Procrastination should be solved by lighting fires, not filling buckets - <AUTHOR> http://www.visakanv.com/blog/2013/09/0086-productivity-apps-fill-buckets-when-they-should-be-lighting-fires/ <comment><USER2> I have found all of my procrastination to stem from lacking a certain degree of knowledge of how to perform the task that I'm procrastinating. When I don't know how to do something or I don't know how long it will take, then I don't know where it fits into my schedule, so I never fit it into my schedule. Most of the time, I grossly over estimate how long something will take, i.e. "all day" when it's probably only a 15 minute issue.

Of course, there is the opposite issue of grossly underestimating the problem. I've had "close old checking account" on my todo list for well over a two months now. I thought it would take 15 minutes to just call them, maybe scan a signature or something, and be done. They actually want me to come into the office, which is over 3 hours away (hence this issue of wanting to close the account). It is experiences like that that help to keep the gross- overestimation/procrastination game in business.

How do I fix it? I choose a day where I decide I will be fine if the only thing I get done is I find out how long it will take to get one thing done. Usually it's not that bad, though. I usually end up getting a whole slew of things done. But being OK with not getting anything officially done for a day helps me to kill the procrastination cycle.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly right, for me at least.

Sometimes its easy to know what is required, and probably guess at how long it will take (15mins or 1 day), usually because you've seen other people do it this quick. But if you don't know how to do it, and even worse, don't know where to start to learn it (which book to read, which course to take, who to ask) you can end up sitting about doing nothing but getting frustrated.

A great example is Linux. You know a task is easy (like creating an automated backup), but you can't just go and do it. You need to read up on it, you need to learn CRON and how it works, you've then got to read up on the subtle differences of your linux distro vs the one in the tutorial. You then need to read up on chmod or sudo to change the permissions, etc., etc.

Point is, it's an easy task once you know how, but when you don't know how, all you see is a huge mountain of learning you have to do to achieve it. And to make matters worse, sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Why spend all day reading up on Linux just to copy some files?

End result... I'll do it tomorrow

<comment><USER4> > _You know a task is easy (like creating an automated backup), but you can 't > just go and do it._

Even worse is when the todo is to also _make a decision_. I need to automate backups to a new NAS. Do I install Linux? FreeBSD? FreeNAS? RedHat? Good old debian-stable? I should definitely explore all decision branches, in full detail, to make the best choice. _open in new tab, open in new tab_

But I have no idea how long that would take. I can't even set aside 15 min (or 45) to determine how long it will take. It's incomputable. It's either dive headfirst and hope to come out with a working solution, or put it off another week (and hope some howto pops up on ars).

<comment><USER2> This is why it's important to have days where I'm okay with not getting anything moved to "complete".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is just a friendly reminder that if you would describe yourself as a procrastinator, it might be something more. If you've always been one, if you want to do things, but can never do it, it could be a sign.

ADHD is a real problem, and has real solutions (and those solutions aren't all addictive).

If you feel like you are always running behind, always trying to catch up. If anyone says you are a great developer, but that you're always playing catch up, get checked. It can help change your life for the positive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I do exhibit ADHD symptoms, but I don't think I have it, or if I do, I don't have it bad. I can get a little dramatic in my writing. I have been able to make some progress on some fronts, I'm just easily dissatisfied.

Thank you so much for your concern, though. What are the solutions you're talking about? Do you mean medication? I think I'll give myself a few months to try and work things out myself (I think it's really just very, very bad habits entrenched throughout my adolescent years that I have to unlearn).

<comment><USER5> I have ADHD and OCD, diagnosed earlier this year. I've had it for as long as I can remember. I first remember being tested in when I was about 10. I'm 33 now.

For solutions, I see a therapist to work through my OCD, and I take medication for my ADHD. It makes a difference. I notice it on days I happen to forget and don't have backup.

I never thought medication could make such a big difference, but it does. The idea of sitting down and just getting stuff done is amazing.

Anyways, the point of posting was to share. I was 33 when I got tested, and I wasn't get tested for ADHD! I'm not here to diagnose people, or to suggest you are doing things wrong. Rather, I just want to make it clear that you can get tested, and it might surprise you. It did for me. For far too long I saw all these posts on "how to get things done." I read GTD, followed all sorts of advice. Tried different strategies. Practiced pomodoro. Nothing worked.

I thought I was just lazy. Unmotivated. This resulted in a lot of repressed hatred for myself and my perceived failures. I still have a difficult time accepting success and compliments. I focus on the negative, and dismiss the positive as a fluke. Note, these are all relative to myself. In others, I see the best. When I congratulate someone, I really mean it. In myself? I was just lucky.

Anyways:

> I think I do exhibit ADHD symptoms, but I don't think I have it, or if I do, > I don't have it bad.

I thought it was shameful that I was getting tested at all. I've lead a good life, I've been lucky, I've worked hard, and I've been successful. I thought I was being egotistical getting tested. Once I found out I had ADHD and OCD, and had to get over the idea that I was just a whining successful white guy. After all, who am _I_ to complain about my situation when others have it so much worse off.

If you have it, you have it. Better to know about it and take the necessary steps to do something rather than dismiss it as a minor problem. Minor problems can add complexity, and they are still problems.

<comment><USER6> Do you find that your creativity is stifled, or that your personality is very subdued because of the meds? Do you take weekends off the meds to be yourself? Or maybe one or two workdays off for creative stuff, and three days on for "nose to the grindstone" type work?

I haven't been medicated for years, but I'm struggling and thinking about looking into it again. I remember feeling like on meds I was an alternate personality - a different version of myself that I never felt comfortable as.

I keep thinking some of the advantages of ADD will give me an edge if I can just buckle down and get some real work done, but this has been going on for a while with far too little progress.

<comment><USER5> > Do you find that your creativity is stifled, or that your personality is > very subdued because of the meds?

Not at all. I am still me.

> Do you take weekends off the meds to be yourself?

No. I can be myself and still take the medication.

> I remember feeling like on meds I was an alternate personality - a different > version of myself that I never felt comfortable as.

There are different types of medications. The only side effects I've experienced is less of an appetite and my mouth feels more dry than usual. I drink more water as a result. If the medication changes you, there are other kinds you can try. As I mentioned, I take medication that is not addictive (adderall is addictive, for example, and must be carefully monitored).

> if I can just buckle down and get some real work done

I remember that feeling before I knew what I had. I remember the drives into work, feeling excited about what I had waiting for me, and thinking over the problems. But when it came time to actually do it, I'd get easily distracted, and by the end of the day, have nothing to show for it.

<comment><USER6> Would you mind sharing the medication you're using? I've been prescribed various dosages/releases of both Ritalin and Adderall, and they both affected me in the same way.

By the way, thanks for your posts here - they've been helpful.

<comment><USER5> Sure. Strattera.

[http://www.strattera.com](http://www.strattera.com)

And yes, both Ritalin and Adderall both made me nervous because of what I'd heard.

<comment><USER7> Glad to hear you only have minimal side effects from the Strattera.

I tried it for a while several years ago, and, while it worked wonderfully (first period of my life where I actually had any reliable sense of time!), the side effects I had were unacceptable.

The mild dizziness, occasional headaches, and minor dry mouth were not a problem, but the main side effect was ... more troubling. Let's just say that, while the Strattera enhanced performance in some areas, it degraded performance in others.

Still, I heartily recommend those diagnosed with ADD or ADHD to give Strattera a try. Side effects went away within a week or so of discontinuing the drug, so no real risk.

<comment><USER8> How long did it take for you to notice the effect of Strattera on your sense of time? Did you notice it right away or should one wait a few weeks?

I have non existent concept of time, so this might help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just set up a bunch of IFTTT recipes to trigger when random stocks go up/down by 1% in a day, and then get it to push-notification me a question like "what are you doing right now?"

I should only get one every couple of days they way I configured it (I think,) so perhaps requires more stocks. I wrote a different question onto each one, so I could easily get different reminders on the same day.

If anyone else knows a better randomness generator for IFTTT (I couldn't seem to use "someone followed me on twitter" as a trigger...) then pipe up!

<comment><USER10> I have a Python script that runs on my home computer. It runs on a 1 minute chron job and randomly sends a text message (via Verizon's firstname.lastname@example.com address) to my phone to check what I'm working on. The difficulty is that this system (on Verizon's end) seems a bit unreliable. I've been thinking about putting together an iOS app to send random push notifications to check what I'm working on. Would there be interest from others in this?

I also have it set up so when I reply to the text message it logs it into a spreadsheet. My plan was to do some machine learning on my productivity. Haven't gotten around to that part yet though.

<comment><USER9> IFTTT can send texts, and also works with the Pushover[1] app (not free) which collates push notifications like this. You can also send it notifications yourself programmatically - check out their API to see if you can link it up to your python script.

You might want to check out iDoneThis[2], which send you an email at the end of the day asking what you did. (I used it for about a month and then gave up, and it's less random, but it does log your responses.)

[1] [https://pushover.net/](https://pushover.net/) (links to both iOS and Play stores.) [2] [https://idonethis.com/](https://idonethis.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yesterday, I happened to come across a particularly inspiring reddit post about about determination and drive. Objectively it's rather silly, but I left that window open anfd got to work.

No less than five times that day, I switched over to my time-wasting site 'work'space to procrastinate, saw the post, and decided to keep working instead.

I got a lot more done yesterday than I had planned on. I think that there's definitely something real here.

<comment><USER12> You got me curious. Could you please post the link?

<comment><USER11> [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1ndbx1/what_can_a...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1ndbx1/what_can_a_21_year_old_do_now_that_will_help/cchkybp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hey visakanv,

If I can show you a viable solution today will you pay me $100 as you claim in your blog post? I have a viable solution for you, but I bet you won't pay.

1 - Sign up for Gmail. It's free.

2 - Open Google Calendar.

3 - Click Create

4 - Add your motivational prompt in the 'Untitle event' field. For example, the one I'm using is "Ryan, you will die someday. Are you doing exactly what you should be doing right now to reach your goals before you die?

5 - Click the Repeat text box and set it to repeat Daily

6 - Set one pop up reminder and one email reminder.

7 - Click save.

8- Rinse and repeat for every motivational firestarting prompt you need.

9 - send paypal of $100 to firstname.lastname@example.com

Good luck, -ryan

<comment><USER14> The problem with this (and similar things like the "what did you do today?" emails) is that you eventually start filtering them out and ignoring them.

I'm a bad procrastinator, my bad habits have trained me to crave novelty in a bad way.

<comment><USER15> I thought about the same thing. Maybe the "solution" is to make something that behaves differently every day, so you are always caught by surprise and can't ignore it.

<comment><USER16> An AI-complete motivational prompter... I think, for writers, these are known as "agents" ;)

<comment><USER17> Some people are unlucky enough to have such AI-complete entities, usually they call them "boss".

<comment><USER16> Well, in the analogy, this is a motivational service you're paying for. Agents are also, partially, a motivational service you're paying for. Bosses, on the other hand, provide a motivational service because they're paying _you_ , and are incentivized to try to get their money's worth. (Then again, you _could_ structure things so that workers are at the top of the corporate hierarchy, and have hiring/firing power over people they get to manage them... but not even co-ops tend to do this, and I'm not sure why.)

<comment><USER18> >Then again, you could structure things so that workers are at the top of the corporate hierarchy, and have hiring/firing power over people they get to manage them... but not even co-ops tend to do this, and I'm not sure why.

I... have wanted to do this. I have not, in part because I can't afford someone with middle-management experience, and in part because I don't have the middle-management experience required to tell if someone is good at middle-management.

We've had many discussions about this within the company. My buddy suggested a 'babysitter' while my dad suggested a 'mom'

But yeah, that's the thing... middle-management can be effective as 'chair kickers' \- Hey, Luke, get back to work. but... I think that middle management generally gets in the way when it comes to decision making... and there's no way I'm letting a non-technical hire (or fire) technical people.

Now, other people have said that what you are proposing is common in the business world; they are called secretaries. But... I think that's a different dynamic. As the other comment said, "more like an olympic coach" \- I don't want someone to make me more comfortable... I want someone to push me. I mean, especially when I hire people who aren't good friends already? there's a problem. They don't want to say bad things to me about my behavior. They'll criticize other employees, but not me. I mean, I'm sure it's a problem that can be overcome.

Of course, I know other people who just don't need external guidance. There really isn't any need for middle management with those folks... they just do it. For those people? Management is largely unnecessary. Unfortunately, I seem to be in the majority here; I get a lot more done under a manager, usually; though personality-wise, like many technical people, I chafe but hard when someone I see as less technically capable than myself tells me what to do. It's a problem I need to solve... or I need to start working for other people again. You can only coast on the strengths of your hires for so long (especially if you can't pay enough to /keep/ those hires for that long.)

Actually, thinking about this, I think I might actually institute a 'person X is middle manager for day Y on department Z' policy with people I have now, where X isn't a particularly senior person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It sounds to me like you may have ADHD. Dr. Russell Barkley mentions in one of his speeches[1] that frequent prompts are one effective way to keep someone with ADHD accountable and on track. You may want to watch this shorter version[2] and see if you recognize yourself (that's doesn't proof anything of course, but it's a start).

[1]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUQu- OPrzUc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUQu-OPrzUc)

[2]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyDliT0GZpE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyDliT0GZpE)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Totally going to check them out.

There's a quote I saw on Tumblr once- "Before diagnosing yourself as depressed, make sure that you aren't, in fact, surrounded by assholes." Similarly, I think a lot of my ADHD tendencies (I really don't want to call them that- feels like I'm shitting on people with actual ADHD) come from the fact that I've spent a lot of time in an education system I hate.

But I have no idea, of course. Maybe there's something to all this. I don't think it's so black-and-white. Will check it out. Thanks for sharing. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting concept. Once I worked with a really talented/accomplished designer and he said something that's stuck, with me while we were working at something that felt like it could go on interminably: "What would I do if I had to finish this today?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I think that's a great way to get over the fear of shipping imperfect stuff.

Procrastination and perfectionism are very tied together for me- it's largely a fear of failure. To be more precise, it's a structural, habitual, systemic underestimation of how it's better to fail a little bit every day than to "fail by default" (as JK Rowling beautifully put it) because you never try at all.

I see a lot of parallels between this and smoking, or any other unhealthy, damaging habit- an inability to grok, at a very visceral level, how small things add up to big ones.

The only way to learn is to stick to it, and anything that helps me/you stick to it is worth trying, I think.

<comment><USER21> This. I've recently had some successes with an app called "Way of Life" on the iPhone (or its Android equivalent, Hab.it). It's half way between the bucket filling an fire lighting methods, but it's so quick and easy to use, I've actually managed to use it for 6 weeks now. I realise that doesn't sound like a lot, but this is coming from someone who can write a diary for 3 days max and to-do lists last a week or so.

The idea is that you put in a behaviour and tell the app whether it is bad or good, and then every evening you spend 10 seconds telling the app whether you did it or not. Very soon you have a red or green patchwork of your life's choices to stare at on a daily basis.

The bad: I've been pretty honest so my results aren't great (about 60:40 green to red).

The good: I've had many occasions where I'm at the tipping point of doing or not doing something and thinking about getting that green square for the day has nudged me to do the right thing. Which I figure means it's worth it.

Since buying the app, I've lost a few kilos, been to the gym twice as often, reduced my computer games usage, almost stopped biting my nails, and cut out 90% of the fizzy drinks in my diet. Stopping eating chocolate seems to be a persistent problem though...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Recommending some resource on procrastination usually leads to more procrastination (reading said resource but doing nothing :P) but at the risk of causing that I can highly recommend the book "Switch!"

The authors use the metaphor of an elephant and a rider and at least for me I usually motivated the rider but the elephant wasn't trotting along. I suspect the OP is not looking for "constant reminders" etc. but rather for some peanuts to feed his inner elephant :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read the book before (the Heath brothers are just awesome), and the I do find the metaphors very helpful.

The problem is, I'm a very different person when I'm motivated and when I'm not. I can be the most motivated person after a good conversation with a friend, or a great experience, but I have difficulty maintaining that on a day-to-day basis. I don't feel that this reduces the "quality" of my motivation at all.

This is very pathological for me, and it bleeds into my personal life. I'm bad at keeping appointments, etc. Does that mean I don't care about the people in my life? I don't think so. I think I'm just incompetent, and I need a lot of learning and practice when it comes to being competent, and raw willpower and vague structures haven't helped.

I think I need some sort of structure or prosthetic that I can't ask of any other person (unless I hired a personal assistant to bug me 24/7, which I wouldn't be able to afford). I'm sure there are other people out there who could use such prosthesis, too. In the long run the goal would be to wean myself off of it, but I think I definitely could use help of some sort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think such prompts would only work for a short while and thereafter they'd just serve the purpose of making me feel miserable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think prompts with "hey, don't forget your dreams!" won't work long, but I think prompts like "Why are you doing this? What is your goal?" etc that force you to respond (and it should track your responses, so you can read your older responses) will quickly force you to come clean with what your real goals are. well- that's my hypothesis.

Won't know until I get to try it out myself. It's kind of like having a commitment buddy, only you don't feel like you're imposing on someone as much

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Several people have been asking me if I'm serious about the $100! Wasn't expecting this to catch on, but here's what I'm going to do- I'm going to try out every solution that people send or suggest, and I'll document it in my blog, and I'll paypal the $100 to whomever's solution works best for me. :-)

<comment> super-serial I'll take your challenge. Does a Chrome extension work for you?

I am going to add this feature to a new version of my Productivity Owl: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity- owl/e...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/productivity- owl/eoagmdboiealblmpaahjlhajggndaahi)

Even if a Chrome Extension isn't what you're looking for - thanks for this idea. The way my owl works is that you schedule freetime, and during non- freetime all pages have a timer, and when the timer reaches 0, the owl closes your tab. It also has a block list for time-wasting pages like reddit or HN.

Lately my problem is that I delete the owl's timer, or schedule freetime when I shouldn't to avoid doing work. I was going to implement a "Respect Score" which I'm still planning on doing - but I really like the idea of the owl recognizing my 'workarounds', and prompting me with questions about my goals, instead of just berating me. Maybe I'll let users add their own prompts.

So I think your idea is a perfect addition to my current system. I plan to have a new version in 2-3 weeks.

<comment><USER24> I have the same experience as you and the author. Chrome extensions with timers such as StayFocusd have not worked for me. I just disable it or use firefox or something.

What if the user had to enter a predetermined answer to the question prompt in order to continue? By making the user actually type something that they themselves chose the prompt becomes more powerful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Echoing what others here have said, I found professional ADD or ADHD diagnosis and treatment to be helpful.

As far as a repeating reminder/logging system, I glued together a Google calendar with multiple daily repeating events separated at 30 minute intervals and 5 minute SMS reminders. This gives me an automated Pomodoro clock as well as a place for prompts.

I've pushed this farther by setting the calendar event titles as bit.ly links to a Google Docs form backed by a Google Docs spreadsheet. The form has a single radio button form question letting me log what I'm doing at the end of my sprint.

I have not tried to use this to improve my behavior yet, but I do now have a decent log of activity to use as a baseline when I try something new and want to measure it's effectiveness.

</comment><comment><USER26> Answer number one

Would you waste time while your boss watches you?

Get someone who would sit by you while you work. I convinced a friend to sit by me for 45 minutes everyday while I write a story. The friend does not write a word, I do all the writing and it's been a about 3 weeks now and the book is about 15k words already. Use this technique on one task at a time.

Answer Number two

Commitment contracts - get the book carrots and sticks. The most useful part is in the first section. It's simple. Get a friend, your wife or anyone who you can trust with money. It worked for me in completing and editing a book I've been skipping for months.

I stay at Ghana and i'm a student with a monthly allowance about $100. I had about $100 in savings but used $50 from my savings in betting.

On Monday, I give 5 - $10 notes to a trustworthy friend. I chose the work I have to complete before the next morning. If I do it, she gives me back $10 from the $50. If not, she keeps the $10. It's simple it's worked for me.

Got the idea from the book carrots and sticks but from my explanation, you've gotten the fire you want. What better thing to light your ass on fire than the prospect of losing your own money?

</comment><comment><USER27> The app I've been developing may help you with your procrastination, and light that fire that you need.

It merges two ideas. One is that you need to get things done on your to-do list. This is incredibly hard for us procrastinators. So, similar to a personal trainer you would have at the gym to help you exercise, I created a virtual personal trainer to help you work on your to-do list. He prompts you with what you need to do, and then you do it.

The second idea is that you need to feed your craving for interesting and inspiring web content. To help with this craving, the virtual personal trainer allows you to see productive and beneficial web content as a sort of break from your current work session. You get to gain knowledge while procrastinating. I call the idea "to procrastigain".

You can check out the demo at [http://procrastigain.com/](http://procrastigain.com/). Let me know if it is useful to you at all, or if you can think of anything that would make it better for you.

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't think you need an app for this at all.

What I've started doing is just printing a calendar and writing down whatever I've accomplished that day - sort of a reverse to-do list.

Looking at whatever I did yesterday reminds me of how I felt after finishing those tasks, and looking at blank spots does make me feel guilty (but not quite as overwhelmed as looking at a long to-do list).

</comment><comment><USER29> My thoughts on procrastination and activation by fire. "Prompts affect thought" yes, but the context was social.

I wouldn't give a rat's ass when faced with a disconnected prompt forcing me to acknownledge the fact that I was browsing funny cat videos for the last two hours. Maybe that little "see, you're doing it again!" bump works for someone, but not for me. If those activities were to be made public. Well, that would probably have a totally different effect on me. After all, who want's to be seen as lazy?

      * Fear of letting others know that I was actually doing: nothing.
      * The feeling when receiving recognition from things accomplished.

Peer pressure + x would be my recipe. I'd like to know x, though. Maybe build an app that somehow connects what you /really/ did, every day, to your social circles. Be it online or wherever. Let the other's light a fire under your tail :)

-pro. c.

<comment><USER29> I was thinking about why I'm here, reading this "was it not for the content", overly-long and boring thread:

I gain something from these posts, as these are experiences of real people. Why is any procrastinator here, reading, rather than doing something that should be done? Why do certain news titles or content seem more interesting than others. I skimmed some titles and noticed that some words grabbed my attention more than others. Thinking on these words let me remember exciting things that I had done before. They have a strong (emotional) fingerprint in my memory. But then again, why did I do those things in the first place? Maybe they were brought out in a setting that already made me feel good, and thus there was no friction sliding in to the work that, in turn, left me with the memory.

Could these prehaps be combined to something resembling self-triggered strong drive to accomplish a task?

I don't know. Maybe this is stupid and obvious, but I though to share, maybe it'll spark something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One thing might be fun to make (a little beyond me at the moment) is an app where you upload some Rspec (or other testing solution) test that will run every X hours, and you CANNOT shut it off. If the test fails it sends to your mobile phone and email address the test results. The only way to get the messaging to stop is to get the test to pass.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER31> I guess the key point is "I would pay 100$ a month for a helping app". I think you might not have enough constraints. A financiel constraint is a great motivation.

I have been a freelancer for 4 years. The first year, the excitment of this new activity was enough to motivate me. After this time I slowly became lazy (syn. for procrastinator). I was losing money and felt to a point where my bank account was almost at zero. This financial constraint sent me a huge kick in the butt. I stopped home-working, rented an office and (re)started to work for real. Two years after this episode everything is fine. I am still in a nice office and ready to hire my first employee.

In your case, I would say you need either bigger constraints or a challenge that drives real passion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not rich or anything, I'm married with a stay-at-home wife, I'm paying for a house, I'm building my savings, etc. But I do think $100/month is worth it because I don't think I'm using even 10-20% of my max potential, and the value I could create if I were more productive would be more than that. I do have an interesting challenge at work that I think I'm about to really break open...

god I realize how cheesy this sounds. There's really no way to talk about this, talk is very, very cheap in this regard. But thank you so much for your perspective and advice, I will incorporate it into my own persctive best as I can.

<comment><USER31> I am sorry if i missed the point. Maybe try a mixed approach.

\- Baby steps : define a realistic goal for a day (even it needs only 30 min. to achieve) and just make it. The next day take a bit more important goal. One goal a day. Just one. But every __* day.

\- Leverage the shame : make sure your screen is visible by everybody in your office. That way you will feel a bit ashamed if you spend too much time on FB. That "shame" will drive you to work.

\- Disconnect : if your job does not require Internet, simply disconnect your computer. Or edit your host file to redirect facebook.com to 127.0.0.1 during daytime

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Do you have a Mac or iOS device you can use this on? I ask because I was considering making something like this a short while ago. I was going to call it 'Mindful Day' and even registered the domain mindfuldayapp.com for it.

At the time I was thinking of either an OS X menubar app or an iOS app, or perhaps both (with iCloud sync). My own preference is for the former, because I use a Mac all day.

Roughly, the idea was for an app that would prompt you for your day's todo- list at the start of your workday, then remind you every hour to stick to the plan, then ask you at the end of the workday how much you got done. It got postponed because eventually I second-guessed myself into doubting how useful it would be.

</comment><comment><USER33> I recently built an Android app [1] that implements this idea in pretty much the most basic way possible. It just fires a notification at a specified time every day. The notification can link to a URL, which I point to a Google Form for responding to the notification (e.g. "How many pushups have you done today?"). I've been meaning to allow push frequencies other than once-daily, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

[1]: [https://github.com/meshulam/PushQ](https://github.com/meshulam/PushQ)

</comment><comment><USER34> Isn't this—kind of—what iDoneThis and Lift are trying to solve? My problem even with them is if I'm in an unproductive rut I won't bother checking in on them.

</comment><comment><USER35> Brilliant. I feel it, man. In fact, as of two weeks ago _I am building this right now_ (in a small slice of spare time of course).

Thanks for the inspiration for a new aspect of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers! Would love to see how it comes together!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The reason a post like this will get so much action on a site like hacker news is that programming sucks as an activity, and alternative activities are more interesting.

Thinking about programming is fun, finishing a program is fun, solving a little programming puzzle can be fun, but programming in general sucks as an activity.

That's why programmers procrastinate, because programming sucks.

<comment><USER37> Nope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Something that asked me every 30 minutes, what the fuck are you doing with > your life?

Shut up and take my money. Wait, where's the product?

<comment><USER39> Give me your phone number and your credit card number

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I liked this idea so much that I just updated a little tool I built a few months ago [https://github.com/jez0990/inyourface](https://github.com/jez0990/inyourface)

Hopefully it's useful to someone else reading but I have no idea whether it works on other operating systems! (I'm using Ubuntu)

</comment><comment><USER41> Okay, I have a crazy idea. I don't believe the answer lies in a digital solution. Our bodies adapt and can filter out a lot of background noise, our email boxes and phones are just the same. We filter them out. So you need a loud reminder.

What you'll need: 1) 1x Egg Timer. Its need to be mechanical and loud. Crazy loud. An mechanical alarm clock is just as good but it needs to be loud. This has to be on your desk, within your line of sight.

2) 1x Day to Day diary if you travel, or a piece of A3 Card if you work in one location.

3) Golden or silver star stickers (yes folks we are going back to school).

Premise:

1)Pick a task to complete (if its a big task, break it down into workable small chunks).

2)Set the Loud egg timer to fifteen minutes.

3)Go. You have 15 minutes to accomplish this task.

4) When the timer goes off. Stop. Have you accomplished the task? If yes, put a star sticker in your diary or on the piece of card but keep this out of eye sight. Write down the task you accomplished. If you didn't complete the task, no sticker but doesn't matter. Keep going.

5)Start a new task with a completely different subject matter. Set the timer for another 15 minutes and go.

6)Once you have completed this cycle four times. Stop. Set the timer for 15 minutes. You are free to surf any social sites, check your phone, email etc but when the timer goes off. Get back to it.

7) On the Sunday of every week, publish how many stars you got on your blog, in a public post. No need to detail the exact tasks but a summary of what you accomplished, would be good.

8) At the end of the month, write a summary on your blog. Repeat for every quarter. Then at the end of year, write an end of year review. Publish it on your blog.

Goal: To fill the page of your diary or the A3 Card with stars so that at the end of the day. You can see what you have accomplished. However the main thing is, its not the stars you've stuck on (which is just a simple gamification), its keeping your mind occupied.

The publishing your achievements on your blog is for a public record.

Notes: Don't use your phone, computer or digital timer. You'll just block it out. An mechanical timer is best because its loud and in your face.

If you are really serious about the money, donate it to a worthy cause.

<comment><USER42> I can't see that solution working for most people. Maybe some, but it feels too involved and inflexible to become habit. The point about digital solutions is to find a way to make being productive a habit, despite your existing habits. If you've got the discipline to set aside time every day, scheduling around obligations to work/friends/family, with an egg timer and actually get work done, you probably don't need a solution in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I do something like this with a script called "boss.py'.

It regex matches time patterns from a dict and yells out the value by calling the mac 'say' command. I have it configured to yell at me to focus every 5 minutes and to lock me into a pomodoro-like work cycle. I run it on days I can't seem to get going.

<comment><USER44> care to put it on github? I'd love to give it a try (though I don't have too many problems focusing myself. I'm in the middle of a workday, just doing some..shit, HN).

<comment><USER43> Sure! [https://github.com/snoonan77/boss.py](https://github.com/snoonan77/boss.py) \-- Mac specific though easily tweaked if you have a working TTS command line tool floating around.

<comment><USER44> nice, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> You might try committing to 2-3 minutes of whatever task you are putting off. That can help get you into the groove. If you tell yourself "just 2 minutes" you will often find you are in flow and just keep going. But you need to give yourself the mental time frame of just a couple minutes.

</comment><comment><USER46> I use an iphone app called Mind Jogger. It's a good solution in that is does constantly remind me of things I tend to forget about, things that are important in my life, but as others have stated, eventually you begin to ignore them.

</comment><comment><USER47> You know, you could just actually practice concentration exercises.

And to echo what others have said: procrastination is itself a symptom of deeper issues.

</comment><comment><USER48> I like this idea. Were you thinking about a browser add on, or a native desktop program?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure. I was actually imagining it on my phone- it locks my phone and I can't use it until I update whatever's up. Maybe browser add on too, for that same purpose. Maybe something pomodoro-ish but more "involved".

Or maybe a desktop thing, jeez, I have no idea. Sorry I'm not being helpful here. If I knew how to build stuff I suppose I'd try simplistic versions of each and see which felt most natural/optimal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think Astrid fit his bill, but it was bought and is offline now.

</comment><comment><USER50> We made quickrota.com for periodic group based nagging.

</comment><comment><USER51> Problem is that he'll be numb to those prompts after a week (been there, etc.).

Try meditation. It works.</comment>


A ghostly radio station that no one claims to run - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170801-the-ghostly-radio-station-that-no-one-claims-to-run <comment><USER2> For the lazy who were hoping to find an audio clip in the article: you can find some here: [http://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/The_Buzzer_(ZhUOZ_MDZhB_UZB76)](http://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/The_Buzzer_\(ZhUOZ_MDZhB_UZB76\))

<comment><USER3> The WebSDR at [http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901](http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901) (based in the Netherlands) can be used to hear the station as it is broadcast. Set to 4625 kHz, USB.

<comment><USER4> Neato - it's picking up the buzzer station right now!

<comment><USER5> If you're unfamiliar, search for 'number station.' They are kinda neat and still in use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read this article last weekend and after reading it, I put batteries in my shortwave radio to see what was out there. Turns out, there's pretty much nothing.

I couldn't hear anything on 4625 kHz. I let my receiver scan and when it was done I checked out what it detected and found absolutely nothing interesting. The most powerful signals were Christian broadcasts that had a kind of doomsday feeling about them.

It seems like there's a lot of underutilized spectrum.

<comment><USER6> Were you in a good spot? I can hear a lot of stuff with my shortwave receiver and I'm in SLC, Utah. Occasionally, I get to hear pirate transmissions and whatnot.

<comment><USER7> "pirate transmissions" I am surprised. Only a month ago I met a guy who (as an "art project") has actually started to transmit on the shortwave. Bought an old army radio and was now jumping all over the country with the installation and transmitting... well, arty stuff. He claimed he got responses every now and then, now I think he might be right. Is that a thing? I bailed out of the radio waves 30 years ago when I got access to data links...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _the Buzzer operates at a relatively low frequency known as "shortwave". > This means that – compared to local radio, mobile phone and television > signals – fewer waves pass through a single point every second. It also > means they can travel a lot further._

Nice explanation.

<comment><USER9> Is it? If you imagine a fixed point in space, a short wave would mean more waves pass through it every second, not less. Short waves have more energy (they have bounce up and down more quickly) which allows them to travel further.

<comment><USER10> Shortwave, as in short with respect to "mediumwave" transmissions, like regular old broadcast AM radio, or "longwave" which can be used to communicate with submerged submarines.

It's a really old term...

<comment><USER5> IIRC, subs use ELF or ULF. My understanding is that some of the older subs could trail a long wire antenna behind them.

It'd seem to me that the bandwidth for such would be abysmal.

Is this correct? I did take some EE courses but that was like forty years ago. All I have ever done with that is receive. I should probably learn more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're interested in Number Stations the you should check out the Conet Project [1].

[1] [https://www.irdial.com/conet.htm](https://www.irdial.com/conet.htm)

</comment><comment><USER12> What's to stop an adversary from broadcasting the same tone on the same frequency and overpowering the signal in certain areas? It strikes me that if the conjecture (of it being a reserved frequency for war time command signals) is correct, it would be relatively easy to break. Perhaps the weekly random words are some kind of authentication mechanism, but that seems like a long time to have to wait to authenticate the signal.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is very very cool. Feels like something out of Half Life.

</comment><comment><USER14> It sounds from the article they likely do know where the antennas are based?

If not, is it possible to use direction finding to obtain the location of antennas propagating shortwave frequencies?

(I assume this is more difficult due to the use of the ionosphere)

Also is there any remote chance the hardware attached to the aerial (power amps etc) could pick up unwanted RF or other interesting electrical interference and re-broadcast it, which may give some useful information.

</comment><comment><USER15> Who pays the power bill?

<comment><USER16> The ghosts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Neet, I used to listen to machine sent morse code number stations as a kid on my shortwave.

[https://lifehacker.com/5961035/how-to-listen-to-real-spy- bro...](https://lifehacker.com/5961035/how-to-listen-to-real-spy-broadcasts- right-now)

</comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of a numbers station.

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

<comment><USER19> It reminds me of a number station because the article had a long section talking about numbers stations, and speculating on where "the Buzzer" fits in, given the assumed typical uses for those stations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Any speculation that it's as mundane as a test tone for a specific radio device? Is your radio working, is it calibrated properly...

<comment><USER21> As mentioned in the below comment, the author buried the probable lede: most of the time transmission is a placeholder to discourage others from using the band. During exceptional circumstances (as defined by the station's operator), it will transmit coded messages to global/regional operatives. E.g., to coordinate espionage when conventional communications are offline.

<comment><USER22> That constant sound is also useful for the spies. Without that it would be hard to know you have tuned on the right frequency (I'd assume they would use some pretty simple and low tech radios).

<comment><USER23> They would use commercially avaliable radios in the place they live to deter suspicion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> otp22</comment>


A Data Analyst's Blog Is Transforming How New Yorkers See Their City - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/11/28/367046864/a-data-analysts-blog-is-transforming-how-new-yorkers-see-their-city

<comment><USER2> I'm all for open-sourcing public data.

However, the general public has a very crude understanding of causation vs correlation(I certainly struggle with it in areas outside of my expertise). I'm not totally sure how the conclusion of the MTA over-charging people was drawn, but to make that leap from the data is questionable.

I would be impressed if government workers thought that hard about fare denominations. The reality is, Joe Blow government worker pulled the fare deposit amounts out of his ass. This isn't big oil or Wall Street...

Now you've got citizens up in arms about what was probably just standard gov't laziness. Maybe instead of the incredulous spin, the headline I'd like to see: "Blogger working with MTA, helps riders save $50M."

I have to say though, this guy is the man for popularizing no doubt what will become a major trend and push other local gov'ts to open up their data.

TLDR; Teach more stats to the children!

edit: typo

<comment><USER3> The MTA charging tactics are obvious when you just look at the default options they present when people top up their cards:

Here's the TL;DR:

> Three quick options. But wait a minute. One button leaves you with the same > $9.45 card, and gives a remainder of $1.95 after just three uses. The next > one is even more frustrating: you end up with a $19.95 card, leaving a > remainder after 7 uses of $2.45! That's right, the nickel we were talking > about earlier. The last option does not leave you much better off. You'll > get a $40.95 card, which leads to $0.95 on your card after you use 16 rides. > So all three buttons presented leave quite a bit of "insufficient fare" on > the card.

[http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/96700509489/how- memorizing-1...](http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/96700509489/how- memorizing-19-05-can-help-you-outsmart-the)

<comment><USER2> Hmm, very interesting, thanks for the link!

I guess I meant for my point to be somewhat larger, "using public data for good instead of controversy" \- or something like that.

It's been awhile since I've been to NYC, does bus fare run the same as train fare? Would that throw this off at all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You all should be starting something like this in your own town!

<comment><USER5> This only works _because_ of the law that makes such data available.

I'd be interested in doing something like that for San Francisco but the only really significant data offered is crime data: [http://data.sfgov.org](http://data.sfgov.org)

<comment><USER6> Then maybe considering making a similar law for the jurisdiction you are concerned with -- in California (both statewide and at the local level), laws can be enacted by citizen initiative without any involvement by legislators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "The skinny data nerd …"

Looks like a normally proportioned guy to me.

<comment><USER8> Yes. I can confirm that I am not skinny. They did not fact check that part.

<comment><USER9> Maybe skinny data is the opposite of big data? And you are a "skinny data" nerd?</comment></comment></comment>


Audible is becoming more like Amazon Prime Video - <AUTHOR> https://simonowens.substack.com/p/audible-is-becoming-more-like-amazon <comment><USER2> ...in the sense that you have a flat price that gives you access to a library of a certain size, and can pay more for per-title access to items outside of that initial library. Given that Amazon owns Audible, this comparison makes good sense, and is different from how Netflix operates.

<comment><USER3> At 99 titles so far.

I can't complain, cost per hour of entertainment is great.</comment></comment>


Country of 97M kept its coronavirus death toll at zero - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/29/asia/coronavirus-vietnam-intl-hnk/index.html <comment><USER2> I think the question is whether this is actually true. Just like we don't believe the numbers from China, is there reason to believe the numbers from Vietnam?

I have a hard time believing zero deaths, no matter how well they did. Even Taiwan had deaths, not many, but they had deaths. And they did an exceptional job.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate clickbait, so I'll reveal that it's Vietnam.

<comment><USER4> And this is how they achieved it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtulL3oArQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtulL3oArQw)</comment></comment>


Attacks on Google may have been work of amateurs  - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9165518/Update_Attacks_on_Google_may_have_been_work_of_amateurs_

<comment><USER2> The whole story is based on the word of Damballa, Inc. who has a vested interest in pushing this story out to the media. Strike one.

Secondly, Google specifically denies Damballa having any first-hand knowledge of the attacks or the resulting investigation. Strike two.

Third, Damballa's conclusions are completely unfounded. The fact that the attacks were 'unsophisticated' in nature doesn't exonerate the Chinese government. In fact, it seems quite in character. Strike three.

Until Damballa or Google publishes something more conclusive, I think we can safely ignore this story. As it stands, this smells like a grab for media attention by a new security vendor.

<comment><USER3> I had exactly the same feeling reading this. The only thing I'd add is that this is exactly the sort of clumsy FUD that the Chinese government might throw out there to cover their tracks, especially given what a diplomatic cluster- you-know-what this has become for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "...carried out by relatively unsophisticated attackers using outdated botnet tools..."

Sounds exactly like a government launched attack to me. "Amateurs" are more likely than anyone to be using the cutting edge of botnet tools.

</comment><comment> rm-rf I have no idea what the submitters intent was, but I upvoted this and am commenting on it because I think that it's interesting.

If the anti-botnet vendor's assertion is true, that the botnet was ordinary/amateur, then the much of what the media called 'advanced persistent threats' and 'state sponsored' attacks would be incorrect. If major corporations got beaten by amateurs, the state of corporate desktop security is far worse than I imagined.

The assertion originated from a security tool vendor though, so one must assume that they are severely biased toward selling security tools.

<comment><USER5> We don't sell security tools but do deal with this type of stuff. You'd be surprised at the state of corporate desktop security and how easy it is to get hit.

To be honest the line between APT, the more advanced criminal stuff and the run of the mill botnets are more blurred than most vendors would be happy to say, especially when information is bought and sold anyway (so in theory the chinese government wouldn't even need to attack people).

<comment> rm-rf That's interesting. I thought I was the only one with fifty thousand unsecured desktops on my network. It's nice to know I have company.

Not really.</comment></comment></comment>


A Data Point on Every Block (Interview with Adrian Holovaty) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-3860.cfm <comment><USER2> The post is an interesting interview with founder of a startup I'd never heard of called EveryBlock. It's a data aggregation website for Chicago New York and San Fransisco. It takes data from various sources and builds an interactive map on Django and Mapnik. From a UI standpoint, the site is beautiful (crisp and clean). The maps themselves are gorgeous (a la Edward Tufte).

[http://nyc.everyblock.com/locations/neighborhoods/schuylervi...](http://nyc.everyblock.com/locations/neighborhoods/schuylerville- throgs-neck/map/)

Interesting quotes from the article:

"An obvious example of data that's EveryBlocky (EveryBlockish? Um, location- specific?) but not yet on our site is the set of recent home sales -- lots of local relevance there. Of course, we're a news site, not a real-estate site, so it'll be interesting managing people's expectations about what real-estate data and features we offer."

"If we'd launched with awesome reader-contributed content features, that's all that people would be talking about. "EveryBlock: a user-generated news site!" People are very quick to make judgments about a Web site, pigeonholing it into some generic "user-generated" or "Web 2.0" bucket. I wanted to send the message that our focus is on providing a newspaper for your block. The tone was set. Any subsequent features that we add -- whether they involve local voices or not -- are in support of that core goal."

"On the business side, clearly we'll have to figure out how the site is going to sustain itself after our grant money is spent. I have a feeling some solution will make itself apparent at some point over the next year and a half. But even before that, we'll find out whether our idea is something that catches on with our audience -- this whole thing is an experiment, after all! For all we know, EveryBlock might be a novelty that doesn't sustain an audience in the long term. Being honest Chicago people, happily far away from the Silicon Valley BS, we have no delusions of grandeur."

<comment><USER3> Grant money? Now I really have to read the article to see if he explains that.

EDIT - duh, it's in the first few paragraphs. $1.1 million grant from the Knight News Challenge

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been following what' Adrian's doing for about a year now. He's got a great head on his shoulder's and an all around nice guy. And, he's coming at programming from a Journalism background. So, he has a good sense of design, as well as a good sense of what people want.

He's one of the big reasons that I'm going with Django as opposed to Rails.

</comment><comment><USER3> Something else interesting:

"One of the obligations of the Knight grant is to make all the source code available. Does that affect how you think about the site as an asset?"

"The open-source requirement affects both our technology and business decisions. We've engineered the thing so that it can be replicated in any area, with any data. I suppose we would've done that anyway, even without the open-source requirement, because it's just the Right Way to do it, but the open-source requirement certainly influenced us."

Source code forthcoming?</comment>


Facebook should offer solidarity flags for every country – or none at all - <AUTHOR> http://www.thememo.com/2015/11/16/paris-terrorist-attack-french-flag-facebook-france-is/ <comment><USER2> I don't think facebook came up with this initiative. Rather people were doing it en masse and facebook integrated it into their platform, for the time being.

But facebook is just following the trend here, blaming them because there aren't enough sympathy buttons is extremely short sighted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course. Just like ALL lives matter, let's take focus off the actual event and talk about how other people are feeling.

Let it be and start a discussion on the side about how things can be improved, instead of shitting on people who are suffering.

</comment><comment><USER4> people have been dying in middle east for many years, especially in Palestine, but i've never seen such unified reaction from all over the world. are lives in france more valuable? is terror more awful in europe?

<comment><USER5> > people have been dying in middle east for many years, especially in > Palestine

Exactly because of that. Sadly, terror in the middle east is for the moment, a given, since the seventies or so.</comment></comment>


Looking for software developer position – Any technology - <AUTHOR> I have a masters degree in computer science and 6 years of experience. I have never missed a deadline and always write great code. I recently lost my job because of some company politics. I raised my voice that we could do more and that i was willing to do anything to delivery a great product at the startup i worked at. I am on h1b! and will require a transfer. Please email me at email@example.com or call me 513.888.1500. My linkedin is https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaibhavdeoda <comment><USER2> In case this post is flagged ...

Please see the FAQ regarding job posts: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

For the latest post, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=whoishiring)

Perhaps you can find something interesting there or post in the correct thread.</comment>


SAP Labs working on Implementing a Ruby VM on SAP - <AUTHOR> https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/13661 <comment><USER2> I've worked with people who swear by that archaic crap they are using for hacking SAP now. They should by falling on their knees with joyful tears for this amazing boon.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ruby and ABAP. That is totally crazy Ruby Enterprise Edition :)</comment>


Show HN: Hand Drawn Icons V.2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.handdrawnicons.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure the wooden background works well to present this, why not a paper-like texture since they are hand-drawn?

<comment><USER3> I agree on the background needing a change. But I think a hand drawn icon needs a very geometric background to contrast the icon's organic drawing.</comment></comment>


WPA2 wireless security cracked - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2014-03-wpa2-wireless.html

<comment><USER2> What is new about this?

That forced deauth / reconnection and handshake capture has been in tutorials all over the web for years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone have the full text of the paper?</comment>


Show HN:  Needed Ideas for things to build, so I built this - <AUTHOR> http://www.aswhoiwant.com <comment><USER2> I like it. To limit spam, use twitter for auth and connect ideas to twitter profiles, then let people flag other people as spam - and hellban their account.

If you don't want auth, you can still just let people flag spam and hellban machines spitting out spam.

Edit: You can also use basic ratelimiting - maybe only allow 1 post per 10 seconds.

<comment><USER3> Just rate limit (one word, two words?) to 1 per 30 (10 seems not enough, dunno) seconds and not allow more than 3 of the same strings repeated sequentially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried

        As a SQL injection, I want a '); DROP TABLE Statements;--

And got a 500 error... you might want to look into sanitizing the data

<comment><USER5> Wait you mean you really don't want to drop a table? Liar!!! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Brilliant! I've always had an idea in the back of my mind for a website that allows people to tell you "what they want". I like how you have the "as a" part of it, so rather than someone saying "I want this", they say "as a X, I want this". I think it prompts people to be more concise and clear about what they want.

But there are some obvious things to address... \- how to deal with malicious/unserious users \- how to organize the information in such a way that it's easy for entrepreneurs and "makers" to navigate to problems they'd like to solve \- make it easy for people to use this on the spur of the moment. people are best at telling you what they want on the spur of the moment, rather than having them think back to what there problems were

Some ideas... \- maybe you could do some type of language processing to keep track of how many times someone said "I want X". (you can't literally match the characters because there are multiple ways of saying "I want X") \- making it easy to use on the spur of the moment probably means making a good mobile version of this. (I don't have a smartphone, so I don't know if you did already) \- I'm not sure how this would be done, but I've always had the idea of having some sort of browser add-on where you have a keyboard shortcut for an "idea bar", so you could just press cmd+i, type in your idea/problem, and it'd be sent to a database/site like aswhoiwant.com. you could also keep track of things like what site the idea is coming from, maybe some stuff about the user etc. this might lead to more serious use. EDIT: I like what _lex1 said about spam \- I've thought about it a little, and to reduce spam and increase seriousness, you'd probably have to make it less convenient. maybe don't show people the streaming list of posts. but it'd be good to show people a list of their posts along with how many upvotes they got. maybe there should be a list of posts that you could upvote, updated every hour or so. maybe one list for popular posts(with most upvotes for day/month/year), and another for new ones.

</comment><comment><USER7> As much as it saddens me to say this, I think this needs a CAPTCHA to keep the "hackers" from spamming it to oblivion. Cool idea, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> its starting to seem that way.. thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER8> don't captcha just rate limit by ip

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everyone's talking about auth to limit spam, but I think a more interesting approach is to let people click to flag spam, then train up a little naive Bayes classifier.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool idea. Seems pretty similar to <http://www.tweetspiration.com/>. After putting a decent spam-filter on this, maybe there's a way to introduce crowd- supported mechanics (ala upvotes, comments, relevant mentions/hashtags)?

<comment><AUTHOR> i like the comments idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> you should add an algorithm to filter out the spam and make an app out of this. you could change the theme every day, e.g. tomorrow it could be "if I had [..] I would [..]", etc.

can totally see this taking off

</comment><comment><USER12> Did you release this anywhere else? I'd be _appalled_ to learn all that foul language is coming from HN.

EDIT: Very sad. Nothing more to say.

<comment><AUTHOR> only on hacker news :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I tried testing some XSS stuff and got 500 errors, you might want to make sure you are catching encoded < > stuff

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting to see the amount of different inputs that people are trying. Swastikas and attempts to DROP TABLE aplenty.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is it odd that I find the exercise to prevent the spam far more interesting than the product itself (not a criticism)? No traditional captchas, no oauth tie-ins... just good-old-fashion machine learning, graph analysis, hellbanning, negative captchas, etc

<comment><USER16> Yeah, looks like a good technique for programmers to gain some experience : build a hacking magnet and defend it

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess that it isn't something you intended, but you've build great entertainment site. As your user I want you to archive these pearls of humour and let me upvote'em. Time to pivot ;)

</comment><comment><USER18> As a spam-filter to mail I want a spam-filter to aswhoiwant ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> If you need ideas for things to build, you can look at <http://firespotting.com> \- Hacker News for Ideas.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is pretty fun, I just posted a random want, I dont know where this is going but it seems promising.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not sure this is being used the way you expected / planned, but it's still pretty cool. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> haha thanks! I can't say I didnt expect some "porn star" style requests

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've just been watching it for about 5 minutes, pretty entertaining actually.

</comment><comment><USER23> My wants are not being acknowledged. I want to see my wants on the list.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, seems like the spammers are blocking some requests from hitting the Pusher api

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Idea: if the "as a"-field starts with a vowel, change the "a" to "an".

</comment><comment><USER25> You should pivot. This is more useful as a joke generator.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm the 555 guy. Let's talk about semantic communication.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great idea really! Just the spam is a problem...

</comment><comment><USER28> watching this really shows you what some of the lurkers on HN are like. I'm glad they tend to keep quiet on HN itself.

</comment><comment><USER29> phew, someone just automated it and is spamming you hard. this is interesting to watch, thanks :P

</comment><comment><USER30> what did you use to build this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ruby on Rails, with the Sync Gem by Chris McCord and Pusher

<comment><USER31> Thanks for the mention! I love seeing examples of what people are building out there. Some crafty visitor was spamming the list with scripted entries and the updates were buttery smooth :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Methinks it needs a captcha...

</comment><comment><USER33> boy there was a lot of talk about bananas when i took a look.

</comment><comment><USER34> sounds like tailors want wang. Get on it, YC.

</comment><comment><USER35> can you limit the posts?

</comment><comment><USER36> this is really cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! now if only i can prevent the spam...

<comment><USER37> Why not just use a simple csrf stored in a session? You already have an "authenticiy_token" in the request data, why not use it, or add another value for csrf?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for software to reimburse volunteers for a nonprofit - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for an app/platform to reimburse volunteers for a nonprofit. I've looked at Square Cash, Paypal, Venmo, etc., but they all seem to limit transactions on a monthly basis and are geared mainly for personal use. Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> They're not volunteers if you're paying them, and you'll want to use some kind of bookkeeping software in conjunction with the payments. You probably need to bite the bullet and use a payroll company.

<comment><AUTHOR> They aren't being paid. They are being reimbursed for purchasing items.

<comment><USER2> PayPal's P2P transfers are free and have a high limit. Zelle might also work for you.

I've done a lot of work in payments and there just isn't a great, no-limit solution for consumers. It's because they want to charge the higher-volume users to make up fot the free users.</comment></comment></comment>


Downgrade from Google+ - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/downgrade/ <comment><USER2> I think there should be more explanation as to what this process will actually do to your Google account. A large number of people rely on Google for quite a number of critical services, and removing part of their account could have any number of unknown side effects.</comment>


The Year the Internet Thought I Was MacKenzie Bezos - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/internet-thought-i-was-mackenzie-bezos/ <comment><USER2> The snippets feature has always seemed somewhat shady to me -- in essence, it steals pageviews from the websites that did the hard work of sourcing the information.

<comment><USER3> From my (probably naive) point of view this does seem like a useful feature for users. If you can get an accurate answer for your query without clicking on a link or having to grep the linked page for the answer that's a win in my book and a time save for users. I guess an issue arises when the snippet is _not_ correct. But in my personal experience, the snippets are usually pretty helpful/accurate

<comment><USER4> Snippets are indeed a useful feature to have, but Google should share some of the ad revenue it generates with the publishers of the featured content snippets.

<comment><USER5> They do indeed generate revenue for the publishers, because a fraction of the users actually click through into the article. Without the snippet promoting it, the article would see much fewer traffic from Google.

<comment><USER6> The snippet is almost always generated from the first search result, which garners the lion's share of the clicks. Now, many find what they were looking for in the snippet and forego the click.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fact that Google doesn't immediately change bad data for queries is extremely scary to me. Misinformation from a query should be a civil offense, similar to libel or slander. They are effectively causing disruption in lives these days and I'm perfectly okay with Google being sued directly for spreading misinformation. If their algorithm doesn't work, it shouldn't be a public, they can't just say "nope sorry that's just how it works".

<comment><USER8> The information in the snippet was correct.

<comment><USER9> OP's point stands though, you can search "google snippet fail" for all kinds of misinformation this feature spreads, from harmless but funny mistakes, to conspiracy theories, to dangerous/unsafe advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "In situations where people are searching for something like a phone number > that is not readily available online, our systems are understanding these > pages (that include those exact keywords plus a phone number) to be the best > matches available, even if the phone number is not the correct number for > that entity," Lara Levin, a spokesperson for Google, said in an email.

This is completely depressing. I would really like to know what thought process led to something like this being implemented. Why would anyone even think that attaching a wrong phone number and email to anyone and broadcasting that on the top of Google Search is a wise idea?

<comment><USER11> The thought process probably was 'if people just want to find the number for X, we should show it on the search page'... The problem being that some phone numbers aren't readily available, but people still want them.

It would seem like something they could figure out, but I'm guessing there's a lot of 'contact us' pages that have the phone number and rank well for the keyword, but don't have the keyword near the phone number.

They _should_ probably have a 'this isn't correct' link in the snippet or something to trigger review of it, but Google is alergic to humans in the loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> An equally disturbing part about the article to me is the number of people who are willing to email a perfect stranger to beg for money or try to start a romantic relationship.

</comment><comment><USER13> You could list the contact info on a different page and just link to it "to contact this author, click here"

<comment><USER8> Or just move it a few more sentences away from MacKenzies name, or possibly add some more HTML tag gunk to separate it, or out then author's name near the phone number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Last year I had the opportunity to work with some Xooglers. According to their CVs an Linkedin they were with Google for a year or two. All with job titles that trim down to project managers. All very junior.

Still, considering that Google only hires the best of the best I expected to work with ambitious, clever people.

They were the worst. The showed me graphs, fancy presentations and project plans in some saas tools (lots of them).

I soon realized that they did not have a clue what they were doing. Neither could they answer "who does what when" nor even show defined measurable goals for the projects they were managing. And they were not able to make any decisions at all.

If they are an example of Googles middle (project) management it's quite clear why Google does not progress anymore in 2020 and lots of their products rot away on an at best mediocre level.

In my point of view Google needs a major crisis (like Microsoft under the late Balmer) before it becomes the innovationleader again - which it once has been.

<comment><USER15> I'm not entirely certain that your anecdata about ex-Google project managers (who only lasted a year there) has much bearing on this article.

<comment><USER14> It's anecdotal. The question behind it is: "How does such obvious broken features like 'featured snippets for phone number searches' make it into production?"

Obviously there are working lots of very clever people at Google, so why is Google putting out so much subpar products and features?

Weak middle management is my explanation, there might be others.

<comment><USER16> Junior project managers aren't "middle management", they're probably not people managers at all.

<comment><USER14> weak project management then.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Power of One Push-Up - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/06/push-ups-body-weight-bmi/592834/ <comment><USER2> These measures may be good indicators, until people optimize for them specifically. It reminds me of algorithm questions in tech interviews. They may have been effective at finding the right candidate before it became common knowledge to study algorithms. Measures like walking speed, grip strength, or pushup speed may only be good health indicators, until people begin to optimize for those measures specifically.

<comment><USER3> Really optimize for them? Doing pushups or increasing grip strengths are not things that you can improve in isolation. To get to even 20 pushups, you can't be obsese, you need enough strength in your shoulders, the core has to be strong. Similarly, grip strength, if you've just let yourself go, there is no chance you have any strength left in your forearms.

<comment><USER4> > To get to even 20 pushups, you can't be obsese

That's ridiculous - I know tons of 'obese' people who can do a hundred pushups in one go.

<comment><USER5> What sort of form are these people maintaining? with proper form, and slow and controlled motion I would be very surprised if more than 1 in 1000-10,000 people could do hundred pushups in one set.

I went through the [http://www.hundredpushups.com/](http://www.hundredpushups.com/) program when I was at peak fitness (on multiple sports teams) and it tooks everything out of me over 10 weeks to hit the hundred push up in one set milestone.

<comment><USER4> Fifty push-ups in one go with excellent form is the base level of fitness in the British Army (probably similar in most other armies). A hundred in one go is a reasonable for many people to reach. Many very fit people count as obese, especially those with the muscles to do push-ups. The Serjeant Major of the British Army said in a TV interview that he was 'obese'.

<comment><USER5> The percentile graph of max number of pushups is not a linear function. Its entirely possible for a large section of population to reach 50, the same way its possible for a large section of the population to hit the 20 second 100 m, but for almost no one to hit the 10 second 100 m.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After reading that those who could do at least 40 pushups without stopping [0] had a 96% lower risk of heart disease, I started doing pushups each day until I could do 40. I'm surprised by how much better I feel.

[0] [https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart- health.h...](https://www.livescience.com/64789-pushups-men-heart-health.html)

<comment><USER7> How long did it take you to get to 40 consecutive pushups and what method did you use to get there?

<comment><USER8> Not the OP, but the method that worked for me when I was training for the military years ago was to (situation permitting) drop down and do five push ups every half hour for most of the day. Do that for a week, then the next week add five more. In a few weeks you're doing 20-30 push ups every half hour and the maximum you become capable of doing if you have to take a fitness test goes through the roof.

<comment><USER9> This technique is called "grease the groove" and it's useful anytime you've plateaued on reps for an exercise.

Edit: also focus on your form!

<comment><USER10> Has anyone tried it? I believe you want to try for 50% of maximum.

The technique is discussed here for pushups.

[http://www.100pushups.com/greasing-the- groove/](http://www.100pushups.com/greasing-the-groove/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> BMI is highly useful. That it doesn't work for Dwayne Johnson is merely an attempt to reject the whole of it because known edge cases don't work. We know where it doesn't work: extreme heights and serious athletes who are enough standard deviations of muscle mass outside the norm. For that, we can do body fat %. But body fat% is harder to measure, so we've got a quick yardstick: It is BMI.

BMI is rejected because it tells people they're obese and since its unhealthy, they need to change themselves. Noone likes hearing that. The truth hurts.

You'll see these common rejections: 1\. Bodyfat loss is hard, so its claimed as not a good measure. 2\. BMI has outliers so _mine_ being bad doesn't count. 3\. Because not being obese does not provide data about health, they attempt to deny obesity as a poor health marker. This is almost always "you can't tell a skinny person is unhealthy" retort as an excuse to reject obesity as unhealthy.

They will not escape the evidence-based scientific truth that obesity is unhealthy.

<comment><USER12> I'm 5'11 and 185. I'm in the overweight section of BMI, yet have under 10% bodyfat. I'm definitely not an elite athlete. I used to play hockey at a junior level, but now just bike to and from work. Every thing during my physical is in a good to great range. No issues what so ever. Yet BMI says I'm overweight. To me that's an issue with the index.

<comment><USER13> To get those #s you would need to have an extreme diet/exercise regime. 185 at 5'11 is either a lot of extra fat or muscle. If you are Sub 10% you definitely have a super defined 8 pack and some of that weird muscle striation body builders get. Would be very surprised if you achieved that by just biking to work.

<comment><USER12> I have large legs (around) from all the skating growing up. Don't have a defined 8 pack, never really had a strong core, it's mostly legs.

<comment><USER13> To Quote Mens Health:

"The 7% guy is definitely following a very strict regimen," he explains. He's probably eliminating certain macronutrients, like being Paleo with no carbs, and is definitely paying very close attention to what he eats.

Meanwhile the 10 to 12% guy is in constant flux—some weeks he's at 9 percent, others he's at 12%. "He might have a cheat meal—splurging on wings instead of steamed asparagus when out with the guys—but not necessarily a cheat day," McCall says.

Someone at 15% is having a cheat day. "He's paying attention and making certain decisions—no fried foods, burger without the bun, no accidental break room pastries. But he's not uber health conscious," he adds."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This entire article (and most like it) can be summed up by one of its very own sentences:

        Essentially, these quick metrics serve as surrogates that
        correlate with all kinds of factors that determine a
        person's overall health—which can otherwise be totally
        impractical, invasive, and expensive to measure directly.

</comment><comment><USER15> anecdote on pushups:

A group of friends and I just started a challenge to do 10K pushups in 1 year.

Six months ago, I tried doing a 100 pushups in 1 hour. Couldn't do it. Got spaghetti arms, couldn't move them the next day.

After doing this challenge for 3 weeks, I can do 60/minute and can easily top 150 in one hour, without breaking a sweat. The 10K goal seems too easy now, so setting we've set our sights on 50K for the year. It's been purely about consistency and a smidgen of testing our limits every once in a while. There's no schedule or set limit each day -- just as many as possible given your day.

Oh and for fun I added a Twilio/Flask app so we can text in our push-ups to a Google spreadsheet, which sends out a daily email (through Apps Script) with a few fun analytics (average, estimated end date etc.).

</comment><comment><USER16> In the cited study, a significant difference between highest pushup group and lowest pushup group is a mean age of 35 and 48 years, respectively. It is well known that age is the strongest predictor of cardiovascular events.

First chart under 'figures / tables' [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2724778)

</comment><comment><USER17> > Its inadequacy is famously evident in examples such as the human muscle- > mound Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson qualifying as obese.

It's called an outlier.

<comment><USER18> An outlier on a meaningless metric is a meaningless data point.

<comment><USER19> To expand on this, BMI was created as a population level comparison in the early 1800's, which it does a decent job at. It was not designed as something to look at a single individual with, let alone diagnose a health condition.

<comment><USER20> But the way it is used to categorise people in a blanket way in many area's is one of concern however.

I say this as somebody who is barrel chested, short legs (28 inside leg in inches) and large upper torso for somebody who is 6 feet 1 inch high and size 13 shoes (UK size, so size 14 in America). I always fall foul of many norm's in society. Always failed a BMI, even when you could count my ribs. Yet come across so many medical professionals who use it as gospel that it's almost religious with them. Same with calori intakes.

But then society often loves to define normal and project that. Be that imposing lark hour mentality upon night owls and leverage disdain upon them, or just calling somebody obese because of some legacy data metric that does not take into account that nobody is perfectly normal. Equally ignores that muscle is heavier than fat, just picks an arbitrary weight based upon gender and height and fills in all the blanks with norm values.

BMI as a metric needs improving - anybody aware of more refined and granular methods that can or are being used?

<comment><USER19> Sorry if I was unclear, I agree that using BMI to categorize people is a mistake. I think for it's original purpose of comparing two populations it has some value. In terms of a better model Body Fat Percentage is pretty easy to take now, at my last physical I just had to hold a little electronic device for around 10 seconds and it gave the result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Yes, how hard you can squeeze a grip meter. This was a better predictor of mortality than blood pressure or overall physical activity. A prior study found that grip strength among people in their 80s predicted the likelihood of making it past 100. Even more impressive, grip strength had good predictive ability in a study among 18-year-olds in the Swedish military on cardiovascular death 25 years later."

</comment><comment><USER21> There'll never be another push up as famous as Jack Palance's one-arm routine during the Oscars.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g426J4Uh2m4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g426J4Uh2m4)

</comment><comment><USER22> > _the number of Americans who can do a single push-up is likely only about 20 > or 30 percent_

Wow, I wonder how that percentage has changed over the lifetime of the nation, as well as the figure globally over time.

</comment><comment><USER20> Push-ups was one area of excercise in which I would always struggle - even at a time when I was a top competitive swimmer and also area Kendo, lots of cicling, running. I was fit. But pushups always a struggle.

Solution - do pushups at an angle, so use a chair pushup from that (a comfy sofar arm rests even better and perhaps safer as well). This does mean you are using less effort, but you are still working those muscles and will be able to gradually lower the angle. Bigger the angle, less effort (yay science). So even those with extremely weak muscles involved in a pushup, can do them without struggling and exerting themselves as well as possible injury trying the usual style push ups.

TL;DR Push Ups involve muscles that you may not use in other sports and activities. Push Ups at an angle can aid those with weak muscles who struggle to do a normal pushup and aid them in building the muscles up to the level that will enable them to do a normal pushup.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a big fan of "minimum effective dose" when it comes to working out but doing only __one __pushup is skimping...

<comment><USER24> I don't think it's advocating for doing a single pushup. Seems to be about the idea of simple physical tests (walking speed, number of pushups in a minute, grip strength) being better predictors of health than BMI.

<comment><USER25> Right, and presumably are useless once people try to game them. 'Useless' might be too strong a term, but you can't e.g. decrease your mortality by training your grip strength.

<comment><USER26> So build a battery of tests and aggregate them into a 'score' of health. You can't optimize each aspect to get the best score without actually improving your overall health.

<comment><USER25> But the point isn't that e.g. walking fast is bad for your health, it's that when it isn't being explicitly trained for, it is a marker of health. Once you explicitly train it, then it stops being that marker, _even though it may still have positive effects on your health_.

What we need, in order to understand these proxies, is an understanding of the mechanism by which they work. Take this example: Suppose I am a smoker. I notice that I walk very slowly because I have bad cardio vascular health. I hear in the paper that walking slowing is a marker for death. So I train walking fast. I get up to 'elite non-athlete'. Even though I'm still smoking. In this case, even though I've successfully improved my health, as an indicator, my walking speed will over-predict my health.

For grip strength it's even easier, since it seems very unlikely that actually have a strong grip is realistically correlated with anything health related. Rather, have significant untrained strength is probably _very_ well correlated with a host of genetic, enviromental, and hormonal factors that would likely be strong predictors of health.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Summer Camp for the Ultra-Wealthy Teaches Kids How to Stay Rich - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-30/at-rich-kid-summer-camp-big-banks-try-to-hook-heirs-for-a-lifetime <comment><USER2> Better idea: A camp where they have to struggle as the working poor for two months and get shit on by cops, bureaucrats, banks and angry customers.

<comment><USER3> You can't mimic being poor. Enduring whatever isn't that hard when you know it's just a temporary game. At the very least, you don't get the psychological effect.

Despite that, it would still be useful.

<comment><USER4> That's right, but I doubt the "would still be useful part."

I'm not sure there's anything more harmful to society than wealthy folk who _think_ they were poor once, but were not.

Short-lived poverty feels like a game to me. It's entirely motivational. The psychological toll doesn't set in until repeated let-downs begin sinking in, and opportunities start evaporating. It begins undermining every other aspect of well-being and it really seems like somebody is playing a trick on you. This is why poor people prefer to be surrounded by other poor people. It helps to be reminded you're not alone, which is what truly puts a person over the edge..

<comment><USER2> > ... poor people prefer to be surrounded by other poor people...

I'd challenge that assertion. I think people like to be around friends, and society tends to put people in a position where the only friends they can have are in the same economic strata.

<comment><USER5> If people who feel deprived are frequently reminded of their relative deprivation, they will tend to dislike it. If your friends all talk about their vacations in Bali and $300 dinners, most people will find themselves feeling at least a little inadequate no matter how wonderful, kind, loving, and compassionate those friends are.

The same thing will happen even via more subtle means as people give moderate- cost gifts or wearing clothing that is visibly more expensive.

You're 100% correct. People like to be around friends. It's perhaps worth considering that there might possibly be more to it than just that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love it. The super rich are so drastically removed in their experiences from the 99 percent of the population from birth how can they ever have empathy or understanding for the rest of humanity?

Combine that with the massive power and political influence that comes with money and the chances are they're not looking out for the best interests of society as a whole and humanity ends up having revolution after revolution...nothing changes with our primitive human monkey brains.

</comment><comment><USER7> Having multigenerational wealth is actually very uncommon and hard to do. I wish them luck.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems like a brilliant marketing strategy from UBS. And it's a great way for wealthy youths to make friends and learn about responsibly managing and preserving wealth.

</comment><comment><USER9> WTF is going on with that URL? I get and endless loop of what appear to be redirects.

P.S. Update: It appears to be something in my browser configuration, perhaps a bad extension update.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Average age of 27" ???

This is hardly the summer camp the title would lead you to believe.

</comment><comment><USER11> Summer camp for the poor teaches the glory of revolution against inherited wealth. /s

This headline is a microcosm of what's wrong in America today.</comment>


Ask HN: Whats the easiest way to build a Twitter bot nowadays? - <AUTHOR> I need to create a simple twitter bot that can take the tweets listed in say a CSV text file, and then tweet those tweets on a schedule.
Rather than build it myself, I expect that there has to be some sort of utility or a website or a template that I could use to get started?
This is for a personal itch I need to scratch so duct taping is totally ok <comment><USER2> I do exactly this. I use oysttyer[0] to do the tweeting, and I wrote a bash script to:

      * read a line from a file;
      * tweet that line;
      * rotate the line to the bottom.

Then I run that script from a cron job.

The magic is in oysttyer. It is a little tricky getting it to run automatically because it requires the tweet text as a command line parameter, and can't read it from a file or stdin. Even so, all pretty trivial, really, depending on your existing skill set. You need skills to:

      * read the line and feed it to oysttyer;
      * rotate the top line to the bottom;
      * set up cron scheduling.

[0] [https://github.com/oysttyer/oysttyer](https://github.com/oysttyer/oysttyer)

</comment><comment><USER3> Posting a tweet picked from a file at random: [http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/03/08/posting-a-tweet- picked-...](http://johnbokma.com/blog/2019/03/08/posting-a-tweet-picked-from- a-file-at-random.html)</comment>


Trade advisor Navarro says no plans for investment restrictions on China - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/navarro-no-plans-to-impose-investment-restrictions-on-china-and-other.html <comment><AUTHOR> Can anyone speak to the significance of Chinese ($) investment in US tech? Would restrictions really be that big a deal, or is should they be more so understood as political posturing and playing to a base?

Thanks.</comment>


Social Network Movie Advertising on Facebook and MySpace? - <AUTHOR> http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2010/10/01/the-social-network-movies-advertising-on-facebook-with-myspace/

<comment><USER2> A major studio's marketing arm doesn't want to limit their audience engagement. Shocking!

Moreover, I haven't seen the film, but from what I gather, it's not a cheerleading session for Facebook. So why would the author expect marketing—even from a purely idealistic perspective—to build up some sort of mutually masturbatory "Hey Facebook, Facebook is awesome! Am I right?"</comment>


AMD dismisses numerous open source developers   - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/AMD-dismisses-numerous-open-source-developers-1745131.html

<comment><USER2> People may also want to check out the official response from AMD over at the Register. Link: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/amd_closes_german_os...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/amd_closes_german_osrc_lab/)

Part of the response: " We will continue to support the Linux kernel, and the software development work happening at the OSRC is being consolidated and will be performed at other AMD locations."

<comment><USER3> This still seems incredibly vague, though.

The radeon driver is part of the kernel, as well... And how exactly they will "consolidate and perform" the cpu-related work in other locations without the people who have been working on it is a bit of a mystery to me.

I don't understand how this is supposed to work. ARM or x86, if they want servers, they will need good Linux support. Who's going to provide that is everyone's guess...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As somebody who recently sent back a notebook because Linux driver support for Radeon is abysmal and now is a happy Intel graphics user, this doesn't surprise me at all. More power to Intel.

<comment><USER5> The same is true for me, I will continue to buy Intel CPUs and motherboards, for both desktop and mobile, until someone else takes open source graphics drivers as seriously as they do.

<comment><USER4> or even drivers in generals - I'd still prefer closed but working NVIDIA drivers over the crap that ATI puts out

<comment><USER6> This has been a major pain point for the Linux community since the Radeon days. It's such a shame, because ATI had a huge opportunity to steal that market from nVidia back then. Instead, maximizing value away from users and toward shareholders left us with a video-diminished Linux community.

<comment><USER7> Given how many thousands of dollars we steered to Intel because of it, I'm not sure this maximized shareholder value either. Few things businesses do are actually big-picture decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately it seems recovery of AMD now depends on very smart people that are not there anymore

Looks like they gave up after settling with Intel (and some years of bad management)

To be fair Intel also abandoned their idiotic race for MHz which fixed things for them.

Maybe their investment in ARM servers may be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people.

<comment><USER9> "Every computer at a store today is fast enough for 99% of people."

Nope. Shitty laptops with 5400 rpm old hdds, 2 GB of ram and old turion/core CPUs will NEVER be "fast enough".

<comment><USER8> It is a good machine for typing school papers and checking Facebook and Youtube

You're overestimating what most people do with their computers

<comment><USER10> I actually have exactly that setup (shitty Gateway with Turion and 5400 rpm hdd, dirt cheap).

It works well enough for what I need it to do - surf the web, Office, Facebook, Youtube, Plants vs Zombies, movies, - heck it has an HDMI port. And I've been able to do some light programming on it without trouble.

Only thing it really doesn't do is non-casual games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "OSRC staff primarily worked to develop the Linux support for AMD's server processor"

It's almost like they want to fail. Do they expect their hardware to run Windows Server or something? Thankfully, the linux developers they're letting go won't have trouble finding jobs.

AMD stocks are unsurprisingly going down (as they have been doing for a while now). See <https://www.google.ca/finance?q=NYSE:AMD></comment>