Ask HN: How many of you (coders) use marijuana? - <AUTHOR> With the recent public talk and growing awareness about marijuana and the failed policies against it, it occurred to me it would be interesting to get an idea of how many fellow programmers use marijuana and how it affects their work. I find it specially positive in my work, as an aid to better concentration and also greater creativity. <comment><USER2> Not me. I'm of the opinion that lighting things on fire and sticking them near your head to breathe just sounds like a bad idea all the way around.

I'm for legalization though. The idea of outlawing a weed that does less harm than alcohol is ludicrous.

I experimented a bit as a teenager. As I recall, it didn't help my analytical skills at all -- unless by analytical skills you mean finding doughnuts at 3am or being able to smile stupidly while listening to Led Zeppelin tunes.

I think intoxication is a natural state of mankind, so if you like toking or drinking or running until endorphins seep out of your ears I can understand that. I just don't think any of that, no matter how good it feels, actually makes you a better coder. If anything, I think good coders learn the natural rhythms of their bodies and minds, then maximize their performance based on that.

Now can it make you _think_ you're a better coder? Sure thing, boss.

<comment><USER3> I do have issues with the smoke myself, and I indulge maybe once in a few months, so I never get used to it. Although I find the effects of marijuana to be far, far superior to alcohol or most other drugs, for me anyway.

Anyone tried vaporators? Supposedly they heat the bud to the point of releasing essential oils into the air, but not to the point of ignition.

I wonder if any hardware hackers here have applied their skills to drug consumption? For instance, I know a guy who has produced ingenious contraptions for nitrous oxide delivery.

<comment><USER4> Vaporizers are my preferred way of consuming. Ever since I got a good quality vaporizer, I don't smoke anymore. It's a lot cleaner than smoking (though not totally tar-free, but close enough), and it saves you money. In my non- scientific estimation, I think I use about 1/4 of what I would if I was smoking. It also seems like a cleaner high, often times more energetic, and I come down from the high smoother.

I have the HerbalAIRE Vaporizer H2.1 (<http://www.gotvape.com/store/herbalaire.vaporizer.php>). You can set the temperature for (which it regulates), and it fills up a bag. It's not a Volcano, but its good enough (costed $250 vs the ~$600 Volcano). I built my own from a soldering iron before, but it just doesn't work as well as it took 10-15 minutes before it was ready, whereas this one takes about 3-5 minutes. Buying a good quality vaporizer is well worth the money vs making your own, unless you are skilled enough to make your own quality vaporizer (with proper temperature control).

Also, cooking it in oil/butter is also a healthier alternative (the healthiest alternative probably). I do that as well, but that's more for when I will be out in public where I can't use my vaporizer (really great for concerts for example). I generally cook the oil or butter into baked goods (brownies or chocolate chip cookies), or sometimes take spoonfuls of the oil straight.

The only problem with both of these methods is that you are committing to using a certain amount and its harder to regulate how high you get. With eating it, you don't feel it for an hour or so, so its sometimes hard to judge how much you need unless you've already tried a batch. With vaporizers, whatever you put into the vaporizer gets used up, and you can either waste it by not inhaling it all, or inhale it all which could lead to getting higher than you wanted to. With smoking its easier to regulate as you can just put it out or not toke again; or take your time between tokes.

As for actually using when coding, I do occasionally work on my personal projects after getting high; but this is more because I'm obsessed with coding and working on these projects more than purposefully getting high with the intentions of sitting down and coding.

I don't know if it improves my abilities, really, but it does make doing mundane tasks more tolerable. It allows me to focus and get lost in the problem. And also I sometimes do brainstorming and come up with ideas which I quickly note down before I forget. It makes my imagination start to think about the problems I am working on, which leads to actually having the motivation to try out what I'm imagining, hence why I often end up coding after I get high (though generally after I've come down a bit). The idea that pot de-motivates you is a myth in my opinion.

And yes, I created this account just to post in thread, and have a separate HN account for non-incriminating conversations :)

<comment><USER5> > Buying a good quality vaporizer is well worth the money vs making your own, > unless you are skilled enough to make your own quality vaporizer (with > proper temperature control).

I don't smoke pot (I would try some, but I don't care enough to actually find someone who sells it), but I am sorely tempted to make a vaporizer and put the schematics online. Does it just need to maintain a constant temperature in a small area? That sounds like a pretty fun project. I imagine you could make a control system pretty easily with a few op-amps and a basic temperature sensor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I created this account for privacy reasons, and I'm one of the more active/karmic people in this community. Yes, this is an oppressive culture (in the US).

I'm a somewhat heavy bud smoker and a full-time developer. #define HEAVY? That's subjective, but I can comfortably go through a quarter ounce in a week, and my ideal consumption is probably 1.5 grams per day. I've known people who think a bowl a day is heavy and that an ounce a week is normal, so like I said, subjective.

I oscillate between stretches of daily smoking and stretches of sobriety. Clearly, there are advantages to being sober, and I wouldn't appreciate the benefits that ganja brings if it became too regular a habit.

I'm full of it, right? It's a pitiful escape, and an intoxicant couldn't possibly have any benefits, right? So allow me to enumerate them:

1\. Ganja truly opens your mind. Now, we all have open minds, but there's a further degree of relaxation and openness that it helps one to achieve. This allows me to grasp very abstract concepts quickly because there are fewer preconceptions and other obstacles to learning. It would've taken me far longer to grasp functional programming, I believe, without this benefit.

2\. Morale: After a night of boozin', you will feel like crap the next day. After a night of smoking, I feel like a million bucks in the morning. Granted, I've been an insomniac all my life, and ganja is prescribed in many places for this malady. I come in to work the next day refreshed and ready to dive into my work, and I'm undoubtedly more productive when this well-rested.

3\. Energy/endurance: I don't always have the patience or energy for prolonged hackage, especially when it comes to things that once frustrated me, like setting up a dedicated server. When high, I can easily wade through the tasks at hand, and next thing I know, they're done. I often come home from work feeling drained, fire up a little bowl, and am re-energized. What just a minute ago seemed unthinkable (fatigued, firing up my computer to hack on something) becomes irresistable because it's one of my true passions.

So, ganja is very good for me. It may be terrible for others, so I don't offer any advice here. I have yet to encounter any ill effects thus far concerning my health, and it does _not_ at all affect my stamina in physical activity as would tobacco.

I never show up at work blazed, and only partake in my free time. And if you think that stoners are lazy, on top of this full-time job I run a web development business with three employees.

\- 21 year-old

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure you're with me on this one but allow me to elaborate:

4\. Concentration: distraction and lack of focus is the #1 killer of all good software projects. And I have seen that programmers, in my experience, have a natural talent to be distracted and lose focus. Who never lost a day on a combination of Reddit, Bloglines and Hacker News? I know I did. Of course you don't need marijuana to force yourself to attain focus, but the forces that drive me to work are usually negative ("If I don't deliver this, I won't get paid", "My rent is overdue", "I'll just finish Y so I'll have time to do work on X which is more interesting").

The state of mind marijuana gives me is the one of calmness and extreme relaxation, and as it's been observed, "Relaxation precedes perfect concentration" (<http://tinyurl.com/6c632t>). It's the bizarre kind of relaxation that you get when it's past midnight, you have to wake up early, and yet you can be completely focused at your code editor without worrying about ANYTHING, not worrying about the things you have to do before you go to bed, not worrying about the things you have to do the next day, not worrying about anything. That kind of focus is GOLDEN, and it has helped me write huge pieces of well written code in very little time.

<comment><USER7> I suspect that largely depends on the subject.

I focus when I'm under pressure. For me, MJ would remove all that pressure, so I couldn't care less about code.

Different people, different results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You have a choice in life:

You can smoke dope, get stoned, start dozens of unfinished projects in Ruby or Scala or Haskell or whatever you've just read about, wear bad clothes and think you're doing something worthwhile just because you're up to date with xkcd and know how to jailbreak your iPhone.

Or you can learn a real language - one with braces, as God intended - preferably C# but Java is acceptable, build a business and hang out on yachts with beautiful women covered in cocaine. It's your choice.

<comment><USER9> Ew, cocaine.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, real .NET programmers use heroin. Everyone knows that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I read the article in question, and it said that marijuana didn't have much effect on "chronic" marijuana users. I suspect that if you smoke pot occasionally, it will totally destroy your programming ability while high.

You need to look at this study carefully. Essentially, it says if you are a pothead, pot smoking isn't so bad for your cognitive skills. But, that isn't to say that the long term effects of pot didn't already impair you... it just means that once you are used to it, it doesn't hurt you to be smoking it.

The article makes perfect sense really. There is certainly such a thing as a "high-functioning alcoholic." That doesn't mean anyone can get drunk and work well, or that alcohol helps you work. It just means alcoholics have a tolerance.

<comment><USER12> It might well be this article for those interested in reading it themselves: - "Effects of Acute Smoked Marijuana on Complex Cognitive Performance" - Neuropsychopharmacology section of the medical journal Nature

URL: <http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v25/n5/full/1395716a.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I havn't in a little over a year now. Current company drug tests and I enjoy a paycheck more than I enjoy getting high.

That said, I do very much enjoy it and have had some "breakthroughs" related to coding projects while high. Moderation is key, it can be great for helping you think about things differently, but if you overdo it, you can certainly do more harm than good.

<comment><USER14> I have always been firmly against company drug testing. How is that legal? Also, you could be a severe alcoholic or on huge amounts of prescribed medications and that is just fine?

<comment><USER15> It's not legal for a company to force you to be drug tested. You can always say "no" and walk away. Unfortunately, it is in almost every state totally legal for your employer to fire you for absolutely no reason, so long as they aren't discriminating against for you on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, or disability.

<comment><USER14> Interesting, I assumed it was legal for them to force you (unintentional Canadian ignorance on the issue).

Thanks for the clarification!

<comment><USER15> Just to be clear: I'm saying they can effectively force you, in the sense that they can fire you if you don't comply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Only to relax. I know some architects / senior coders who can concentrate better while high, but for me remembering what you did / thought about several minutes ago is more important than unnatural thinking.

Maybe it just takes more practice...

</comment><comment><USER17> This should be a poll, you're unlikely to get a comment from most people on this issue.

Use <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll> to create a new poll.

<comment><USER18> AFAICS he doesn't have enought karma to create a poll

<comment><USER19> But one was created (though the options are not what I would have picked): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509693>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It might only be giving you the illusion of helping. Can you benchmark test yourself with and without it?

<comment><USER21> Indeed. Programmer productivity is nearly impossible to measure, and so subjective, how would you even perform this kind of test?

That being said, I'm 100% sure that I'm far less productive after smoking pot, and I suspect that any reasonable measure of programmer productivity would show the same results for just about everyone.

But I'm also less productive after a few beers, or while watching a movie, or having sex, or eating dinner, or riding my bike. There's more to life than cranking out code. Marijuana feels good and is mostly harmless. Enjoy in moderation!

I have found that my productivity suffers when I lead a less balanced life. Since we programmers tend to fixate, it can be challenging to remember to take a break once in a while. Sometimes, if you don't over-indulge, the things that impair productivity can, in the long run, make your productivity more sustainable.

Or maybe I'm just rationalizing getting high and having fun ;)

<comment><USER20> A good sleep and a little bit of exercise helps too. I went for a blade yesterday and it really cleared the head, was exhilarating and I could think a bit about life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been an avid smoker longer than a programmer; although, these days I get high as means for keeping my left-hemisphere in check, which helps new ideas breathe, but the biggest reason I keep smoking is to forget. Forgetting is good if tend to worry to much, while psychologists typically have an entire lexicon for the word anxiety, which is more or less a state invoked from worry. Getting high helps me forget all those nouns/pronouns for a brief period and just sort of float around.

These days I can make an 1/8th (~3.4 grams) last a good +2 weeks.

Believe it or not though, my life long dream is to move to India, get in contact with a spiritual guru, and live in the now for as long as I can.

</comment><comment><USER23> I agree. Up to a point, it seems to have a beneficial effect. Especially in design, perhaps not so much when it comes to data modeling and logic.

<comment><USER24> Ironically, while you're probably correct in programming design, I'm a national master in chess(which requires reasoning and logic), and I know about a handful of chess masters(FM/IM/GM's) that actually smoke dope. Allegedly, it helps to mentally slow the game down and reason each move out into their potential move branches. In the time allowed, they're able to visualize moves several iterations on down and concentrate better on mentally traversing them to figure out their best move.

<comment><USER25> Sounds like they could be using it to meditate.

Cannabis has been used for thousands of years as an aid to meditation in various Eastern cultures, e.g The Saddhu tradition in India.

Meditation has not only made me a better coder, but has really helped with my anxiety and depression.

I found this book most interesting:-

<http://headstuffbooks.com/titles/cannabis_and_meditation>

<comment><USER26> Just ordered it....Not my field, but I'm told users in Canada regard this book as the dog's? Anyone else dabbling with the subject matter?

Also, to those here who beleive that it can't possibly help with creativity, try it, you will not be disappointed. I find it hard NOT to be creative on it, it's just that kind of drug. If you have too much or use it badly then obviously it's not going to help, but as long as you use it responsibly, it's a great drug for helping you get back on track on those days when thinking about coding is the last thing you want to do. It gives impetus, creativity, stamina, and in some cases, very strong objectivity about your output too. <USER26>
</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whenever I smoke marijuana I just want to eat and watch movies. So even though it's impossible to measure, for me it has an absolute negative effect in terms of coder productivity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe that's just the way you grew used to smoking, just sit down and relax. If you try doing other activities while high you'll probably see some interesting results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yeah, make this a Poll, and I might 'fess up. Did I say that?

</comment><comment><USER29> Yes, I do (although I just ended up in a new country, where I haven't figured out where to get any yet).

I don't smoke a lot of it, and quantifying the benefits that I receive from smoking marijuana is a bit difficult because they're rather abstract, and (at least for me), the effects of the plant vary from use to use. They don't vary widely, but there's a decent range of effects, which has a lot to do with the strain of the plant, but I digress.

When thinking about high-level design of a project that doesn't have anything put to code yet, I find that marijuana can help me visualize how things should fit together.

When doing exploratory programming at a REPL, I tend to try out more new things, put feelers out in a larger portion of the libraries of whatever language I'm using. I think this is objectively measurable - I may take a stab at it in the future, but I'm unable to right now.

When reading new things, or studying up on languages with unfamiliar paradigms, low doses of marijuana make it easier for me to snap my brain out of "language x" mode and into "new language y" mode.

When coding things in a language that I'm very familiar with, it makes it easier to get in "the zone". Not so much with languages that I don't already know like the back of my hand.

In general, I get a creativity boost from marijuana - and I'm fairly certain that it's more than a placebo.

Everything is not rosy though; If I smoke too much marijuana, my anti-social tendencies tend to be more pronounced. I'll have problems speaking casually with people, and my short-term memory will be shot.

I don't like smoking it with people who stare at the wall when they're high. It doesn't make me want to do that at all - it makes me want to do something creative _right now_. Play music, code, paint, something.

But yeah. I use marijuana in moderation. I know how I feel at different dosage levels, and I know what my limits are. I also know that a lot of people who use it turn it into more of a lifestyle than a part of a life, which is rarely a good thing to do with anything.

</comment><comment><USER30> My brain is the organ that keeps the lights on, writes the codes, designs the presentations and pays the bills.

I have no interest in messing with it.

I actively avoid caffeine when the going gets tough.

<comment><USER31> That's akin to saying "My legs are what gives me locomotion. I don't want to create stress and tear their muscle tissue by exercising. It will just mess with them."

Please note that I'm not taking one side or another, but caffeine has been shown to provide more benefits than harms in moderation.

<comment><USER32> I also gave up caffeine in university. I found myself drinking bottles of Mountain Dew during lectures and still feeling drowsy. So I gave it up.

After two weeks of fatigue and lethargy, I was fine. I slept better, and was more alert.

But most of all, I gained the ability to actually abuse caffeine. If I need to work through the night and still function the next day, all it takes is a single can of Doctor Pepper or a cup of tea. It's like a super power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I use weed rarely nowadays, but have consumed my fair share. The effects differ a little bit per person, but in general:

Weed makes you think you're sharp and insightful, but it actually makes you really stupid and slow. You forget things constantly. Using before work is only interesting if your job is mind-numbingly dull.

Some more facts:

1\. A single joint has about the effect of 4 glasses of alcohol, or 2-3 cups of coffee. But it's a downer instead of an upper, making you more relaxed.

2\. Marijuana is the Spanish name used by advertisers against the use because it sounds more foreign and dangerous.

3\. Propaganda in the 50s (as lobbied by alcohol producers) gave weed it's bad name.

PS: I live in the Netherlands

<comment><USER34> Great facts, but do you have references?

<comment><USER33> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7O4Sa8sGXk> This video refers to "experts", but I am pretty sure you can find more of the same via Google.

And apparantly the propaganda was in the 20s-30s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I do, nearly every day.

I don't drink caffeine (nor alcohol or any other types of drugs/stimulants).

It does a few things for me, chief among them is that it calms my ADHD and makes it easier to focus on things, specifically the mundane boilerplate shit.

My best designs/architecture have come from work sessions where I've been burning the midnight oil, to make a poor pun. I can't tell you why, other than the abstraction is infinitely easier to grok.

It does make me lazy though, but in someways there are benefits to that. For instance, I work hard to find easier ways to write code.

I wouldn't recommend it for anyone, but I grew up smoking weed. Also, quality plays a HUGE factor.

Moderation is key.

<comment><USER36> moderation is key?

But you you smoke nearly every day.....

<comment><USER37> You can consume alcohol nearly every day and still drink in moderation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It sounds like use in moderation might make it easier to rapidly leap around the conceptual problem space, perhaps reaching apparently unrelated insights. This tallies with the stereotype of being good for creativity.

At higher doses, this would be overshadowed by the negative effects (leaping _too_ far around the problem space, into nonsensical ideas, deleterous effects on memory and motivation.)

I presume an experienced user could differentiate, judge their own reactions and moderate accordingly. I don't believe I could.

</comment><comment><USER39> Not I. Cannot stand the stench of it.

</comment><comment><USER40> I smoked extensively for years between the ages of 16-22.

To begin with it increased my creativity a lot (thinking outside the box), I came up with a lot of (objectively verified) really genius pencil art.

Then, with habitual use, creativity levelled off to where it probably was before I started smoking, but, importantly, with creativity and general joy dipping noticeably in dry periods. I believe this is caused by artificially high dopamine production from the smoking, conversely resulting in lower general dopamine levels when sober.

Also, I am one of those persons for whom pot impairs social interaction. I felt increasingly alienated and only felt 'normal' after two-three days of sobriety. Basically I came to enjoy sobriety more, which was the direct reason I gave it up.

As far as coding is concerned, pot makes coding sessions fun and enjoyable so it probably helps you sit down at the keyboard, but I am sure it hurts the output (of the code, it may help with very high-level design). Pot makes you interested in investigating little details, but makes it difficult to keep a consistent overview of things.

</comment><comment><USER35> Jeff Atwood apparently doesn't:

<http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/1305109744>

<comment><USER41> I agree with him 100%. This is a bit of a disappointment. Hacker News is very slowly going the way of reddit. Very slowly.

I hope we can eventually keep this in check.

<comment><USER25> I don't. Hackers have long had a hippy element to their culture and plenty of people on here clearly find it of benefit. It's a valid topic to discuss.

Who made this Jeff person the thought police anyway? Does he have a rival site or something...?

<comment><USER42> I've been suspecting that his recent blog post "The value of downvoting" to be an insidious attempt at getting more PR for his site, stackoverflow by dissing HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've see marijuana have a very negative effect on my friends work, (whether they realized it or not) and that was enough to make me not ever try it.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is the first time I have commented. Please don't do this: you are increasing your risk of schizophrenia by smoking dope. If you only saw what that does to people and those around them. My brother suffers from this and it is terrible for him. You can all do the searches if you want to find evidence for the increase in risk.

"my brain is my second favourite organ", keep it that way.

<comment> a-priori Correlation versus causation. Cannabis use and psychotoic disorders like schizophrenia are definitely _correlated_ , but last I heard there is no evidence of causation (Hall et al., 2000). If my information is outdated, please let me know.

Personally, I think it's far more likely that schizophrenics, or pre- schizophrenics, are drawn to cannabis as a form of self-medication.

<comment><USER44> BMJ 2002;325:1199 ( 23 November ) <http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/325/7374/1199> here is the conclusion paragraph: Conclusions: Cannabis use is associated with an increased risk of developing schizophrenia, consistent with a causal relation. This association is not explained by use of other psychoactive drugs or personality traits relating to social integration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> * WARNING: Heavy drug material and offtopic both in one message. Don't complain if your Internet etiquette sensors blow up. *

I've never smoked marijuana but I did take DXM (~1.5-2.0mg/lb) several times. Certainly, during DXM trip I would have absolutely no concentration or creativity. However, after it I found that the after-effect effectively destroys two of the great challenges to thinking:

\- Fear

\- Close-mindness

I might not have been able to go through a chapter of Intro to Algorithms because I was scared, or concentrate on a bug for five hours because of fear but after DXM I could. I guess it increased my attention span. I remember I was learning about RBT tress and noticing how I am not freaking out because I don't understand stuff at first and how my mind was a blank piece of paper where anything complex could be written.

There was no frustration that usually comes when I meet a problem in the thinking process, only curiosity. That helps.

Oh, and it also healed my suicidal depression so I guess not being dead helps concentration and creativity a lot.

<comment><USER37> Holy mother! Dextromethorphan and pot do not even compare, in terms of effects. That said, I am glad you found it to be of use. My several experiences with DXM did not have such positive effects, so I have learned something here.

It's also worth noting that DXM is a dissociative drug, and like all dissociatives (ketamine, PCP, etc.) it causes measurable brain damage each and every time you do it. This effect is compounded if you don't take a break in between usages. This is in no way a condemnation; just be sure you measure your risks and benefits accordingly.

<comment><USER10> There is no way you can take it as often as pot. It's not a daily drug, of course. For me, I use it about several times a year. A couple of months is usually enough for clutter and stress to gather down so I can clear it all up with a disassociative.

Also, on permanent brain damage, see DXM FAQ ([http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dxm/faq/dxm_side_effects.sht...](http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dxm/faq/dxm_side_effects.shtml#toc.6.3)).

So far (about a year of usage) I find that the positive outweighs the negative.

PS. I'm also learning how to "astral project" (I put this in quotes because I just think it's a natural disassociative, not a spiritual experience). So far, I found AP to be much more powerful (albeit much shorter too) than the second plateau of DXM and I intend to stop drinking disguisting syrup completely as soon as I gain enough practice with AP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I've tried, but I simply can't. I sit down with a text editor and get stuck immediately. I think it's because too much of my knowledge is encoded in state-dependent learning.

(Another user making a new account to answer this one anonymously. This is not a post you want to come up when someone googles your name!)

<comment><USER46> You probably shouldn't care about people that care that you smoke once in a while. People like to think that there are millions of dollars sitting around in the hands of conservatives waiting to be handed out to people that don't do drugs, but that's just not true. These people are a tiny majority. Everyone has done some sort of drug.

Anyway, I'm happy to admit to my experience with weed. It makes me sleepy. I haven't really been able to obtain enough to really experiment with it, however... but I hope to rectify this situation in the future.

Wow, even after saying that, I still have a job. Amazing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I confess that I find it surprising that some people here on HN freely admit using Marijuana. Worst-case scenario, couldn't YC be subpoenaed by the feds and requested to provide each user's email and IP address?

I know this sounds a bit too draconian, but didn't the last administration try to subpoena Google?

<comment><USER21> In most parts of California, it's effectively legal. While it's still technically against the federal law, the state law says that anyone with a prescription can buy it at a store and smoke it in their home.

Getting a prescription is as easy as picking a doctor off a list, paying for an appointment, and saying, "I get headaches. Pot helps."

It's available, reasonably priced, and you can have it without being hassled by the authorities. As long as you're not a total idiot about it, it's pretty much just another alcohol. No one cares if you smoke pot on the weekends, as long as you do good work.

<comment><USER48> We used to have a boss who obviously was into drugs. _extremely_ volatile, and he'd often email 'the team' at weekends, with long incoherent rants about how badly we're all doing.

California does seem to have a culture of pot smoking for some reason.

<comment><USER49> I wouldn't go as far as saying California has a culture of pot smoking... just as I wouldn't say that New York has a culture of being assholes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I used to, but its been just over a decade now. For me the creative effects were never realized. It just made me dumb. After my first year at university my average mark was 2.9. Then I quit pot and got 4.0 for 9 nine quarters in a row. Your mileage may vary.

</comment><comment><USER51> The comments here are interesting. Weed seems to have different effects on different people(not enough data to make definite conclusions though). I've experimented with it when i was 15-16, then i stopped, and its been 3 years now and i've had maybe 4-5 joints since then. I don't know what the effects it has on programming would be, but i could guess that i would be in a more relaxed/lazy mood, and in that mood im usually very creative, but not concentrated enough to actually be productive. Im usually relaxed/lazy, so i probably wont be less productive if i start smoking again.

</comment><comment><USER52> I use marijuana. I also use tea. And tomato juice. I'd say it does affect your coding, to the worse. However, it makes your creative thinking and problem- solving more enjoyable, which is a good thing, and positively gives you a boost.

So when I actually sit down to code something I designed prior to this, _I won't use it_ , it makes me slow and narrows the attention scope, which makes me paranoid, which makes me go through my code a couple more times, and definitely more than needed to catch all the trivial bugs.

</comment><comment><USER53> This is what drugs do to you: <http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm>

<comment><USER54> I think that says more about caffeine than anything, though. It's hard to generalize about drugs as a whole in a meaningful way. While marijuana probably has a neutral-to-slightly-negative effect on programming, and alcohol and opiates certainly do, piracetam/aniracetam/oxiracetam (for example) can has a pretty positive effect.

Besides, none of us are spiders. (Right?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I don't drink, smoke, do drugs, and a cup of tea is about the limit of my caffeine intake.

My brain is very precious to me, and if I do anything that might damage it, there's no way to fix it, or get a new one, so I try to stay away from anything that could kill brain cells, rewire things, etc...

But, that's just me. I'm pro legalization, etc... People should be free to get high if they want.

</comment><comment><USER56> I don't use it. On the few occasions I have it has made me turned me into a completely unproductive zombie.

Still think it should be legalized but not because I like it or want to use it... it just makes economic and legal sense.

</comment><comment><USER57> I have used chronic for several years and as a developer I find that it provides three important benefits, and I believe that for many developers it could provide the same but with important caveats and considerations.

1\. It helps me get a peaceful full nights sleep, which for me is approximately 7 hours, with and clearheaded thoughts the next day

2\. As an aid to creativity, but about only 10% or less of the time while working. My mind is getting stronger and so I can now be directly productive while high, however I tend instead to take notes and later revisit those notes while not high for speedier production

3\. As an aid to learning, but perhaps only 10% or less of the time while studying. Rather I regularly review difficult material lightly while high in order to experience the benefits of heightened abstract thought

Very important notes:

\-- There is a long process to the mind learning about and how to benefit from something as intoxicating as chronic. You won't know many things about it and yourself until you've had a lot of experience

\-- Chronic is a strong sedative, many people fall asleep easily when they are first getting experience with it

\-- It is very important to only smoke the female plant. The male plant has a lot of negative effects and can cause you to be groggy similar to over- drinking, and the positive effects are in my opinion not enough to warrant the negative effects

\-- It's very important to take notes of creative ideas, since your memory for specifics is likely to be fuzzy

\-- When approaching new concepts and abstracts

\-- If you care about your productivity and learning, wait until you've gained lots of experience before trying to accomplish or study when you're high, otherwise a lot valuable time can be wasted. With a bit of experience it because possible to learn which creative and learning experiences can be directly improved from smoking

\-- Use a vaporizer. It is not 100% safe as others have claimed, but it significantly reduces risks, as well as reduces all forms of odor, red eyes, etc, and the dosage can be controlled better

My programming capability has become so significantly better from smoking, but legal and medical dangers shouldn't be taken lightly. People who already know they are susceptible to self-destructive behavior need to realize that this is a drug that can sedate you heavily and it's important to learn when you can and cannot take it due to pressing work.

But as a way to improve your programming skills and learn abstract concepts (functional programming, linear algebra, and so on) and connecting the dots between fields of study its a godsend.

Plus, you'll just be happier :-)

</comment><comment><USER58> I created a poll for this for those who are worried about privacy: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509693>

</comment><comment><USER59> 'use'? somehow it seems so innocuous that 'use' is way to strong a word that said, not me. marijuana makes me stupid to the point i forget i have muscles.

</comment><comment><USER60> Nope. A glass or two of 'vino rosso' with dinner, or a 'spritz' with friends once in a while.

</comment><comment><USER61> YOU ARE ALL GAY; BURN IN HELL

</comment><comment><USER62> Though I smoke Marlboro Lights but still I hate Marijuana or weed.</comment>


The Extraordinary California Drought of 2013-2014 - <AUTHOR> http://www.weatherwest.com/archives/1797 <comment><USER2> The Oakland Museum's Gallery of California Natural Sciences has some great installations highlighting California's water management and usage. I was taken aback by how much of California's total rainfall is captured and diverted for human consumption. It's well worth a visit to learn about all the infrastructure California already has for managing water and coping with draught, and how severe this draught must be to overcome those safeguards.

<comment><USER3> I'd argue that California's water management infrastructure is doing a great job. For example, the Crystal Springs reservoir, which supplies San Francisco, has remained nearly full [1], and municipalities haven't undertaken rationing or other drastic measures beyond "rat out your neighbors if they are watering the sidewalk."

This means that not only is the reservoir system keeping water in the taps of California's 38 million residents, but at least some of it is also keeping enough of a reserve to deal with catastrophes like an earthquake severing the pipelines that supply water to the San Francisco Bay Area.

[1] [http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi- progs/queryMonthly?CRY](http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryMonthly?CRY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I don't understand is how we have gotten to the point where we are living paycheck to paycheck in terms of water consumption. We know that it varies from year to year... why don't we have some sort of cushion with which to plan ahead?

<comment><USER5> We have an enormous cushion and can survive multiple drought years. The current water restrictions are just mild precautions against the chance that this will be a multi-year drought.

Right now we are at the "please let your lawns get a bit brown" level. In the 1970s, the multi-year drought got to the point where the restrictions were "do not use more than 50 gallons per person per day."

<comment><USER6> Who uses 50 gallons per person per day? People with a swimming pool? A 10 minute shower is ~25 gallons, so how on Earth can 50gallons/person/day can be a "restriction"? (not being a judgemental asshole, but I'm not honestly dumbfounded)

<comment><USER7> A dishwasher uses ~6 gallons of water per cycle. Flush can use 3 to 7 gallons and are often flushed 2 or more times a day. Shaving and brushing your teeth can easily use 2 or more gallons. Add in cooking and 50 gallons per day is well below what the average person uses even without watering their lawn.

PS: Older showers used up to 4 gallons per minute, high flow showers can get well above that. Worse and old style washing machine will often use 40 to 45 gallons per load.

<comment><USER8> That would have to be an ancient toilet to use 7 gallons of water. US law has required a maximum of 1.6 gallons per flush for new toilets since the late 90s, and I've never seen one more that used more than 3 in my life.

<comment><USER9> Don't forget the folks who rent. It looks like the national average is 35% and California can be up to 50% in areas (hard to tell if the statistics are by person or by household).

Landlords have no incentives to install toilets and appliances that use less water (or electricity), and every incentive to go cheap (which will also be less frugal). They don't incur any of the running costs. And since it is private property they can't be forced into doing anything. Tenants rarely have rights to install more efficient ones either.

<comment><USER10> If you get out of rent controlled areas like San Francisco, you'll find it's actually quite common for landlords to foot utility bills (except electricity), or at the least charge a flat fee per month that doesn't vary with usage.

Having individualized water meters isn't nearly as efficient or convenient for large apartment complexes as just doing it centrally, especially when the landlord is also using a large chunk of the water (eg for communal lawns). Rent control regimes prohibit separate fees (or higher rents) including the price of the water, so landlords in rent control situations will pass such costs directly to residents any way they can, even if it is inefficient. They'll also pass the costs of upgrading fixtures like toilets and showers, since they're not allowed to charge for them either.

<comment><USER9> I lived in Santa Cruz, CA for 14 years where there is no rent control, and in regular houses. While apartments may have utilities included for the reasons you gave, individual houses don't because there is no need.

In one house it would have cost $20 more to replace a toilet with an efficient one, versus repairing the existing leaking old one. I wanted to pay that $20 extra - they refused leaving me paying higher water for several years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> that is kind of disconcerting here is that there are clear winners in the drought - people who have water rights and who sell these rights at record prices as it is just much more profitable to sell the rights than to put that water to productive use. I wouldn't be surprised if these people haven't had any effect on the state water politics.

On the other side, once price gets high enough, some enterprising folks will charter some big tugboats and start towing icebergs to CA :)

<comment><USER12> > _much more profitable to sell the rights than to put that water to > productive use_

But this is exactly what selling the rights does: passes the rights on to someone who can put the water to better use.

<comment><USER11> if somebody can use it better why would you get assigned rights to the shared state resource like water in the first place? It is not like the water is collected on your land or pumped from your well (such cases would have at least some logic behind it)

<comment><USER13> Because the state generally arbitrates what the 'best' use of a shared resource is sub-optimally, usually according to politics, rather than economics.

Hence when the state allocates water you get a situation where crops that would be grown at a loss when paying for water, like rice and almonds, are given severely discounted access to water to encourage misallocation of water from profitable uses to unprofitable ones.

In a market economy when someone does something stupid, like thinking it's a good idea to grow rice in a desert the market responds by making their business unprofitable. In a political economy when someone does something stupid, everyone else goes without so that morons can grow rice and almonds in deserts. Therefore almond farmers being somewhat non-moronic will sell their water rights to people who need to take showers rather than grow almonds because they are at least intelligent enough to understand that more money is better than less money.

For an example see, any centrally planned economy, ever.

<comment><USER14> > For an example see, any centrally planned economy, ever.

We're pretty centrally planned here in Denmark, and it works well. :)

The key is to centrally plan infrastructure, but not _everything_. Electricity, healthcare, heating, oil/gas production, transport, education, and other basic infrastructure is mainly centrally planned, but plenty of the economy isn't. Things are also not always centrally _operated_ (transit is usually bid out to private companies to operate), but infrastructure, energy, and other common resources are generally centrally _planned_. I think overall this produces results that are less chaotic and short-term-profit-maximizing, and more sensible.

Central planners can also use market mechanisms where appropriate, so planning and markets aren't exclusive. For example, the university system is 100% public and generally rationally planned, but there are also market mechanisms within it that reallocate funds based on various metrics, such as tying # of admissions slots in various fields to employment outcomes. I don't think it's perfect, but I strongly suspect a laissez-faire market would produce worse outcomes.

(You do, of course, also need a functioning civil society, so that the planning isn't abysmally stupid, but that is basically a prerequisite for democracy to work at all.)

<comment><USER15> The key is to have a country 2x the size of Massachusetts (one of the smallest states in the US) — Denmark is the 133rd largest country. Using a country of your size with a population only 2/3rds NYC to argue for global planned economies is incredibly disingenuous.

A more apt comparison would be China or the former USSR.

<comment><USER16> Disregarding the EU is also disingenuous.

Rather than consider the USA as a single monolith and comparing to a single European nation like Denmark, compare to the equivalent monolith (the EU has 46% of the area, 158% of the population, and 103% GDP of the USA). Most EU countries have heavy central planning for all the things _delirium mentioned, probably all EU countries if you use the USA as a baseline.

<comment><USER15> Right, the EU is more applicable if you compare each country to a US state. US States typically do have central planning, like doling out these water rights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just a few days ago some HN commenters were saying it's perfectly fine to waste food in America because, hey, you can't really know how much food you'll really need while buying it. Someone ought to correlate what is the environmental impact on California from wasting 35 million tonnes of food annually.

<comment><USER18> It takes somewhere between 441-12,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, depending on whether you want to believe the stats from the beef industry or an ardent environmentalist/vegetarian: [http://www.gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the- big...](http://www.gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big-water- footprints)

My guess is that the real number is somewhere in between, but that still represents an order of magnitude more water consumption than producing plant- based foodstuffs.

The 35mm tons of wasted food is terrible, for numerous reasons, but we shouldn't stop there. There are a lot of things we can and should do to drastically reduce our water consumption. Like eating alternative foods.

Fwiw, I essentially haven't eaten beef in about 17 years. I eat a fair amount of poultry and fish, and occasionally eat pork, but I skip beef both for personal health and general environmental reasons.

<comment><USER19> It is not so much water consumption that is the problem, it was the ridiculously subsidized price of water to this area that made it a problem. Locating water intensive farming away from a natural resource was only asking for problems.

Then to top it off with far too many people who want that picturesque green lawn and just throwing water on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone interested in managing water should read the book Living with Water Scarcity (free pdf here [http://livingwithwaterscarcity.com/](http://livingwithwaterscarcity.com/))

</comment><comment><USER21> When you really stop to think about it, the amount of things in our lives that depend on the weather are overwhelming.

<comment><USER22> My electricity bills seem to have been more expensive last summer than last winter (obviously no heating in the summer, and no cooling), which I suspect is because of less precipitation (though I haven't looked into it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My wife and I had an argument about whether we would ever move from our paid- for house in zip 90045. I said if the drought gets bad enough, she said never. Hope we never have to decide, but I am worried.

<comment><USER24> I don't get it. Why would you think about moving just because you can't wash your car or water your lawn for a couple of months?

<comment><USER25> The drought could get much worse than disrupting home irrigation. Depending on how bad it gets, the price of water could rise and force people out, leaving them with no choice but to leave. I don't know what that would look like or how it would affect households already economically strained with limited capacity to move, but I doubt it will be a good situation.

The disruption to California's ability to produce food will also affect people outside of the state, raising prices.

There's probably water around to import if the price is right if it came to that, so I think it just becomes a question of market forces and how the drought will impact California's economy and the country. I don't think many people are going to die of thirst, although that is a real possibility for immigrants who cross the border illegally who may encounter less water because of the drought.

<comment><USER26> If history teach us much, the scarcity will spark innovation in water efficiency. Most of the US has been pretty lax when it comes to water usage.

Perhaps large scale desalination efficiency will be found, or atmospheric moisture extraction will take off.

Imagine if you could get some order of magnitude improvements on these technologies..

Consider reversing the flow of water now: pump from ocean, back up the land, and let each consumer desalinate on premise?

<comment><USER27> Another thing history might teach is that when critical resources like food and water are so poorly and corruptly managed that the result is famine and drought, millions of people can die. I suppose we're going to call that disruptive innovation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I always come back to air traffic. Did patterns change significantly in the last few years? I could swear the weather here in MI changed a bit after delta bought northwest and made Detroit a non-hub. But that's just anecdotal. Does anyone study weather pattern correlation with air traffic routes?

<comment><USER29> As you might remember, there were a few days after 9/11 when all air traffic nationwide was grounded. Some scientists took it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to examine what effect air traffic might have on climate.

Here's an article in Nature talking about it.

[http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335.h...](http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335.html)

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the link. I was well aware of that week. Michigan skies were exceptionally deep blue and cloud free - all week. I am also aware that NASA recorded an increase in the daily temperature range (details escape me). My question getting modded down to -4 is an amazing example of... something. People thinking climate is all about CO2? I dunno, but I'm gonna go follow that nature link. Thanks again.</comment></comment></comment>


The Ultimate Coding Soundtrack Created by the Hackernews Community - <AUTHOR> http://attictv.tumblr.com/post/20830591794/the-ultimate-coding-soundtrack-93-of-the-best-songs <comment><USER2> I get mocked by many of my colleagues for this, but I find nothing focuses me better for programming than stuff like Aphex Twin and Autechre. So it's good to see them having a strong presence in this sound track.

One criticism though: the retired DJ inside me is screaming at the lack of set structure. :P

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks laumars for that.. yeah. more structure to the track is definitely needed. will that retire DJ come out and start creating Mixtapes on AtticTV? :p

<comment><USER2> Possibly. What sort things would you be interested in? I already have a few mixes online that's available to download. HN doesn't appear to have a PM function, but I'm contactable via a number of different IMs / chat networks if you want to discuss this further :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ported to Spotify: [http://open.spotify.com/user/trolocsis/playlist/7t1g2joCifrz...](http://open.spotify.com/user/trolocsis/playlist/7t1g2joCifrzM9fMU9YbCG)

A few songs are missing on spotify, including Metallica.

</comment><comment><USER4> Will check it out. Another good site for coding music which has been on hacker news a few times (that's where I found it) is <http://musicforprogramming.net/> Been using the music from there when I need to concentrate and its worked well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! will definitely check it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ported to Grooveshark playlist: [http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Ultimate+Coding+Soundtrack/6...](http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Ultimate+Coding+Soundtrack/69336970)

</comment><comment><USER6> The concept reminds me 'Music for programming' mix series: <http://www.datassette.net/?l=mixes>

</comment><comment><USER7> Ported to Rdio: <http://rd.io/x/QVpUIzNUbgo>

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this.. Saved me from cracking my head at youtube trying to search for songs... :)

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome! great it works for you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a shuffle button hidden somewhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> nope.. not yet unfortunately :( will definitely get it done -- pronto!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Halcyon and On" is always a must have.

</comment><comment><USER11> Goodjob :D

</comment><comment><USER12> wow, this is good stuff!

</comment><comment><USER13> Too much Deadmouse

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah.. exterminators are a plenty :/ haha.. you don't like deadmau5?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> oh sem!

</comment><comment><USER15> Cool !

</comment><comment><USER16> Awww yeah~<3

<comment><USER17> fuuuuhhhhhhh! <3</comment></comment>


Bitcoin exchange Youbit shuts after second hack attack - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42409815 <comment><AUTHOR> At some point Bitcoin exchanges will have to realise that they need to be as secure as a bank is. For exactly the same reason.

And that this is expensive.

<comment><USER2> you mean like only allowing 6-digit passwords without symbols?

<comment><USER3> If the consequence of my account being compromised is the bank adjusting the numbers in the ledger back then the bank are welcome to enforce such rules.

If a bank said that customers were responsible for the money stored in the bank and that the bank could not undo transactions (from the POV of the genuine client) then we'd be demanding much stronger banking passwords.

<comment><USER4> The exchanges can just change a couple numbers in their database and reverse the hack... r-right?

<comment><USER3> Yes, if people accept fractional reserve banking for bitcoin. I'd actually assume that's how most exchanges operate under the hood but many people who buy into bitcoin for ideological reasons won't accept that.

A consequence of making that formal is that the total owned amount of bitcoin would be more than 21m, because the hacker would own bitcoin and the users would own bitcoin on the exchange.

As long as there isn't a bank run, that discrepancy would not be a problem, but it would deflate the currency, also seen as unacceptable to bitcoin purists.

edit: access -> accept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Should I be worried about having my cryptocurrency assets on an exchange?

<comment><USER6> Yes

Unless your local security is worse than that of an exchange

<comment><USER7> Echoing this - for long term storage, they should be kept on a hardware wallet.

<comment><USER8> For long term storage, that sounds a terrible idea. Do you really want to trust your savings to $20 of electronic components that aren't designed to last more than a few years?

<comment><USER9> The wallets can be regenerated using your seed phrase. So your argument should really be, "Do you really want to trust a $0.02 piece of paper" :)

<comment><USER8> Exactly. The hardware wallet is pointless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If I was building an exchange for crypto here's what I would do.

1\. Encrypt you users private keys client side with a password only they know. Now I just hold encrypted keys my side.

2\. When the user wishes to make an exchange I would create the transaction client side let them sign it and do the exchange.

This way funds are now encrypted by default at rest and if compromise occurs the thief gets encrypted private keys only. Hopefully the users chose passwords secure enough to avoid compromise.

It's not perfect, but can we finally move away from the hot wallet model.

p.s. If you want to build this, and require advice and backing let me know.

<comment><USER11> That does not solve exchange take over and transaction reversibility/clawback until the settlement X days in the future which is basic tenet of risk mitigation.

The reason you cannot electronically rob Ameritrade is because NOTHING can be done immediately outside Ameritrade. Since the settlement is at _least_ T+3 there's no such thing as "Obtain control in 30 seconds and be out of there 3 minutes later with the loot"

<comment><USER12> this is exactly the reason Coinbase has been delaying transactions but somehow people think it's a bad thing and keeping them away from their money.

<comment><USER11> Delay for risk mitigation on exchanges are _known_. You transaction _will_ settle on a 3rd business day.

After a wire is authorized by a broker (i.e. passed authentication and the person making a request is authorized to make it and the margin is satisfied and there's no block on the fed level), it _will_ be posted by your bank on the same fed business day if the wire is authorized before fed cut off time.

Coinbase is a VC-funded shady co if it does not operate based on strict and _known_ confines. Banks and brokers spell out the confines (new account rules/withdrawal rules/funds availability rules) at the opening of a new account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Almost all crypto operate by requiring only one actor authorise create a valid transaction. You loose your one-single-point-of-failure-private-key and its over, what's needed is a more sophisticated system at the protocol level which requires secondary authorisation.

<comment><USER14> [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Multisignature)

<comment><USER15> Back when I held bitcoin this is what I did. I had two ledger nanos holding a private key and one private key managed by an online wallet, that shut down since. It was a really comfortable way of accessing my coins and it felt quite secure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Confused it with yobit for a second.

</comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, I wonder if a centrally trusted third party could have prevented something like this? Maybe, just maybe, anonymous currency systems (i.e. cash and all equivalents), just aren't inherently secure so there's no real point in replicating them? Just maybe...</comment>


What Do Jesus, Mike Krzyzewski, and Jimmy Buffett Have in Common? - <AUTHOR> http://www.marginofexcellence.com/2012/03/16/what-do-jesus-mike-krzyzewski-and-jimmy-buffett-have-in-common/

<comment><USER2> I was expecting a funny joke... but no.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is this on hacker news?</comment>


No Child Left Untableted - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/no-child-left-untableted.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><USER2> I am writing this in NY while having discussed this article with multiple teachers and principals at a charter school.

Here are some facts: The US spends over $600 billion on the K-12 education system. Just around 0.46% of that entire budget is spent on educational software resources. Most of the content money goes in the pockets of Pearson and other big textbook publishers.

I have been an ed teach entrepreneur for over 1.5 yrs and I started building ed games for ipads over 2 years ago. I actually learnt objective-c for that purpose alone. I have tested our games and numerous other games with 100's of kids and I can unequivocally say, that in my 'subjective' experience, replacing workbooks/textbooks with ipads is much better for kids. iPads should serve as a tool to optimize education.

The argument that these teachers don't know how to use them is complete BS. For every 50 year old teacher, there is a young 23 yr old TFA graduate who is vastly superior at integrating technology. As a society, you cannot make decisions based on accommodating the ever shrinking population of teachers that is too old to work with technology.

Amplify is hardly the example of disruption, they are a big company with around a thousand employees, led by a former superintendent who greases the superintendents all over the country. They have the resources to esentially 'buy-out' schools. Schools in turn let themselves be bought out rather than evaluate all the options, due to district procurement rules. Good tehnology for ed will only be available if there is an easy way to test products in schools since most good tech is iterative. We have to go through so many barriers to do this on a school level, but I have linked up with enough good teachers who understand its value and are willing to put in the time and effort to do so.

I have faced many of the same questions from parents that this article comes up with. Those are nothing new. The question is not about tablets or or no tablets, its the fact that all computers will be tablets (or some form of touch devices) in 5 years. If that is the only computer that is going to be available to us, then schools and teachers need to learn how to assimilate it.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Random thought dump incoming.

There are a lot of issues in the public education system. In fact, one might ask whether the compulsory Prussian-based system is still relevant and effective these days.

One thing's for sure: you're not going to fix these problems by pumping in consumer electronics into the curriculum. You'll temporarily mask it, maybe please the parents and students a little (especially the poorer ones), but ultimately you'll have accomplished nothing.

For one thing, you're offering them locked down, DRM-packed, proprietary tracking devices that give an abstracted user interface but won't give you much potential to tinker with its inner workings or hack around. Most districts go with Apple products, so even things like app development are significantly more closed.

There is no doubt that education needs to catch up with the technological world and the Web of Things that lies ahead, but it's being done in the most careless and ineffective way imaginable. To the point where it might even be hampering education.

If your objective is to make a subservient class of automatons who lack critical thinking skills, then sure, stuffing them with iPads is the way to go.

Public education should be online-integrated and technologically conscious, but in my mind what we need is a radical paradigm shift: a higher acceptance of autodidacticism and alternative education as viable learning paths. A lot of public schools teach at a very slow pace, one that more savvy kids can be ahead of with the global repository of information online (of course, most prefer social networking, but I digress).

Who knows? MOOCs might make a lot of schools obsolete soon.

What's worth noting is that the private schools which the children of the elite and the wealthy attend tend to be educated in highly selective institutions that for the most part do not utilize contemporary technology and rely on more traditional approaches to education. Perhaps there is something to be noted here.</comment>


Money Crypto vs. Tech Crypto - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bexpro/money-crypto-vs-tech-crypto-5730641d64e1 <comment><USER2> "Tech Crypto"

Doesnt mention the near impossibility of having 7 computers verify every database write for an application. Its slow/unreliable and expensive.

Ethereum doesnt seem to scale and the solution to this is going POS, which removes the trustless nature of blockchain.</comment>


One year of Master's in Journalism costs $149,000 - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/11/new-journalism-degree-columbia-150k-catch <comment><USER2> Journalism in general seems to be seeing a higher and higher price for entry, especially where 'formal' training is concerned. First you've got stuff like this, then you've got to somehow afford an intership or something in one of the most expensive cities in the world, then you're being paid little enough that actually being able to afford to live near your workplace is probably near impossible.

Add the (also rather ludicrous) prices for journalism related conferences and events and it seems you've got a field where the 'professional' route to entry is only open for rich kids, not the population as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can attest to this. I am rich now and can afford to attend a college near nyc to get degree in journalism. I was dirt poor for most of my life though, so I hope to carry that perspective with me forward.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it's a huge problem: most modern journalists tend to come from a place of privilege. Not only is it expensive to get a degree but it also requires lots of free time to build a portfolio. And then once you've "made it" \-- which might take years of hustling -- you're lucky to be clearing $40k/year. For a profession that has such great influence over society it's very concerning that's not a more egalitarian field.</comment>


The DNA of a Successful Book - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hiptype.com/the-dna-of-a-successful-book-1

<comment><USER2> Huffington Post's SEO abilities and juicing every possible pageview from a story don't make the best example for what book publishing should be like IMO.

We already have plenty of low-quality newspapers 'optimized' for sales all around the world. Invariably they have one or more naked girls on page 9, and "funny" police sections. Is that the future of books? Pure entertainment?

<comment><AUTHOR> You make a good point. What I was trying to get at is that HuffingtonPost has a DNA that's different than many of the previous "new media" models that didn't perform nearly as well.

It's not that book publishing's success stories will exactly resemble HuffPo. In fact they will likely look very different. Rather, I expect the internal process to be very similar, in that the winners will use data to win arguments, will move fast and break things, etc.

And maybe the book culture could use a bit more medium/low-brow culture to better expand beyond its core audience. An analogy would be how a blockbuster movie like "The Dark Knight" manages to both be very entertaining but also appeal to a huge audience.</comment></comment>


The 21st century skill students really lack - <AUTHOR> http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2013/05/the-21st-century-skill-students-really-lack.html

<comment><USER2> Having access to digital distractions is just half of why students get bored. The other problem is that the material taught in K-12 schools feels irrelevant, because it is.

As an example, OP brings up art analysis. Done properly, it is a rewarding endeavour. But the kind of art analysis you find being taught by dispassionate high school teachers are of the "The Curtains Were Fucking Blue" variety. And so, students come away thinking that's what all art analysis is: irrelevant.

Students need real-world, meaningful context for what they're learning.

Not contrived word problems or symbolism-searching.

<comment><USER3> _Students need real-world, meaningful context for what they're learning. Not contrived word problems...._

This unfortunate meme is spreading like foot fungus in our schools, because there is some truth to it: you DO need SOME experience applying your skills in real-world contexts for your brain to decide they are worth keeping.

Unfortunately, this is misunderstood to mean that you don't learn things that aren't learned in realistic contexts. This is false and reflects a misunderstanding of the nature and value of math.

Math is the study of abstractions. When you learn that adding two apples to three apples gives you five apples and adding two bunnies to three bunnies gives you five bunnies, you soon discover that you can think of all such problems abstractly: adding a number to a number. When you then study how to add pure numbers, you are gaining _experience_ with an infinite number of concrete, real-world problems simultaneously.

The point is not to give you experience with specific, realistic problems that you might encounter later, but to give you enough experience with different, concrete instances of an abstract concept that you begin to see the underlying similarity of all such problems. You don't need the instances to be "realistic", you need them to be recognizable enough that they lead you to an understanding of the abstraction. If problems are too realistic, people are tempted to solve them on the basis of domain experience and possibly miss the abstraction they represent.

You also need enough practice working directly with the abstraction (e.g., adding numbers that don't represent anything specific: pure numbers) that the result is fluency in recognizing a problem at an abstract level and easily solving it with your skills in manipulating the abstractions.

I think applying these abstract skills to some realistic problems is a great thing to do. But the fashionable notion among "progressive educators" that the study of "contrived problems" and "meaningless symbol manipulation" is to be avoided is a sad example of the blind leading the blind, robbing students of the true power of math: the ability to think in mathematical abstractions instead of being limited to the real-world contexts they've directly experienced.

<comment><USER4> Willingham would be proud, as this is a recurring theme and a whole chapter in his book "Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom." He also made this case on this on his blog when responding to Andrew Hacker's ridiculous suggestion to change math so that you don't actually learn math:

"The problem is that if you try to meet this challenge by teaching the specific skills that people need, you had better be confident that you're going to cover all those skills. Because if you teach students the significance of the Consumer Price Index they are not going to know how to teach themselves the significance of projected inflation rates on their investment in CDs. Their practical knowledge will be specific to what you teach them, and won't transfer.

The best bet for knowledge that can apply to new situations is an abstract understanding--seeing that apparently different problems have a similar underlying structure. And the best bet for students to gain this abstract understanding is to teach it explicitly. (For a discussion of this point as it applies to math education in particular, see Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996).

But the explicit teaching of abstractions is not enough. You also need practice in putting the abstractions into concrete situations."

Neither of us, though, can make the point as well as he does. In the book he explains what transfer is, as well as surface knowledge, deep knowledge, etc, and how an understanding of these concepts ca inform a philosophy of education and shape education practices.

Everyone, read his book! If the title worries you that it's too focused on educators, then ignore the title. The content is applicable to anyone interested in learning at all, especially if you want to improve the way you learn. Obviously, I strongly recommend that book, but alternatively, he covers a lot of what's in the book in his articles[2].

</willingham_fan_boy>

[1] [http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/07/yes- algebra-i...](http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/07/yes-algebra-is- necessary.html)

[2] <http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment> j-m-o I suppose I fall into the category of a 21st century student, although I finished my CS degree in the early 'noughts.

I think the thesis of the article is generally accurate, that students are capable, but less inclined, to pay attention to things not deemed worthy of the effort. However, I think the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff of stimulus is also an important lesson.

I look back to most of my courses fondly, but there were definitely periods where the professor was rehashing previously covered material, or pushing their own research agendas well beyond the course curriculum. As a student with limited hours (and in my case limited again with several part-time jobs), does it make sense to pay perfect attention to the lectures at hand, or maybe put the finishing touches on that assignment for another class?

That said, coming back to the author's example of art history, that was one of the most rewarding classes I took in university. Albeit a 3-hour examination of one work seems excessive, there's a lot to gain from the appreciation of fine works outside of algorithms and data structures.

</comment><comment><USER5> The replacement is already being piloted in schools: mindfulness meditation. It encourages the same kinds of depth and discovery, in a more general-purpose fashion.

After all, if you aren't patient enough to do nothing at all, how are you going to be patient enough to study challenging material?

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't see the ear/squirrel/shoulder thing mentioned in the article. I looked really hard.

<comment><USER7> you can spot the resemblance only after two hours of staring at the painting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The other half of patience: grit. Also lacking.

</comment><comment><USER9> School sucks and students are aware of it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I want to comment, but I feel obliged to study this article for two more hours before I do so.

<comment><AUTHOR> _I want to comment, but I feel obliged to study this article for two more hours before I do so._

Isn't the time limit for editing a Hacker News comment approximately two hours long? Go for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Seeing how the educational system that we have now was nonexistent 100 years ago that routinely offers information one can find online now, I feel like the author is referring to something that was more valuable and more applicable to a point in history than the current state of affairs (at least in the way our society values/rewards formal education with assumed employability and/or a necessary prerequisite for any further study for many things) .

Though on some level I can appreciate the need for patience when undergoing a process with a well defined end-point worth the wait that is understood by the person doing the waiting, I am failing to see how the current state of affairs in the education system deliver this to the students as they apparently have in the past (which I doubt seeing they ways things are now).

I would even doubt career academics would attribute their success to their patience (or being told that they should be patient) before their own curiosity.

<comment><USER12> > _Seeing how the educational system that we have now was nonexistent 100 > years ago_

I'm not sure what you mean with "nonexisting". Attended by fewer people? If so, yes.

Still, a century ago (and quite a lot more for that matter), there were excellent universities and great curriculums, of the kind that put a lot of modern university curriculums to shame. Is fields such as literature, history, sociology and such there is no comparison even, compared to the watered down modern equivalents. But also in hard sciences. Our knowledge might has progresses, but university courses have more often than not declined, to adapt to "market needs" (something with is also widely admitted by professors).

> _that routinely offers information one can find online now_

It's not about information, it's about knowing how to evaluate information.

Information without the skills to evaluate it is just white noise.

To put it in another way, a 20 year old with full access to the Internet, is not (as a sum of his and the internets information) smarter and wont be more productive than Einstein or Bertrand Russell.

> _I feel like the author is referring to something that was more valuable and > more applicable to a point in history than the current state of affairs_

Nope. The availability of huge amounts of information online even makes it much more important a skill -- for if you can show the necessary patience, then you have much more information at your disposal to evaluate and take advantage off.

Just the information without the patience = the typical internet user's attention span and non-productivity.

> _I would even doubt career academics would attribute their success to their > patience (or being told that they should be patient) before their own > curiosity._

Most of them (of what I've read in biographies and interviews) attribute their success to hard work and study, which sure sounds like "patience" to me.

Curiosity without patience = Reddit.

<comment><USER11> > _I'm not sure what you mean with "nonexisting". Attended by fewer people? If > so, yes. Still, a century ago (and quite a lot more for that matter), there > were excellent universities and great curriculums, of the kind that put a > lot of modern university curriculums to shame._

I'm talking about K-12 and the notion of public schools as well not just universities themselves.

> _To put it in another way, a 20 year old with full access to the Internet, > is not (as a sum of his and the internets information) smarter and wont be > more productive than Einstein or Bertrand Russell._

I was implying nothing of the sort. I see it as those who would never have the type of access to the infrastructure associated with our educational system (you know, K-12, free lunch, public transportation, student loans, and etc), could learn how to evaluate information without the aid of a such an institutionalized system (and even as the cost of the degree goes up, most americans are going to essentially be priced out of even mediocre universities if they don't want to live their productive lives paying student loans if they can get a job not soon to be automated by computers/robots, of course, for the chance [seeing as students today are lacking this ability even with the degree according to this author] to learn how to evaluate information with patience).

The 20 year olds I sat in class with during MatSci seemed to equate evaluating information with regurgitating what the professor regurgitated from his lecture notes that he wrote up and posted online in the previous years, and seemed so incompetent when unable to apply their "evaluation skills" when trying to etch/dope wafers in lab (but able to deftly copypasta a lab report together with their peers for that good ol' "A").

> _Most of them (of what I've read in biographies and interviews) attribute > their success to hard work and study, which sure sounds like "patience" to > me. Curiosity without patience = Reddit._

Notice how I wrote " _…would attribute their success to their patience (or being told that they should be patient) before their own curiosity._ " and not "Curiosity without patience" as I noted before that when I qualified the circumstance where patience would be valuable in this context.</comment></comment></comment>


Windows93 - <AUTHOR> https://www.windows93.net/ <comment><USER3> My four year old doesn't believe that computers ever looked or loaded like this. Hacker News is 'farty' and 'telling stories' today.

Edit - The four year old doesn't believe that I went to school. This is going to be quite the ride to daycare...

<comment><USER4> It didn't look like this. Especially not in 1993. They are mixing a bunch of metaphors from different time periods. Mostly late 90s but nothing ever animated like this either.

<comment><USER5> Windows 93 is what became Windows 95.

<comment><USER6> Nah, I don't think so, Windows 95 was codenamed Chicago before it was released. I can't remember ever having seen the name "Windows 93" mentioned in that time.

<comment><USER5> See The Old New Thing, by Raymond Chen: [https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC](https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=wYrCitbs5PQC) , where he says "Windows 95 was originally Windows 93, after all."

<comment><USER6> You're right, apparently, and I was wrong. Wikipedia says so too:

> So the development of Windows "Chicago" was started and, as it was planned > for a late 1993 release, became known as Windows 93 which was also known as > Windows 4.0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This site is truly amazing, it's really inspiring to see how some people can get so creative using the old Desktop GUI metaphor. I'm personally curating a list [1] of all these websites and webapps that look like vintage desktop UIs.

[1] [https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-gui- websites](https://github.com/syxanash/awesome-gui-websites)

<comment><USER8> Apologies I'm not familiar with request process on your github. Your list is great, I have some of those already saved as bookmarks. But here is another good one, Amiga workbench; [http://www.chiptune.com/](http://www.chiptune.com/)

<comment><USER7> Thanks so much for this site, it's really well crafted! For your information you can simply modify the file README.md and then open a pull request for your submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No matter how hard I try, can't find a way to trigger the BSoD. There must be a way, will keep looking.

Edit: Seems it's supposed to crash on its own at random intervals for no apparent reason. It's really just like the original.

<comment><USER9> So much to explore, and so much fun:

Defrag is a game of Snake with some old Nokia (I guess) monophonic ringtone playing in the background.

"Manifest" is a randomly-generated hilarious equation, for example: "utf8 + doge = web 3.0"

There's a Star Wars episode all in ASCII.

Inside /a/README.txt: 'Indeed, we have a "fuck the cloud" philosophy !'

Start → Run: "There's nowhere you can run..."

In "Cat Explorer" (browser) there is a bookmark under "INTERWEBZ" for "Mark Zuckerberg's homepage" that appears to be genuinely his, back when he was 15 years old: [https://web.archive.org/web/20021104225654/http://www.angelf...](https://web.archive.org/web/20021104225654/http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/)

In some places it gets very modern though:

What If: "What if I told you / You can eat without posting it on Instagram"

In any case, no matter what you do, don't start Hydra.exe.

(And I still couldn't get the BSoD.)

<comment><USER10> >There's a Star Wars episode all in ASCII.

You can have it in your terminal too:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

<comment><USER11> Man, it was mind-blowing back in the day to see a video streaming from a server right to your local machine in real time

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I kind of miss how speedy and usable a desktop like this was. I remember running Windows 95 on 64MB RAM (even did it on 16MB, barely) on a 486 DX2 66MHz (it was something someone else had thrown out, in the era of Pentium IIs, I was poor).

And then installing RedHat 6.0 from a magazine cover CD and using FVWM and wondering how I could make my feeble poor machine look like the glorious KDE2 and GNOME desktops gracing the pages of said magazine.

I miss KDE2's look TBH.

<comment><USER13> 64MB?? _wow_. My 486/33 had 4MB. I eventually was able to upgrade to 16MB (I think it cost like $400 though), and my linux kernel compile times went down from 8 hours to 12 minutes. That was the day I _truly_ learned how much swapping affected performance.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it was a bunch of SIMMs (I think - they had metal edge clips to destroy your fingers compared to modern DIMM insertion) that they chucked out at school (they gave them to me instead of binning them). It would have been more normal for 16MB in the days when a 486 was mainstream but this was many many years after 486 were considered ancient - 1998 to 2000 I think? I was poor and my paper-round only stretched to buying Micromart and looking at computers I couldn't afford.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> previous hits from past 1-5 years

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12691597)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14531578)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9162566)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507786)

<comment><AUTHOR> Grah - I had checked for previous posts, but only by pasting the URL into HN search (no hits). I'll try harder next time, apologies for the noise.

<comment><USER15> Hackernews clears the existing post check after a given time period. Refreshing old stuff occasionally is not against the rules and sometimes encouraged because not everyone sees it the first time, or sometimes people just like to comment on reruns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So it seems to be able to open itself quite well: [https://imgur.com/a/dkEYrFW](https://imgur.com/a/dkEYrFW)

</comment><comment><USER17> Ahaha this is great, the laggy emulator, the unwinnable minesweeper, the horrible delays caused by a system full of spyware and garbage. The desktop seemed maybe a little bit too clean though, there wasn't icons half off the screen or hidden entirely and it lacked the random files typically placed or saved there because if it's not on the desktop it doesn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER18> Should remove the closing animations. They break the nostalgia.

lol! lena and virtual girl. You do realize there are women on this site right? may be have it a bit less bro-ey ?

</comment><comment><USER19> Mad props for running completely smooth on Firefox Preview for Android. Drag to select, double click, window resize, everything just works perfectly. Why can't modern SPAs work as well?

<comment><USER20> > Why can't modern SPAs work as well

Some do

<comment><USER21> Very true. The ones that don't, I don't know what their excuse is.

Maybe they thought they would add performance later. Maybe they pulled in dependencies willy-nilly without truly understanding the problem space. Maybe it's a result of the frantic rush to add features.

Somehow it has become acceptable to keep users waiting for multiple seconds. It's crazy and often unnecessary.

For example, I just built a trivia game PWA[0]. >1MB in size, including ~30 SVG illustrations. 7kb per game. Writing offline mode now, it will add ~1.45mb but only once, at "install" time. It's only MVP but it's already fast.

Whatever the cause, it makes me very frustrated as a user and front ender.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Oh dear Cthulhu, I'd totally forgotten about the Hamsterdance!

<comment><USER23> That was one of the first daft websites I remember visiting, when it was first possible to use the Internet on a computer at school. (That's _a_ computer, the one with the dial-up modem.)

Start → Programs → hampster to see it here.

[1] [http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/](http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/) and then open [http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/images/plasticjesus.wav](http://www.angelfire.com/id/hern/images/plasticjesus.wav) and play it on repeat, since web browsers won't do this automatically any more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My vapors are waved.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone remember the address to a website that loaded basically a full blown VM of a random vintage OS? This reminded me of that and I've been wracking my brain to try to remember it

<comment><USER26> Search for Fabrice Bellard.

<comment><USER27> Yes, this is it. He ported (and created) Qemu to JS using Emscriptem and we can run differen OSes inside the browser. So cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nitpick: Turbo C in DOSBox doesn't work by default. Options - <USER2> point to C:\TC\ whereas Turbo C is actually installed in C:\\.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Safari is teh new Internet Explorer"

huh

<comment><USER30> I find that quit upsetting since it's clearly _the authors choice_ to not support Safari and not any particular failure of the browser. It's my goto browser for everyday surfing, fast, light and with great standards support.

<comment><USER31> I can understand choosing not to support it. Safari is frustrating to web developers because you can't legally test on it without owning Apple hardware. Whereas Microsoft provides free virtual machines for testing on its browsers. I've done the same thing on my personal sites - I've outright blocked Safari with a message explaining that I won't unblock it until Apple provides a Safari VM.

<comment><USER32> They used to provide builds of Safari and Webkit for Windows; people complained endlessly about the very fact of their existence. Apple stopped providing them. True story.

Also, outright blocking Safari users is sort of obnoxious.

<comment><USER31> Sorry but that's not even remotely close to being the same. The Windows builds were notoriously badly supported and were never equivalent from a debugging perspective. Microsoft made a genius move by providing its IE VMs, and if Apple didn't want to force developers into its ecosystem they'd have done the same.

I agree that it's obnoxious, but I'd rather do that than deal with Safari users complaining about bugs on my sites that I have no intention of buying a Mac or breaking the law to fix. I'd rather avoid the bug reports and let the users know that it's Apple fixing it. The sites I run are entirely free and paid for out of my own pocket anyway, so I don't want my money going towards people who support Safari. I've considered blocking Chrome, too, for other reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is quite impressive, I played with PukeData and it works quite well. And the maze3d in ascii is quite brilliant too though I find it quite hard, everything looks the same. And the Halflife 3 is mocking me, it appears to be loading but keeps on initializing silly stuff like VR Pizza, etc..

<comment><USER33> Oh and don't click Hydra.exe. It killed my session:)

<comment><USER34> Dr. Marburg is there for a reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> My favorite site for when a colleague forgot to lock his PC. Win93, put the browser in full screen mode and it looks like the PC has been haunted or hacked. Took some of them minutes to find out what was going on, especially because the programs are functional.

</comment><comment><USER36> Text rendering seems off. Some are clear but some are very blurry: [https://i.imgur.com/G2lyFEY.png](https://i.imgur.com/G2lyFEY.png)

Is this intentional or just a bug?

<comment><USER37> I do not know, but I have another font problem [https://i.imgur.com/VwMWcOm.png](https://i.imgur.com/VwMWcOm.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Honestly using this on a phone is not very far from the android ui.

</comment><comment><USER39> Even there is a Half-life 3 and it's loading forever.

</comment><comment><USER40> This version of Minesweeper seems a bit hard to beat.

<comment> phoe-krk Play around in the options to get the vanilla minesweeper.

<comment><USER41> Disable "Troll mode" in "Options".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> One of my favorite pieces of software art! Jankenpopp and Zombectro are awesome artists... [http://jankenpopp.com/](http://jankenpopp.com/) [http://zombect.ro/](http://zombect.ro/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Looking at the console, it's disappointing to see it trying to connect to (the now defunct) Coinhive

</comment><comment><USER44> Was this inspired by Windows RG ([https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg](https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg)) ?

It is obviously way more impressive but I'm surprised nobody else has mentioned it.

</comment><comment><USER45> I forgot defrag was a thing. Whenever computer felt slow, run it to have your placebo.

</comment><comment><USER46> All the apps work, this must have taken forever, there's a full solitaire game, ms paint, etc. each one not that easy to do in JS, well done. I wonder why? It's a lot more than a proof-of-concept or prototype.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm pretty upset that I couldn't outsmart the AI and win tic-tac-toe. I wrote some tic-tac-toe "AI" a while back, and it wasn't as good as this one. I could beat mine...

<comment><USER48> Just in case someone doesn't know better, there are fewer than 300k possible games of tic-tac-toe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Weird quirk, but it seems that MineSweeper / BrianSweeper always places a mine in the upper-right corner. I usually start here, and 30 games in a row it had a mine in that position.

<comment><USER50> There's always a mine no matter where you click first.

<comment><USER51> I put a flag on a random square as a first move, and clicked the square next to it, I didn't die!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm kinda curious about the backstory. For example, the NES emulator is kinda cool, (even though I can't get the arrow keys to work,) and each game is an accomplishment in itself.

</comment><comment><USER53> This reminds me of a browser based computing environment demo (I believe it was WebOS or MyWebTop) in the late 1990s. We have indeed come a long way in the last 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER54> I found the Castle Gafa game... interesting, to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER55> Open "Solitude" click "Game" -> "Yeah" and follow the instructions. You won't be disappointed.

> click and drag anywhere on the game to see the fun, thanks to mr doob

</comment><comment><USER56> Half-Life 3....confirmed

That one cracked me and my boy. Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER57> Progress Quest is a surprisingly engaging game

</comment><comment><USER58> Amazing! It would be fun if they could somehow integrate jspaint.app which is a very close replica of 90s MS Paint.

</comment><comment><USER59> Doesn't work in a private browsing window on Firefox. It could be that local storage is disabled, IIRC?

</comment><comment><USER60> Very cool. Technology has come far.

Sidenote: Is it just me, or is the minesweeper game designed to make you lose every time?

<comment><USER61> I managed to beat it on intermediate.

<comment><USER62> How?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Oh, this takes me back a long time. I kept a game of Progress Quest open for far longer than I should have.

</comment><comment><USER64> Wow, I don't know how I just missed modern browsers being able to run Game Boy emulators.

<comment><USER65> Modern browsers can emulate Windows 95, which is a significantly more involved feat than emulating a GB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> In the Trollbox chat log I see

>~anonymous is now known as wuhan-clan

Is this added lately? If so, its very convincing.

<comment><USER67> Social media on windows93.net is a massive live UGC sandbox. Take for example [https://myspace.windows93.net/](https://myspace.windows93.net/) , you could spend days getting lost in retro parody reenactment without even wrapping the experience in the windows93 desktop.

<comment><USER68> Can confirm, I got lost: [https://myspace.windows93.net/?id=244](https://myspace.windows93.net/?id=244)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> This website has totally destroyed my productivity for the day. Thanks for that! :D

</comment><comment><USER70> Is there a current gen operating system that maintains this appearence style?

<comment><USER71> Well, several Desktop managers for Linux have old-school Windows-like themes. For example: [https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95](https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95)

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Thinking of days when I was a student playing wolfenstein 3d...

</comment><comment><USER73> Where is Visual Basic 6 enterprise when you're 13.

<comment><USER37> I had Delphi then

<comment><USER73> Just saw this now, I wanted to switch but couldn't get my head around it and what I was used to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Most fun was: launching Brain Sweeper! ROFL!!1!

</comment><comment><USER75> The trollbox is probably the scariest part.

<comment><USER76> The worst part is that it's a real chat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Oops, lenna.png is definitely NSFW.

</comment><comment><USER78> OS in a browser, and its snappy.

</comment><comment><USER79> Doom works!

</comment><comment><USER77> Are you trying to get me fired? I started playing solitaire and was like wait, you're at work dummy.

</comment><comment><USER80> Lotta memories here. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER81> So good, so very very good!

</comment><comment><USER82> Defrag works as expected.

</comment><comment><USER83> always upvote windows93

<comment><USER84> Half life 3 confirmed windows 93 exclusive

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I like the Half-life 3

</comment><comment><USER86> This is so superbad

</comment><comment><USER87> Good old days :D</comment>