Resolutions for programmers - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/programmers-resolutions/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER2> Learn Dvorak - I'd warn against bothering with Dvorak. Huge time sink with dubious claims of speed improvements. While a mythical programmer may exist who feels his raw typing speed limits his productivity, I never met that unicorn. While learning you have an increased error rate, run into incompatibility with other programmers and programs (emacs or vim... good luck) and end up needing to defend something no one actually cares about.

Back Up Your Data - I'd argue the resolution should be "Restore Your Data". Everyone has "backups" but that doesn't mean they have a valid restore procedure that they know works.

I like the list overall. It definitely has some interesting suggestions. The dominant arm in a sling sounds fun.

<comment><USER3> I learned Dvorak to help with RSI.

It worked.

I'm fast at Dvorak after 4 years (90 wpm), but not as fast as I was with Qwerty (120 wpm).

Dvorak has a pleasant "rolling" finger feel and my wrists never ache, so I've kept it.

What fascinated me about learning Dvorak was that I felt like a stroke patient. Suddenly, I could not do something I had been able to do for years.

It made me consider the cost of a keystroke.

Great experience.

<comment><USER4> I used to have wrist pain after particularly-long coding bouts. Then I decided to type like you play piano - hands up, wrists straight, move arms rather than wrists to punch keys in other locations.

No pain again. Ever. Only later did I find out that it's the recommended wrist posture. I still cringe a bit when I see people buying keyboards with wrist- rests (and using them), especially "ergonomic" ones - why improve one ergonomic point while intentionally worsening another?

<comment><USER5> Whenever I try that position, I quickly feel muscle fatigue in my arms from having them suspended in the air for an extended period of time. I think that is why most people don't type in that position mostly.

I might be doing it wrong somehow, but how do you deal with arm fatigue?

<comment><USER4> A good part of it might be that my upper-arms are essentially straight down, so it's just biceps. Holding your arms out / forward will tire you out, and it's pretty easy to do that in a lot of desks / setups, especially if they're too high. That, and I tend to move around and/or stop and think a lot. In part because I should, in part because otherwise I get stiff. That tendency to not sit still for long has helped in a lot of other ways too, though it makes me hate long drives :|

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most "list" posts suck; this one was awesome.

My only quibble: "Argue against something you believe" is not a special, part- time exercise. It should be a tightly-integrated element of your ongoing mindset, even in 'damn the torpedoes' dev mode.

<comment><USER7> Have you ever tried arguing against this quibble of yours?

I don't mean to sound snarky; that just feels like the best way to express my reaction to your statement. I don't disagree with the sentiment; I just don't think you have any idea what you're talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to add a caveat to the "Implement a cryptosystem" suggestion-- Implement one, but DO NOT USE IT. It's a fun challenge, but only fools use their own crypto libraries.

<comment><USER9> Better still, implement one, assume it is broken, and find out why.

<comment><USER10> That's not a good advice. It is extremely hard to find problems in your own implementation, even if you're experienced in doing that.

Better advice: Find a mate (or a group), and find out why the other's implementation is broken. And go through some case studies first (see e.g. colin percival's postmortem in [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap- critical-...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical- security-bug.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone who takes him up on his Datalog suggestion, this ([http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/ramsdell/tools/datalog/datalog.h...](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/ramsdell/tools/datalog/datalog.html)) is a pretty good standalone implementation. Free (LGPL), in a mix of C and Lua.

For Prolog, try GProlog (<http://www.gprolog.org/>) - it has good constraint programming support.

<comment><USER12> Mercury is a modern logic language. It takes the statically typed approach

<http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/>

<comment><USER11> Or, learn both! Mercury will teach you different things than Prolog.

(I've read about Mercury, but never really used it. I'm most interested in constraint programming, which doesn't seem to be part of it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a couple of contrary suggestions with respect to health.

        1. Don't follow the conventional wisdom on RSI

I struggled with RSI for years, and did all the usual things (warmups, exercises, braces, a Kinesis with modified key layout, etc.) Then, in early 2010, I read (at Aaron Iba's suggestion) _The Mindbody Prescription_ by John Sarno. Within a couple of days, I saw remarkable improvement; within a month, I was symptom-free. YMMV, of course.

        2. Don't wear a brace of any kind.

I question the advice to wear a back brace. Over time, this leads to muscle atrophy and causes or exacerbates the very problem you're trying to solve.

I don't warm up, don't wear braces, and have switched back to a Qwerty layout. I stay strong and healthy other ways, but I now ignore all RSI-related advice that doesn't acknowledge the "mindbody" nature of the problem. I've been symptom-free for more than a year. (This is an anecdote, so take it for what it's worth. The book's like $12, though, so you don't have much to lose.)

<comment><USER14> > The Mindbody Prescription by John Sarno

The central claim of this book (from reading Amazon reviews) seems to be that chronic pain may be caused by mental/emotional distress. To me, this seems like a remarkable claim, and I'm super-skeptical without some kind of evidence.

Out of curiosity, does the author offer any such evidence in the book? Are there other books on the topic?

<comment><USER15> Exactly. I was so desperate, I would have tried anything. But, I could not finish _The Mindbody Prescription_. General non-scientific fluff, and a lot of complaining about Freud not being taken seriously these days. No real evidence, although I only got through a few chapters.

However, despite me thinking the book was rubbish and tossing it shortly, my RSI problems disappeared. I guess the suggestion that pain wasn't actually physical in source was enough for the pain to stop.

I've gone from being dominated by RSI problems to not giving it much thought at all.

The placebo effect is real, sometimes even when the patient is aware that it's a placebo.

Note: I don't think the book is correct. There are plenty of phenomenon that we don't understand, and not having a real explanation is not reason to just make one up and assert its correctness without evidence.

<comment><USER16> > The placebo effect is real, sometimes even when the patient is aware that > it's a placebo.

I actually think Sarno explains quite well why the placebo effect works in many cases. It works because the pain is caused by psychological issues to begin with, so when you receive a placebo, your mind knows to make it go away and shift to a different problem. He actually calls it a "nocebo" because it doesn't actually make it go away. For example, you may have back pain, do some kind of therapy to address it (whether it is chiropractic adjustments, massage, medication, cortisone injections, or even surgery); it goes away, but then a week later you start having wrist pain, and the cycle continues (maybe with the back pain coming back) until you address the underlying repressed emotions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Tips for completing resolutions, such as these 12:

a. Have a plan with dates, milestones and accountability mechanisms

b. Start small (Instead of one month using a different OS, how about day and go from there)

c. Make it meaningful, Know why you're making a Committment, Be Selective (Have an intrinsic motivation to make a change in your everyday life)

d. Stay the course (If you get off track, get back on)

edit: formatting, typo

<comment><USER18> That is a good idea, make a plan and try to stick with it. BTW, I find Google Calendar to be good for posting reminders to myself to do different things throughout the year: quarterly taxes, contacting people in a few months to check on how their project, etc. is going, delivery milestones, etc. I like Google Calendar because event alerts also hit me on my Droid and iPad.

<comment><USER19> An extention to this is to use email alerts. It's too easy to dismiss an alert and forget about it.

For example, I might but an email reminder 4 weeks in advance, 1 in advance, and 3 days before for an important deadline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Going analog" is something I have really tried lately. The more I find myself into tech, the more I appreciate not being around it.

I really want to give woodworking a shot this year.

<comment><USER21> I started getting into smoking meats and making my own bacon a few months ago and it's been an incredibly nice break from being constantly plugged in all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I definitely recommend learning about the humanities and other fields outside of technology. For most people, we already know enough about programming, and learning another language or framework is a marginal investment.

But delving into another totally different subject like healthcare, or insurance, or psychology opens you up to a whole set of new problems and ideas. Whereas just learning technology helps you with the implementation side of things, not the high-level problem solving.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. I thought this paragraph was apt:

"Engineers need to learn how to measure what they can't count, instead of counting only what they can measure."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was really hoping this would be about screen resolutions. 1920 x 1200 all the way, baby (or failing that 1600 x 1200, which is increasingly expensive to get nowadays).

</comment><comment><USER25> Though the entire list is pretty awesome but somehow I missed or got overlooked that it does not contain the factor to give time to family.

Most of us, programmers when get busy in work tend to ignore our families unintentionally.This pattern is not different than artists who pain pictures.

After watching the TED Talk by Matt Cutts(mentioned in my last post) and some serious complaints by my wife and kid, I decided to make a resolution of this year to give more time to family than I used to give last year. It's covering few things mentioned in the post:

1- Coming out of comfort zone: When I start coding or doing something relevant of it, I just forget everything and often work in wee hours. Now coming out of it is definitely not comfortable for me but eventually would turn out to make things sane around me.

2- Be social: When one gets social,even with wife and other family member, you got to face things which don't pertain coding. While things like that could be painful at times due to bad situation but it naturally makes your brain cells think about other things as well.

So, I request to myself and entire HN community to give more time to your family too. You never know how such "non-technical" moments make your technical journey more beautiful.

my 2 cents.

</comment><comment><USER26> You will never be able to accomplish being "Healthier". What is healthier? a little healthier? maybe a little healthier than that? until you feel healthy? eat green stuff?

Try something more concrete like "Eat no more than 2 fast food meals a month".

Basically, your first resolution should be "Set 11 tangible goals".

</comment><comment><USER27> Great list. This is basically my new years resolution, which is actually a list of things I've wanted to do for a long time that I put together after I lost funding. The most important one being complete a personal project. My list has a few additional items including learn web dev and launch a simple web app and get back into mobile development and release something on Google Marketplace and\or the Appstore.

</comment><comment><USER28> Other than going to work on time using a Seinfeld calendar ( so that my lax work environment doesn't eat into my evenings ) I'm going with this: [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/newyears-resolution- fu...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/newyears-resolution-full-disk- encryption-every-computer-you-own)

</comment><comment><USER29> Good mathematicians make good programmers ... if they want to. but those I work with (Finance) can produce very awefull code.

</comment><comment><USER30> Get serious with Testing? :-)

<comment><USER31> Do it! Seriously, it's worth it.

I didn't get really serious about it until last year, but now I wouldn't code without it. The confidence it gives when refactoring code (run the test, see if you broke something) is pure gold. Plus, just writing the tests puts you in a frame of mind where you're questioning a lot of your assumptions, and you often discover flaws in your architecture that would be painful to fix if discovered later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I really like the suggestions. So, January is analog. Time to buy myself an XBox Kinect and try and high score Virtual Dance Off High School 8.

3\. Embrace the uncomfortable. How about quit Facebook...

<comment><USER33> Could be worse, for me it would be to join Facebook. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well I have tried to put my money where my mouth is in ref to this, just ordered the following from amazon.

SICP (Wizard book),

Practical Electronics for inventors,

Code Complete,

Javascript: The good parts,

Programming Android,

Arduino Cookbook

Now the question is , what order to read them in?

</comment><comment><USER35> languages: I'm going to give F# under mono another try, in the spirit of other langauges suggested (haskell, ocaml, racket)

<comment><USER36> I would really like to hear progress reports on that one. Does F# Mono now correctly implement tail recursion? The most recent release notes suggest it does.

<comment><USER35> are you talking crash or leak? the one ticket was fixed pretty fast

<https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=693905>

<comment><USER36> I've only followed F# Mono from afar as an academic interest, but I've seen comments about tail recursion causing stack overflow, while in .NET I've easily calculated the millionth power of 2 and very large fibonacci numbers with simple recursive algorithms (i.e. it really did recurse a million times).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Another one:

Meditate Regularly

<comment><USER38> This, to most people, is too vague on its own, because the concept of meditation tends to fit certain lifestyles, such as those that go Yoga or follow some form of Buddhism or other spiritual practice. This really deserves a few paragraphs at minimum for most people to even consider taking it seriously.

That said I think meditation would benefit a lot of people more than they realize, but they really need a proper introduction and guidance to actually do it in a way that is beneficial. This is extraordinarily hard to do on your own. (I started in my 20s and got a lot of out actual instruction at a retreat center).

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> 13\. browse stackoverflow daily

</comment><comment><USER40> Love the list. Favorited that for future-use with spicing up my life.

</comment><comment><USER41> A toc but no links, maybe you need to add: learn usability

</comment><comment><USER42> +1 for trying the vegan diet

If you do this, please go to restaurants and request a vegan meal. The environmental benefits of the vegan diet are well-documented.

The best way to enact change is to get restaurants to start listing vegan options.

<comment><USER43> I do not believe that Veganism is healthy at all. Vegetarianism with a correct diet (and only then) can be, but the human body isn't fit for a vegan diet in the long run. I respect your choice if you do it, but at large it's just not reasonable.

Oh, and something slightly offtopic: if you have children, _do not_ raise them with a vegetarian or even vegan diet. That should be classified and punishable as child abuse.

<comment><USER19> > if you have children, do not raise them with a vegetarian or even vegan > diet. That should be classified and punishable as child abuse.

That's ridiculous. Would you not agree that vegetarian people are likely to be more conscious of their nutritian than the average person?

Here's an anecdote. I know three children brought up in vegetarian* family. All three were high achievers academically and athletically. It's worth noting that their mother was very conscious of nutrition, and did give them supplements.

*Pescatarian, actually. Though many pescatarians call themselves vegetarian, including this family.

<comment><USER43> _> Would you not agree that vegetarian people are likely to be more conscious of their nutritian than the average person?_

That's certainly true, and actually a necessity for vegetarianism to be healthy in the first place (just removing meat from your meals isn't going to magically be more healthy, it's actually the opposite). It's still pretty much impossible to supply a growing child with the needed nutrients on a purely vegetarian basis. While it's of course possible for children to grow up into healthy adults this way, it's still not without heavy risks to the child's physical development.

<comment><USER44> People who say it's a dangerous diet without any sources are only spreading FUD. Of course you don't just remove the meat, you replace it and get your nutrients elsewhere. I have a three-year old vegan daughter that is thriving, and we spent New Year's with two families, each with vegan one-year olds.

If the above children are still too young for the alleged negative health effects, read up on older vegan children at [1]. If you want the American Dietetic Association guidelines [2]:

"Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life-cycle including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence and for athletes."

Instead of "pretty much impossible", I would say it's quite easy to provide all needed nutrients. All parents, not just vegan parents, should read up on childrens' nutritional needs. But it doesn't matter if the protein comes from meat or kidney beans, or if the B12 and calcium come from cow's milk or fortified oat milk.

[1] <http://veganhealth.org/articles/realveganchildren>

[2] <http://www.eatright.org/Media/content.aspx?id=1233>

<comment><USER45> All of the above assumes parents are very well educated (and can properly monitor) about the needs of their vegetarian kids.

It seems to me that that kind of diet is not appropriate for the majority of the population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Amazing list. I'm gonna follow every month.

</comment><comment><USER47> me: talk more.

</comment><comment><USER48> Programmers stuck inside who need fitness ideas get out and meet people. Go to meetup.com, type in your area and type in running, health and fitness. Find a running club where you meet up somewhere and run around a loop, trail, or city area. I found that extremely rewarding. It is a filter to screen out the fraggles from the doozers.

<comment><USER49> What is it that makes people assuming exercise -> running? It has all the unpleasant effects of exercise + it destroys your knees and you still don't have a sixpack.

<comment><USER10> > It has all the unpleasant effects of exercise

That's subjective; I like running outside. It lets me clear my mind like no other form of exercise. (I hate running int he gym, though)

> it destroys your knees

Only if you do it wrong. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the people do it wrong. I had started to develop some knee pains (only while running) after a healed knee injury. And then I discovered the Vibram Five Fingers, and after two weeks the knee pains were gone for good.

They take a while to get used to, but they're worth it.

<comment><USER40> It's not the shoe that's solving your problem, though. The trick is to run on your forefoot and roll back to your heel. That's it. That said, it's true that the key difference in the average running shoe and the Vibram line is the lack of heel-cushioning, which as a result encourages correct running, but I felt it pertinent to clear that up.

tl;dr run with an impact front-to-back, toe-to-heel.

<comment><USER10> That's right. I knew that long ago, but I was unable to maintain that pose while running 10km -- old habits die hard. After about one month of walking and running with the Vibrams, my step changed from heel-first to front-to- back, as it should -- and it stays that way even when I don't use the vibrams (I hardly use them at all during the winter -- they're not good for running in city puddles)

front-to-back toe-to-heel is the key. The vibram is a way to get there.

<comment><USER50> Wouldn't any shoe with no heel cushioning be a way to get there?

<comment><USER10> One required feature is the flexible toe-ball connection (so that you can comfortably use the toes to balance when the weight is on the balls of your feet), which not every shoe without heel cushioning will provide, though some probably will.

The other important feature is "high-resolution" impact transfer - you need precise ground feedback for your muscles to compensate for an uneven terrain.

If you have (as an extreme absurd case) a super-hard graphite/plexiglass sole, then you have no cushioning, but are not likely to avoid delivering impacts to your knees even if you run on the balls of your feet.

Supposedly, Vivo Barefoot, Nike Free and Newton are as good. But I only have experience with the Vibram FiveFingers, which is why I recommended it.

<comment><USER51> I own a pair of the Merrell True Glove trainers and love them. I thought they used basically the same sole as the VFF, although obviously not with separate toes. I just couldn't buy into having plastic between my toes, or not having option of wearing some liner/socks, also since mine look more "normal" or let's say less "goofy" I can confidently wear them in any environment.

<comment><USER10> Never heard of these - I will look them up.

> I just couldn't buy into having plastic between my toes

Me neither, but I just had to try, and I actually like it, even though I don't like "toe socks" inside a regular sneaker.

> or not having option of wearing some liner/socks

There are injinji socks; but I prefer the VFFs unsocked if I can properly wash and dry them (I use socks when I don't have wash-and-dry facilities).

> since mine look more "normal" or let's say less "goofy" I can confidently > wear them in any environment.

That's a definite plus. (On the other hand, if you're looking for a conversation starter, the vibrams are hard to beat!)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/consciousness-goes-deeper-than-you-think/ <comment><USER2> This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" is perhaps the most egregious offender.

This is especially troubling when you consider that meta-consciousness sells easily to the general public as "the hard problem" (our thorough use of it seemingly being a large part of what makes humans different, after all), while it's likely that it's more of an engineering problem after you've figured out base consciousness.

If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. Implementing recursive phenomenal access seems like an undergraduate research project after that. Yet it's most often the very thing we spend all our time focusing on. Frustrating. We need new words - or wider usage of existing ones.

<comment><USER3> > If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem.

I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".

<comment><USER4> Being unable to agree on a definition for consciousness is a huge problem. I think this happens because consciousness is being studied at a too abstract (high) level. Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning. Fortunately, at this level definitions are exact and concrete - agent, environment, goal, actions, values. At this level we can understand and simulate what it means to be a worm, or a bat - as agents playing games.

I think what the current philosophic theory of consciousness lacks is a focus on the game itself. The agent is but a part of the environment, and the game is much more than the agent. The whole environment-agent-game system is what creates consciousness and also explains the purpose of consciousness (to maximize goals for agents).

Analyzing consciousness outside its game is meaningless (such as p-zombies) - the game is the fundamental meaning creator, defining the space of consciousness. The Chinese room is not part of a game, it is not embodied in the world, and has no goals to attain, that is why it is not conscious, it is just a data processing system.

On the other part, a bacteria can be conscious on a chemical, electric and foto level even if it can only process data with its gene regulatory network (which is like a small chemical neural net). A bacteria has clear goals (gaining nutrients, replication) thus its consciousness is useful for something - all consciousness needs to have a clear goal otherwise it would not exist in the first place - something rarely emphasized in consciousness articles.

<comment><USER5> _> switch to the low level dual of this problem [...] reinforcement learning._

But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness! So why not do _both?_ There's no obvious short cut through the confusion, but discoveries in one field may guide questions in the other. In general I think it helps to have one's feet on the ground as well as one's head in the stars (for instance Newton ground his own lenses).

<comment><USER6> >But that is itself a theory about the problem of consciousness!

No it's not! It's a computational theory of motivated action.

<comment><USER5> What I mean is that the idea that reinforcement learning is a 'low level dual' of the problem of consciousness is also a theory about the problem of consciousness. It's part and parcel of philosophical topics that one can't get out of the game...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me.

We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much.

What _thing_ are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness?

At this point it mostly just seems like we define ourselves to have this "conscious" property and then circularly use that as a distinguishing characteristic of humans.

How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?

<comment><USER8> Have you heard it said that you can never know if another being is really conscious, and yet you can know that you are? Presumably you disagree? This is what, in essence, it _means_ to be a subjective fact rather than an objective one, and why it's hard to pin it down as a "thing."

<comment><USER9> But that's the problem with the philosophy of mind. They have all these subjective notions like consciousness, self-consciousness, analytic and synthetic I, the accompanying such-and-such feeling (e.g. _I_ -feeling), self- awareness, awareness, attention, qualia, qualitative experience vs. content of qualitative experience vs. phenomenal experience vs. sense data vs. innr experience, cognition, embodied cognition, stream of consciousness, and so forth. Each of them comes with many fine-grained additional distinctions, but they are all subjective and cannot be measured easily and every author promotes his own vocabulary.

Then they wonder why they can't agree on a common theory, quibble endlessly about the adequacy of their various subjective definitions, and most if not all of their arguments are based on 'intuition-pumping'.

<comment><USER10> The topics you mention are mostly arguments against physicalism, rather than being for something. There seems to be a lot more effort expended (on both sides of the physicalism-dualism divide) in trying to disprove the other side, rather than on explaining consciousness, though perhaps that's just what the general-interest coverage focuses on.

<comment><USER8> If "consciousness" is taken to refer to this "thing" I can be certain I have but cannot be certain you do, then it doesn't refer to any objective property that can be proven or explained, right?

<comment><USER10> Looking for proof in these matters is probably a fool's errand (though many seem to undertake it...) As for explanations, that doesn't seem to be out of the question up to some assumptions, as is usually the case with explanations. Anyone choosing to go down the rabbit-hole of solipsism is literally alone with his thoughts.

<comment><USER8> I agree. All I mean to say is that the reason it's hard to come to a consensus on what we mean by "consciousness" is that we're trying to _unambiguously_ capture this first-person thing in third-person terms. This is bound to fail for effectively the same reason it's impossible to know (with certainty) that anyone other than myself is conscious. I can at best capture evidence for the _objective properties about you_ that make me _believe_ you're conscious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The issue presented at the beginning of the article is (as most philosophical issues are) one of semantics. Philosophers as I understand it use "consciousness" as the quality shared by things that are able to have experiences. A rock gets wet by the rain, but humans "feel" wet when it rains. A bat might not self-reflect but it feels /something/ when it uses echo- location.

On the other hand, conciseness in our everyday use of the term is very tied to the idea of attention and awareness, i.e. a "conscious action" or an "unconscious motivation". This is a very Freudian concept, that there are thoughts we think and others that lay behind. The philosophical consciousness is much more holistic, but also very vague. You wouldn't think a tree has an Ego, but it might have some sort of existential awareness.

It's cool to see the philosophy of consciousness intersect with neuroscience, since outsiders like me tend to think of these fields as at-odds.

<comment><USER12> Listening to Marvin Minsky on Closer To Truth on Youtube was a revelation for me. As in many philosophical debates, before you even start to begin to think about and communicate about a subject you have to get your terminology clear and accurate.

Conciseness is a suitcase term that contains within it a mass of different mental processes. It's just not useful to talk about it much in general, except that it's so general a term which frankly we just don't understand yet. If we did, we'd at least have a general idea of how to design one and we don't. Rather than try and make any more pronouncements about this, I'll just refer to what he has to say on the subject as he does a much better job than I ever could.

This is a good primer on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r70jzcmMxU&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt- Dlv&index=6)

Here's a great explanation of this in the form of an apparently simple example scenario and the very many different faculties of the brain that in entails: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPeVMDYodN8&list=PLFJr3pJl27pIGTG8LiAqVOPM7zudt- Dlv&index=10)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much.

Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat.

Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem? The cells that make us vomit? The bacterial colonies in our sinuses?

I just think the answer to all of these questions when all is said and done will be yes. And we'll be sad how much life we killed because we didn't think it was conscious enough.

And maybe if we're lucky when we die we get to watch our consciousness grow to include all things. Maybe that's why we have circuits in our brain that seem to respond that way to mushrooms.

Maybe there's a genetic advantage to harboring the illusion that you are a separate consciousness, but it's just there to make you want to struggle to hold up your tiny corner of a collective consciousness.

<comment><USER14> No. the universe isn't conscious. The universe is matter. Consciousness is a part of the universe. Therefore consciousness is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less.

It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.

<comment><USER15> Have you ever considered that objective reality is seated in consciousness rather than the other way around? Look into Plato's allegory of the cave. The world around you is actually a simulation created in your brain by synthesizing inputs from your sensory organs - you aren't experiencing it directly. That model includes the conception that you have a brain and sensory organs which simulate an objective reality. In other words, the possibility that objective reality stems from the subjective world, i.e. the mind, is not an absurd assertion.

<comment><USER16> Just to nitpick: Wouldn't this by definition make it non-objective?

I would think the objective reality in your explanation would be what your sensory organs are reacting to, not what you perceive.

<comment><USER15> Yes I've thought of this but didn't want to complicate things. My current stance is that reality is dualistic and both subjective and objective are symbiotic and can't exist without the other.

<comment><USER16> Why do you believe this to be the case?

<comment><USER15> It seems to me that there is no evidence for either the subjective or the objective realms being the "real" reality. There is a strong argument for either, and they can both be explored with depth.

The concept of "reality", of a physical universe, of a "you", of order and pattern, of an persistent objective reality outside of you, do not exist per se, but as simulation and models in your mind that you accrued throughout your life.

To be more specific, there is an underlying reality that is neither "objective" nor "subjective", but from which both of these realities emerge once a conscious being appears in it. We cannot directly know the true nature of this underlying reality, as it cannot be directly experienced. What we call objective reality is really the experience of the simulation in our mind synthesized from sensory data, as well as our model of this simulation (science), and not the underlying "true" reality.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure I follow.

From my understanding of the term, the "real" reality would be the same as the objective realm per definition;

What do you mean when you say "objective" as in "... the subjective or the objective realms"? Some sort of shared definition? If so, wouldn't this also be subjective to a certain degree?

I might just be post-hoc rationalizing my own interpretations here, but doesn't our subjective experiences of reality being based on our sensory organs' interpretation of stimuli from what is presumably the objective reality make fewer assumptions than a concept involving interconnected or "symbiotic" realities?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm completely lost. What does it mean to be conscious of something, but unaware of it? I thought those were synonyms.

The article asks this question:

> Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your > nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not > experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention > to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? > By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious > or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that > the sensations were conscious?

Implicitly saying that "experience" and "consciousness" should be defined such that I experienced and was conscious of those sensations even though I was not aware of them. Thus, using the terminology of the article, I am currently conscious of a _ton_ of things all at once:

The feeling of my feet on the floor, my butt in the seat, my tongue in my mouth, the sound of my typing, and of the rattling behind me, and of the rumbling of the train, the vibrations of the train, the propioceptive feeling of the positions of my limbs, the slight but distinctive smell of mass transit.

Is this right? Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything the brain processes"?

<comment><USER18> > Is "consciousness" in the sense of the article just a synonym for "anything > the brain processes"?

And is able to describe that thing, even if just to itself.

Have you ever experienced in a dream, being able to do some wondrous thing - write music, feel a wall from a distance, whatever. In the dream you _feel_ that ability. But when you wake up, while you _remember_ dreaming about it, you can not actually make yourself re-experience it. (For example: Describe the song you wrote.)

That's what the author claims is the difference between conscious and not conscious. (If I understood him correctly.)

If you have conscious thought, you can cause your mind to experience any sensation you have already had. A non-conscious being can not do that, they can only experience what they experience right this moment.

<comment><USER17> In your dream example, I remember the music. But in the article's example, I don't even remember my breath. Since I don't remember it, I cannot recall it. So while that's a nice distinction, it doesn't seem to be what the article was trying to get at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is hard to take the author seriously, or as an authority, when he rejects materialism and states something like "Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness", and he believes in the afterlife.

<comment><USER20> Why does that make the author hard to take seriously? Because of your bias toward materialism?

<comment><USER21> Well, when it comes to consciousness the alternative is dualism and dualism is the belief in magic.

Given how discredited dualism is it is amazing how far people will go to deny hey are dualists whilst spouting all the arguements and beliefs of dualists.

<comment><USER22> Dualism is the belief there is more than one fundamental substance in the world (mind & matter). There's nothing magical about that, it's just an ontological position. But it does have the problem of how mind & matter interact.

<comment><USER21> _But it does have the problem of how mind & matter interact._

Yes, that is where the magic is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems consistent with my experience that when I'm attending hard to a task I have no idea what it is like.

 _> For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one's mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth._

This also seems plausible since we can't perceive a new thing accurately without a prior expectation of what it's like. This could be solved by an iterative cycle of increasing realisticness and accuracy.

</comment><comment><USER23> This puts me in an uncomfortable spot w/regards to abortion. My go to argument was always 'the lights aren't on yet'.

If I'm understanding correctly they might be, albeit dimly, and each day getting brighter.

<comment><USER24> I'd encourage anyone to examine their conscience, read about the viability of babies born prematurely, and consider that even post-birth a baby is not self- sufficient. We don't have good criteria for what makes something alive or conscious, yet many draw an arbitrary line at birth.

I'm not looking to continue this discussion, but I'm glad you're thinking about this.

<comment><USER25> "Self-sufficient" is not a good argument. Most people are not self-sufficient when it comes to survival on their own. Just look at the history - as soon as mass-produced food is cut off, famines kill hundreds of thousands, millions sometimes.

I used to support abortion, but more and more I'm sliding towards being maybe against it, because (some of) the anti-abortion side arguments are logical too. No matter how you draw the line based on some argument, you can use the same logic to kill adults. That includes viability, lack of pain, etc.

On the other hand, our technology is at the level where you can turn any cell in your body into sperm:

[https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human- sp...](https://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-skin-cells-human-sperm.html)

So if you're against abortion based on the "viability", every time you scratch your nose, you commit genocide.

It's a hard question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Expanding on the breathing example in the article, could we say there are at least three distinct systems in the brain that control breathing? They are:

\- Conscious breathing: I follow a chosen breathing pattern with no immediate awareness of the breathing process.

\- Meta-conscious breathing: I choose to be fully aware and in control of multiple aspects of breathing. I control my diaphragm and lips directly, I listen to and feel air passing, I consider how the position of my body affects breathing, etc. I also may choose an appropriate breathing pattern: deeper for hiking, more rhythmic for aerobic exercise, or slow for contemplation. After I have chosen a new pattern, that new pattern soon becomes conscious rather than meta-conscious; although the special breathing continues, I am no longer immediately aware of my new behavior. A change in activity reverts my conscious breathing behavior back to normal without any meta-conscious choice.

\- Unconscious breathing: What I do when I sleep. It's clearly different from conscious breathing because I may snore, and many people even suffer from sleep apnea, which means they momentarily stop breathing while sleeping. Neither snoring nor sleep apnea are part of the experience of breathing consciously, so unconscious breathing must be very different somehow.

Am I using the terms correctly?

Curiously, many activities like speaking, eating, and swimming interrupt normal breathing yet do not necessarily invoke any meta-conscious decision making. If I had to think about when to breathe every time I wanted to speak, my meta-conscious mind would be overloaded with that task alone and I would forget what I wanted to say.

<comment><USER27> From my gut I'd say there are two - your "conscious breathing" is actually the same as your unconscious breathing process: Both are done without awareness to it and are primarily modulated via the vegetative system (O2 receptors in the carotid, hering-breuer reflex and so on).

The difference being that while you're awake you can consciously affect and correct your breathing (your "meta-conscious breathing"). When you're asleep, your body has to rely on it's other unconscious mechanisms to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> My interpretation of "meta-consciousness" as described by the article:

It is simply a brief period of intent, focused replay/study of the experience that just occurred, while it is very fresh in the mind/short-term memory. One is closely reviewing what happened, looking at the experience from different angles, replaying it, etc. This could all happen in the span of a second or less.

It is a matter of focus and proximity. It isn't a special layer of consciousness. It may seem qualitatively different, as the mental model of the experience is so deep & rich in the moments immediately during and after, if one is focusing closely. But I don't see the argument for this becoming some sort of "meta-consciousness".

In short, the concepts of "consciousness" and "being conscious of [something]" are related, but they aren't the exact same thing.

<comment><USER29> What if you're merely interpreting meta-consciousness according to the mode in which your mind currently operates?

<comment><USER28> Come again?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Reflection and introspection are programming facilities in the Java programming language that allow an object to discover information about itself and other objects at runtime."

Sounds about similar.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have a theory.

Any theory about consciousness that does not include learning is at best incomplete, but more likely just wrong.

\---

Our brains create models of the world. They are constantly predicting, making choices. And on surprise, looking back to see where it went wrong. On reward, reinforcing the behavior leading up to it.

In a way, our brains are observers of our environment, our bodies, and itself.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've been involved in meta cognition research, but I am confused by the distinction being raised between consciousness and meta consciousness, as 'conciousness' seems to reduce to 'interact', as in particle A hits particle B, and so reduced seems to have no meaning.

</comment><comment><USER33> I lost the thread in the first two paragraphs. Can anyone explain to me why it's so obvious infants are conscious? THis seems to be taken as a given for the rest of the article. Couldn't they be in a state similar to sleepwalking which seems not conscious to me? Perhaps consciousness flashes on as you have your first few "flashbulb memories".

<comment><USER34> Consciousness does not have to mean being "mentally" (intellectually) aware of what's going on. It's about experiencing stuff, and having a _sensation_

<comment><USER35> Does a thermostat have a _sensation_ of temperature? Why or why not?

<comment><USER36> A thermometer senses temperature, much like the human skin does. But we would not consider it conscious because it is a reactionary device.

Of course at some point along our development of machine intelligence that may change. At some point in the past all life was reactionary, then as it evolved that changed. My take on it is the first consciousness in life occurred when creatures started making predictions on when they would eat something or get eaten and act before it occurred.

<comment><USER37> It already happened then. [https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/25/deepmind- create-ai-imagi...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/25/deepmind-create-ai- imagination/)

AI makes predictions and acts on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Lets challenge this. What if baby can be born alive without having consciousness? It's not impossible since we can't detect consciousness. Maybe it occurs in some babies born with brain development problems, maybe not. Besides title says "Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think". Sounds clicky- baity and it assumes that reader is dumb.

<comment><USER39> There's nothing saying a fully functional human must have consciousness. It could just be that some people are machines acting on biologically coded rules, and that they don't have an inner experience of their self.

<comment><USER40> It seems to me, though, that this would eventually come up in conversation. Much of human discourse is centered around the concept of individuals' inner experiences.

The thought that someone who seems on the outside very similar to me could be completely missing the "inner experience of self" that I (think I) have certainly _feels_ wrong-- it's deeply uncomfortable and rather frightening. Furthermore, espousing such an idea opens the door to those who would attempt to use it to discriminate (likely by applying existing bias with a flimsy illusion of accuracy).

This one doesn't have much use to me beyond tangential thought experiments. It can be cited to justify terrible things in the hands of bigots, and I suspect it's fairly easily invalidated for all practical purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me.

</comment><comment><USER42> If consciousness is always present, but we don't show signs of it until ~5 months, maybe it's just that we need memories to understand the depths of our own thoughts? Like going from a 2D plane of the now to a 3D plane of the now, before, and after thus birthing more abstract thoughts such as cause and effect?

</comment><comment><USER43> Consciousness can esists also without the object of perception because is over the duality subject/object. In a room we have perception of the objects forma the light. But in a room empty of objects we can see the light because the light autoreveal her self. In an equal mode is the consciousness

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder what consciousness would be like if our brains had the size of our solar system. Would we be conscious if our neurons took on the order of minutes to communicate with each other?

<comment><USER45> [Nitpicking alert] The giant squid have the fastest axons to try to coordinate their giant body. They use some tricks to make the transmission faster, so I'm not sure if you can use this speed inside a brain successfully.

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_giant_axon) the speed is 25m/s, so in a minute you the signal could travel 1500m ~= 1mile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Like defining "athletic" or "smart" or even "stress" or "eating" \- all go deeper than we think.

</comment><comment><USER47> I find that any discussion of consciousness that doesn't build upon the work of so many other great thinkers (like Daniel Dennett, et al.) is usually a waste of time.

<comment><USER48> and yet such 'great thinkers' are quick to 'not build upon the work' of religious thinkers throughout the ages, despite the fact that at this level, these topics lie solely in the realm of philosophy..

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Killer observations. I've been wondering if conscienceness is circular activity in the brain, such that while we are conscience there is a constant circle of activity, and upon sleep this circle stops. I suppose this article is saying that this is metacognigtion, but still circle all the way down.</comment>


iPhone and iPod touch need a way to tell you when they are about to fall. - <AUTHOR>

Have you had an iphone or iPod touch in your shirt pocket and bent over to do something only to see your device fall?<p>This is avoidable by a warning alert that would occur when the device is in sleep mode yet its orientation changes in a way suggestive of an impending fall. <comment><USER2> I think I did that once, then learned not to do it again.</comment>


Ask HN: Freelance or Full-time? - <AUTHOR> I'm full-time Web Developer at NYC digital agency. Currently I'm making $55K, but tired of the agency environment. Is it worth to become freelancer? <comment><USER3> Based on your portfolio, I would suggest seeking some design training if you seek to freelance - as a front-end developer you should be owning the latest design standards such as proper content spacing, font combos that compliment, simple colour palettes, interaction animations & loaders, etc etc etc - <USER2> of which I see in your portfolio. You really need to impress and to also learn to sell yourself as a freelancer (you know, fake it til you make it, all that).

</comment><comment><USER4> I think the first step is to realize how much NYC digital agencies charge and how much they're taking advantage of you at $55K. The agency environment is also the most demanding in that there is always an endless queue of projects to be done and the developers are interchangeable with a hot swapping of projects being quite common in which projects are just shuffled around between developers requiring you to quickly pick things up and become familiar with the codebase in order to fix bugs handed off to you.

On the other hand, finding a next gig as freelance can be a royal pain in the ass unless you have a lot of connections, but if you do, having a queue of projects and working remotely is the ideal situation imo as long as you maintain a decent social life.

For full-time, you can just pick something either based on the size of the company or what they do.

</comment><comment><USER5> Without knowing any details aside from what you provided, it sounds like you are being seriously underpaid.

</comment><comment><USER6> From one native of Uzbekistan to another: you are massively underpaid. You could make 80k easily

</comment><comment><USER7> y, sounds like you are underpaid but depends on your skill set and what you're working on. I'm in the midwest and that's probably avg. web developer position around here but would expect NYC jobs to pay 2x that due to the cost of living.

Freelance/Consultant is lots of work keeping the pipeline full finding good clients.

If you haven't already I would work on leveling up your skills learning full stack web application development (Rails or Laravel) the rate/fees are better ($50 to $100+/hr) if you enjoy that kind of work the projects are more interesting too.

Keep leveling up.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why not try for yourself on the side? Set up a bizo and see about getting some moonlighting jobs happening. If you find you're getting work you can chase more. If you realise your not up for the hustle of client chasing and dealing with them in general, look for option 3.

</comment><comment><USER9> What is your skillset besides HTML?

Edit: Based on your website, it appears you are based in Uzbekistan. Is that correct? If so, what is the typical rate for Uzbeks at the same skillset and experience?</comment>


This Isn't Sparta - <AUTHOR> https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21398893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21398893)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great title for a great article. It's hugely important we dissect the lies we are told about how the world is and how it was.</comment>


Reasons to Abandon Windows for Linux - <AUTHOR> https://www.slashgear.com/reasons-to-abandon-windows-for-linux-06572307/ <comment><USER2> Use what works for you. Switching sometimes to learn new stuff is great, but don't lose your productivity.

I have been a long term Windows user (as main machine). I always liked it - even with the _obvious_ annoyances. I'm pretty savvy at it, so can always fix issues that arise.

Now at my new job I use a Mac and also a lot more Linux. Its good and I like the command line but I am still happier when I'm working on a Windows machine it seems. Mac has its own annoyances and issues, like with display adapters and memory resets, as well as updates.

So privately I just bought a new Surface Laptop 2 and I'm happy and like the entire experience. Finally having more native Linux tools makes it much better experience also (and there is now a native ssh client! Yay!). It's also powerful enough to run a Linux VM seamlessly at all times- because I also really like Linux. So why not have both. :)

My advice, just use the one you are most comfortable with and where you know how to fix things.

<comment><USER3> This is a very mature approach. Skipping the fanboyism. Especially now unless you are doing something very platform specific (e.g. iOS development or need Visual Studio) all platforms can have a decent workflow for development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The main reason why I use and love Linux: hackability. MS and Apple just can't produce something comparable 'cause it will hit their closed ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> Windows is pretty hackable. Unfortunately, the documentation is pretty spotty and often outdated. And you can't go read the source code when you get stuck.

<comment><USER4> > Windows is pretty hackable.

OK, give me sources of Windows bootloader 'cause I need, for example, draw a green animated dragon instead MS logo. And put this dragon inside Cortana logo.

<comment><USER6> It used to be possible to change the boot screen on Windows 9x :)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I remember changing the bootloader windows image to something fancy back then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried this last year and eventually gave up.

I definitely prefer the Ubuntu shell experience, command line, etc. They've done a great job.

But the last mile is still too rough. Battery life, sleep/wake, font rendering, Bluetooth, all still have problems even on a Dell XPS 13 9370.

After a few months I just didn't want to mess with it and went back.

Windows has gotten a lot better but still does a lot of befuddling and annoying things. WSL saves it.

<comment><USER9> I think it's unlikely to have a great Linux experience on any random new-ish laptop. Even some Lenovo laptops are imperfect experiences with Linux, especially within the first year or two of launch. If you really want to try Linux seriously, I'd recommend trying it on a desktop instead. Most tower PCs with stock parts tend to work great, with only minor exceptions (some weird audio codec setups can be fidgety.)

I don't buy specifically for Linux because I'm willing to deal with the incompatibilities, but in my experience battery life can be at least comparable, and sleep/wake/Bluetooth are fine out of the box on all of my machines. Worst problem I had was my Lenovo P51 and its Nvidia Optimus setup + docking, but that actually was also kind of tricky in Windows, so I can't complain too much (and it improved over time.)

Font rendering is the only thing there that you probably want to tweak regardless. For me, I just prefer disabling hinting and subpixel rendering, for blurry-but-accurate rendering.

And if you did ever want to switch to Linux as a primary OS, you can base your hardware purchases around it, which while isn't strictly necessary (I know I don't) but certainly helps a lot if you just want stuff to work out of the box.

<comment><USER10> I would tend to agree with this. I just do not see myself going back to Windows any time soon. In my experience, battery use is comparable, and might be even better on Linux with a few tweaks (powertop/tlp).

Fonts are likely a matter of taste. I personally can't stand how they look on Windows, to the point where I had difficulties reading off one of my monitor (and none of the cleartype settings helped). Having quite different font rendering on multiple screens is something that highly annoys me.

As for hardware, I was probably lucky, and use a nice DELL laptop from my lab. Sleep doesn't work on my Ryzen desktop, which I don't know how to debug, though it's only a minor annoyance.

The general reason I use Linux (aside from philosophical/ethical considerations) is to get my system as lean or as bloated as I want, but always exactly know what happens on it, how parts fit together and be able to diagnose and fix a problem is one arises.

<comment><USER8> This all has to exist within your tolerance and commitment. In my case I have limited time and patience (kids, etc). It's different for everyone.

But the battery and sleep issues aren't close. On Windows I get probably double the battery, maybe more. With Linux I had to hard reset out of sleep on a regular basis, never mind if I had it connected to a monitor.

Again I really want it to work. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot. Maybe next year I'll try again. But in reality I'll prob just get a new MacBook, it's really the best of all worlds imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> Whereas Windows updates are often laggy and frequently require reboots,

Windows update processes regulary pegs my cpu for minutes at a time. Why does this come out of nowhere and totally hog my system?

<comment><USER12> The Windows update situation is one of the primary reasons I've switched all my machines to Linux. It's infuriating to open my laptop for something quick - either to show someone something or to get some work done on the bus - and be greeted by an inescapable update screen that lasts minutes.

<comment><USER3> latest news are that MS is phasing out the forced updates or at least letting all users no matter which edition of windows they are running to postpone updates. this will go live with the next big update 19H1 which should be out in a month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Highly customizable, especially the desktop interface

That entirely depends on the desktop environment. I know GNOME 3 was very hard to tweak when it just came out. I always enjoyed GNOME 2 with Compiz though.

> A curated software catalog like mobile platforms

That has some things to iron out regarding the usability perspective. I removed some office apps from my xfce4 desktop, and Ubuntu also decided to remove other apps like xcfe4-session-logout, so I couldn't logout anymore. These things shouldn't happen.

My fresh xfce4 desktop always shows a "system error". Why? I don't know.

Years after years I tried Linux (Ubuntu actually, which I expect to be the most stable) desktop but it still is not polished. As a sysops/devops I know what to do, but the average user doesn't. But even then, I don't want to troubleshoot my desktop after I have just installed it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nothing here that programmers don't know.

And there's nothing in the article that a myriad of regular users face on a daily basis when it comes to computers that Windows solves.

</comment><comment><USER15> It depends on what you do with it in the end. For programming, I feel much more comfortable on a linux machine rather than windows.

If you're a gamer, it's probably the opposite. :)

<comment><USER16> Gaming has come a thousand miles in the last 18 months. It's now possible for a relatively layman user to be able to install and run games using steam and lutris with no issues.

<comment><USER15> I am doing so on Linux, and with the (relatively old) games I play I have no problems. But drivers and performance can take quite a hit for recent games, in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought I could jump from Windows to Ubuntu on my gaming computer after Valve did all that great work on Photon. Not quite. Ubuntu couldn't connect to my bluetooth xbox controller, and would never reconnect to wifi after resume or restart.

I do prefer the speed, workflow, and several other things about the Ubuntu desktop, but as I only need to play games on that computer, it's not worth it.

My laptop has always been Ubuntu though, as Linux is the best bootloader for Emacs.

<comment><USER18> We swapped out Windows for Linux on our TV-connected video game PC, and have had pretty good luck. Windows 10 was getting really obtrusive with its ads for stuff like Office 365, as well as frequently making games stutter because it decided that it needed to start an update in the background right then. I'm sure some of the Windows issues could have been fixed by someone more familiar with Windows, but I mostly saw Proton as a way out.

Xubuntu installed easily for me, and Proton has done a good job for all the titles I've tried. But the games themselves are a bit more of a hassle than Windows. I had to dig around in Steam to enable Proton for every game.

My wife and I recently played Divinity in split screen (Linux native) and occasionally ran into audio issues if the game had been running for a shameful number of hours. Divinity 2 (Windows version), doesn't work out of the box, though ProtonDB forums had a straight forward fix. So far, I think Divinity 2 in Proton might be at least as stable as the Linux version of the original.

But... it's a bit of a gamble. I mean, I bought D2 on sale so it's not a huge loss if a game doesn't work out, but also you want to play the game. So, there's always a little voice asking "will it work?" that you don't have with Windows.

We have two Steam controllers, which probably makes things a little easier for us. For whatever reason, we grew to like the Steam controllers and have stuck with them. I would guess that the Bluetooth controllers would be harder. I haven't gotten the hang of making bluetooth work anywhere really, and I could imagine the interplay of bluetooth, steam, and proton all to be a bit problematic.

On balance, I'll probably not move our game machine back to Windows barring some title I really want to play early in the release cycle. The hassles of Linux feel like things I can figure out, whereas the hassles of Windows feel like I'm fighting the established order imposed by a product manager at Microsoft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I rather like this list. My main everyday work machine is an Ubuntu 18 box, it's 99% awesome. Everything works, I almost never have troubles. I've been working like this for years now. I spend all day working on Linux and supporting Linux servers and other open source projects. BUT I can't get USB headphones to work. It drives me CRAZY. This is such a stupid basic thing that "just works" on every other OS but Ubuntu just fails me totally on 2 different boxes. I've tried EVERYTHING I don't want to even think about the amount of time I've waster. So yeah, reason #1 I can't abandon Windows is because USB headsets don't work on (my) Linux. This sounds like a stupid little thing, but it's a big pain for me.

</comment><comment><USER20> I just use MSYS2. Everything I want from Linux, nothing I don't.

</comment><comment><USER21> I use macOS at work, Linux desktop at home and a Surface Go.

The HiDPI/multi-monitor support on Linux is still lacking and I haven't tried it on batteries. It's great when your dev and prod use the same OS and web/db stack versions.

The Surface Go is surprisingly usable which I wasn't expecting from a Windows platform. I never use my 13 MBP anymore. So much so that if I need a more powerful laptop, I'd opt for a Surface Pro rather than any Apple product.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can I be honest? With emacs and firefox as my daily drivers I'm relatively platform agnostic, but I feel too old for the switch.

I was bound to windows to do work for far too long (adobe and no mac) and have close to 300 apps installed. I don't want to bother to set up all my tools again, rewrite my ahk scripts, search for these niche programs (if alternatives exist at all) etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have a Linux desktop, but disagree with this notion in the article:

 _" Highly customizable, especially the desktop interface"_

Basic stuff, like changing the font size in the main "start menu", or having an on screen keyboard for the lock screen is either hard or impossible. Varies, of course, with whether you're running Gnome 3, MATE, etc. But, they all have big quirks.

<comment><USER24> >having an on screen keyboard for the lock screen is either hard or impossible

It's dead simple in Gnome. In the settings menu, under Universal Access, just check the box that says "Screen Keyboard".

<comment><USER23> Yes, as mentioned, problems vary with the desktop. In this case it's MATE that can't have an on-screen keyboard on the lock screen...even though you can have one on the login screen.

Edit: There is a workaround (switch user button, enable, go back), but there are other desktops with no work around, like Cinnamon.

<comment><USER25> > Highly customizable, especially the desktop interface

The freedom to choose MATE, which doesn't solve this issue for you, is included in that statement. But this "Highly customizable" vs "uniform experience" on the other hand, are mutually exclusive descriptors.

Freedom of software choice includes the freedom to take away complexity. In this case, assuming that you have a keyboard and it interfaces in the usual way, without overlapping the screen, and that it works and you can use it, all drastically simplify quite a lot of complexity that the developer would otherwise have to prepare consideration for on your behalf.

Don't you prefer that developers of orthogonal software packages each are individually free to spend that time on other concerns? I'm almost certain that you could also be starting from the gnome login screen into the MATE desktop manager, or use MATE with LightDM, or some other login screen that does support on-screen keyboards, if you really need it.

And sure, that's extra work for you, and it's sometimes a little bit harder than configuring Windows, but you only have to do a customization once if you're happy with the result.

<comment><USER23> That might make sense if the login screen also didn't have an on-screen keyboard. But it does have one. That makes it pretty clear it was an oversight. They do have a fix in MATE now, it's just not yet backported to a current Linux distro.

<comment><USER26> And this is my biggest problem with Linux: that you generally have to either rely on the distro and repo maintainers to get up to date software or compile from source. That's completely ridiculous.

<comment><USER25> In Debian unstable, many of the packages are submitted from upstreams (eg. the folks that made the software.) The bar is simply "Debian developer" uploads the package, as I understand it. The Debian developer may or may not be the upstream source.

In Debian testing and stable, you're getting software that has been through a longer and involved peer review process by Debian maintainers. That's not ridiculous, that's why you would use a stable distro in the first place. Because it doesn't put so much trust in upstream vendors to always put out consistently good production-quality releases without adding any new bugs in them.

I don't recommend using stable distros for anything but production machines, and those you keep to approximate them (like say, staging machines).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wasn't sold by the article.

Trying to suggest to Windows users that they abandon their platform for Linux is a bit silly really, clickbait at best. People are okay with Windows and wouldn't be happy on Linux unless they have gone part of the way already, e.g. struggled with development on some Virtualbox thing and need the productivity of going native on Linux.

To me the difference between consumer operating systems and Linux is exactly that - the paid for operating systems are a bit like consumer goods, you aren't expected to go under the hood. Sure you can use them for software development but they are designed for running user friendly programs where everything is made easy.

I think that there are parallels in everything from hairdressing to the automotive world. If you cut hair then the tools of the trade cost a fortune and those scissors have to be sharpened monthly or replaced if dropped. You wouldn't recommend those scissors to someone doing a craft class with their toddler.

Or in automotive. You can race any consumer grade car but if you get into it properly then the whole thing is different, no fancy dashboard, rose joints that you have to replace all the time, a roll cage instead of central door locking, the thing probably isn't even road legal. And there isn't a 'sports' of 'M' badge on the back by the time you get into it as full on lifestyle choice.

Most people don't want to do linux things any more than a non-track-day motorist wants to open up the bonnet of their lease-financed car on the motorway (on the way to the in laws).

</comment><comment><USER28> Also: much less overhead when testing apps intended to run on Linux servers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Reasons to abandon Linux for Windows:

1\. It works

2\. Lets you use professionally produced, widely supported, best-in-class software, with support

3\. Hardware works out of the box, rather than taking a week to get it working, if supported drivers even exist

4\. Updates less likely to brick your hardware

5\. Your company's IT department, your ISP, etc will help you fix it

6\. You don't have to tweak configuration files by hand, run a series of commands, or call up your cousin's nephew who you heard has used this thing before

<comment><USER30> Reasons to abandon Windows for Linux:

1\. It works

2\. Lets you use a huge variety of sensibly licensed, high quality software

3\. Hardware works out of the box, unlike my perfectly fine scanner on Windows which doesn't work on anything newer than XP (except Linux, of course)

4\. Updates less likely to brick your hardware

5\. If something breaks, you'll be able to fix it instead of looking cluelessly at logs that don't tell you anything.

6\. You can tweak by hand whatever you want

<comment><USER26> > Hardware works out of the box

If it works at all. Maybe.</comment></comment></comment>


Google have locked down viewing of the Chromium MathML ticket - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152430 <comment><AUTHOR> They had disabled commenting on this ticket some time ago, but I find it curious that now even view access seems to be restricted. Are they really that determined to avoid dealing with this issue?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your preferred PowerPoint alternative? - <AUTHOR> RevealJS? Google Slides? I'd like to just write some quick markdown and have it look nice.. <comment><USER2> Bitmaps.

Size just never matters much. Bitmaps, as long as they are not too big just work. And, depending on content, are not even all that heavy.

Some presentations warrant the spiffy things PP and similar can do.

Many don't.

For some time now, I have archived software demonstrations as a series of screen captures too. Sometimes things break, and it is a nice fallback. Have totally ended up needing it too. (Enterprise apps failing badly)

Also a nice review tool.

"Here is what will happen..." Flip through them, annotate, done.

Just pile them into a directory, tweak names for display order, done.

Paint.net does just about all the quick, "communicate it" things needed. It is just too easy to drop images, text, graphics onto layers, shuffle, save, next.

As far as actual tools go:

I have used Presi.com a few times. Lots of fun! Easy. If you need some sparkle, that tool makes communicating big concepts graphically, very easy.

Very enjoyable program. For the right crowd, the high motion, graphical style is compelling.</comment>


Ask HN: Quick labelling of text data? - <AUTHOR> Suppose I have a CSV file where each row is a piece of data and I want to label it quickly. There's a small number of labels (say four) and each row can have any number of them (they're like tags).<p>Is there something I can use or have a non-technical user use to go through and label them? I thought there must be something like this but I'm having trouble finding it. <comment><USER2> There are a lot of tools for this, I searched "nlp text annotation tool", and found this thread: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-tools-for- manually-a...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-tools-for-manually- annotating-a-text-corpus-with-entities-and-relationships)

There's no clear "best" as far as I can see, so depends what you're looking for.</comment>


Five Keys to Corporate Programmer Happiness - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mikedesjardins.us/2008/03/five-keys-to-corporate-programmer.html

<comment><USER2> Good ideas. I think meaningful, fulfilling core responsibilities are more important, though.

If the product sucks, I would be unhappy working on it no matter the pay or perks.</comment>