What's Deoxyribonucleotide in Sign Language? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-49057331 <comment><USER2> I would wonder, given that many scientific words--especially in chemistry--are a jumble of root plus prefixes and suffixes (de-oxy-ribo-nucleo-tide), and there are a LOT of these chemistry words, would it be productive to treat the signs the same way. So instead of a single sign for deoxyribonucleotide, you break it into a sort of compound sign that is built up from similar meaning sub parts? I know very little about ASL or BSL to know how much this sort of word construction already happens.

<comment><USER3> I am Deaf myself and my Signed Language (Swiss German Sign Language) is special, so I don't know whether my experience is generalizable.

It is very possible to agree upon a language with your interpreters and colleagues who are also Deaf. So you create something not official but what works for you and your situation.

This approach often works fine for me: try to convey the meaning into movement and dynamics. Signed Languages are very powerful and are conceptually more capable to express something at its core instead giving it a name. Add to this "core" sign a few modifiers like fingerspell the first or the first few letters, and what works very well in Swiss German Sign Language, mouthing, i. e. move the mouth as if you would verbalize but don't make a sound. These mouthings are linguistically known as "mouth pictures". Exactly as loan words, and often the loaned words are mangled horribly but they are just an expedient for communication.

<comment><USER4> I studied American Sign Language for 3 years in University (more of a drinking club with credits than anything else). We were taught that a lot of signed language is like this- that signs can be invented as needed and agreed upon and that's just a normal part of what makes Signed languages cool.

As a result, it was expected that if we traveled a few hundred km in any direction, the local signs might be dramatically different than the ones we're used to, and so we'd better learn to interpret context and ask what specific words meant.

<comment><USER5> This is a feature of all natural languages, not just signed ones. We commonly refer to these words or phrase as idioms, slang, jargon, etc.

<comment><USER3> Signed Languages are different. It's hard for people who don't talk a Signed Language to understand because of the Blub Paradox.

The word "Blub Paradox" in itself is a good example of what Deaf people do if they encounter concepts they need to communicate. They make up words. Signed Languages are very productive in making up words.

So it is not just an idiom, slang or jargon, it is more than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a problem in just about every language that isn't English. Since the language of science is English, either you borrow the English word (which interestingly is likely borrowed from Latin) or you know a local word that.

But at some stage your local vocabulary runs out, and you wonder whether you should just use English for everything in that domain to make it consistent.

I've run into this problem with a load of languages, I just don't know the right word for things like DNA or vector calculus, or it sounds wrong.

<comment><USER7> How do you "borrow" spoken words into sign language? You can't, really -- which is why he has to invent hand gestures.

<comment><USER8> I suppose the equivalent is (what I now know is called) finger spelling: an unnatural 'sounding' word that breaks the flow, but it's [spelling is] taken from a language where it already exists.

<comment><USER7> See how well spelling out words rather than pronouncing them works for you in conversation. This really _is_ a unique problem to adopting spoken words into a non-vocal language.

<comment><USER3> Deaf myself: usually we start with fingerspelling. If we discover it being cumbersome we invent something. Borrowing is different but not impossible.

<comment><USER9> Not to mention the new signs can involve the hand shapes from, say, the first letter of the borrowed English word. Say the word starts with a D, and everybody recognises the fingerspelt word just from the D alone (in context), then the new sign might use the hand shape for D but give it a specific action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am Deaf myself and I studied Bachelor of Law at the Swiss Distance Learning University ([https://distanceuniversity.ch/](https://distanceuniversity.ch/)). For the mandatory attendances (six Saturdays a year in Fribourg) I hired two Signed Language interpreters.

Ask me anything.

<comment><USER10> Why did you capitalize "Deaf"?

<comment><USER3> Because there is a difference between "deaf" and "Deaf".

The capitalized word is meant to highlight the cultural and social parts of living in a community with other Deaf people. You also would not write American in the lower case.

Being "deaf" is about the handicap, about the loss of hearing and other problems.

Being "Deaf" is about being a member of a community, about the keen visual sense, about communicating in a Signed Language, and so on.

<comment><USER11> So there are Geeks, Nerds, Programmers now too?

Why not capitalize every Noun like in German

<comment><USER12> A question was asked, a response was given. Why do you need to be snarky with the GP?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On this side of the pond, the University of Washington has a large and growing ASL STEM dictionary: [https://aslstem.cs.washington.edu/](https://aslstem.cs.washington.edu/)

I don't know how widely accepted these signs are and it has a serious problem with spambots, but it was useful when I was tutoring a Deaf friend in programming.

</comment><comment><USER14> Does the article (well, the video) actually demonstrate the new sign for deoxyribonucleotide or DNA or so? I didn't catch it (not that I understand sign language).

<comment><USER15> "Stem Cell" at 1:55 in the video

<comment><USER3> Yes this is a beautiful word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This dude is awesome. Props to him for tackling a challenging situation head on. I wish for him the best!

</comment><comment><USER17> Why even use sign language, when you could just do real-time speech to text, and just _read_ what is being said? Is that actually less efficient than signing?

Edit: So rather than being entirely uneducated on this topic, I'm googling it. There seems to be some disagreement between which is better, and it also appears to be a somewhat sensitive topic (according to non-deaf people who are writing articles about deaf people on the internet. So take that for what its worth)

<comment><USER18> I'm not deaf, I only studied ASL in HS and it included some useful lessons on Capital-D Deaf Culture. So I'm not much more of an expert on the subject by any means, but I love language studies.

Efficiency is only one spectrum in play. Sign languages are languages distinct and evolutionarily unique from spoken languages. Early attempts such as "Signed English" attempted to minimize the distinction between the spoken language and signed language, but living languages evolve to fit their medium, and sign languages evolved some truly unique grammars and even their own words that don't always reflect relatives in nearby spoken languages.

Even though sign languages for the most part haven't adopted their own written languages that better reflect their grammar and uniqueness (and there's really interesting arguments on both sides whether they should), there's an increasing difference between a sign language and its "written language neighbor". One particularly fun example is that American Sign Language (ASL) is much closer to French Sign Language (FSL) on the language family tree than ASL is to British Sign Language (BSL). Despite what you might presume from the spoken language "neighborhoods" of the sign languages, an ASL signer is going to have an easier conversation with an FSL signer than a BSL signer.

Which leads to the fact that there are even native speakers whose first and primary language in their lives is a sign language, and with a culture to match (Capital-D Deaf Culture). Written English will always be a foreign language to them, even if it is a second language they have a lot of reason to study from early in life.

So it's a quality of life question as much as or more than just an efficiency question. (Just as with most language issues, really. We could probably find a more efficient use of language for English medical/scientific jargon than smashing lots of random bits of Latin and Greek together. But we have what we have for a lot of familiarity and cultural reasons.)

<comment><USER17> Wow there is so much more there than I realized at first. I probably should have realized that any communication system would have layers, and when you're restricted to a subset of visual signals there would be all sorts of intricacies. The dual-language comment also lines up with a lot of what I've read this morning on the topic, in that many folks who use ASL full time have commented that written English can almost feel like a second language to them.

Seriously though, thank you very much for sharing your perspective on this. It's awesome to ask a question (in an area where I have no domain knowledge) and get such a high quality responses.

<comment><USER19> > Wow there is so much more there than I realized at first.

The eternal cry of the hackernewser upon finding that other subjects as well as computer science exist.

(EDIT: To clarify, I'm not intending to dunk on the parent poster specifically, rather call out how many people in this community and in the hacker community continually ignore the fact that, not only do _other subjects exist_ , but they also have a _lot of knowledge_ that _isn 't necessarily self-evident_, and the issue has _different constraints and priorities_. A lot of the posts on here feel like nobody learned anything from the idiots that set up Metamed).

<comment><USER17> Lol to be fair, I don't know much about computer science either. Also, n-gate does a really good job of calling out the perception you're expanding on in your edit, and is usually fairly funny to boot.

As a bonus, the only thing that seems to be more common than someone on HN appearing out of touch with reality, is someone on HN trying to bring up how often HN appears out of touch. Be the change buddy :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This comment is made in full good faith.

I get that being clear/accurate/specific is important, but isn't this what slang/shortnames are used for?

Even in the most conservative engineering positions I've had, slang was used alot, since there are tons of things that have overly long/descriptive/technical terms which no one wants to use in everyday language/communication. The only time you would use them would be in documentation, and even then many times there is a glossary and the shortname would be used.

<comment><USER21> But isn't that exactly what he's doing by inventing these signs--creating shorter names so that it isn't necessary to finger spell everything out explicitly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Frustrated at the lack of complex scientific terms in British Sign Language (BSL) during classes, Liam decided to take matters into his own hands.

::Trombone_sounds.mpg::</comment>


Ask HN: What do productive people do on weekends? - <AUTHOR> We have a lot of articles here about how to be productive and successful. But what are those highly productive people doing on weekends ? <comment><USER2> I am very weary of people that describe/brand themselves as productive. There is something about getting a lot of things done that is appealing to all of us, but in the words of a classic "it does not matter how fast you drive if you're going in the wrong direction".

Setting that aside, both during the week and during the weekend I optimize for physical and emotional health. Eat well, sleep, exercise, spend time with other humans (your family qualifies as humans :) ). On top of that, if time allows it: see, learn or experience something new. Reading is awesome for the learning part btw. If I ever "work" on stuff, it's to scratch an itch I have or to align with the above.

Don't worry about being productive, especially in a non-work related context. Find out what you enjoy and do that.

<comment><USER3> The faster you drive in the wrong direction, the earlier you realize that you drive in the wrong direction, maybe.

<comment><USER2> that's true, but only if you know there is such thing as direction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What are you hoping to find out with this question? So called "productive" people do as wide a variety of things on the weekend as everyone else. Some people are productive in 30 hours per week, and some people are productive because they work 80 hours per week. Some people make furniture, some relax to Netflix, some read academic papers, and some get extra sleep. Since we're on HN, many startup founders spend their weekends working.

<comment><USER5> I am not OP, but I'm interested in this question too.

To be honest, I'm not too sure what "everyone else" does on the weekend either, and am curious about that also. Sometimes I end up intending to be productive, but end up more-or-less procrastinating and neither being productive nor genuinely relaxing. I've often wondered whether to attempt to be more disciplined and productive on the weekend (e.g., work, exercise, piano practice, read "serious" books, etc.), or to embrace relaxing and absolving myself temporarily of any responsibilities.

I would very much welcome any testimonials from anyone who has made either decision!

<comment><USER6> The reality is that it's a judgement call.

Some people have good health and boundless energy. For such people, spending more hours working can pay off -- at least, in the short run. They may actually be heading towards burnout without realizing it.

Some people don't have that kind of energy. Pushing themselves too hard actually hurts their productivity in the short term.

It can also vary over time for the same person. Maybe some weeks, they can do more, but other weeks, they really need some recharge time.

Wisdom is almost always specific to a particular set of details and is about a person having deep knowledge of that specific situation and acting on it in an informed manner. It tends to not generalize as well as we would like.

<comment><USER5> > Wisdom ... tends to not generalize as well as we would like.

Ain't that the truth!

I should maybe make it clear -- I'm not really asking for advice. Rather, I would find it very valuable to read how a variety of people have answered this question for themselves.

There is an inevitable bias to what we can observe other people doing: if I decide to show up to the gym, or to some social activity, or whatever, then I can see other people who have made the same decision. But one doesn't really get the opportunity to see firsthand how people spend their downtime.

<comment><USER6> _Rather, I would find it very valuable to read how a variety of people have answered this question for themselves._

I agree with this idea. It would also be nice if they fleshed out the _how_ with some of the _why_ in their case (without violating their personal sense of privacy, preferably).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All summer my wife and I would do the same thing every weekend.

We would find a town within 45 mins, any direction, that we haven't been to. We'd find a really nice park there and take our toddler and have a picnic. After that was unplanned. Sometimes we'd go home and take it easy. Sometimes we'd wander.

<comment><USER8> 45 mn is a rather small radius. Didn't you run out of unknown towns after some time? I'm pretty sure I've visited all cities in my neighborhood, at least those that are worth it.

<comment><USER7> Check the map for surrounding Waterloo Ontario. There's a ton of cities and towns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Family time. Getting ideas for blog topics, write up a few pointers and .. Working out. Catching up with friends. If you are doing Forex, then spend a couple of hours analyzing last weeks' results and begin charting for the next. Read the news. Catch a movie. Listen to a full album. Do the groceries shopping for the week (while listening to that full album).

If I am not currently reading a book, I go through my phone's photos and pick my next read (evertime I walk into a Waterstones I take photos of the books' covers I find interesting.

Edit/addition: I email myself articles I want to read, chores I need to do, brainfarts I want to explore, and these must either be done, or take a place in my calendar, or (my favourite) be deleted :)

</comment><comment><USER10> I do the same thing on weekends that I do every day, but as a solopreneur who is single without kids and works from home, I have that flexibility. I typically laze around most mornings, meditation, cooking, reading, writing, long hot shower, exercise etc. Then I spend between 3-6hrs on productive things (revenue generating or in pursuit of revenue generation). Sometimes that will go much longer, depending on how into it I am, but rarely ever below 3hrs.

As mostly all of my friends are only fully available on weekends, that's usually the only thing that is different is that these activities that are in person usually only take place then.

The weekend as a thing is a very modern invention. I've found that i'm much more relaxed day to day and no longer have to "look forward" to a weekend for a break. I take those breaks as I need them. It did/does take a lot of cultivated discipline to make this work though, if you hate your work that's going to be a problem for this lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sleep in, take the kids to their activities, play music, take care of the house, ride my bike, tinker with bikes in the garage.

Saturday is Pizza Night -- homemade of course.

A few hours on Sunday to take care of the side business.

Sometimes I think about something that requires a little bit of peace and quiet away from the office.

</comment><comment><USER12> On Saturdays, I wake and get to the office by 4am, just like a regular workday. The only difference is I'll leave around 9-10 am (vs 5-6 pm M-F) when the family is awake. Let's me catch up on things I missed during the week.

Sundays I'll try to keep my mind off work but still find myself thinking of things.

<comment><USER13> So you're working ~13h per week day and ~6h per weekend? To be honest that doesn't sound healthy at all. What are your reasons to work that much, if you're willing to share?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a person who was under the impression they were having a productive weekend but who is somehow writing an answer on HN now...!

Personally I would describe productive time as

* Anything which isn't consuming media, whether it's movies/tv shows/Reddit/HN/gaming.

Then starting with the obvious "gotta do it" or "good for you" stuff.

* Just finished doing my taxes

* Cleaning your place, organizing your things

* Cooking / Meal Prep

* Working Out

* Seeing friends & family

And then I'd separate any efforts made towards personal development and in pursuit of goals you've set, separated into two main categories.

1) Learning (Coding, How to do a rubiks cube, anything really which requires concentration and effort)

2) Creating (Any side project, personal business, home improvement, etc.)

These categories are broad enough to include pretty much everything.

Any mix of these activities in which I minimize the consuming media part, I'm happy with.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't have 'weekends'. Part of 'success' seems to me doing what you love and what you want to do, and if you're doing that, you want to do it every day, and never 'retire'. Then work and play aren't clearly separate. I don't really have 'hobbies', or I don't understand the idea, at least - I'm kind of equally serious (and unserious[0]) about everything I do. (e.g. for me, whether it's programming, making music, making art, learning some new subject or skill etc) I've noticed from all over the place that 'side projects' almost normally become peoples' main thing, whether in science, programming, art etc. Whatever they're working on for fun and curiosity.

(I read recently about how the Institute for Advanced Studies produced almost nothing, because although it sounded great, to pay geniuses to spend as long as they wanted on anything, the effect was that there were 'no side projects', and making everything 'the main thing' seems to somehow stultify it. Maybe we're natural procrastinators, and the AIS model was defeated by that.)

[0] I mean, in the sense of being alert for the comical, unexpected side of things. A playful sense of joy. Most of my favourite writers (e.g. Chesterton, Russell, Kierkegaard) have a great sense of humour, university lecturers too. I got into following chess tournament commentary online because of some commentators who were very funny. (e.g. Mig Greengard, Ben Finegold, Jan Gustafsson). I've noticed almost all great scientists, mathematicians I read/hear have a strong sense of humour, in their personalities if not in all their works. It's not separate from their curiosity and serious intellectual concerns.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sleep, youtube, Netflix. If you're very productive 5 days, do you really have to be productive 2 more days? Sometimes I do try to be productive on Sundays like reading, side project programming, walking, hiking, laundry etc... But give my lazy Saturdays please.

</comment><comment><USER17> I started teaching myself to code about a year ago and in my last job before I "retired" to travel I managed a team that was woefully inefficient and stuck in their ways. I was _constantly_ telling them "there's always a better way!" When I had learned enough about programming to strike out on my own a bit I realized I need to practice building stuff that was a bit more complex/interesting than yet another To Do App. So I started to keep a little list of all the things I encountered that were frustratingly inefficient or annoying so I could try to "build a better way" as a way to practice coding.

I try to work on building something from my list every weekend. I'll be the first to admit that (so far at least) most of the things I've built have not, in fact, been better than the status quo. But it lets me flex my problem- solving muscles a bit and I definitely learn better by coding something from scratch than I do from any code-along course/project.

</comment><comment><USER18> In addition to the great advice in this thread, I'd recommend finding something which doesn't involve a screen or work context that you can be interested in. The brain works best when it has a multitude of activities, and crises don't seem as large when you have alternate activities.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wouldn't call myself productive, but I take a great pleasure in Security bounty hunting. My day to day work doesn't leave me a lot of freedom to spend a few hours focused in something.

</comment><comment><USER20> Define "Productive" Define "Success"

Assuming I qualify, no two weekends are the same, I don't have a routine.

This particular weekend? I slept in. I sent an email that I've been drafting all week. I had dinner with my parents, wife and kids for my daughter's birthday, and spent some time by the pool at the hotel drinking beer (it's rare I catch up with my parents, they drove up specifically for the day). I deleted a post I'd spent an hour writing because I realised I had to go back and rethink the entire premise of my reply. I spent a few hours catching up on a legal drama between two game developers. I intended to play some apex legends but now I wasted too much time in the evening watching youtube and drinking. I watched a tutorial video or two. I wrote this reply and almost deleted it too...

Overall my weekends boil down to: Family stuff, personal projects, sleep and recreation.

(I should add, I invested hugely in building my career profile, lots of weekends and late nights involved so the story is very different now that people are chasing me for my skills instead of the other way around).

</comment><comment><USER21> The most productive person I know literally cannot stop. He has to be doing something every moment of the day or he turns sour. He's also horrible to be around often because he's prone to caustic, hyper criticism. He seems to have been born with more energy than average. Tho maybe it's a symptom of ocd or somehow related?

I personally average one completely lazy day per weekend and one day of getting everything done.

<comment><USER22> Sounds like a personality trait, not a mental disorder. High conscientiousness plus high neuroticism would be my guess from my favorite armchair.

Anyway, I agree that obsessing over productivity can be toxic. The correct mindset is to be efficient, not just productive, so you can finish your tasks faster in order to enjoy life sooner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am going for a hike along the coast on a beautiful spring day with my wife.

<comment><USER24> I have no idea who you are, but I like you already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Generally my weekend activities include:

* Sleep * workout * some computer games * grocery shopping * hacker news and some other forums

I read on weekends quite a bit. Currently reading Release It! Design and Deploy Production Ready Software. Outside of weekends, I really only read books during my commute in the morning.

I also wrap up laundry on weekends- bed sheets, towels, clothes.

I do cleaning my apartment on weekdays and so on weekends, everything is pretty clean generally aside from laundry. I will dust and vacuum the apartment and clean the bathroom over a couple days in the week and so it never accumulates to feeling like a big task.

I might go out shopping for clothes or books (there's an amazon book store in walking distance) with my spouse. Occasionally we go out to eat on weekends.

The kitchen we never have to devote time for on the weekends. My spouse and I have a strict rule to never leave a dirty kitchen overnight. We cook a few times each week in quantities to last the whole week and we promptly wash cookware and dishware.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wake up early on Saturday/Sunday. Endurance exercise -- usually relaxed long- distance biking ~20+ miles. In NYC it was limited, but in Washington DC suburbs, I keep strictly to country trails, so it is simultaneously also forest bathing, of sorts ([http://www.shinrin-yoku.org/shinrin- yoku.html](http://www.shinrin-yoku.org/shinrin-yoku.html)) Some days i'll walk instead of bike (~6mi) and listen to big-picture audio-books in the seclusion of the forest walk, so awesome.

Be back home by 11am. Before I had family, I used to read the rest of the day and go to restaurants/cafes with friends in the evening. Now, with family, I spend the rest of the day with family doing art, reading, puzzles, playground stuff.

After this, I sleep very well in the evenings because I'm tired to the bone. I'm incredibly productive on Monday/Tuesday after this sort of stress cleanse.

</comment><comment><USER27> No idea whether I'm productive, but generally, 2h in the morning of studies, then cook, eat, rest, 2-3h in the afternoon for studies, and then rest.

By studies, I mean whatever I deem productive to studying... At this moment, I'm doing a math mooc, but I did certifications as well, new technologies, or simply engage in second work when I had one.

</comment><comment><USER28> They do whatever they set out to do for the weekend.

For some, that's clean the house, grocery runs, laundry, cook, date with their partner, play with the kids, read a book, video games, visit family & friends, sleep in, work on their hobby, whatever it is. if you planned for it and get it done, then you're productive.

</comment><comment><USER29> A lot of productive people are as passionate and productive with their free time as they are with work. Competitive, challenging, adrenaline filled and technical activities have great appeal. Things like road cycling, kite surfing, ultra running and skiing attract productive types.

</comment><comment><USER30> Basically taking care of whatever can't be done through the week. There is also a need to relax, should your job be demanding, but if you have an idea in mind, it's important to spend some time to do some research on it and bootstrap it.

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't know many highly productive people, but the few I know don't differentiate between weekdays and weekends. Working seems to be a habit, and they appear to enjoy it. Might be a case of Stanford duck syndrome though.

</comment><comment><USER32> Network with infants. Early investment is best; you get diminishing gains as they age. You need someone trustworthy to delegate your empire to when you're older, so better get your propaganda game on now.

<comment><USER33> I'm surprised the venture capitalists aren't scouting 5 year olds as future founders.

<comment><USER32> VC funds don't go that long. Strategic marriages are a great long term investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Working/bootstrapping my company when I'm not working at my day job

</comment><comment><USER35> Usually I'm trying to balance out many things, which makes it more difficult than the weekdays:

\- getting more sleep \- working on my side startup \- getting some form of exercise \- reading all the things I've queued up during the week \- errands around the house \- spending time with family

The weekends, I find, are more hectic than the weekdays. There's no set schedule and it changes every weekend.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sleep. Exercise. Go out.

</comment><comment><USER37> I tend to take one-off classes at Stanford to try and see if I can short- circuit some learning that would otherwise come the hard way. Aside from that, sometimes meeting other entrepreneurs, working on long term projects that I don't get to do during the week, and meeting friends to have a few laughs together.

</comment><comment><USER38> I don't work a 9-5, so weekends aren't that special to me. Often I work on weekends, or don't work on weekdays.

This weekend is the beginning of tech week in the theatre -- I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if that's evidence of my productivity and success, or lack of!

</comment><comment><USER39> The first thing I do is a list of the things I want to. The list could have anything from chores like cleaning and laundry, to reading or playing games, alone time sometimes makes the list too as does work and/or hobby projects I want to spend time on, etc. I sort it and I try to work through it.

</comment><comment><USER40> I tend to work Saturday morning for a few hours on something I find interesting work or otherwise and then do housework and get ready for the next week. Saturday nights I might go out with friends. Sundays I try to see family or friends for brunch and then relax and cook

</comment><comment><USER41> Sat: 8:45am kettle bells / body weight workout 9:15-10am boxing fitness class

Then home, shower, breakfast

11am-3pm work (my own stuff) 3:30-5pm massage

Might do another hour work after that, but otherwise relax

Sunday - maybe a couple hours work, otherwise time with gf, brunch / go out and do something and relax

</comment><comment><USER42> Either you're working or you're not. Any time not meant for work is strictly prohibited for doing any work.

I do not work unless I want to.

I am hardly productive in one sense because I know when not to work.

I optimize for problem understanding and lazy solving these days.

</comment><comment><USER43> Not spending time on HN.

<comment><USER44> but today is the weekend

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> If we reversed the question, would the thread get any replies?

<comment><USER27> Idempotent questions are my new favorite thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Reading Hacker News, of course!

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm getting doing Georgia Tech's online CS master's program.

</comment><comment><USER48> Sleep.

Take a "digital sabbath" (google it).

Exercise.

The dividends those pay in the long run are huge.

<comment><USER33> Aka sabbath?

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> relaxing

</comment><comment><USER50> Code, learn, drink and spend time with friends

</comment><comment><USER51> Sleep and cook.

</comment><comment><USER52> Chores.

</comment><comment><USER53> trailrunning

</comment><comment><USER54> Consume, create and distribute memes. Work on personal projects. Watch YouTube.</comment>


Microsoft exceeds goal of 5,000 layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/020110-microsoft-layoffs.html

<comment><USER2> In effect looks at the issue raised in the Microsoft is a mature tech company/Why tech companies never pay out their earnings as dividends <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1090632> and another earlier. Many Microsoft units improved their bottom line by reducing headcounts ... and this is not a sign of an "immature" (growing, hopeful, etc.) company.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess Microsoft exceeds in all aspects, even layoffs!</comment>


Multitasking: Study examines limits imposed by brain structure - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126018694

<comment><USER2> <http://www.rexresearch.com/kahne/kahne.htm>

Strand Magazine (October 1925) An Interview with Harry Kahne, Whose Brain can do Six Things at the Same Time

... Figure 3: Writing with Both Hands, Both Feet, and Mouth Simultaneously ~ A demosntration of multiple concnetration of both mind and muscle which Mr Kahne frequently gives before doctors and psychologists. Note: the right hand is writing backwards and revesed, whilst the mouth is writing backwards but correctly).

</comment><comment><USER3> The limit can be affected by the stakes. How about drugs?

I've been in music competition situations where I've gone into hyper vigilant/super multitasking mode and my recollection of time seems to have expanded, like a scene from the Matrix. However, my brain overloaded and my coordination melted down.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about performance? I think performance can explain this.

Imagine you are working (let say coding some code) and you have other things that are playing in your mind (like taking the kids or your Credit Card debt) so you'll be focused on two things, but you don't achieve the same performance.

</comment><comment><USER5> Arstechnica also has a write up at [http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/in- multitasking-...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/in-multitasking- more-than-two-tasks-do-not-compute.ars)

</comment><comment><USER6> I look forward to follow-up studies about how to train the brain to divide into more tasks. Wasn't it Jefferson who by legend could handwrite two documents simultaneously in different languages? I doubt he had a third lobe.

<comment><USER7> Two documents with two hands in two languages. That's one doc, hand, and language per lobe. That anecdote fits in this article's model.

<comment><USER6> What about thinking about what to write?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a rule in my team that you can only have 2 major tasks at one time. This is supported by this research. However, we can also have multiple short tasks that take < 30 minutes to do.</comment>


Chill: turntable.fm for video from team behind Namesake - <AUTHOR> http://chill.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm sad that none of my Facebook friends are on Chill so I couldn't check it but the whole concept of group video watching sounds awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't seem to get in because I don't have a facebook friend on Chill. Does anyone know another way to get invites?</comment>


Using Git with Dropbox - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shvetsov.com/2013/04/using-git-with-dropbox.html <comment><USER2> #git on freenode has some interesting thought about this:

11:44 -gitinfo(firstname.lastname@example.com)- Storing git repositories on DropBox is a Very Bad Idea™. Use a free hosting service (such as Bitbucket or GitHub), or read !dropbox_why if you insist upon having your repo corrupted.

11:44 <iveqy> !dropbox_why

11:44 -gitinfo(email@example.com)- git uses a lot of frequently- changed small files, which dropbox's synchronization algorithms barf on. Use of multiple dropbox clients compounds this, with hilarious results

<comment><USER3> Does this include using Dropbox for the local copy only? Still pushing to GitHub as usual, just using the Dripbox folder as the local directory.

<comment><USER4> If you're playing by the rules, it includes any scenario where a Git repo is stored within Dropbox.

Git expects to have full control over the files in the git repo. Git does not expect any changes to the files that it does not perform itself. Any scenario where an outside process performs regular changes to the Git repo is an opportunity to corrupt the repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Something faster, something that didn 't require connection to central server, yet still allowed me to access my work on both my home and work computers. Git alone met majority of these requirements, I just needed a remote repository to share and sync my work between computers._

Other DVCS's (Hg, Fossil, Bazaar, Monotone, etc.) did not?

</comment><comment><USER6> You still could use bitbucket. It allows to create unlimited amount of private repos with max of 5 users.

</comment><comment><USER7> Fine for a single developer project, but you would quickly get dropbox conflicts when working as a team.</comment>


How U.S. Banks Took Over the World - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-u-s-banks-took-over-the-world-11567589403?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> What most people in this thread are talking about is retail banking. Retail banking in the US lags far behind the EU in terms in technology and security. However, retail banking is only accounts for about 25% of total profits when compared to commercial and investment banking. This is where US banks have consistently beaten the competition. Especially since Brexit which has destabilized London as the financial hub of Europe

<comment><USER3> This pretty bold statement what is this based on ? As someone who just moved from US to Ireland I def. not getting that impression. I also highly doubt there are banks in EU that can match say Chase on security side.

<comment><USER4> You´ll be finding out I suspect.

No idea how it is in Ireland, but in most of the EU, digital transfer between banks and countries is completely seamless. I can transfer money to family members accounts in different banks in the same country in a couple of minutes, and to another country in a day or two. I haven´t used a physical cheque since I moved back from the US.

<comment><USER3> The transfers thing yes (although it's cultural to an extent). The Clearing House's Real Time Payments network has launched in Jan. but people are not that used to products using it. On security side Chase's security spend dwarfs even largest security firms. If I remember correctly they spend on the order of 4 billion per year on security which among other things allows them to be running world class security team.

<comment><USER5> Expensive security and good security are two entirely different, often uncorrelated, things.

<comment><USER3> In a market where competent candidates start at 300K+ you can't hire a good team unless you a) have resource b)are actually willing to pay for talent. Chase actually has a very competent team. I have doubts there are many (any?) EU banks who's team is on par with Chase.

<comment><USER4> Yes, well, so the way it is in banking if you don´t have a competent security team, you won´t be in business for very long. And banks in general, everywhere and anywhere, have been in the business of security for a very long time indeed.

I´m sure American banks have very competent teams. So do the Europeans. Behind the scenes they all also tend to collaborate quite a lot in this area at least.

<comment><USER3> " if you don´t have a competent security team, you won´t be in business for very long" oh that what logic would have you believe and yet it very far from reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be fair I think this article doesn't fairly assess whether this is good or bad.

From my POV as a US citizen that has been living as an expat in different countries for the last few years, US banks globalizing is a net positive. I get convenience and speed with US banks that I get nowhere else -- i.e. the most online traditional bank in the UK is probably NatWest, which sucks because you have to get a physical card reader (like an actual machine that scans your debit card) in order to use the online banking most of the time. There's Monzo which is fully online but it sucks internationally, and adding funds is a pain. In China I had to jump through so many hoops to get an account and there are hundreds of restrictions in place; likely because I'm not a Chinese citizen. This is not a pain point for any immigrants I know in the US as it's fairly easy to move money around.

I'm sure US banks in control is bad at a macroeconomic level, but for the average consumer and at a microeconomic level I think it could bring about a lot of positive changes. Then again my perspective is probably skewed as an American

<comment><USER7> We have very different experiences of the global banking system, it seems. To me, US banks are archaic, slow, and backward—and the UK has to be in for close second so it isn't a fair comparison at all.

I have lived/banked in New Zealand, Canada and The Netherlands, all of which are delightfully eons ahead of the US banks almost across the board. For example:

\- P2P or bill payments in Canada can be made to any email address and received within 60 minutes for free.

\- Splitting a bill or requesting payment in Netherlands is trivial, because the banks all allow you to generate a URL and send it to anyone for instant payment.

\- Transfers in NZ are realtime, instant, and validated before you send to ensure its the right person. You can also create accounts online with your government login. Touch to pay exists everywhere since at least 2010.

Meanwhile in the US, checks exist and people go crazy when Apple Pay is accepted at a single chain store. I've never touched a check, and I hope I never need to—and the examples of hoops to jump through are likely because you're new! KYC regulations tend to relax over time, and it can be painful at first almost everywhere. The fintech revolution in Europe between N26, Revolut and the dizzying array of others is evidence we don't need, or want, US banks to do anything. It won't help.

<comment><USER8> Why do European vendors have such a hard time accepting credit / debit cards and still insist on cash?

I know of instances where a credit card from Amsterdam, the Netherlands is not even accepted at a shop in the Swabia region of Germany.

I also know of instances where they outright refuse to accept Visa and only deal with Mastercard and such - that too issued in Germany!!. What's the point of a credit card if you cannot travel with it?

Why are cash transactions so much more prevalent in Europe? I've seen the same in Japan but that's entirely a different case.

[1] For Many Germans, Cash Is Still King

[https://www.npr.org/2019/06/09/728323278/for-many-germans- ca...](https://www.npr.org/2019/06/09/728323278/for-many-germans-cash-is- still-king)

<comment><USER9> I think that's more a Germany thing than a European thing. In Sweden cash has almost been completely eliminated from their economy to the point that some retail banks no longer deal in cash.

<comment><USER10> More fool them - wait until they have a major banking computer crash / cyber attack.

<comment><USER11> And then what? They have to close for a few hours? A few excited local reporters coming by?

<comment><USER10> Seeing a Bank run with lines of citizens queuing at banks does tend to concentrate politicians minds.

<comment><USER9> Why would there be an in-person bank run in a cashless society?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Because they can threaten the people in charge of holding them accountable:

> To be clear, the decision of whether to indict a corporation, defer > prosecution, or decline altogether is not one that I, or anyone in the > Criminal Division, take lightly. We are frequently on the receiving end of > presentations from defense counsel, CEOs, and economists who argue that the > collateral consequences of an indictment would be devastating for their > client.

> In my conference room, over the years, I have heard sober predictions that a > company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could lose > their jobs, that entire industries may be affected, and even that global > markets will feel the effects. Sometimes – though, let me stress, not always > – these presentations are compelling.

[https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney- genera...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/assistant-attorney-general- lanny-breuer-speaks-new-york-city-bar-association)

<comment><USER13> > a company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could > lose their jobs, that entire industries may be affected, and even that > global markets will feel the effects

Isn't this what capitalism is all about? If they can't do the job then somebody else will come up on it's place.

<comment><USER14> The original speech which is quoted is an outline for the use of 'deferred prosecution agreements' office which are effectively corporate plea bargains by the DOJ.

The public policy problem is that if a corporation is indicted, legally they are presumed innocent but the market may not see it that way. Though the company might be eventually fully exonerated in court, they might have driven to bankruptcy by the market. By agreeing to a DPA, the company can treat it as a pseudo-regulatory matter.

This, of course, has critics on both sides. On the one hand some critics feel this has allowed corporations to engage in ongoing criminal behavior without ever really paying the full price. On the other hand, people have criticized the Attorney General's office for using the threat of indictments on flimsy grounds as a means to create a backdoor regulatory regime with no legislative basis.

<comment><USER15> My biggest issue with it from a public policy standpoint is that we don't have any problem putting the same burden on individual people. A person accused of a crime they didn't commit runs the same exact risk of bankruptcy and financial ruin if they can't make bail (and sometimes, even if they can), despite the same presumption of innocence.

How are we supposed to reconcile giving a corporation, with vastly more resources, special consideration that an individual person does not get?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The primary component in the success of US banks over European banks is that European banks struggle to do business in the US. This is because the jingoist zeal in the US puts up massive hurdles in the way of any foreign bank.

In other words, Americans only buy from Americans. This is why "Twenty-five years ago, European banks charged into the U.S. They bought storied firms like Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette and Wasserstein Perella and dangled big paydays for rainmakers" \- to convince Americans they were buying from other Americans.

This allows American banks to build up a war chest domestically and keep the fight in Europe and the developing world - while there is no fight in the worlds largest economy. China is doing the same.

<comment><USER17> I'm really not sure what you're talking about. I cant go open a bank account at HSBC or TD today if I like. And ING was a thing before they I guess got bought out by Capitol One.

<comment><USER16> This is about investment banking. Not retail banking.

<comment><USER17> Fair enough, I'm a lot less familiar with that side. But don't Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Credit Suisse have a large US presence?

<comment><USER16> They are discussed in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read the article but there is no insight into why. Are the US banks better run? Is the regulatory environment post-crisis better in the US? Something else?

<comment><USER19> I can probably provide a few elements of response.

First regulations and rates. Europe is actually several major jurisdictions:

\- Switzerland: they went through a near death experience during the financial crisis, with two huge banks relative to the size of the economy (UBS and Credit Suisse) that would have sunk the country if they failed. Their reaction was understandly to slash and shrink these giants to a less threatening size. UBS and Credit Suisse, once major global players and dominating asset management, are the shadow of what the once were.

\- UK: of the major UK banks, two went really bad during the crisis (RBS & HBOS) while the others big banks were mostly healthy. Those two banks were requested to massively deleverage (RBS pretty much exited investment banking). The other UK banks (HSBC, Barclays) were comparably healthier. There was a wish for tough regulations within the EU, however the state of European banks is generally pretty bad (particularly in Germany and Italy) which severely limited how tough european regulations could go before threatening the stability of the country. The UK didn't have that problem and therefore gold- pleated all EU regulations, requiring higher capital ratios, higher coco triggers, strict ring-fencing, massive fines, massive PPI penalties, more severe rules and timing from UK banks. It forced them to retreat from many businesses and to shrink.

\- rest of Europe. EU regulators generally are hostile to investment banking and the new regulations make many traditional IB activities uneconomical (in particular trading and financing trading transactions, as well as imposing various degree of ring-fencing of non IB activities). In addition, the EUR zone maintained low rates for a very long time (now going deeply negative), which adds further pressure on the profitability of EUR zone banks.

In the US, regulations have been less aggressive, and the rate environment (high rates) less toxic to banks (the reason why low and negative rates are toxic to banks is that 1) the bank is a net receiver of interest rate, because it has interest paying assets and liabilities, but more assets than liabilities, and 2) because if rates turn negative, it may not be able to pass on negative rates to their depositors (negative rates on current accounts) and find themselves pocketing the difference between their assets and liabilities).

However some European banks have been doing OK, like BNP Paribas or Santander. Their local regulators rather shielded them from tougher regulations. They are challenged nevertheless by the rates environment.

I think the second reason is culture. US banks took losses upfront, slashed bad activities quickly and put the problems of 2008 behind them within a few years, in a typical aggressive, pragmatic american way. The culture in Europe is often to try to live with problems and hope that waiting will make them go away. Even aggressive european players like Barclays, Deutsche Bank or SocGen were very slow to react to the new environment, and were still downsizing and cutting activities long after US banks went back into bullish/expanding mode. In Italy the banks were never really restructured.

<comment><USER20> > UK: ... It forced them to retreat from many businesses and to shrink.

The UK Banks didn't so much retreat as split their business in to a ring fenced operation (for retail), and a non ring fenced operation. The non ring fenced operations sometimes having their customer facing portion offshore in IOM, Gibralter or Channel Isles subsidiaries.

I believe one or two may have completely retreated.

Stuff like over the counter share trading which used to be available in UK Retail banks, no longer is. One has to deal directly with a stock broker operation (which could just be another company in the same bank group).

<comment><USER19> I am rather refering to commodities, illiquid rates and currency trading, certain exotic products. Also certain regions where the UK banks weren't big enough, in Asia, Africa or South America.

The ring-fencing is kind of an orthogonal question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not only the U.S bank... China aswell

they loan billions for poor countries they know they son't be able to bring the loands back

once they don't pay the loan they take control of strategic building/places in those countries.

<comment><USER22> Actually you just described what the world bank did to virtually every African nation in the 60s when they were gaining independence. For most nations the interest on the loans they owe exceeds their GPD, so they will be forever enslaved monetarily. The world bank dictates that for example Ethiopia can not sell processed coffee, else the World Bank will bankrupt them and destroy their economy.

What China are doing now is a lot more honest and up front (though I'm not saying it's good). They go to a country and say "We'll build you these roads/bridges/hydro stations" in exchange for mineral/fishing/whatever rights. So the country gets actual improvements for its citizens, and China gets cheap minerals.

<comment><USER23> "What they did" and "What happened" are very different. The loan was supposed to foster economic growth, which would have enabled paying back the loan. Which didn't happen for sad reasons.

The coffee part is odd - what's that about? What does the World Bank have to do with coffee?

<comment><USER22> > _The coffee part is odd - what 's that about? What does the World Bank have > to do with coffee?_

The world bank holds many countries to ransom by dictating what they can (or can't do).

Guinea wants to get the internationally accepted price for their Bauxite? World Bank says no, else we'll call in your loan.

Senegal wants to get a fair price for it's resources? Nope, let's put a travel warning on them and decimate their tourism for a year or two.

The list goes on and on and on. I just spent 3 years in Africa at ground level in 35 different countries. The longer you spend there the more you realize.

Read this: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FDVMOFU/?tag=roadchoseme-20](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FDVMOFU/?tag=roadchoseme-20)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Perhaps in the next few generations we will see similar headlines from other growing superpowers such as India and China.

European and US bankers may chuckle good naturedly when this idea is mentioned, but they forget that the European banking sector was the genesis of most of our current modern-day banking system starting from the 17th century, and yet today they are eclipsed by the US banking sector, aided in no small part by the size and influence of the US economy.

The tables can turn relatively quickly.

<comment><USER25> US didnt exist when (european) banks began existing so i dont understand the analogy

<comment><USER24> The point I was trying to make was that upstarts can overtake experienced incumbants relatively quickly. Perhaps it's a self-evident point to an HN audience, but the (small) set of bankers that I've spoken to don't seem to believe that anybody else can credibly challenge their dominance.

<comment><USER26> What if US banking dominance was considered a national priority by the state, and they used some mix of military might, diplomacy, and spycraft to maintain it? It's an interesting possibility, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How did they take over the world. We barely see one US bank here in Romania for example, and its coming just happened recently.

With the economical crisis starting from US and NSA scandal(s), I'd never trust a US bank over a EU one.

</comment><comment><USER28> That's a very misleading article. 'Took over the world' isn't exactly going from 42% to 52% of market share...

Also quite funny is "Coming out of the crisis, U.S. banks quickly raised capital and shed risk" and the chart below showing that it's actually the European that cut the assets they are holding to 50%, while the US banks actually increased theirs... Granted, asset != risk, but it's a pretty good proxy here.

</comment><comment><USER29> I thought this was going to be about J.P. Morgan and the World War I era. The article is not wrong but there are a number of interesting moments over the past hundred years that have shaped the world because of the financial system changes and its influences on politics.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just another industry where European companies are slowly dying while the Americans succeed.

<comment><USER31> A lot of UK banks chose to retreat from investment banking to focus on retail banking. That's not dying, it's risk avoidance.

<comment><USER30> OK dying might have been the wrong word, but I'd count retreating as similar to what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Circa 2008 we were told there was too much power in too few hands. Then we went for eight major banks down to seven. Now those seven hands are expanding their reach?

If they're too big to stop, then certainly they're still to big to fail. The queation is, will the world be willing to do the bail out next time.

<comment><USER33> _...will the world be willing to do the bail out next time?_

Are the relevant decision-makers still industry insiders and others who owe their wealth and position to the industry?</comment></comment>


Armed Russian robocops to defend missile bases - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229664.400-armed-russian-robocops-to-defend-missile-bases.html <comment><USER2> It's not a "Robocop" unless it has a human brain inside. It's also not a "drone" (with the current definition of drone) because nobody is controlling it remotely. It's apparently simply a robot with a gun and a switch "Patrol only/Fire at will".

Better title: "Armed Russian robot to defend missile bases"</comment>


Building a better Bay Bridge - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10001505.html?tag=mncol

<comment><USER2> It may be better, but it sure is taking forever. The original bay bridge took 3 years to build, but the new one is taking 24 years from the time of the Loma Prieta Earthquake which caused a portion of the original bridge to collapse. Think of it: when the old bridge is finally retired, a third of its lifetime will be occupied by building its replacement.

<comment><USER3> Replacing pieces on a pre-existing structure has to be more complex than building from scratch.

Besides, they are optimizing for high availability over speed. You have to remember, the bridge is only unavailable for -5 days-. That's a feat in and of itself.

<comment><USER4> Which should be familiar to any experienced software engineer. Initial product = 1/10 or less of the total effort.</comment></comment></comment>


Yammer CEO predicts Silicon Valley is over - <AUTHOR> http://upstart.bizjournals.com/news/wire/2012/08/20/yammer-ceo-predicts-silicon-valleys-end.html

<comment><USER2> The famous "everything that can be invented has been invented" quote attributed to Charles H. Duel, a late 19th-century commissioner of the US Patent Office, is apocryphal ([http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote- ev...](http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2011/01/tracing-the-quote-everything- that-can-be-invented-has-been-invented.html)) but remains a comically potent response to this sort of short-sighted bullshit.

There will always be new problems to solve. There will always be better solutions invented to existing problems. And solving problems experienced by a lot of people, and solving them well, will always be worth a lot of money.

I run a 20-person webapp design and development consultancy, with employees all over the US and no central office. Group communication is a constant problem for us: we use Campfire rooms for most project communication, but frequently have to drop into Skype for ad-hoc video calls. I wind up in Google Chat several times a day with employees and clients as well. Campfire is great for realtime-ish team conversations, but if you want to ask a question like "hey, anyone want to go in on a house for SXSW?" you're probably better off sending an email if you want everyone to see it and have a chance to respond. We keep a lot of company docs in Google Docs, stuff which would really be more useful in the company wiki we don't have setup currently. I could go on, but the gist is that our communication tools for project teams, the company, clients, and 1-on-1 conversations are pretty fragmented.

Theoretically Yammer should solve this problem. It doesn't. We've experimented with it in the past, and it's a poor fit in a thousand tiny ways. We're a bunch of geeks living all over the country designing and building software products, not a division at Big Co.

But, y'know, everything's been invented. ;)

<comment><USER3> Right, the market is full of point solutions that keep focusing in only one aspect of the communication problem. Sort of like UNIX command line tools: great at doing one thing, but loosely coupled with other apps you use.

Yammer is great at microblogging, falls short for the rest. Email is great for 1 to 1 messages. Campfire does chat really well. Asana or Trello do tasks. But your data still lives in a dozen places.

I started a company around the very problem you mention, trying to bring together all the tools I used, and we're now close to 250k business users. And, despite the big guns like Yammer, we're seeing our revenue double every 4 months. Take a look if you're curious, it's called Teambox (<http://teambox.com>) and it brings together tasks, GDocs, chat, wiki-like notes, etc.

<comment><USER4> Disclaimer, I work at Yammer.

I'm not going to plug our product's features here, but I'll say this: microblogging is not an accurate portrayal of what it is anymore, and hasn't been for at least one and a half years.

<comment><USER5> Care to elaborate on what it is? At work we looked at Yammer, some people use it and others don't. However, my impression awhile back was "great another facebook but for work". (I mean no offense to it, I am honestly interested in how you view yammer.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The idea that big players are Borg-like (#) in their perfect ability to anticipate and assimilate all great and threatening innovations is at odds with my own experience. The current crop of behemoths may be better than their predecessors, but it's still the case that they are much slower and less efficient at deciding and doing things than startups are. They are still myopically focused on current profit centers and fraught with strategy taxes. They are still arrogant and inflexible. (At least in my experience.)

Having helped build a startup (ITA Software) up to 500 employees, I was struck by the degree to which even companies whose leadership tries to do the right thing accrue politics, time-wasting, heavyweight processes, and outright antibodies to good ideas. And don't even get me started on working with other, much bigger companies.

The cost basis argument might be right; maybe it does take more money now to get a fully-formed, defensible product to market. That's exactly the phenomenon that has lead to the consolidation of the video game business; it takes 100+ people to make a AAA title now. I don't see the same thing happening with consumer internet startups, generally though -- in fact, it seems the opposite: with iOS apps, for example, the entry cost is low, but upside is also relatively limited (compared to, say, Google).

(#) a phrase from one of David's own replies

</comment><comment><USER7> I think he's right for the wrong reason. The Valley has gotten unimaginative, and Mr Sacks is suffering from the ambient lack of imagination.

I think there are other communities waiting in the wings, who don't yet compulsively chase VC funding and TechCrunch news cycles, who have intelligent, creative people who still have some spare time to start new projects (possibly because they are underemployed, unlike in SF where talented people all work at least 40 hours/week)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not so sure.

I think of it like art and artists in the United States. It's too expensive for most artists to live in Manhattan or New York City in general, so many of them will live in places where the cost-of-living is lower. Online showcases, write-ups from art critics, social networks, and independent shows will help them show their works.

However, to continue to grow their name, New York City still has the greatest concentration of buyers, curators, dealers, etc. To get at a high level, the big cities in the world are inescapable.

Likewise, I see other places where it's more affordable to start a startup but ultimately the pool of talent are where the funders are, which is the Valley. And so when the startup hits a certain size where it needs to grow it's team, well it has to decide whether it's feasible to get people to move to their location or to move where the supply already exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I constantly hear has-beens saying that because of some personal experience or their general malaise about something, an entire industry/area/field is "over"

Wired wrote about the death of the internet. People write constantly about the death of websites and the rise of apps. Or about the death of hardware and the rise of software being all that matters. Or the post-computer age. Or whatever crap they're trying to hock or stock they're trying to inflate.

They're all wrong. Most of them just come off as trying to blame a changing environment for why THEY didn't succeed. In Yammer's case, it sounds more like "see, we did the right thing by cashing out and becoming a part of a giant corp, because we're just fleeing a sinking ship" rather than "we were getting out ass kicked by other social networks and this was a lifeline".

</comment><comment><USER9> Yammer's CEO points out 4 problems:

1) Have escaped the attention of major Internet companies. 2) Cost less than $5 million (the typical seed plus series A investment) to prove and launch. 3) Be protectable from being crushed by big companies. 4) Be defensible from patent-infringement claims.

and asked "How many ideas like that are left?"

In my opinion, 1) and 2) are not a problem.

3) and 4) are the difficult ones, and they're what VCs and investment is supposed to solve - get injections of capital to grow before the big bad slow companies get you, and have money to defend yourself from lawsuits and generate your own IP.

Marc Andreesen said in his response:

"An infinite number—human creativity is limitless—which doesn't make it easy, but does mean the opportunity is unending"

</comment><comment><USER10> Good to hear he's been assimilated into Microsoft culture so rapidly. He'll do great there.</comment>


Obtvse clone in node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gorekee/obtvse-node.js

<comment><USER2> ok enough! Can we just try and go the whole week without more Svbtle unsubtleness?</comment>


Sketch Alternatives - <AUTHOR> https://beebom.com/sketch-alternatives-windows-linux/ <comment><AUTHOR> The app is universally loved and has very few direct competitors, but unfortunately, due to the technologies exclusive to macOS that it relies on, the developers are not considering releasing it on Windows and Linux. So I guess these are only options available then...</comment>


Researchers find last of universe's missing ordinary matter - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-06-universe-ordinary.html <comment><USER2> The article states that this matter is at "temperatures of around 1 million degrees Celsius". This seems incredible, if true. Is my expectation of how temperature works in a near-vacuum simply flawed? Google seems to say the average temperature of space is around 2 Kelvin. How can 30% of ordinary matter be almost as hot as the sun, but apparently not affect the average?

</comment><comment><USER3> >>Ordinary matter, or "baryons," ...

Whoa. Leptons are ordinary matter too. Electrons are leptons.

<comment><USER4> That's a reasonable nitpick, though the Missing Baryon Problem is/was a problem of missing mass, and electron mass is so small compared to nuclei as to be indistinguishable from noise. That's why we often say ordinary matter is "just" baryons, in the same way that galaxies are "just" blobs of stars and gas, with planets contributing neglible mass.</comment></comment>


Nvidia Uses Artificial Intelligence to Render Virtual Worlds in Real Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-ai-research-render-graphics,38185.html <comment><USER2> Simply amazing. We need more tools for artists to convert existing real world objects into digital versions. This tech is amazing because you don't need a set of cameras taking photos from all possible perspectives, instead it can just take visual cues from a video. Very impressive.</comment>


What WordPress 4.x Could Be - <AUTHOR> http://thomashunter.name/blog/what-wordpress-4-could-be/

<comment><USER2> Mustache may be too limiting for designers, and a custom template language may represent an annoying learning curve. How about Twig which is well adopted within the community?

(after a Google search, it appears people have done this integration already)

</comment><comment><USER3> That was a really dumb idea. Kill off thousand's of themes and anger millions of developers and end users, just for the sake of having cleaner, "purer" code?

Better idea: fork Wordpress into something called TemplatePress, implement a templating engine which does not allow for arbitrary php code in themes, and see how well people like it. Chances are it will be dead within a year-- people choose Wordpress because it is easy to modify it to their own needs. They don't care about maintainability or cleanliness or portability.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

Existing Themes

The biggest asset of WordPress is the large number of themes and plugins available for it. Of course, by switching to a templating language such as Mustache, the existing repository of PHP based themes are no longer valid. To take care of this, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) could bundle a plugin with WordPress 4.x that allows loading of old templates, which would be disabled by default. Keeping that code out of core would help keep the overall project more manageable and secure.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I read the article. Pushing basic functionality to a plugin is not a solution, as themes would still need to be rewritten to use the plugin.

Putting basic functionality in a plugin works with RoR because developers are used to it, but it is guaranteed to break if attempted with WordPress.</comment></comment></comment>


He Removed Label That Said 'Medical Use Prohibited' Then Tried to Sell Thousands - <AUTHOR> https://www.texasobserver.org/he-removed-labels-that-said-medical-use-prohibited-then-tried-to-sell-thousands-of-masks-to-officials-who-distribute-to-hospitals/ <comment><USER2> KN95 is the Chinese equivalent to the US N95 or European FFP2 standard. A mask labeled KN95 does not mean it isn't effective.

There are however fake KN95 masks out there.

[https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1791500O/comparison- ffp2...](https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1791500O/comparison- ffp2-kn95-n95-filtering-facepiece-respirator-classes-tb.pdf)</comment>


I haven't had a smartphone for more than two years…and it's been great - <AUTHOR> http://www.thememo.com/2015/06/24/i-havent-had-a-smartphone-for-more-than-two-yearsand-its-been-great/

<comment><USER2> I have never had a smartphone. Keyboard phones ftw.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have had a smartphone for the last 6 years and it's been freaking awesome!</comment>


Questions about competitors and the YC application - <AUTHOR>

I've found a few direct competitors (all are other start-ups), and plenty of indirect competitors (larger more established companies (which I'm less concerned about)) to my particular idea.  I understand that competition can help validate the existence of a market, but at what point do VC's feel like there are too many start-ups competing in the same space (or does that not concern them (perhaps they are just hoping to pick the best horse))?  I should add that I think my target market is rather large and there would be plenty of room for all of the start-up competitors to co-exist (IMHO).  For the YC application in particular, are many turned down primarily for this reason? <comment><USER2> Can you persuade potential investors that you have a concrete advantage over competitors? Something that they can't (or won't) copy easily? As for the size of the market, IMHO there's no such thing as "large enough for all of the competitors to co-exist" on the internet. That works maybe when you can carve yourself a geographic niche (e.g. grocery stores, banks, and there's consolidation going on lately in both markets). When online markets mature, only a handful of competitors survive (e.g. search). You may want to try and redefine your market - as a subset of the large market you see now. Try to show how there are customers whose needs were overlooked by all other competitors, but you're going to serve their needs and thus come to dominate this niche.

</comment><comment><USER3> No one has ever been turned down for this. We ask it mainly to see how well you understand your market.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you feel you have a decisively superior advantage whether strategically (your idea of how to do it is better) or tactically (your technology works better) then keep at it, but realize that it's tricky with VCs. True story: Back when I pitched a startup during the good 'ol dot-bubble days, we worked a long time to put together a world class management team, prospective customers, figure out how to make money, etc. VC response: "But I just read an article in Red Herring where these two guys just announced they were going to do something similar and that their company is the global leader in the XYZ sector. Too late. Try something else." "But", I tried to reason in vain, "How can it possibly be too late when for a year I labored to figure out how to make money, put together a great team, found prospective customer and all they did was blabber in some magazine about how they just had the idea now and they plan on being the global leader in the industry?" "But they said they're already number one so why imitate them?" "But how are they number one? They're just two guys in an office somewhere doing interviews about as-yet non- existent developments!" So on the one hand you're correct, it is a proof of concept, on the other hand, many VCs, like people in all other walks of life, look for excuses to lose ... so they think if they read about an idea on a forum this morning, by the end of the day it must be well on its way to an IPO so there's no point in even bothering. Never-mind that many late-comers eventually have risen to the top and top dogs are only a few missteps away from losing critical masses of users.</comment>


Carbon Tax Simulator - <AUTHOR> https://www.uscleanenergyfund.com/blog/carbon-tax-simulator/ <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


C++ concepts support merged into GCC trunk - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2015-08/msg00377.html <comment><USER2> For others like me who have been living under a rock:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepts_(C%2B%2B)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepts_\(C%2B%2B\))

<comment><USER3> So their primary function is to make template error messages more readable, by giving tools to the programmer to be more specific when defining template types?

I really need to see a comparison with examples that shows that it's interesting to use, if I remember template metaprogramming was not an intended use, so are concepts redirecting the language to saner places ?

It seems like it could be beneficial for certain specific software like math software (maybe AI or language software ?), but other than that I feel very unable to grasp concepts. Maybe a CS teacher could explain it better to me. Again, can't wait for Effective C++ to cover those, but a slight introduction would not hurt :)

<comment><USER4> Concepts were supposed to be one of the big features of C++11. They weren't going to make templates more efficient, but they would make working with templates a little easier. Eventually, they became unwieldy, and they made compilation times much worse. The Committee had the pressure to ship and fix it later that Hoare talked about in his Turing Award lecture ( [http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/COP4610/hoare.pdf](http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~engelen/courses/COP4610/hoare.pdf) ).

Surprisingly, they resisted Hoare's "mad dash" and deferred concepts. This article is about a stripped-down version of concepts that was accepted into the upcoming version of C++. It's supposed to have most of the benefits of the C++11 proposal, without the complexity.

But I have to admit that the main benefits are better error messages, explicit comments in code of what a template requires, and an additional syntax for declaring/defining templates. The C++11 proposal was more exciting, but there was a question of whether it went too far.

<comment><USER5> Any summary on what was omitted? I'm not a C++ programmer so going to the source wouldn't help me much, but I'd love to know.

<comment><USER4> I hadn't followed the original proposal closely, so I can't give a complete list. One feature I know about, that was implementable but very expensive, was the ability to specify multiple ways that a type could match a concept. For instance, a Sortable concept could mean the type has an operator<, _or_ could be passed to the function compare(). I'm sure there was a way to handle cases where a type had both. But then, if you had a type with a method, say lessThan(), you could somehow specify that was an acceptable operator<, and then use anything that relied on the Sortable concept. As far as I know, that isn't in "concepts light."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> After watching this talk [0] by Andrei Alexandrescu, I became somewhat sceptical about concepts (and type classes and traits). Nevertheless, it's probably an improvement for C++.

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

<comment><USER7> Can you summarize what you found convincing about his presentation?

The narrative of the presentation is him focusing on a case where they don't work and tries to claim they _never_ work. His pretty brash conclusions do not follow from his "demonstration"

<comment><USER6> I tried to document my insight here: [http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/interface_fail.html](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/interface_fail.html)

Concepts probably work for 80% of the cases and you can work around the rest intuitively. On the other hand, we might not have realized how some algorithms can be written even more generic with "static if".

<comment><USER7> Really cool of you to document your insights, I wish more people would do that :)

<comment><USER6> Thanks. That is one of the essential elements of blogging for me. It allows me to link to larger text from short comments. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm really glad that concepts are finally making their way in after such a long time. Concepts make using and developing templates so much more straight- forward and easier to read!

<comment><USER9> How do you know that? Have you had any practical experience with a large code base using new style (e.g. post-C++11) Concepts? People have been using Concepts in some form for a very long time and even properly documented they can still be a major hurdle to less advanced or interested users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So type checking for thing inside the <> as well as the ()?

<comment><USER11> I think so.

I figure C++ has a static type system in most places because it helps the language be fast -- resolving the target of a method call at compile time turns it into a straight function call, and straight function calls can be inlined etc etc. You know how big your objects might be, so you can put them on the stack and you can copy them back and forth.

Templates give you a limited kind of polymorphism without sacrificing all of this nice stuff. Compilation of templates is "interpreted", though -- you don't compile a program to quickly instantiate them, you don't JIT them, the data structure just keeps data structures in memory along with its ASTs and it iterates over them, doing its type-checking and everything else "the slow way". I guess C++ compilation looks a lot like Python interpretation, with "No candidate for operator<(const T)&" standing in for AttributeError, and pages of horrible template messages standing in for tracebacks.

This analogy raises a question, though -- if Python doesn't need type checking to get nice error messages, why do C++ templates? An alternative to "assert hasattr(a, '__cmp__')" is try-catch.

Why not do the same with std::sort? Put a big compile-time try-catch around it, catch your template errors and present a nice message to your users.

What benefits would this have over type checking? If anyone wrote their concept specifications too strictly, they might stop your valid program from compiling, and this wouldn't happen with static try-catch. Maybe they thought you needed a random access iterator when all you needed was a forward iterator.

What benefits might concepts provide? Same as regular type checking -- if you _know_ that the provided type has to present a given interface, you probably do something crazy like give your compile-time types vtables for the interface, and dramatically speed up compilation times. I don't know that anyone will actually do anything like this, though.

<comment><USER12> Most of what you propose already exists in the form of type traits together with `static_assert`. Originally concepts hold the promise of also writing adapters so that you could write meta-programs that transformed one type into another compatible with some other part of your code, but I think that part won't come until later on now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this just for experimentation or is it planned that this will be more or less the solution that makes it into the standard?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not just for experimentation. The implementation is the basis of a Technical Specification, that will hopefully make it into C++17.

Finally the TS will be merged into the standard in the further future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Like others I was struggling to find usefulness of this and what problems it solves. I admit, it seems like a stretch. There was a situation in which I needed a template class to be implemented such that I wanted only certain types to be accepted one way and others a different way.

I implemented a stream buffer that can accept different types into the stream. Based on the type, the buffer would serialize and expand to accept the data.

To put this more succintly, an insert of unit8_t type would put a single byte into the stream buffer and an insert of uint16_t would put two bytes into the stream buffer. And I needed a way to make sure the types were plain old data types (int, char, uint8_t, uint16_t, uint_32_t, etc...)

Here is sample code:

template<typename T> class TStream { private:

        typedef TBuffer<T> stream_buffer;
        stream_buffer mStream;

public:

        TStream();
        TStream(const TStream &rhs);
        TStream::~TStream();

        unsigned int Size() const;
        unsigned int ByteStreamLength() const;
        void     Clear();

      // some methods omitted for brevity

        const T&operator[](unsigned int idx);
        const T*operator[](unsigned int idx) const;

        TStream<T> &operator=(const TStream &rhs);
        TStream<T> &operator=(T const);
        TStream<T> &operator=(unsigned char);
        TStream<T> &operator=(bool);
        TStream<T> &operator=(double);

      // rest omitted for brevity

};

Doing this

TStream<unsigned char> ByteStream

causes ambiguity with

operator=(unsigned char).

I basically want operator=(unsigned char) to be omitted if T = unsigned char.

The way I solved this, without Concepts of course, was to use CRTP like so:

template<typename D, typename T, typename U>

struct implement_operator_plus_equals { implement_operator_plus_equals() { static_assert(std::is_base_of<implement_operator_plus_equals, D>::value, "CRTP failure" ); } D* self() { return static_cast<D _> (this); } D const_ self() const { return static_cast<D const _> (this); }

      typedef D Self;

      Self& operator+=( U u ) {
        static_assert( (sizeof(U)%sizeof(T)) == 0, "Non integer number of Ts in a U" );
        T* b = reinterpret_cast<T*>(&u);
        T* e = b + sizeof(U)/sizeof(T);
        for (T* it = b; it != e; ++it) {
          self()->consume(*it);
        return *self();
      }

}; template<typename D, typename T> struct implement_operator_plus_equals<D,T,T> { implement_operator_plus_equals() { static_assert( std::is_base_of<implement_operator_plus_equals, D>::value, "CRTP failure" ); // Have an operator+= that cannot be called, so using ...::operator+= is legal, // but mostly harmless: class block_call {}; void operator+=( block_call ) {} } };

I believe I could have solved this without CRTP using Concepts. Although my understanding is that Concepts follows a methodology of deny all, allow what is defined and there appears to be no way to allow all, deny what is specified as a Concept. In other words, Concepts only tell the compiler what is allowed and there appears to be no way to specify what is NOT allowed without some further "trickery."</comment>


Guide to writing Ruby gems - <AUTHOR> http://nithinbekal.com/2011/writing-ruby-gems/

<comment><USER2> Saw this series two days back.Do follow if you need to get some push for writing your first gem.And he has a shared a nice collection of links too(see bottom for .Delicious bookmarks related to rubygems.)</comment>


CNBC misread an infographic on Chromebooks, everyone copied it - <AUTHOR> So, I looked a little more suspiciously at CNBC's claim that "over half" of devices in US classrooms were Chromebooks: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/03/googles-chromebooks-make-up-half-of-us-classroom-devices.html
Major tech blogs all over picked it up, both general technology and Google-specific alike. The problem: The article's wrong.
The article cites an infographic, below, which merely states that over 50% of SALES in Q3 of 2015 were Chromebooks. And when you scroll down to the fine print, you discover an ever larger issue: It only counts laptops.
Somehow, CNBC turned an article about laptop sales in one quarter of 2015 into a claim that half of all devices in US classrooms ran Chrome OS.
I've send notices to correct to a bunch of blogs, and of course, reported it to CNBC itself, but it's concerning to see how far through our "journalism" these days misinformation will transfer, before someone notices it. <comment><USER2> if 50% of laptop sales were chromebooks in $$, since chromebooks are cheaper that other laptops, that means chromebook numbers of units were above 50%

<comment><AUTHOR> The infographic isn't super-clear, but since they have a % in price section lower, I get the general impression the market shipments percentage is in estimated units, not dollars.</comment></comment>


Interview on Startup Life with millionaire entrepreneur Erica Douglass - <AUTHOR> http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/erica-douglass-success-in-vulnerability/

<comment><USER2> I must say that you have great interviewing skills. It feels like a conversation is happening rather than firing questions at them. This something that I feel most other amateur interviewers typically miss. Great interview! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate it Mike, it was my first go, so it's good to get positive feedback 8) Maybe I'll keep doing it.</comment></comment>


Senate Hearing on Russian Hacking - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r_wrbNwgQk <comment><AUTHOR> Just finished about 2 minutes ago, and here's the recording</comment>


Robert Hodgin Uses This - <AUTHOR> http://robert.hodgin.usesthis.com/

<comment><USER2> Skipping the SSD because it's "too pricey" and going for the fastest CPU, most RAM, and best GPU is just stupid.</comment>