles here and there about how the US / NSA "collect data" on EU citizens might be enough to turn the wind the other way.

The real news behind all of these articles is that China is now perfectly able to compete with the US technology companies at this particular level. That's interesting because for many countries, depending on the US for most of their electronics is a big risk worth minimizing, so I expect a shift from a US dominated industry to a balance between US and Chinese technologies being integrated in these countries. Nobody wants to exclusively depend on China either.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. There is no EU call to ban Huawei infrastructure, so I'm mystified as to why you claimed 'the EU is on the "let's ban all Huawei products, China spies on us!" boat'.

The links you posted show that government departments in a couple of EU countries refuse to use Huawei, nothing more...

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I follow you. My claim means that there is the opinion in the EU that Huawei should be banned. For some reason you understand that as "The EU banned Huawei". That's not what I claimed, and I have no idea how you get from one to the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I checked out a Huawei store - they're the same asthetic as an apple store with a ton more useful tech then an ipod, macbook and imac.

The phones were impressive and very affordable. We're talking $200-300 for 6gb ram devices, 128gb storage, etc.

Google, Apple are right to be worried.

<comment><USER6> Google and Apple are just milking it. Smart phones were introduced a decade ago. Flagship phones costed then around $500, now we got to the point that they costing $1,000+ like if mass producing wouldn't cut the cost down. On top of that making a battery be non removable and constantly over-volting the batteries to reduce their life. Ultimately phones become useless after 2 years, unless you replace batteries yourself or pay someone to do it for you.

<comment><USER7> >Smart phones were introduced a decade ago. Flagship phones costed then around $500, now we got to the point that they costing $1,000+ like if mass producing wouldn't cut the cost down.

If making smartphones is really as easy as you make it out to be, and smartphone prices are rising, then why isn't that being captured in the global profit share? Considering that Androids are vastly more popular than iOS phones, there would be no reason why Apple's getting 62% of global profits.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/780367/global-mobile- han...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/780367/global-mobile-handset- profit-share-by-vendor/)

<comment><USER6> Can't view your link.

<comment><USER7> seems like you need a search engine referrer to unlock the paywall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really impressive for Huawei. I do not mean to say that the trade war between China and the US is the same as the Cold War from before, but I have a fun tidbit to share.

One of the more interesting theories I heard for why the US won the Cold War is because Russia struggled to develop IC technology. The Russians were masters of espionage, and I would even give them the edge in mechanical engineering, but the United States' ability to master electrical engineering proved more important. They just couldn't build computers like the US, and computers proved to be _wildly_ important for technological breakthroughs.

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

Now that Huawei has figured out how to do it without us, it's really become autonomous. This is great news for China, and will help them enormously in the ongoing trade war. And obviously it's not so great for the US.

<comment><USER9> >And obviously it's not so great for the US.

There's a lot of confusion, I think, about how you "win" a trade war; as far as I can tell, autarchy is pretty bad for all involved; trade wars seem like a thing where everyone loses and the 'win' comes from winding down the trade war and trading again.

<comment><USER10> It's seems uncommon for people to consider if our trade with China before this "war" was fair.

It seems like most people just parrot: "War. Bad."

I'm not saying this administration is doing everything right on trade, or that it's even doing anything right on trade.

It just seems like people think that what was before "the trade war" was the default, and that the default was fair.

<comment><USER11> You're right. It wasn't fair.

It was heavily weighted in favor of the US which is why the US became the richest country in the world and benefited the most from international trade.

Classic example are the complaints about Apple products being manufactured in China. However, as study after study has shown, a $600 iphone probably leads to economic activity of about $40-$50 in China at most, with a further $50 or so in the rest of the world, and the remaining $500 being generated in the US.

The US had a massive problem which is that this tremendous wealth that was generated was thanks to a variety of reasons concentrated amongst a few people right at the top, and unlike in decades in the past the benefits stopped trickling down to the rest of the country. But the real problem was an internal distribution one, which the current administration only served to exacerbate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Even if those chips are completely devoid of American-origin IP cores, they almost certainly were designed with American-origin EDA software.

I am not sure if such chips would be covered by existing export bans or if EDA software licensing agreements prohibit export of produced design files to countries subject to US export bans.

If neither is the case, I expect either or both to change soon.

<comment><USER13> Excellent point. I would say it would be more impressive if China were to build its own EDA tools.

At this point, I think the US should start protecting its EDA companies from Chinese investors.

<comment><USER14> I really doubt that the EDA software is really that much of an investment these days. It's the lithography tech that's the real crown jewel, and it is being protected.

<comment><USER13> > I really doubt that the EDA software is really that much of an investment > these days

If EDA tools were so simple, why don't the big IC design companies -- e.g., Intel, Apple, Samsung -- just build their own in-house tools instead of paying millions in license fees?

> It's the lithography tech that's the real crown jewel, and it is being > protected.

Sure, but lithography tech is useless unless you have access to solid tooling for design verification. In IC design, no one can afford to debug issues after the chip is fabricated. EDA toolchains include complex simulation software that, when combined with fab-provided models, allow you to simulate circuit behavior down to the lowest level.

<comment><USER14> Millions is not that much. TCO of six engineers for a year gets you into millions. If it's a solved problem, it's probably worth just buying off the street.

<comment><USER13> I hope someone can correct me in this thread, but I recall hearing that a single-seat license can cost ~$50k per year. I would imagine that any company with a large number of ASIC engineers would love to reduce that overhead.

Regardless, none of what you said disagrees with the point that EDA tools are complex and should therefore be protected from Chinese influence.

<comment><USER14> You always get screwed in niche B2B on a single seat license. There's no way the chip manufacturers are actually spending anywhere near that much.

And they really aren't that complex. China has more than enough capability to reproduce them.

I guess I'm not sure how to prove a negative here. What do you think is so special about EDA software that isn't fairly easy replicable? Other than the fab design rules, which if I'm making a litho vs EDA distinction in the first place aren't really a part of EDA.

<comment><USER13> And I'm not sure why you still think that EDA tools are so simple. I guess we're at an impasse, then.

Going back to my first comment: I would be extremely impressed if China is able to build a home-grown, state-of-the-art EDA toolchain. I also still think that the US should work to protect its existing advantage in this area.

<comment><USER11> The poster isn't saying they are simple. The poster is claiming they are complex enough that they are non trivial to create and maintain, and not expensive enough that it's worth it for these companies to go through the effort to create an alternative. (50k per seat, which almost certainly is lower on an enterprise license, is about 20-25% of the cost of an employee, and probably lower when you consider the non salary costs of an employee such as benefits, payroll taxes, office seat rent, food, etc). The equation obviously changes when the lack of availability of the tool is an existential threat and therefore worth billions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's worth noting that Chinese smartphones without any US components have been available for a _long_ time, based around SoCs from Mediatek and Spreadtrum/RDA.

</comment><comment><USER16> I predicted this and it will continue: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303157](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303157)

I think we are in this awkward time where China is shifting from playing catch up to the US to taking more of a lead in some areas that are meaningful. This type of transition is awkward for all involved, but it was going to happen and these sanctions moved it forward a bit.

I am still surprised that the sanctions didn't have that much of a financial effect on China or at least us in the west didn't notice it very much.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Once bitten, twice shy."

"Never turn away a paying customer."

Once those markets go, they never come back. And you're on the slippery slope to irrelevance.

<comment><USER18> That's a two way street, there are plenty of American companies switching to Philippine or Vietnamese manufacturers that won't ever go back to sourcing from China

<comment><USER11> Yup. So the US has created a new competitor and didn't gain anything in the bargain other than paying for the transition.

It would be one thing if this was done after, say, the TPP that ensured that Phillipines and Vietnam created an IP a regime that protected US company interests before they started manufacturing there, but that's not what happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [http://archive.is/utNwf](http://archive.is/utNwf)

</comment><comment><USER20> Don't worry. Huawei barely gets to manage the fund itself from Chinese banks. And the moment that US DOJ launches secondary boycott on Huawei and its financial affiliates & financiers, believe me -- it won't last months.

The most important thing is the financial power. The current wrestle between China and the US (entailing Huawei and Chinese trade deals) is all about the US wanting to forcefully open up Chinese financial markets -- which China will never do.

It would be exciting to see how the new trade deals would unfold.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd be curious to know if Huawei phones and network devices are currently being used for surveillance in Hong Kong.

<comment><USER3> Probably. Snowden showed that every phone in the USA is used for surveillance by the NSA. I don't have any reason to expect China to be any different.

<comment><USER22> Exactly. Yet I found NSA surveillance INFINITELY less dangerous than China's.

<comment><USER23> A large part of that is the oversight panel that is in charge of looking at the program has publicly acknowledged that the programs are not finding anything. [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nsa-program-stopped-no- te...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nsa-program-stopped-no-terror- attacks-says-white-house-panel-flna2D11783588)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Huawei had to license synopsys/cadence/mentor to design their chip(which is using ARM core), if US really wants to play hardball Huawei's IC design can be killed nearly instantly once those CAD design software is forbidden. In the meantime I heard Huawei etc bought a few years' license right before the trade war, they're actually well prepared.

Another way is to restrict chip manufacturing, Taiwan pretty much owns the best technology for that(TSMC), Intel/Samsung has some, Huawei has none.

And you have Android to some degree, without Android there is no Smartphone dominance from China as of now. Open source in general helped China to catch up and overtake the west extremely efficiently, you don't need any business spies anymore, just download/modify/profit.

At the moment USA still has the possibility to contain IC ecosystem if it really wants to do that. In 10~20 years it will be a different story though, by then USA might not have much leverage if anything at all left.

<comment><USER25> I am not sure about large companies, essentially every small to mid-sized PCB design/manf company in China uses pirated EDA software, primarily Altium Designer, OrCAD and Mentor Graphics. In fact, piracy of sofware is encouraged by the CCP - I won't name the websites, but in order to get a download link you need a WeChat or Baidu account which is ultimately linked to Citizen ID or Passport through phone number (OTP). Yes, I setup a Windows VM to get access to these sites where you need to install a Baidu download manager in your operating system.

There is also specific Chinese forum lingo that is used to thank people who post pirated software ("1st floor", "2nd floor", etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think the US is making a big mistake by falling back to isolationism and confrontation in a sort of last-ditch attempt to reign Chinese progress in.

The prevailing quite chauvinistic attitude among many people outside of Asia is that because of their lack of political liberalism China or other Asian countries will always be stuck with copying or being the manufacturing bench. I think this will turn out to be a grave miscalculation and that the trade wars will only accelerate the decoupling and strengthen the Chinese regime's narrative to develop at all costs.

I think many people in the West really are not aware how deeply the resentment goes in Chinese society to not be bullied around ever again, the mentality really is 'better-broken jade than intact tile', and it's hard to compete with that.

<comment><USER27> I agree, many have underestimated China resolve to be number one. Many also don't understand China's history because they've gone through much more suffering than a trade war in the last 50 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone has an outline link or something?

<comment><USER29> Try [http://archive.is/9jQd1](http://archive.is/9jQd1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm unable to read the full article (paywall), but going on only the title, this is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER31> Should add inferior in the sentence

<comment><USER32> I have a Huawei P30 Lite which I use for work purposes. Build quality is better than Samsung. I prefer using it over my iPhone. It is nowhere near inferior. Did I mention that it is supposed to be a cheap phone but its performance is impressive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Articles whose content contradict their headlines are rather quite frustrating. The title is "Huawei Manages to Make Smartphones Without American Chips"

But the article itself states: "While Huawei hasn't stopped using American chips entirely, it has reduced its reliance on U.S. suppliers or eliminated U.S. chips in phones launched since May"

And it's graph shows significant usage of US chips.

I'm sure Huawei is trying it's best to reduce its dependence on US chips, and thanks to access to chips from the EU, Taiwan, JP, it likely will succeed. But I can't help but be annoyed at the thought that Taiwan and Japan are relying on the US to protect them from the same CCP they're short sightedly profiting from.

<comment><USER34> Your comment has some validity, but the title doesn't seem false; the key point is that Huawei's new flagship product, the Mate 30...

> _contained no U.S. parts, according to an analysis by UBS and Fomalhaut > Techno Solution_

<comment><USER33> I missed the statement on the Mate 30. I guess the chart combined with other parts of the article threw me off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The US basically started a slow-motion kidnapping of Meng Wanzhou in December 2018. The ban on US shipments to Huawei might have sped the process up, but I imagine they already saw this as personal.

Best of luck to them I say.

</comment><comment><USER36> How likely it is that Huawei got access to the technology behind Samsung's Exynos[1] to speed up the development of their own ARM chips? At least that's what happened with Samsung's foldable screen technology[2].

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

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south- kor...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-29/south-korea- charges-11-with-selling-samsung-technology-to-china)

<comment><USER36> Where I am coming from[1]:

> CNEX, a microchip company backed by Microsoft and Dell, has filed new > allegations in a Texas lawsuit accusing Chinese tech giant Huawei and one of > its executives of stealing trade secrets.

> It's the latest filing in a suit set to go to trial June 3. CNEX claims that > Huawei spent years trying to steal its data storage secrets.

And also[2]:

> "We expect other nations will want to become self-sufficient in critical > technologies. That's what we'd expect of a responsible government," he said. > "The issue isn't that China has set out to do that. It's that part of their > industrial policy, part of the way they try to accomplish that, is state- > sponsored theft or creating an environment that rewards or turns a blind eye > to it."

> He pointed to evidence of such behavior allegedly linked to the "Made in > China 2025" strategic plan. The Chinese government introduced the plan in > 2015, designed to reduce dependence on imported technology in 10 priority > industries including robotics, IT, aviation, railway transport and > biopharma. "We've charged cases, I believe, in eight of those 10 sectors, IP > theft cases," Hickey said.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/huawei-executive-accusetd- of...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/22/huawei-executive-accusetd-of-stealing- trade-secrets-from-axas-company-backed-by-microsoft-and-dell.html)

[2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/23/chinese-theft-of-trade- secre...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/23/chinese-theft-of-trade-secrets-is- on-the-rise-us-doj-warns.html)</comment></comment>


Adobe and HTML - <AUTHOR> http://html.adobe.com/?hn

<comment><USER2> <http://thegraphicalweb.com/meet-svg>

For those that don't remember, Adobe produced an SVG plugin for IE, which they pulled in 2006. Having SVG on all browsers reduced their competitive advantage they had with Flash having a higher penetration then SVG.

Adobe was doing their best to kill off open standards in favour of their proprietary ones 6-7 years ago, a plan that failed due to the poor quality of Flex, IE 9's support for SVG and iOS' dislike of the technology.

It's always amusing to see such folks eat some humble pie, particularly when the technology they were trying to peddle was such a poor piece of engineering.

The new adverts about IE 10 trolls are really an attempt to divert from the real reason people have beef with MS and Adobe. They tried to kill open standards, failed, now want to join the cool gang like nothing happened.

But don't limit our penetrating stare to just those that have historically done this. Keep an eye on where Google are going with the various Chrome extensions.

So, Adobe and HTML, fine, but they only joined us because they couldn't beat us.

<comment><USER3> And for instance, you could say that "iOS's dislike of the technology" was nothing more than a strategic move from Apple and Jobs to win a battle of content over the channel, where the money lies, but you chose or forget to acknowledge this in your discourse; I just don't see how it is any different from MS or Adobe or any other corporation trying to do what they are supposed to do: making profit.

Also, _ouch_ on the "poor piece of engineering"... If I recall it has been able to help push some usage of the web forward (Youtube? Before Flash?), and foster creative content (anyone been working in the game or ad industry these past decade could testify... I'm talking Art Directors and Flash devs on websites, not annoying page ads). Or maybe I'm wrong on this - if so, please someone correct me. I don't remember Java succeeded in this field.

I don't want to start a flame war, it's just this anti-someone view, whoever that may be, raises my eyebrow all the time. As far as I know they do what _every_ other company on the field does: use and protect their hero assets for as long as they can, then catch up with the disruptive tech as soon as they penetrate.

<comment><USER2> I fully agree. I could have continued past Adobe and MS and started on the likes of Apple, but it'd have been a very long post. I considered whether the MS comment was out of context, that was my attempt at saying it goes beyond just Adobe.

But the OA is about Adobe and HTML. Of course, it's not so much that they'll jump to the tech that has displaced them, it's more the marketing language (which, again, I know everyone's at it) suggests "yeah, cool, we always wanted this one to win, honest". They even give a history lesson on the site, and that's not the history I remember.

Poor engineering, that's aimed more at Flex than Flash. I spent many months suffering at the hands of Flex and the Adobe IDE. We implemented exactly the same app in both Flex and Java, Flex and its environment were painful, relatively.

Companies will protect their own interests, but both I personally view Adobe's decision to drop the SVG plugin, and Microsoft's decision to enforce their own standard on IE as de facto, as having put a general drag on what could and can be achieved in browsers. They're entitled to do so, but I think the decisions have been detrimental to the Internet population as whole, that's all.

<comment><USER3> >the decisions have been detrimental to the Internet >population as whole

Absolutely. We're still paying the price(s) now...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great topic! Adobe _and_ HTML. What's hot at Adobe right now? Digital Publishing is. What are the main players? Adobe and Quark (yes they still exist). One uses InDesign Postscript-to-Javascript and Air to create, build and publish. The other (far older player, Quark) uses an HTML-engine to build and publish, see: <http://www.appstudio.net/#2> So Adobe loves HTML? Doesn't look like it from my perspective.

<comment><USER5> ... Right because Adobe ONLY produce InDesign.

For digital publishing, Adobe have Dreamweaver, Muse, Edge, (part of InDesign), Flash... all linked with Creative Cloud, which allows you to publish 'to-the-web' (Great for non-technical designers).

I would hazard a guess that you work for Quark, or are an Apple-like fanboy of them, to present such a one sided argument with a fraction of the complete information.

<comment><USER6> "Apple-like fanboy" really? I come here to avoid idiocy like this. Your point is valid, but you've rendered it moot by behaving like that.

<comment><USER5> Great contribution, my point is still valid regardless of what you think of me... you, on the other hand, didn't make a useful point.

To say Adobe is tied to Postscript unlike Quark comes across as fanboy-ism. Given adobe are heavily invested in HTML. That said the OP clarified what he means by Desktop Publishing and it makes more sense.

<comment><USER6> No, it's moot. Especially given the GP's disclosure. Just because someone has a differing opinion to yours, it doesn't make them a 'fanboy'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> angry-hacker The custom fonts on Chrome (Windows) looks horrible, well known bug for everyone, same time Chrome is the most popular browser in most of parts of the world... are people who are using custom fonts on their pages ignoring this issue because all the designers/developers user Mac's or I just dont understand...

<comment><USER7> Thank you. Thank You. Thank you.

Fellow sufferer here. "looks horrible" is probably understatement. Some days "makes me want to poke my eye out" is appropriate. I have resorted to custom Stylish font replacement scripts to step around the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Humorously, when their stats script gets blocked none of the links actually work in my Chrome build.

</comment><comment><USER9> I can vouch for Edge as an animation tool. We've already started creating commercial work using it.

But I wouldn't touch Reflow if Adobe Muse is anything to go by. Muse produced horribly verbose and unreadable code.

<comment><USER3> To be fair with Muse, I've tried the first public beta some time ago and I admit the produced code was a sad laughable mess. I had to opportunity to reopen my try-out site on the latest public release, did an export, and took time to compare: it's much, much better. Seeing how fast their release iteration is, and the short time between the two tests I did, I turned from mocking skeptic to actual...hmmm... believer(?).

That is of course, considering the main target for the product is not me or my peers but rather non-coders... I'm always better off on my own with my big hairy hands on the keyboard typing my code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd hope there's open source effort based on bootstrap, with actual human maintainable css/js code generator.

<comment><USER11> it is already a complete tool to create websites. what else do we want?

<comment><USER3> If I understood correctly what est meant... For non coders, maybe an actual WYSIWYG? Or even for coders, as a rapid-prototyping tool?</comment></comment></comment>


Fluid Dynamics in Javascript with Canvas - <AUTHOR> http://tholman.com/series/flash-forward/ports/multiphase-flow/02/

<comment><USER2> Can someone share some insight on why Flash is so much more performant at these types of operations? I recall not too long ago when the Javascript + Canvas demos of this type weren't even possible with a couple hundred particles, and this one does an outstanding job, but if you click on the Flash version, you can fill it so full of particles that the physics break, and there's little or no lag (on my system). Why is that, and can we ever expect Javascript + Canvas (or similar tools) to catch up to Flash?

<comment><USER3> I think (but have not verified this) it's mostly the rendering that makes the Canvas/JS so slow. If you'd turn off the rendernig in both versions you'd probably get similar rates.</comment></comment>


Npm appears to be down - <AUTHOR> http://www.npmjs.org

<comment><USER2> [http://status.npmjs.org/](http://status.npmjs.org/)</comment>


Ask HN Hackers: What's R's future? - <AUTHOR> The R community seems to be growing rapidly, with many favorable reviews of the language/system. For instance --
Forbes Magazine, Names You Need to Know in 2011: R Data Analysis Software: http://blogs.forbes.com/smcnally/2010/11/10/names-you-need-to-know-in-2011-r-data-analysis-software (and links therein)
And some of its developers are suggesting that they scrap it and start over (don't know if the whole "Core Team"'s on board tho'): http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/downloads/Compstat-2008-Slides.pdf
Are there parallels like this in the development of other languages/environments/ecosystems (e.g., Python3, Perl6 "revisions")? How do these efforts usually end up (I guess we're still waiting to see about Python3 and Perl6...) -- and how would it affect your business's decision to develop a library in this environment? <comment><USER2> I'm a non-IT employee (but with a comp-sci background) working in the insurance sector, and I'm currently managing R adoption for a group of about 30 business analysts with minimal programming background.

Programming in the business world is screwed up beyond all imagination. The more money a given application is responsible for, the more likely it is that it's a house-of-cards (pun intended for MVS nerds). They're always mishmashes of COBOL, SAS, DFSORT, and random proprietary languages that have never been the subject of a third-party book, and were sold to a company that was sold to a company that was sold to CA Technologies back in the 1970s. Whatever these languages can't do is implemented through Escher-painting constructions of Excel references and VBA macros.

So, when people say that R has some issues, I say, "boo fucking hoo".

Most businesses suffer from an unnatural separation between IT and the business end. If business people want something programmed, they call IT. They don't learn Python and do it themselves, because Python is a "programming language". R is the first real language that business people are being encouraged to learn, because it's an "analysis environment". You have no idea how often I have to edit the word "programming" out of my presentations for this reason.

R will win in business because it's decent, and it's been around long enough to not be scary to managers. I'd be cautious about drawing comparisons to other languages that have undergone big design changes, because, as far as I can tell, the existence of a decent language in the business world is entirely without precedent.

(Edit: In case the above came off as sounding like a "non-hackers are idiots" rant, it wasn't meant as such. Many of the people that produce these hideous monstrosities of SAS and VBA code have PhDs in statistics and atmospheric sciences. You can be pretty smart without knowing how to write software well.)

<comment><USER3> It is surprising how many business people aren't afraid to build monstrous macro-driven spreadsheets, but cringe at the thought of programming.

Makes me wonder if it is a UI problem. In the macro spreadsheet, you have data with code tied to it. In the programming world, you generally have code accessing data.

The abstractions might just be wrong for business people and a "simple" change could reduce a lot of IT pain.

<comment><USER4> The reason that spreadsheets are popular is the same reason that many students trying to solve a maths problem immediately plug in the knowns, without rearranging terms first. It's fear of the abstract and comfort of the concrete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I predict a 10 year campaign of conquest followed by a 30 year death march. R is a complete mess that kicks ass in its niche. There are too many data types and the syntax seems kind of random, but two lines of R can get you publication quality graphics.

R is really becoming huge in academia. As far as I can tell, health sciences is the last SAS holdout. I expect it to take over business as well. Biz types will love it because it's so powerful as a scripting environment, but the programmers building and maintaining stuff with it will come to loathe it. R will become the PHP of analysis; ubiquitous but hated, and no one will have the chutzpah to fix it.

Random aside, anyone notice that the Kiwis are all over R? The original creators and the guy who wrote ggplot2 among many others.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, in my experience, most biostatisticians (especially those involved in public health and clinical research) are SAS folks. Some of that is inertia- a lot of these people learned SAS at the same time they were learning stats. However, I think that most of SAS's continuing prevalence is due to the fact that, for all of its (many, many, many) problems, SAS is a freakin' log chipper when it comes to statistics- it doesn't care how much data you throw at it, or what kinds of crazy and/or exotic statistics you ask it for- if you can decipher its syntax, you can get it to do it.

Even for stuff that a lot of other programs can do just fine, SAS often has an edge. For example, everybody and their brother can do a logistic regression model... but SAS can give you confidence intervals for all kinds of crazy parts of the model that SPSS won't even bother calculating and that R will only give you point estimates for.

The other great thing about SAS is that a lot of the good statistics books from the last twenty or thirty years include SAS sample code- for example, I'm currently having to do some off-the-beaten-path ANOVA stuff, and the reference I'm using (Edwards' "Analysis of Variance for the Behavioral Sciences") uses SAS as its language of choice.

That said, I personally find the SAS "language" to be alternatively bewildering and nostalgia-inducing (the "cards" command, anybody?). SAS is the only language about which I can honestly say "it makes R's syntax look clean and predictable". Also, the Windows version of SAS is an absolute abomination from a UI standpoint. And, their licensing schemes are draconian, and installing the damn thing can easily take an entire day, especially if (say, for example) the installer gets confused because you've already got a JDK installed on your computer. Not that I'm bitter, or anything...

Of course, as others have noted, in bioinformatics, R either is already the default or is almost there. I know that in my department's bioinformatics courses, they use R, Python, and Perl almost exclusively, and only break out the SAS when there's something specific they need it to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While there may be a new language that deals with some of the deficiencies of R at an unspecified point in the future, R is here today. It works, it works very well for the tasks it was designed for and is both well written and well supported. Get coding.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder - could R in theory be rewritten as a Python library? If not, why not? Is there any special syntax of R that makes it more amenable to statistical analysis than Python? Performance concerns?

It's just a shame to see a whole language popping out of something that could just be a library.

<comment><USER9> [caveat: I am a numpy/scipy developer]

The idea of rewriting a large body of code in a different language does not make much sense.

Also, being a niche language has some nice consequences:

      * R has been there for a long time through its predecessor S
      * R is a specialized language: little chance to see it being screwed up by some library which wants to change everything, as it happens too often in python
      * Because it is a niche language, its behavior is consistent across platforms (it is just easier to do with R than with python, or other "real" languages).

Note how being a "real" language goes against those advantages. Also, most researchers are very lousy programmers. Often, their software is super smart, but the code quality is awful and write-only. A less powerful language may mitigate those issues

<comment><USER10> Would love to know why you think R isn't a "real" language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is still going strong in bioinformatics/genomics. I think it's slower and clunkier than the alternatives, but for stats and graphics it's pretty easy for scientists to learn...

<comment><USER12> It's also slowly getting a foot hold in Pharma. I think the large Pharma companies would love to get out from under the expensive SAS licenses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Incanter is a project worth checking out if you use R I believe.

<comment><USER14> as is this article - <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3726>

_We propose developing an R-like language on top of a Lisp-based engine for statistical computing that provides a paradigm for modern challenges and which leverages the work of a wider community._ \- Ross Ihaka (co-developed the R statistical programming language with Robert Gentleman) and Duncan Temple Lang (core developer of R)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> R as a language could use some help. It is painfully slow, a big memory hog (since it copies large objects with abandon), and has lots of language "gotchas". We had a saying where I work: "R is really fast if you write it in C".

However, the libraries are great. Anything you'd want in statistics is already there. So I do use it all the time.

Just to say something nice, I do like data frames (a two dimensional matrix, where each column can have a different type).

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm more interested in the education vs. income vs. prestige graph in: [http://blogs.forbes.com/smcnally/2010/11/10/names-you- need-t...](http://blogs.forbes.com/smcnally/2010/11/10/names-you-need-to-know- in-2011-r-data-analysis-software/)

Looks like there might be a ceiling for prestige, and that income is not as related to it as I would have thought. But, what are the units?

</comment><comment><USER17> I would love to see Python become the standard language for scientific computing including statistics but right now R is popular and gets it done. Don't get me wrong, R is excellent for its purpose and I like working with it and its many specialized libraries. However, Python is fun to hack away in and is more of a multipurpose language.

R works for me right now so that's what I'll stick to.

</comment><comment><USER18> It think it's more like "abandon Perl/php/javascript/whatever in favour of Python/Ruby/Lisp/whatever".

As long as there aren't more than 10 books written about the yet unborn data- cruncher saviour and as long as the brand new alternative isn't adopted in courses, I wouldn't bother -- unless you want to be the saviour's father (i.e. developer) of course.

</comment><comment><USER19> I believe that over time, it will become the standard for statistical computing in most businesses, eventually displacing much of what SAS does today.

It's attractive to embed into databases like Neteeza, Teradata and other analytic databases, and vastly easier to use than SAS.

Even if it was rewritten in python, I think that would be unlikely to slow down it's adoption, which is driven by grad-students, researchers and quants who often have no real programming background (and frequently aren't interested in learning more than they need to generate figures for their publications).

</comment><comment><USER20> Implement data frames and trellis graphics in Numpy/Scipy and I don't think I'd go back to R for much.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would love to use R for my latest project, but as far as I know you can't create a compiled executable for use in a runtime, live web environment. Anybody know of a solution to this issue?

<comment><USER22> Rserve is an tcp/ip interface to R so you can send R code from any other language. I have used the rserve-ruby interface to some success.

<comment><USER21> I didn't see a ruby interface - where is it? Also, this doesn't deal with the issue of speed - can R scale to handle, say 100 simultaneous connections?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I do wish they'd change the name, R is such a difficult search term

<comment><USER22> using rseek.org will help for search on R-related pages.</comment></comment>


How Pushing to Extremes Led an Amateur Cyclist to Ventricular Tachycardia - <AUTHOR> https://cyclingtips.com/2017/04/book-excerpt-pushing-extremes-led-amateur-cyclist-ventricular-tachycardia/ <comment><USER2> VT, sudden cardiac arrest and cardiomyopathy survivor here. I also have an ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator) like the subject in the article. From a technological standpoint it's an incredibly interesting thing. On one hand I have this fantastic piece of implanted technology that has on different occasions saved my life. It has a 10 year battery life, supports wireless communication and at regular check ins provides a wealth of data to the electrophysiologist about ongoing heart activity (I'd love to have my own API with at least read access to the device).

On the other hand he does a great job describing the PTSD the accompanies the torture and pain the device can deliver. There's something psychologically unique to the fact that this device is embedded inside you, capable of delivering a horrific blow enough to knock you off your feet at a moments notice. From a PTSD standpoint it's as if your assailant is always with you, but permanently implanted within. You can't ever escape it, there's no opportunity to remove yourself from the environment or the factors causing the PTSD. You have to learn to come to grips with that, I've found that makes the recovery much more complicated.

Beyond that, glad to see the cardiac risks of extreme athletics start to get some public attention. There is a certain pull in extreme athletic circles to chase numbers, a sort of oneupmanship to push the limits of what the human body is capable of. Unfortunately at times it's not pretty when some find exactly what those limits are.

Edit: To give it some perspective, I was 31 years old when I had my device implanted.

<comment><USER3> I started to understand the realities of potential PTSD with a particular patient. When I was a resident, we admitted a guy whose ICD started firing while he was feeling fine and mowing his lawn. He freaked out, stripped his shirt off and ran screaming up his neighborhood street until he found some help.

He told the story in an almost comical way, and I nearly started giggling because of how I imagined this would seem to an onlooker. But I quickly realized how absolutely fucking terrified he would feel. I don't think I can fully grasp the long-term emotional impact this might have on somebody who forever knows they've always got that thing in their chest and that it's statistically the most likely way they'll exit he world.

Seems you have some idea of how to cope with that, but I bet a lot of people don't have those facilities.

<comment><USER4> > I started to understand the realities of potential PTSD with a particular > patient. When I was a resident, we admitted a guy whose ICD started firing > while he was feeling fine and mowing his lawn. He freaked out, stripped his > shirt off and ran screaming up his neighborhood street until he found some > help.

My _first_ priority (in the back of an ambulance) with someone who had an AICD fire is to get some significant sedation on board. I've seen multiple patients where the the anxiety of anticipating another discharge is amping up their SNS enough trigger their arrhythmia (triggering another shock).

<comment><USER5> Should they have a Bluetooth connection to my phone to allow shutting off the stupid thing?

<comment><USER4> No, for a variety of reasons...

For starters, there _are_ ways to disable it externally, but they use a fairly specialized magnet. Secondly, even if they could shut it off, the patient isn't really in a position to know if it's shocking them for a legitimate reason or not. Shutting it off may simply shut their heart off...

Finally, the security properties of Bluetooth aren't exactly up to the standards I would like to see for a "can deliver a fatal shock to someone's heart" type device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Many "recreational" athletes push themselves harder than olympic competitors. Their bottleneck is talent and they attempt to overcome this with drive and determination often against others with similar attributes. Many sink into unhealthy habits in an attempt to just hang on to a weekend group ride or to qualify for Boston.

I was shocked to learn that many weekend warrior friends have sophisticated doping regimes just to stay competitive on group rides. I'm not sure there is an answer.

<comment><USER7> The answer is obviously to be less competitive. Relax, you don't have to "win" everything, just do your best and enjoy the experience.

<comment><USER8> The way society is currently set up, this answer doesn't make much sense. Look everywhere you see, competitiveness and drive is encouraged, top athletes are worshiped and paid zounds of money, and the importance of genetics is quickly swept under the rug.

It doesn't really make sense to tell people to be less competitive when pretty much everyone and everything else tells them to be more so.

<comment><USER9> I understand what you are saying, but we need to remember one thing: it was all recreational! Good God, the man wasn't being chased by killers, he was doing this for fun!

The fact is, I don't care who you are, there are limits imposed on the 50 year old body. There just are. If you want to keep active, that's great, but what ever happened to being reasonable? Why is everyone in such a rush all the time to have more fun faster and harder than anyone else?

Maybe this is an artifact of civilization? Since we are no longer being chased by tigers we need to "fun" ourselves to death. Who knows.

To be fair, the article makes it clear that he never felt like he was "pushing" too hard before the incident. It may be he didn't notice his body talking to him, or maybe it just didn't until it was too late, which sucks. Everyone is different. I can tell you that I'm over 50 and have definitely noticed the effort and recovery challenges that accompany my age. I'm active and love to run, bike, etc. But it certainly feels different than it did when I was 15. I have to be reasonable about how much I do how fast.

Be reasonable, people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Question. It seems like V-tach is not something that overwhelms you in an instant--the first time, Endicott was able to stand for at least several minutes, and it took him several hours after that to reach medical attention. He would have died without it, but there was some time.

So why does the ICD strike without warning? Falling over unexpectedly is pretty dangerous even if you're just standing or walking, and can easily be crippling or deadly if you're older, as I imagine many patients are. Wouldn't it be a lot safer if it gave you some kind of warning so you can stop and sit down before the big jolt--a mechanical nudge or tiny tickle of current to some heart-adjacent tissue?

<comment><USER11> There is a slight warning, about 5 seconds where you can hear a "whining" sound as the device charges up. It's not very loud though I've heard it being in the same room as patients. I could see it being missed if you were doing something loud/active.

The reason there isn't more warning is that you want to shock VT before it degenerates into ventricular fibrillation, which is much more serious.

Your question about falls is a good one and it comes down to how much of a trade off you strike with risks of VT/VF vs risks of the shock.

<comment><USER12> Couldn't they make it so it starts beeping alarmingly before triggering? Giving you a few seconds to e.g. pull over, sit down, assume a fetal position, etc. Or would that cause sudden stress and make it worse?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am surprised the article did not mention two genes that are known to link catecholamines (adrenaline et al) and ventricular tachycardia. One gene is for the cardiac ryanodine receptor, and the other is for the CAS2Q gene.

An obvious conclusion is that the threshold for exercise-induced VT is variable across individuals.

There are lots of other genes linked to sudden death during exercise. Examples: long QT genes, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy genes. It's not hard to understand why they are rare. :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> Once in college I decided to see how hard I could run around the track. I finished the lap, but my heart was racing like mad and my vision was fading in and out. I just laid down on the ground for a while, and nothing bad happened.

I decided that was a monumentally stupid thing to do and never did it again. I jog regularly, but never push it past a modest point.

</comment><comment><USER15> Fortunately we have common tools to measure stress and recovery rate (HRV in garmin or polar watches). And the latest ones don't even need a chest heart rate strap. Go hard and fast when you train, make sure you get at least 2 days of rest per week and most importantly get good sleep and rest. In case of doubt , check HRV indicators

<comment><USER16> I've been shopping for one of those devices and the latest reviews report that wrist heart rate sensors aren't very accurate under hard exertion. And there's no scientific evidence that HRV as measured by those devices is correlated with the risk of a cardiac event.

<comment><USER17> I've been pretty happy with my Garmin Vivoactive HR for cycling -- I too was worried that it would be wildly inaccurate, so I did a few rides with both the Garmin (using its wrist sensor) and my old Polar watch with a chest strap to compare them. They were very close to each other -- both on the bike looking at live readings and later looking at the charts at home.

However, it could see it having less accuracy with an activity with more arm motion, like running. And I have no evidence that my Polar sensor was very accurate itself.

<comment><USER18> Yes, the primary concern with optical wrist sensors is "cadence lock", which is when they start measuring the wiggle of the arm rather than the beating of the heart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's an interesting tie-in to the start-up world here. A co-worker of mine started saying a couple of years ago that "cycling is the new golf," and that's definitely true in Silicon Valley. You are more likely to run into tech CEO's and bankers on Saturday morning climbing up 84 in Woodside than you are at the driving range. And, if you want to be able to hobnob with those folks, you'd better be able to hang with them as you pedal up a 10% grade ...

</comment><comment><USER20> Addictions are sad.

<comment><USER21> ..but some are better than others, and having that personality trait isn't necessarily a choice

<comment><USER22> Better in terms of less immediately destructive, sure. But I've gone to more funerals from deaths of adrenaline junkies than drug ones. The holes they leave when they're gone are the same.

<comment><USER18> The number of funerals you have attended could be a poor proxy for the number of lives lost. Drug junkies tend to have fewer friends and be less vocal about their addictions because society, culture and laws.

<comment><USER22> Quite possible. I am not claiming ultimate truth.

But in my 43+ years of living, I've known enough of all of the above to come to think that the specific what of addiction matters less than the core pathology itself. The patterns are too similar across the board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "He was an independent sales representative"

...

"For years it was like the hints were there in all the studies, and [researchers] always conclude that more research needs to be done. And they're still saying that" ... "I've done the research, folks. It happened to me. I've had friends that are either dead or alive that it happened to. [Trust me.]"

No.

<comment><USER19> I don't think you are being fair. It's pretty clear that he means secondary, not primary, research, i.e reading papers and talking to experts. And, it's quite common in medicine that there is very little communication or consensus on the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like this, where five different specialists could give you five different answers. Just look at how long it took him to find someone to do the ablation treatment that gave him some improvement.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has your company banned business travel? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> No. We cancelled travel to China, though.</comment>


"IamA Hacker for the Government(s) AMAA" [verified] - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1tnhgg/iama_hacker_for_the_governments_amaa/

<comment><AUTHOR> [–]DaCrazyKoala 2 points 7 hours ago

Could you talk about the data gathering practices of private companies?

[–]navaseminternetu[S] 3 points 7 hours ago

One company in the valley had a cluster with multiple petabytes of raw live user data that anyone could perform research on with no restrictions. In addition to acccess to live data as needed. It was the wild west there, and they wondered why hackers were exfiling so much data. Sigh It's probably not who you think either</comment>