Linux utils that you might not know - <AUTHOR> http://shiroyasha.io/coreutils-that-you-might-not-know.html <comment><USER2> Anyone here will probably enjoy checking out commandlinefu: [http://commandlinefu.com](http://commandlinefu.com)

Especially looking down the list of all time greats: [http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by- votes](http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse/sort-by-votes)

<comment><USER3> Bringing this on a small tangent, but I've never been comfortable with 'sudo !!' and I can't really articulate why aside from wanting to be as explicit as possible.

<up>, <ctrl-a>, type sudo and enter is nearly as quick and much more explicit for me.

<comment><USER4> If you are a long time "vi" user, put `set -o vi` in "~/.bashrc": the sequence to issue the previous command with sudo prepended will be <esc>0isudo<enter>, probably something that is in your muscle memory already.

<comment><USER5> While I'm a very long time vi user, and I'm completely at home with the keybindings, I could never get into using "set -o vi". For me it falls into the uncanny valley of being quite like vi while not actually being vi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just look at anything in the "moreutils" package. Just great stuff. Excerpt:

\- ifdata: do not parse the output of ifconfig/ip anymore. Just use this tool.

\- sponge: when you need to overwrite an input file at the end of pipe. sponge will wait for the pipe to end before overwriting, preventing any data loss

\- vidir: edit a given dir with your EDITOR. Awesome for mass renames/deletes.

\- ts: add timestamps to a command

\- parallel: C implementation of GNU parallel (in perl). Very small, very fast, just does the core (running commands in parallel), and does not try to take over xargs.

There are others of course.

<comment><USER7> Although these tools are great, I'm afraid these are of limited use, as these aren't preinstalled but must be explicitly installed.

For personal use these are great. But if you write a shell script to be executed on different machines where you can't install anything, these tools won't be available to you.

And if you don't have that requirement, i.e. you can install everything, just install appropriate Perl/Python/Ruby libraries and use a proper scripting language.

(BTW, I tend to assume that Python is installed on almost all modern Unix systems by default, hence I prefer writing portable tools in Python instead of portable Shell code.)

<comment><USER8> Why assume python? It's huge compared to bash or perl. Lots of minimal configuration operational systems won't have python. More likely than go/ruby/node though.

<comment><USER9> You don't need to install go. It has the runtime thing built into the compiled executable.

<comment><USER7> Same with C. However, the binaries are then architecture dependent, so not really portable either.

Nevertheless, statically linked binaries are indeed a good alternative, and provide good-enough portability in a wide range of cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> * 'comm -3' is a quick way to do a set difference from the command line.

* Newer versions of sort have an option for running sorts in parallel. If you're using an older sort, you can split the files, sort them individually with GNU parallel, and use --merge to combine them.

* If you have scripts that read data files, process them, and output more files, consider using a Makefile.

* tmux is a good way to leave a development session on a server that you come back to at the start of the day, or that you run long-running processes in.

* Setting a soft ulimit system-wide is a good way to avoid accidentally running the machine out of memory, causing your C libraries to be paged out to disk, and usually requiring a reboot. Since it's soft, you can override it at any time.

* strace and gdb can be run on just about anything to see what it's doing. If it's an interpreted language, you can often attach to a live process, call a function to invoke some interpreted code, and not have to kill & restart the process to fix a bug or oversight. Or you can attach to a Postgres worker process to get a stack trace, which often tells you why your query is slow if it runs so long you can't get an explain analyze.

* Look in /proc to find tons of useful information about running processes and settings. For example, you can tell how many filehandles a process has open, and sometimes what file it corresponds to. Just yesterday, a grub update caused a server to boot the kernel with the command line replaced with 2 random characters and a newline, which would be harder to debug without /proc/cmdline.

* pushd and popd are useful in shell scripts to temporarily change directories without forgetting where you were.

<comment><USER11> > _If you have scripts that read data files, process them, and output more > files, consider using a Makefile._

Dear sweet hypnotoad, don't use Makefiles for this. Scripts in a pipeline are perfectly well suited for ETL. They have the advantage of using the same language as the command language (Makefile is not shell, and when it differs it's a significant surprise). Plus, you can drop a script into a dir in your PATH and it will work in any project.

Use make if you have a project which expensively computes assets and reusing partial outputs is possible.

> _pushd and popd are useful in shell scripts to temporarily change > directories without forgetting where you were._

I would start with

      cd - # go back to where I just came from

Which handles most of the pushd/popd use cases (outside of writing a script).

Really, there's a whole separate set of skills for effective interactive shell use & writing great bash scripts (e.g. parameter expansion and history manipulation).

<comment><USER12> I'd stick with pushd and popd every time, it's considerably more expressive.

<comment><USER11> > _considerably more expressive_

is that an advantage? Do you have the time to explain this a bit more?

I feel that new users need less expressiveness, to avoid decision overload, and keeping one automatic directory save point is easier to mentally manage than a stack of them.

I do recommend using pushd/popd in shell scripts (always) and interactively (if you must), but I think 'cd -' should be the first thing you introduce to newcomers w.r.t tracking working directory changes.

<comment><USER13> 'cd -' only saves one previous directory, which is held in $OLDPWD. pushd can store an arbitrary history in its stack. And of course, $OLDPWD will change if you hop around after a cd, but the pushd/popd stack will persist.

<comment><USER11> That's true, but I rather would have liked to hear how the expressiveness of pushd/popd was superior to cd - (especially with respect to a newcomer internalizing all the weird coreutils & bash things).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Since the article mentions numfmt(1), I'm surprised that no one mentioned units(1) yet. I use it all the time to convert units.

      $ units '4123412312312 bytes' 'tebibytes'
              4123412312312 bytes = 3.7502217 tebibytes
              4123412312312 bytes = (1 / 0.26665091) tebibytes
      $ units "50 miles per gallon" "liters per 100 kilometers"
              reciprocal conversion
              1 / 50 miles per gallon = 4.7042917 liters per 100  kilometers
              1 / 50 miles per gallon = (1 / 0.21257185) liters per 100 kilometers

<comment><USER15> I use it as a general purpose calculator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is also another command 'paste'.

Example: Created two files (1.txt and 2.txt)

[efg@fedori ~]$ cat 1.txt

file1: line1

file1: line2

[efg@fedori ~]$ cat 2.txt

file2: line1

file2: line2

In order to merge the lines of these two files we can use paste:

[efg@fedori ~]$ paste 1.txt 2.txt

file1: line1 file2: line1

file1: line2 file2: line2

Also check out 'man fold'

<comment><USER17> Also super handy to turn lines into columns. 'paste - - -' for example will take every three lines as single row.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tools like rdfind and rmlint breathed new life into my SSD by hardlinking duplicate files after video editing software helpfully duplicated huge videos on import.

[https://rdfind.pauldreik.se/](https://rdfind.pauldreik.se/)

[https://github.com/sahib/rmlint](https://github.com/sahib/rmlint)

There are great GUI visualizers for disk space, like WizTree/Baobab; for the command line I've had success with ncdu.

[https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu](https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu)

</comment><comment><USER19> Even as a decades long 'nix user, I had never used join until recently, which joins lines of two files on a common field. I used to turn to fgrep or a Python script to solve a whole class of problems join can help solve on the command-line.

<comment><USER20> I recently got to use `join`. However, without reading documentation on outer joins. I went ahead and wrote my own version:

      join -t$'\t' <(cat c <(comm -13 <(cut -f1 c)  <(cut -f1 d) | sed -e 's/$/\t/') | sort -k1,1) <(cat d <(comm -23 <(cut -f1 c)  <(cut -f1 d) | sed -e 's/$/\t/') | sort -k1,1)

Then I stumbled on an easier version with using just join

      join -a1 -a2 -o auto f1 f2

There are really too many unexplored things on the linux command line for a typical dev.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Mgen and Drec. No idea if they have been included in any modern distro, or there are more modern equivalents, anyway over 15 years ago I used them on Alpha hardware under both Linux, BSD and Tru64 to test a local network for missing UDP packets now and then in a strange regular pattern. By missing packets now and then I mean figures like 5 packets every 3 millions at full speed, it wasn't something one could hope to reproduce just by pinging around, therefore we needed something to leave during night hours running and writing huge logs. Turned out that it was an interrupt triggered by the video subsystem on the Alpha machines only under Tru64 that grabbed 100% of the CPU for a very short time, but enough to make the receiving task miss a few packets. Once identified the problem I was able to reproduce and predict it with 100% accuracy.

[https://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/ncs/products/mgen](https://www.nrl.navy.mil/itd/ncs/products/mgen)

ps. ...I know, I know, but sadly no way to make them change the protocol used.

</comment><comment><USER22> "cal -3" is quite useful, I use it all the time. To show the week-of-year use "ncal -w". Add "-S" if you want ncal to start weeks on Sunday (crazy!).

<comment><USER23> Use `cal -m` if you want a week to start on a Monday. AFAIK Sunday is the (US centric) default.

<comment><USER24> `cal` does try to use the expected first day of the week based on the locale. It seems to at least use LC_TIME from some quick local testing:

      bratch@serenity ~ $ LC_TIME=en_GB cal | head -n2
            May 2017
      Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su

      bratch@serenity ~ $ LC_TIME=en_US cal | head -n2
            May 2017
      Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> for extra fun try watch -t -n 1 "factor \$(date +%s)"

<comment><USER26>
        alias primetime watch -t -n 1 "factor \$(date +%s)"

<comment><USER25> Now that's a good alias

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> One note: I believe `shred` won't work as expected on a journaling file system like ext4.

<comment><USER28> No. Ext4 doesn't do data journaling by default. Even when enabled, what's written to the journal is _blank data_ that's about to be written, not the current file's contents.

        1) write to journal "I'm going to overwrite this file with this data (zeros)"
        2) commit journal
        3) write data to file

This is typical for journaling filesystems-- step 3 can be interrupted by a crash and replayed later (by re-reading the journal).

For filesystems with CoW data (ZFS, btrfs), the in-place data will probably not be overwritten.

<comment><USER29> Before evaluating the claims myself: The shred manual specifically claims that it is "not guaranteed to be effective" on "log-structured or journaled file systems", and specifically calls out ext3 in data=journal mode.

I would assume that the concern with ext3/4 in data=journal mode is that shred does not guarantee that the records of previous writes are evicted from the journal.

<comment><USER30> In data=journal mode, data to be written is first written into the journal. Only after the journal is flushed it will be written out to the correct location. Therefore, a crash at any time is fixed by replaying the journal forwards.

Note that the ext3/4 journal is a redo log, not an undo log. Old file contents are not copied into the journal on a write.

Thus, I don't see why shred should be less effective in data=journal mode compared to the other journaling modes.

CoW file systems are a different story. They don't allow you to overwrite physical file contents. You have to set the +C (FL_NOCOW) flag, which is, by principle, _only effective for a file that does not have any contents yet_. Thus, you can't set +C on an existing file and overwrite it's contents.

<comment><USER8> There is no reason for blocks that have been fully rewritten to be written back to the same location. In fact, it is faster to write them somewhere convenient near the write head and update the indirect block. So even though only the meta data goes through the log, block locations can change.

<comment><USER31> I don't know that I'd say there's no reason at all.

For one thing, if you have a contiguous file and you update some (but not all) bytes, putting them back in the original location allows the file to stay contiguous.

Also, if you write the data back into the original location, you don't have to update metadata such as inodes. Now, you may say that's less data, but on a spinning disc, there is some threshold below which the amount of data written doesn't matter much at all and it's the number of seeks that matters more. That is, if it's a choice between a single 50k continuous write or two separate 1k writes in different locations, the single write is probably quicker. (But this falls apart eventually of course.)

Whether these reasons are enough to prefer updating in place is another question, of course. But it's not like there isn't any benefit at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32>
        $ curl -s http://datascienceatthecommandline.com | pup '.sect3 > h3 text{}' | head
        alias
        awk
        aws
        bash
        bc
        bigmler
        body
        cat
        cd
        chmod

<comment><USER33> TIL about pup(1) [1], what a fantastic tool to grab some data from an HTML page. Written in Go too, so easy to deploy. That one's going in my toolchest.

[1]: [https://github.com/ericchiang/pup](https://github.com/ericchiang/pup)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My favorite: basename

Returns just the filename plus extensions e.g.

basename a/b/c/d/foo.php returns foo.php

Very useful for shell scripting.

<comment><USER35> With shell one can just use "${path_var##*/}" to get the base name from the string stored in $path_var. This also works if $path_var is just a base name already without any slashes.

EDIT: fixed the substitution.

<comment><USER36> > With shell one can just use "${path_var##*/}"

The reason I use python whenever I need something "shell" like. Cryptic symbol salad that makes code golf fanatics green with envy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was really happy about tac when I found out about it, same with paste and comm as already mentioned.

Gotten a lot of mileage out of the various seldom used options of uniq, diff and cut too.

<comment><USER38> I have a friend who uses `tac | tac` in pipelines to make the pipeline wait for all the data before continuing, which is an interesting hack.

<comment><USER39> If you install the "moreutils", there's sponge doing the same.

[https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/](https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/) [https://linux.die.net/man/1/sponge](https://linux.die.net/man/1/sponge)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Don't forget the often overlooked "apropos"!

<comment><USER41> My problem with apropos (and man, for that matter) is related to how at least one major distribution handles the man pages. Rather than bundling the man pages with the applications, the man pages for many applications are bundled together in one base package. When this is done regardless of whether or not the application is actually on the system, apropos and man continually return information on applications which are not on the system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Although I frequently use cal, the article mentioned cal -3 which will be useful near the end of each month. Previously I always displayed the calendar for the whole year or next month instead.

Going through the core utils manual [1], I found a couple other useful looking commands I didn't know about. Previously I used awk in bash scripts primarily for printf, but apparently it's part of coreutils too. The timeout command also looks useful.

1\. [https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html)

</comment><comment><USER43> And the columns line has the fan favourite useless use of cat.

[0] [http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html](http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> GNU utils _

</comment><comment><USER45> I like how this article's title doesn't claim that it's about utils "that you don't know". Yet I was expecting utils that have something to do with the Linux kernel, not generic *nix command-line tools.

</comment><comment><USER46> should be noted the factor program on most systems is not accurate!

[https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- cvs&m=147272695616766&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- cvs&m=147272695616766&w=2)

[https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- cvs&m=146826185625800&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=openbsd- cvs&m=146826185625800&w=2)

Hey its part of bsdGAMES not bsdGETSHITDONE :)

</comment><comment><USER47> Which xyz-file buried in the code base has that "abc" function I saw last month?

locate /\\*xyzGlobPattern | xargs grep -E '\<abc[(]'

<comment><USER48> ag -G [file pattern] [text pattern]

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> My favorite unexpected tool: tsort for performing topological sorting (i.e. sorting a dependency graph by order of dependencies).

</comment><comment><USER50> afaik, `shred` doesn't do anything useful on SSDs. Beneath the OS, there's intentional indeterminacy on sector access, so instructions to write over the same sectors multiple times with garbage aren't guaranteed to actually do that.

<comment><USER51> The reason shred writes "multiple times with garbage" is due to magnetic disks where even when overwritten, old bit values could still be extracted with advanced tools. This is not the case for SSDs, so a single pass of shred (either random or zero) is enough here. Multiple passes will just kill your SSD faster.

The problem with sector access still stands, so you're not sure it's actually overwritten. You should use sfill(1) in addition to shred. sdmem(1) also, if you don't want to physically power down your machine.

<comment><USER52> >The reason shred writes "multiple times with garbage" is due to magnetic disks where even when overwritten, old bit values could still be extracted with advanced tools.

People _thought_ that you needed multiple overwrites for traditional drives but in reality that data was gone after a single overwrite of 0. There were no "advanced techniques" that could recover the data. Some specs suggested multiple passes, but this was because they were using precautionary principle.

> This is not the case for SSDs, so a single pass of shred (either random or > zero) is enough here. Multiple passes will just kill your SSD faster.

SSDs do weird things with the data, so if your data is important enough you should destroy the drives. There's some data tucked away in odd places.

<comment><USER53> Hum, no. Some time ago you needed multiple uncorrelated overwrites to hide your data. Then as HDDs shrank you strted needing less and less passes up to today that you just need to clear it once.

It's not about people thinking unrealistic things. The command was created for defending against a demonstrated attack.

<comment><USER50> Yeah. You'd be amazed what you can do with a scanning electron microscope. (ie, read individual bit states off after a rewrite.)

<comment><USER52> Someone would have done it by now if it was possible, so where are the published papers?

It's not possible, and it's never been possible unless we're talking about 1970s 24" platters, and we're not talking about those.

<comment><USER50> [http://escholarship.org/uc/item/26g4p84b#page-5](http://escholarship.org/uc/item/26g4p84b#page-5)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It always pains me when I see people use "cat" left and right, even when they don't need it.

This makes for good reading: [http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html](http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html)

<comment><USER55> It shouldn't. It's 2017 now, and the speed difference between a "misplaced" cat command is normally negligible. The speed of the terminal user is more important.

<comment><USER43> It is slower to type too. Just write the command with the file name already.

<comment><USER56> If you are just doing one line and you write it perfectly, then maybe. For many people cat is simply the start if excessive piping. I like having the filename as far at the beginning as possible so I can Ctrl-W with ease.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Show sorted list with human readable file/foldersize:

du -hs * | sort -h

<comment><USER58> Tha shows only some files. To list all files, use:

du -hs * .* | sort -h

<comment><USER59> Or if you (like me) hate depending on globbing semantics:

$ find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 2 -print0 | xargs -0 -- du -hs

Not that I would write it in a shell. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I really like the command "join" as well

</comment><comment><USER61> I needed column yesterday. TIL

Also paste

</comment><comment><USER62> As much as people make fun of him for caring so much about a seemingly minor point, I've come around to understanding RMS's frustration about people calling all of the GNU project "Linux". This sort of title drives home why: neither Linus nor anyone else on the Linux project had anything to do with any of this.

<comment><USER63> If someone wrote an article titled "Windows utils that you might not know," I would not expect it's content to be solely applications written by Microsoft.

<comment><USER64> With WSL (and cygwin) this could be windows utils you may not know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Why does one use `font-weight: 200` for code?

<comment><USER66> It's to keep the page weight balanced. Prose is considered to have neutral buoyancy, but code is naturally heavier and will tend to drag the page down if that isn't compensated by a lighter font. FWIW poetry can be so light, that it can require a very heavy font weight to keep it tethered to the page.

<comment><USER48> <tips hat>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> To shreds, you say?

</comment><comment><USER68> factor is buggy :

factor 100000000000000000000000000000000000000

100000000000000000000000000000000000000: 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=factor+1000000000000000...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=factor+100000000000000000000000000000000000000&dataset=)

also numfmt bug:

$ numfmt --to=iec 999999999999999999939999999 828Y

$ numfmt --to=iec 999999999999999999940000000 numfmt: value too large to be printed: '1e+27' (cannot handle values > 999Y)

but 999999999999999999939999999 is ~1000YB : [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=99999999999999...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?dataset=&i=999999999999999999939999999+bytes+to+yottabytes)

<comment><USER69> You got the same answer from factor and Wolfram alpha; where is the bug?

<comment><USER68> wa shows 76 prime factors, which is the not same as printing out a bunch of 2's and 5's

<comment><USER70> WolframAlpha lists the factors as 2^38 * 5^38, which is just a compact notation for 38 2s and 38 5s, totalling 76 factors. If you count the 2s and 5s in the output of factor, you get the same result of 38 each for a total of 76 factors.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kinky sex lifts our consciousness into a heightened state of "flow" - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/828481/kinky-sex-lifts-our-consciousness-into-a-heightened-state-of-flow-says-a-new-study/ <comment><AUTHOR> "To achieve flow, the brain needs to be tasked with doing something slightly challenging, but not impossible, and given rules or parameters. People usually associate flow with running or playing chess, for example, so now we might add kinky sex to the list. The researchers likened flow to a rewarding sense of control and loss of self-consciousness; it has also been strongly linked to enhanced creativity."

I relate to the running association. Even sustained walking 30-45 minutes seems to offer "flow."

<comment><USER2> But some flow states are much more intense (or sublime) than others. Those that come with listening to (or creating) music, for example (for some people). Or the sphere of activity referred to in the article.</comment></comment>


Googlers Living at Google: Tiny Spaces, Probably No Sex - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/10/20/googlers-living-at-google-tiny-spaces-probably-no-sex/ <comment><USER2> Great reminder of the thousands forced to do this (and without a Google-level salary or the many amenities). We normally call people who live out of cars homeless.

</comment><comment><USER3> Singapore previously had very small micro-apartments that housed a single person and things folded in/out. Singapore started zoning out these apartments because they were seeing population growth from replacement declining. Just a fun fact.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article implies that engineers who go on to work at Google probably enjoyed tremendously healthy sex lives before they went to work there.</comment>


An intimate talk between Michael Moritz (Sequoia) and John Doerr (Kleiner) - <AUTHOR> http://www.podtech.net/home/5135/keynote-podcast-john-doerr-and-michael-moritz-live-at-the-national-venture-capital-association

<comment><USER2> This is great, very enjoyable to listen to.</comment>


Everything you should know about me as an entrepreneur you could learn from my OB/GYN - <AUTHOR> http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/02/everything-you.html <comment><USER2> Each new business gives hope and meaning to our world? WTF?

</comment><comment><USER3> Ron Paul 2008.</comment>


Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed? - <AUTHOR> 3 times in SF this week, a Cruise AV has driven past my car and triggered my automatic windshield wipers, even though it was totally dry out. (probably the LIDAR interacting with wipers' infrared sensors).<p>Got me thinking about what unintended consequences can spring up because of new technologies. Anyone have other examples, current or historic? <comment><USER2> My favourite one that surprised me and continues to surprise people: kids that have grown up with smartphones and iPads from birth are computer illiterate.

People see their 5 year old using an iPad and the knee-jerk cliche thought/assumption us the classic "oh wow these kids just _get_ technology!" (recall all the "I need my kid to program the VCR" type stuff from the 80s/90s - it is the same thing of older people assuming current children innately understand the current tech)

Yet while today's kids may know how to stab at a screen to get videos of Peppa pig to play, there are people starting to come through to their mid and late teens who don't know how to use a mouse and keyboard with any level of dexterity, or don't know what a "file" is or what folders/directories are etc because that is all hidden away on an iPad. As a result they struggle to do even the most basic tasks that we all take for granted... and they don't get taught because everyone thinks they already know it having grown up with an iPad in their pram.

I chuckle to my self sometimes when I see a toddler walk up to a TV or video advert and try touching it a few times, then walk away confused because what they thought was a touch screen isn't doing anything when they touch it.

Fascinating.

<comment><USER3> Not a parent yet, but I certainly don't plan on giving my kid a touch device... certainly not with internet access. I grew up using the internet as a 90s kid. Today, the internet is even more messed up.

<comment><USER4> Our 5yo has an iPod Touch to play music. But she also has a Linux PC (she enjoys typing things and playing gcompris). But probably our best purchase is a Micro:Bit. Her programs are still simple, but it's clear how much she enjoys being creative and that she can make the Micro:Bit do what she wants.

We are not forcing her to use tech in any way. The Linux PC and Micro:Bit are just there and it's up to her own curiosity to explore them when she feels like it.

I think the problem is that TV and iPads are convenient for parents. You can put your kid behind one, and they'll occupy themselves for hours. Whereas with real computers, Micro:Bits, or even Lego, you have to help them understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Internet usage starts with users querying information they want, and services learning/adapting to deliver information in a format/context based on their activity. This has created some stellar search tools, a personalized network of services and communities available to people, and made the internet a paradise for new content from all over the world.

Despite that all the information in the world is available to us, we only seek out what we want to see/hear/read and then get fed new information based on those queries. It doesn't lead to free exchange of ideas and values, it has created polarized societies where we are digitally segregated by our own sense of identity and community.

People talk a lot about the political side of this, the "echo chambers" online. But I think it's worse than that. We see racial segregation on Twitter, feedback loops of content on YouTube that reinforce themselves, news outlets tailoring their content for users that reach them from their own site and optimizing for usage metrics that feed usage metrics... and we all are in love with it.

It reminds me of _Farenheit 451_ in the sense that this almost-dystopia wasn't created by some fascist dictator or single-party state; we built it ourselves. We wanted it.

That's not to say there isn't beauty on the internet, and we live in an era where more people talk and share and love and fight more than ever with language and ideas. It's just a strange departure from where most futurists thought we were going to be.

<comment><USER6> > We wanted it.

I'm not entirely convinced this is accurate. It definitely is in part, but not in whole. We wanted these better search tools and we like recommendation systems. But I know a lot of people are frustrated with algorithms like YouTube's recommendation system trapping them. (e.g. watch one Joe Rogan video and you get firehosed with more JRE videos). The thing is we also don't notice that this reinforcement also pushes us away from one another. But the solution sounds very similar to the solution to the complaint. People are complaining about being walled in by the algorithm (I for one am one of those people). People are asking for new suggestions. As in new topics, not just other youtubers doing the same thing. I think the difference is that it has become so obvious now that we're noticing and saying "wait, that'd too far."

<comment><USER7> I would love, so much, for Youtube to just stop targeting recommendations. At least then I'd see new things once in a while...

<comment><USER8> ive started to use freetube on desktop and newpipe on mobile. they are not great for discovery at all but at least I can watch the odd [insert-channel-i- dont-really-like-here] video every once in a blue moon without then being harassed for weeks/months/years after to watch more from the same channel

<comment><USER9> I've always opened youtube in a new private window to do that, especially for sports that I'm interested in but I don't want to get spoilers for later.

I think it works because I don't see those topics in my feeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Noise.

Auditory: I can't tell you how accustomed to hearing stuff constantly everyone is. Cars (even just the tires on a busy street), Air Handling, Refrigerators, Beeping timers (ovens/microwaves/calendar reminders).

Visual: Web notifications, web advertisements, billboards, "news," spam phone calls/texts.

Social: Many people have an expectation that sending a message entitles them to an immediate response. In the age of quick answers from Google, people often forget about slowing down for the speed of thought.

Mental: We (humans) can only make so many decisions in a day yet we are overwhelmed with false dichotomies constantly in order to choose one or the other of basically the same thing.

<comment><USER11> I came across more bird scare devices [0] lately and most are at ~19-23kHz at -20~30dB (personal measures, device ranges differ). I can hear them and it hurts. Fortunarely they are mainly only deployed near entrances and do not have a broad field of effect. Would be interesting to know how many people do not hear this and feel kinda weird/sick while standing at those places for a longer period of time.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Ultrasonic_scare...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Ultrasonic_scarers)

<comment><USER12> I'd run across these all over Tokyo, practically unavoidable on most walks. The worst ones were when you'd be queuing for a ramen for upwards of 30 minutes but you'd be unable to do anything about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Journey time calculations in Google maps, Uber etc. mean no one I know is ever on time.

If you need to be somewhere at 8:30 and the journey "takes 17 minutes", one psychologically sets 8:13 as the deadline for leaving the house. You pick up your keys at 8:13, actually leave a few minutes later, hit traffic or take a wrong turn or two, and end up crossing the threshold at your destination fifteen minutes late.

It's no big deal and quite a grumpy old man thing to say, and I also don't know if tech is the root cause, but squeezing travel into unrealistically small and algorithmically created windows of time has killed most people's sense of punctuality, including mine if I'm not careful.

<comment><USER14> Google's estimation for my country is always less than what is achievable if you stick to the speed limit. I guess they calculate it based on other drivers.

<comment><USER15> In practical terms speeding actually makes very little difference to your journey time.

Eg if you have a 100 mile drive on a 70mph road and you drive the entire way at 85mph your reward is saving about 10 minutes on a 1.5 hour trip.

The downside risk is getting charged for speeding and being delayed for much more than 10 minutes.

I've never though the cost/benefit shows it to be particularly worthwhile.

<comment><USER16> There are exceptions to this though. If you're driving through Europe at night you can easily spend most of your trip on highways safely going 180kmh or faster, saving you many hours on longer trips.

<comment><USER17> By Europe you are meaning Germany only, I believe, in most other European countries there is a speed limit of 130 km/h or 140 km/h, day or night doesn't matter:

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

<comment><USER18> To be precise it's 120 km/h in most, 130 km/h in some. At least in western/northern Europe (except Germany of course, with it's Authoban)

<comment><USER17> Yep, but it doesn't change the "base" point, which is, you cannot legally drive faster than 120/130/140 kmh (depending on the country) and certainly NOT 180 kmh in any European country BUT in Germany (and only on some - many - strerches of the Autobahn, in some other there is anyway a speed limit of 120/130/140 kmh):

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

[http://www.autobahnatlas-online.de/Limitkarte.pdf](http://www.autobahnatlas- online.de/Limitkarte.pdf)

[http://www.autobahnatlas- online.de/LegendeLimit.pdf](http://www.autobahnatlas- online.de/LegendeLimit.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Motion-sensing automatic doors can be opened by deer, bears (which has led to some excitement in hotels and hospitals), and even birds. I've seen birds that can activate the doors in the hardware store near me, and that know where the birdseed is on the shelves in the garden department.

<comment><USER20> yup my favorite story of animals adapting to human environments is dogs riding subways in Russia [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJf2L2B5fY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJf2L2B5fY)

<comment> zupa-hu Hilarious :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Depression. People are spending the majority of their lives staring at a screen, and then wondering why they're depressed.

In the moment it might not feel lonely. Exchanging DMs and posting on Reddit / HN / social media might feel like real communication. But ultimately there's a sense of emptiness to it, and it can't substitute real flesh-to-flesh human connection.

But it feels like we're always expected to be on our "grind", always bettering ourselves in an increasingly competitive labor market, so it's harder to go offline and just enjoy life because there's always that lingering sense of guilt that one is being left behind in our collective arms race to...nowhere.

<comment><USER22> This is the exact position i am in right now. I crave the outside world and human contact like a drug. I am not clinically depressed, just in a state of constant longing for social interaction. I keep telling myself my work will allow me to one day enjoy the outside, ironic really.

<comment><USER23> If you don't have to have home Internet service and an Internet-connected phone for work... shut off those services.

It's fine. There's more stuff to do without the Internet than a person can reasonably do, anyway, even if you're pretty picky.

<comment><USER24> I find that advice hard to accept. I'm older so I spent plenty of time as an adult without the internet (unless you count BBSes). I use the internet to find things to do. Meetups to go to, events on facebook, events and parties friends invite me to, restaurants to go do, etc... I don't know how I would do it without the internet at this point. Maybe it used to be I'd look in the local paper like SF Weekly or LA Weekly but I live in a place that doesn't have those anymore and AFAIK even those are a pale version of what they were in the 80s and 90s

<comment><USER23> Well if it's _helping_ you socialize, don't take that advice. Everyone's different. I'd ditch it if I could (for work reasons, for me and for my spouse, I cannot) but then texting is the most technological thing I really _need_ to keep in touch these days, and maybe the occasional e-mail check-in or phone call, and entertainment and diversion's laughably abundant even without it so that's not a concern. If I were finding meetups and such on the Internet that'd be different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> We've learned that better tools doesn't actually create more productivity. Lots of people talk about how they dread email. A singular mega tool like Facebook or Evernote isn't great. Lots of disparate little tools isn't much better.

We've learned that data is unreliable. The highest click through rates come from nudity, or totally gross things like gore and trypophobia triggering holes. The highest CTR on text comes from well, clickbait. At this point everyone realizes this but some still don't notice that data-driven decisions optimizes for weird things.

IOT doesn't scale as well as we thought, because hardware doesn't scale at the rate of web software that we're used to. So hardware companies do more poorly than expected. Replace "hardware" with anything else that's hard to upgrade, and you get software-other hybrids like Uber and WeWork which didn't scale as well as anticipated.

<comment><USER26> > We've learned that better tools doesn't actually create more productivity. > Lots of people talk about how they dread email. A singular mega tool like > Facebook or Evernote isn't great. Lots of disparate little tools isn't much > better.

I'm struggling to figure out what you mean by this.

Obviously it's not literally true (I've saved my colleagues thousands of hours with some of the tools I've made), but I can't figure out what else you could mean.

<comment><USER25> I think it's more like some people walk in the office, comment and tag on Trello, reply emails, deal with messages on Slack, convert and forward files on Dropbox. Then it's lunch.

After lunch, they reply to some more emails, take a meeting on Zoom (waiting half an hour for that one guy to fix his microphone). Then they have 1 hour of work before the evening scrum stand-up, which is done on Slack or Zoom because half the team is remote.

But the CEO doesn't use Slack and his inbox is always full, so we forward him a report on WhatsApp, which has to be converted to PDF, which he then manually puts in his Prezi presentation for a client meeting tonight.

<comment><USER26> This doesn't match any officd I've worked in, nor any office anyone I know has worked in.

<comment><USER27> Then you're an exceptional person among exceptional people. While it's a no- brainer that tech tools bring us utility, there is a nontrivial time, thought, and effort cost to engaging with nearly any tool. Sometimes that cost outweighs the advantage of the tool or feeds behaviors that are counterproductive. A great example of this. The younger half of my ad agency is on Slack. The older half tried it but it just wouldn't take. The young people are productive together, but their habitual Slacking becomes a distraction when they have teams with more seniors than juniors. The tool unintentionally created a divide. Every solution has costs and benefits like anything else. Iatrogenesis. I've definitely seen offices get so overtooled that they resemble what the above person was saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not _exactly_ the same kind of thing, maybe, but I love London's accidental solar furnace.

"This London skyscraper can melt cars and set buildings on fire"

[https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london- skyscrap...](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london-skyscraper- can-melt-cars-set-buildings-fire-f8C11069092)

</comment><comment><USER29> As tech gets more and more advanced and we get higher and higher levels of abstraction, I've noticed more and more programmers just don't understand _what_ their code is doing. There can be a lack of understanding of how calls translate to system calls and machine instruction. The abstraction is good, it allows you to do more and do it quickly. But when you don't understand what the abstraction is, then you are programming by coincidence and errors are more confusing than they should be.

<comment><USER30> I should write a medium article on the questions we asked during interviewing and what the success rate was for each question (spoiler: it was depressing).

<comment><USER29> I'd be interested in that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 'I'm being tracked' paranoia.

I have to force myself to stop thinking about the ways may daily activities can be tracked. I find myself feeling increasingly paranoid, especially when reminded that my actions are available to faceless people and how they help to train systems that then exploit my 'humanness'. In fact, I imagine they will get so good that they not only exploit me, but use that very humanness to veil the fact they are exploiting me!

Now, back to re-watching Silicon Valley before the season premier.

<comment><USER24> Yes! I hate being tracked watching videos. I have a self identity I want to put forward. I hate being judged differently based on what I watch. For this reason there are plenty of shows I don't watch via streaming. If I really want to watch I'll find another way. If it's youtube I'll do it not logged in (it's possible it's still attributed to me but I doubt it).

It's illegal for a video rental company to share your watch list. I'm not sure that covers Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Youtube, etc.. I suspect they don't share the list though, they just put you in categories and sell marketing to those categories. That still bugs me since I'm being judged.

OSes and stores spying on app usage is the same. I've never checked out any of the more risque games or VR apps because I'll be tracked.

<comment><USER32> > (it's possible it's still attributed to me but I doubt it).

It's still attributed to you.

<comment><USER24> can you prove that or is it just another conspiracy theory?

<comment><USER33> They fingerprint your browser, IP address and usage history. I can bring back my entire YouTube recommendations (many completely unrelated subjects) even in a private browsing window by watching just one or two videos (I guess it isn't sure at first whether I'm the same person or someone else, but one or two videos, combined with IP address is enough for them to be reasonably confident it's me and bring back my previous recommendations).

<comment><USER24> I'm not using the same IP address nor the same browser. I've never seen my recommendations being remotely similar. When I view logged out via another browser in private mode all I get are the generic "popular in your region" videos.

I also never notice the videos I'm watching logged out affecting my recommendations when logged in. That doesn't mean I'm not being tracked but without actual proof I'll continue to consider it mostly a conspiracy theory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> One of the big things for me is the demise of trustworthiness in just about everything. Extremely cheap phone calls plus Caller ID spoofing has made the telephone almost useless (raise your hand if you only answer callers in your contact list!), email has never been trustworthy, and the internet has made it possible for hoaxes to spread farther and faster than ever.

<comment><USER25> There's an app for that: Truecaller. It crowdsources who is calling.

<comment><USER35> Why would I hand over my contact info to some app?

<comment><USER25> Because everyone else has done it for you. It's no worse than LinkedIn but actually useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have a small device in my pocket that provides access to nearly the sum total of human knowledge. I use it to get into pointless arguments with people I don't know and look at pictures of cats. (I wish I could claim that as original but it is something I read on the Internet. Between cats. :-/ )

<comment><USER31> Lol, I've been telling my kids for years, "I hold in my hand the accumulated knowledge of mankind."

<comment><USER37> Well, you hold access to it, not the knowledge itself.

<comment><USER38> You don't have a copy of wikipedia on your phone?

<comment><USER37> Wikipedia doesn't include everything, but I get your point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Something I've noticed a huge amount over the last couple of years in particular - no one has any change for the homeless / those on the streets / those collecting for charity. Contactless has been a 'thing' for a while now, but it really seemed to kick up a gear when phones and watches had wallets and the buses and a decent amount of restaurants went 'card only'.

<comment><USER40> Having been almost 100% cashless for the last decade it's only a matter of time before homeless people use contactless payments as an attempt to defeat my excuses.

<comment><USER41> You're going to have to start saying "I don't have that app"

[https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2018/08/barcode- donatio...](https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2018/08/barcode-donations- rough-sleepers-combat-cashless-society/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm miserable and all the tech that has "enabled me to do anything" has made everything seem arbitrary. If you can do anything, why do anything?

<comment><USER42> I used to own music. Now I have all the music, but also none of it.

<comment><USER43> I ditched streaming services a while ago, because I was fed up with the lousy curation of their catalogues and the tendency for albums to randomly disappear and reappear based on licensing disagreements.

Now I'm back to a ~25K track FLAC library and a small collection of LPs for fun. It's backed up to a NAS, to a cloud storage account and to a portable drive I keep in my locker at work. Nobody gets to take the music from me.

<comment> joe-collins I've moved to purchasing music _only_ on Bandcamp, where I get the option of downloading every purchase in the format of my choice (and offers artists an 85/15 profit split!).

And, after one adverse incident, I am very diligent about exercising that download option. Turns out, artists can withdraw themselves and their music from the platform at any time, which leaves customers without access... mostly. For some reason, I still have access to that music on my phone, though I haven't tested whether that's only thanks to the local cache.

<comment><USER43> I do the same thing, download as FLAC and store locally.

There are two options for artists/labels on Bandcamp if they want to remove an album from sale, for whatever reason.

One is to deactivate the album, which removes it from public view, but keeps it in the backend, so people who bought it still have it in their collections.

The other is the "nuclear option" of completely deleting the album everywhere, which also takes it away from the people who bought it.

While I can understand why they need to have the latter option, probably for legal reasons, I do find it troubling that something I've bought can just be arbitrarily taken away from me.

It really should be impossible to completely delete content from Bandcamp, without contacting them first. It should _not_ be an option directly in the artist/label control panel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Optimising for "engagement". I don't think, at least to start with, that Machiavellian intentions were behind it. But it turned out that optimising for the thing that got the most likes, the most retweets, the most emotional reactions, and the most views from people was a shit way of deciding what information should propagate the furthest.

That is a paperclip maximiser. I don't think we, collectively, have fully come to terms with how damaging it is.

<comment><USER45> There was a great series of talks a few years ago called "is anything worth maximizing?". Unfortunately, the videos seem to be down, but his medium post is still up: [https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth- maximizin...](https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth- maximizing-d11e648eb56f)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The weaknesses of the phone system are being exploited and exposed. Telemarketers have learned they can just put whatever they want on their caller ID with zero verification, including the phone numbers of random local individuals. If the FCC and/or the phone companies don't start forwarding originator information so spammers can effectively be blocked by any user, the phone system will (and deserves to) fail. At least among my friend group, most of us don't have each other's numbers, we communicate on chat apps.

<comment><USER34> It's gotten worse lately. I'm seeing calls allegedly from Citi, Capital One, etc., that have the identical credit card scam spiel. They go nowhere (but get recorded), since I've used Asterisk to put a CAPTCHA in the way. My "landline" (actually VoIP now) stays blissfully quiet. If it actually rings, I know it's a human...

<comment><USER47> Do you have a link or guide on where to start with this? It sounds like something that would be really useful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The world's tourist must-see spots are seeing an unmanagable spike in foot traffic.

<comment><USER49> As an expat all of my life, I've really noticed this in the last 5 years. It's also extremely hypocritical because I find myself walking around in places I have lived before, or been to many times, and feeling angry at the "tourists" ruining it.

<comment><USER50> As someone who lives in a pop tourist place, my reaction is less about being angry, it s more 'what the hell are they all doing here'. It feels like those lines outside shops on black friday that i used to see on US TV. How can it be 'cool' to travel when everybody's doing it?

<comment><USER49> I grew up in West LA, which is now overrun with tourists, largely Asian. So I feel it both in places that I have a reason to be in, but also in places which I feel I'm more entitled to than others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I've heard this topic come up before. I belive it is interesting and valuable to think about.

I don't have much to contribite of the top of my head, but I did stumble across this blog a while back (it might have actually been from here on HN, don't remember) that explores this very topic.

It's even named after it :) maybe other will enjoy it. I like the author's writing style, usually a pleasure to read.

[https://unintendedconsequenc.es](https://unintendedconsequenc.es)

<comment><USER52> Hey, glad you like my writing!

<comment><USER51> There he is!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Interest-driven communities online paired with censorship lead people to increasingly radical points of view. Before social media, people were forced to interact and get along with people with varying points of view. Now, we choose to isolate ourselves into groups of like-minded individuals where dissent is silenced, leading people to believe that extremism is normal.

<comment><USER54> So the world was free of bigotry prior to social media?

Does it matter what one is extreme about? Shouldn't we be extreme on certain issues, like the difference between food and cyanide?

<comment><USER55> It's a matter of scale; before social media, small groups would be isolated due to difficulty in "finding" each other. Now it's just a quick google search away.

The other part of that "scale" is that these fringe views are presented with the same facade of authority as a more mainstream view. Generally speaking, something like Google will present the search results in a non-biased way... so googling for "flat earth" will bring up links, just as "moon landing" would. So to a naive viewer, "Google" is approving of the idea of a "flat earth", if that makes sense...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Historically, misinformation spread due to lack of reliable communications technology (news took a while to travel around the world). Now, misplaced trust in media and abuse of technology spread misinformation.

<comment><USER57> I was just thinking about this the other day, in the context of ancient texts referring to things being written down. You come across phrases in ancient accounts like "it is written ....", and in a world where almost all information and news came from word of mouth and rumors, something being written down made it inherently more credible.

Today everything is written down, much if not most of the information we receive is via written documents, especially online. There is a level of bias and intentional misleading that is often hard to believe. Hearing something from a well informed friend seems far more credible than a news story now, since you can't depend on journalists to research and relate the available information without intentionally withholding, minimizing, or amplifying to create a narrative that is in line with what they want people to believe.

I'm not screaming 'fake news' here. An example would be an NPR story that claimed a certain person, previously employed in a professional field, was 'unable to find work' for 6 years. Clearly the person had struggled with substance abuse, but that was never mentioned, and the narrative was 'In This Economy' despite the fact that if you show up drunk to job interviews that is an essential fact in a human interest story about a person being unable to find work. The journalist and/or their editors wanted to write a story about how hard it is to find a job 'in this economy', so they hid facts that didn't reinforce that narrative.

<comment><USER58> Well, "it is written" was also a statement about the credibility due to an inherent bias towards the educated. Yes, you can't necessarily trust a journalist...but you certainly can't trust a friend's opinion either; they aren't even expected to be well informed.

<comment><USER57> I said "a well informed friend". Certainly it is a tautology that a 'well informed friend' can be expected to be 'well informed', no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The platform economics of streaming services incentivizes musicians to release a larger quantity of short, catchier singles that work well in playlists, instead of putting out a sonically diverse album.

<comment><USER60> At the same time it's never been easier for producers of niche art to find their audience and capitalize on it, simply because the cost of production and distribution is nearing zero and there are basically no more gatekeepers (in the traditional sense).

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm sitting in front of a device that will let me peruse what is practically the collected sum of all human knowledge, play all the games, watch all the movies, listen to all the music, communicate in realtime in multimedia with anyone, anywhere in the world, almost all for free, and will send a pizza to my house if I'm hungry.

And I'm still bored.

<comment><USER62> Perhaps an evolution of the "true joke" that there are 1500 television channels and nothing to watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I was just thinking on the tube how Steve Jobs wanted to put a computer on everyone's desks, but he ended up putting one in everyone's hands and now we're all crooked and staring down like Quasimodo.

</comment><comment><USER64> Semi-related to the Cruise AV, but should we be worried about a sudden increase in LIDAR everywhere from the perspective of protecting eyesight? I understand there are regulations and such to limit the "power" of the light, so just looking for more info.

<comment><USER65> If the vendors are complying with known safe-power limits (sub mW laser power), it should be fine.

One should primarily be concerned with laser powers that unintentionally exceed design power, or if they're ultra-fast lasers, with the peak power.

<comment><USER66> Do those limits take into account multiple sources hitting your eye at once? Maybe with laser pulses the odds of that happening for any length of time is nil

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> For me, tech has turned into a crutch when I don't know what to do. I've caught myself in the middle of automatic behavior and it's a bit scary - opening Reddit or HN, closing it because I've already read everything on the front page, then opening it again a few seconds later without even thinking about it.

I wonder what I would be doing without it. Creating art? Going out? I'd have to do something. It's something I want to explore more. Maybe I'll schedule just an hour each day where every device is turned off.

<comment><USER68> Yishan Wong's response to that worry starts out:

> The pre-internet era was boring. Some may say that it was just as > stimulating but in different, more "vibrant, outdoorsy" ways, but they are > wrong. I have lived in both and the internet definitely makes life more > interesting. In fact, combining the outdoors with the internet is one of > life's greatest pleasures.

[https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in- the...](https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in-the-pre- Internet-era/answer/Yishan-Wong)

I'm not sure I'm convinced but it was an interesting very short essay.

<comment><USER23> I feel _really_ relaxed and not bored at all when I go on vacation somewhere my phone gets little or no reception. It's amazing. There's so much to do without the Internet! Books are a thing, and there's more than enough top- notch fiction to last a lifetime, _without_ re-reading. Writing is a thing. Sketching. Hell offline video games are a thing, for that matter, and you can mine the back catalogs of older consoles for (mostly) less money than something new, and have about the same amount of fun. You can keep yourself in more excellent video material than you can reasonably watch with a Netflix DVD subscription and a trip to the library every week, no Internet required (aside from managing your Netflix queue, I guess—do that on your library trips, when you pay your bills). Board games & tabletop games & card games rule. Inventing any of those is fun. Lawn games. Sports. Playing music. Listening to music. Building stuff in the garage. Programming in any language/ecosystem with decent offline documentation. Hardware stuff.

I only, _only_ have Internet service because it lets me work from home and keeps my wife from having to stay at school until 7:00 4 nights a week for 9ish months a year (teacher) since friggin' everything they do is online now (Google, mostly). I mean I have a couple streaming services and such since we have to pay for Internet service anyway, but aside from those two (admittedly great) things that require it I wouldn't bother to pay for it.

<comment><USER7> That's the thing. That's never changed. Vacations have _always_ been more fun. The change is that now, when you're doing boring mundane things, you can pull out your phone and have at least some modicum of entertainment.

<comment><USER23> I mean chillin' in an Airbnb, not hiking or seeing the sights or whatever. Even that part's better, without the Internet.

[EDIT] and yes I get the irony that AirBnB requires the Internet. Occasional Internet is handy to take care of necessities and create convenience. Constant Internet? I'm a skeptic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Like social networks breeding political stupidity, mob rule and demagoguery?

<comment><USER70> Exactly. Political parties spend most on social networking teams now! look at India! Entire elections are based on fake news spread on social networks. Nobody cares about healthcare, economy, jobs and of course education. Obviously if you educate people then they will start judging everything rationally just like we are doing on this thread ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Great question. I've been writing about this broad topic for a while. There are 50+ examples here: [https://unintendedconsequenc.es/](https://unintendedconsequenc.es/) I hope you enjoy reading them. (One of my favorites was on AVs.)

</comment><comment><USER71> Computers have made tracking huge quantities of debt feasible which itself is sold as collateral which exists only electronically, allowing private banks to issue usd credit irrespective of the fed.

This has made land prices track productivity, leaving most on the breadline forever.

<comment><USER72> Im sorry, can you expand on how your first assertion leads to your second?

<comment><USER71> Land prices where demand > supply (most purchases) are bid up by credit, so available credit sets prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Younger people are less likely to be able to deal with directories. (er, "folders", and get off my lawn) They are also less clear about what is on the local machine.

They use iOS and Android. They don't use a file manager, and certainly don't use a command line.

Chromebooks are now common in education. Stuff goes on the Google drive.

This is causing trouble when these people end up needing to use traditional desktop software in college or in the workplace. They have trouble with saving files, moving files, and making backups.

<comment><USER74> They just haven't yet figured out everything behind

      ./a.out

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> USB-C, the intention of one port to rule it all leads to 5 different cables using the same port all supporting different set of spec and functions. Or actually using something similar / variation of USb-C Plug but does not actually confine to any USB spec at all, aka Nintendo Switch.

Leading to Powering and Display in the same port ( aka Thunderbolt ) which is great in theory and idea, in practice there are much higher failure rate of frying the CPU or display controller for all sort of reasons.

USB-C could have worked if we have much more stringent spec, and force only two types of cable, Thin for anything below 25W, and Thick for heavy duty with 100W. Unfortunately USB4 doesn't want to be a better spec.

There are two things I hope Apple will never adopt at its current form, that is AV1 and USB-C. And it looks like Apple is making great decisions on the two so far.

<comment><USER76> What's wrong with AV1?

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Progress before people.

While the Industrial Revolution is the accepted era as the real beginning of progress before people, I feel the new age of technology will make the Industrial Revolution look like an humanitarian endeavor without a PR team, in comparison. In 2 or 3 decades, we'll look back and at the Industrial Revolution as good old times, even with all its utter failures.

I'm sad to see that people don't see beyond modern PR. Even with the recent Silicon Valley scandals and failures... people say they don't believe in religion... but they traded one religion for another. They all pray and tithe to the silicon valley titans and think that's okay.

</comment><comment><USER78> DNA tests exposing family secrets that normally people would take to the grave.

<comment><USER24> Is that a unintended consequence or an intended consequence? Seems intended to me.

</comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux The internet has enabled developers to track user behaviour in apps and on websites on an industrial scale. And they've done it so successfully and implemented it so widely that the idea of tracking user behaviour in your app or on your website is now considered an expected and completely normal practice.

Of course, when it's developers on the receiving end of such tracking they will complain loudly (as they did recently about GitLab). A reflection of the sheer hypocrisy that runs right through programming profession.

</comment><comment><USER79> Spotify's advertisements in which millennials exclaim amazement at the idea of playing music without an internet connection.

Probably accurate for some tiny portion, which is astounding no matter how small of a group that is.

</comment><comment><USER80> That software and tools built by idealists with the aim of increasing personal freedom is being used to create the greatest, most comprehensive system of surveillance and control the world has ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER81> Tech addiction. Information addiction. Addiction to HN, TechCrunch and Elon Musk. I spend more time dreaming about tech than actually doing anything about it..

</comment><comment><USER82> Head horns and narrower elbows: [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190610-how-modern- life-...](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190610-how-modern-life-is- transforming-the-human-skeleton)

</comment><comment><USER83> Lack of patience. We're living in a instant gratification society now.

</comment><comment><USER50> \- Technical: I hate when i get a call on skype and 2 computers and a phone start ringing in concert. And this is default behavior that cant be turned off. I think a lot of apps do that

\- Apps that spam your contacts list and notifications that keep coming even when you closed the app. In the name of dumbproofing everything we ve made it hard to keep secrets secret

\- Probably not getting out of the house as much

\- An anxiety with people's public image, e.g. not being seen in any picture breaking out of your curated public character. This is something that young people obsess over, while previous generations wouldn't give a toss really.

\- An extension of this and porn is public nudity / the end of nudism as culture

<comment><USER45> ...and the other devices continue to ring after you've answered the call :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> How "personalization" and "increasing engagement" has created echo chambers and a horrific level of confirmation bias.

</comment><comment><USER85> When you're about to get a message on your cellphone and it interferes with nearby speakers and makes weird chirping noises.

<comment><USER40> Ah yes, unshielded speakers and cellphones. The terrible noise in the early 2000s letting me know my parents were calling the cellphone they gave me for college in order to force me to keep in touch.

<comment><USER72> The scenario that you describe is one of those cases where the party you empathise with most changes as you grow older.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I do not know how to start with this. Reading through the comments, however, is enjoyable :)

my short and random list of less important things:

a) annoyingly difficult to leave a window slightly open on an otherwise locked vehicle (live in desert).

b) lack of control over raw data on instrumentation due to gui and locked code. impacts science...wherein people are not field and not CS.

c) wanton disregard for self-image due to perceived shield of teh webs. vast majority of us do not know how exposed we are.

d) total collapse of previously accepted informational authority.

e) we need societal help, but we dont know why or how.

</comment><comment><USER87> Good comments from personal perspectives.

From a professional one, an absolute uncontrollable addiction to unprecedented amounts of data.

I'm not much of a Star Wars fan, so forgive me if my analogy is a little off, but here it goes... It's like the Force. Everyone wants it but few can handle it. Of the few who can, the ones who use it for good are constantly fighting a battle against those who wield it recklessly or with malice.

And with modern infrastructure, that data can captured and leveraged in astonishingly quick ways that make it very hard to stop.

</comment><comment><USER88> we're all going to have arthritis in our thumbs from typing on our phones so much. I got a hand MRI for a separate injury, but my doctor noticed I had early signs of arthritis at a relatively young age. it's a lot more common because of heavy smart phone usage.

</comment><comment><USER89> Maybe this is me getting old(er), but personal unintended consequences is how little I care about new tech, especially the focus of mobile phones and how expensive they have gotten. Not only have I reached a point where I am actively reducing the amount of devices I have and different types of software. This also extends to turning off any kind of notification etc, very few things are important enough to disrupt my chain of thought at all, none when on a regular basis.

One of my other gripes is the dumbing down of software, where everything is so simplified that doing your own backups, or finding any kind of backups of a kind is just incredible inconvenient or impossible.

I grew up in the 90s (born mid 80s) and I long for that era of computing in terms of my relationship to it. While I absolutely know that I am looking at this with heavy, rose-tinted goggles, but life without the Internet was better. This is in the context of distraction, because the Internet has become the distraction-enabler through mobile phones, iPads etc. While it has enabled communication, it also enabled distraction. I'd wager that the personal productivity and/or happiness is severely reduced for a large amount of people and companies, due to "abusing the web".

Oh, I also never use my smartphone. I can talk with my friends for hours on it, but other than a few things here and there, I barely use it. But what I hate is the expectation that one should be available and accessible basically all the time. Friends and family have gotten used to my quirks, but I still feel the pressure of being available when the phone is close by.

</comment><comment><USER90> People talking loudly to themselves on the street (if they have airpods in).

<comment><USER61> I still sometimes have to remind myself that no, those people probably aren't crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Unnecessary consequence: assuming what is around you as the norm. Like communication across the globe and having a social media account is as common as toasting bread (see the irony in the last part?).

</comment><comment><USER92> I just saw a video of a woman getting hit by a bus because she had her headphones in and looking at her cell phone crossing a crosswalk.

Not really her fault, but I guess I would have heard a bus coming.

<comment><USER93> As tragic as this is, how is this not 100% her fault. Was the bus running a red light?

<comment><USER94> In a crosswalk, pedestrians have the right of way. So if a driver hits someone in crosswalk while making a turn, the driver is legally at fault. (But that doesn't mean that it's a good idea for people to walk across a street without paying attention.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> That orchestration technologies like k8s and OpenShift generally make services less stable and less performant. IMO not an unexpected consequence, but clearly an unintended one.

I guess this would not happen if people were to use the above technologies with stateless services only, but they don't because the majority of articles, blogs and documentation on the subject leads people to believe that using network based storage for your io intensive state full services is good practice.

</comment><comment><USER96> I'm out of the dating game (thank god) but I noticed dating apps completely ruined dating in all other areas as well.

This is something both my male and female associates complain about.

</comment><comment><USER97> I've used Google maps directions assistance for many trips but still enjoy driving somewhere unfamiliar the old fashioned way: using written directions, paying attention, and maintaining a sense of location. I don't remember the feelings associated with driving the old fashioned way. Clearly, driving assistance technology has made driving much less stressful, but also prevents people from acquiring important navigation skills.

</comment><comment><USER98> The rise of crypto-currency had the unintended result of getting people into investing, rather than starting a new _currency_ people would use...

</comment><comment><USER99> More and more video games require an internet connection and server to be playable. They can't be archived or revisited in the same way that an old Nintendo ROM can be. When _World of Warcraft_ rereleased their "classic" version, there was a lot of dialogue of what that classic experience was and what warranted revising.

How could a computer game historian play 2009's Farmville in 2109?

</comment><comment><USER100> The Gutenberg Press led to the Protestant Reformation.

</comment><comment><USER101> Not so much new tech, but I was out on the deck really late in the summer and heard a horrible sound like a dying alien. After sorting through the noise, I finally recognized it as a mocking bird doing a very bad imitation of a car alarm. I've heard good ones but this was just sounded sickly--perhaps it was blending different types of alarms together.

</comment><comment><USER102> Upgrading to ios 13 and realizing they broke find my iPhone. It used to be I would log in to find my wife's phone the half dozen times a day she's forget where she put it. Now... I have to go to iCloud.com in a browser... another irony- her credentials are stored in my passwords whereas the old find my iPhone had no option but to forget credentials...

<comment><USER103> I just checked to make sure: yup, I still see all of my wife's devices in Find My. So it's not broken out of the box. You _did_ see the new Devices tab at the bottom, right?

<comment><USER102> Is she on the same iCloud login or her own?

<comment><USER103> Her own iCloud account that is part of a Family. So yes and no? Yes, she has her own account, but no, because she's also under the umbrella of my account ("Family"). But it has always been this way, yes? One must be under the Family umbrella to see the devices of others?

<comment><USER102> That's the distinction - we didn't put her account under the family plan. I must truly be an edge case then!

<comment><USER103> I was about to ask, "how would you find her phone if she's not in 'The Family'?" And it occurs to me that you probably would enter _her_ creds into Find My Phone, then find her phone. Yeah, that was broken from the start IMO. Though the current model breaks your previous flow, umm, maybe use it as intended (and the way it should have been to begin with) and just use the Family feature?

Anyway, probably time for me to let this one go, I don't even remember the original issue without backtracking up thread. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Commoditization of human behavior

</comment><comment><USER104> Scooters, scooters everywhere :-)

</comment><comment><USER105> Here's a positive one: smart phones with maps have helped bring about the EV revolution.

I got an EV recently and quickly noted how annoying to near impossible finding chargers would be without an app.

<comment><USER106> I don't really see how this works at all... people would use paper maps or mapquest if personal GPS devices and smartphones didn't exist

(Also a full replacement of gas cars to EV will require 96% of all known Nickel Earth deposit so it is definitely not "the solution" to the energy/resource/transportation problem--buses are)

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> It seems most of the comments are about negative unintended consequences; but most positive consequences also might have been unintended.

</comment><comment><USER108> A resurgence of obsolete analog things

</comment><comment><USER109> Productivity tools.

You end up being more productive and finishing things faster; but most of the time, that ends up in no decrease in the time you spend on working stuff since the system quickly adapts to your new productivity level and you still spend all your time working.

Unless you are the one taking the majority of the surplus of your actions, which is rarely the case in a capitalist society, it is a dreadful feeling.

The end feeling is alienation followed by depression.

</comment><comment><USER110> Arbitrary censorship is OK now. Services do it. Schools do it. Governments do it.

</comment><comment><USER50> oh and people can now work remotely. this was an early promise of the internet that people had kind of given up on , but it came back serendipitously with improved tech.

</comment><comment><USER111> Facebook has amplified negativity. I never thought it would be used to develop psychological profiles and the "Russians to elect Trump".

Waze and GPS has ruined local neighborhoods and the sense of direction.

New kinds of addictions due to instant gratification.

Lack of social skills and engagement.

</comment><comment><USER112> The concept of "literacy" is relative to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER113> Everyone is oblivious to their surroundings. Whether it's because they're looking down at their smartphone or listening to a podcast or music on their AirPods, people aren't paying attention to what's happening around them, and they are walking out into streets without looking for cars, assuming no one is coming. I bike most places, and the number of pedestrians (and other bicyclists!) who can't hear my bike bell is astounding.

<comment><USER114> > I bike most places, and the number of pedestrians (and other bicyclists!) > who can't hear my bike bell is astounding.

I recently started to notice how many people - young and old - nowadays are walking on the wrong side of the road, i.e. in the same lane with other traffic in the same direction.

As a kid I always learned you should be in the opposite lane, so you can monitor oncoming traffic coming towards you, jump out of the way if needed. A safety measure (4 watchful eyes instead of 2).

I guess more than half of people no longer do that, and I wondered if that was also an effect of our self-centered, smartphone society: 'I can't be bothered to take note of you, but I expect you to take notice of me'.

<comment><USER115> At least where I live (not US), the law states that bikes should not go against the traffic.

Accidents are more dangerous in frontal collisions and the reaction window is shorter.

I bike daily and I've been surprised a few times by other bikers coming against the traffic, especially in turns.

edit: I think I misread you. You're talking about pedestrians. Oops.</comment></comment></comment>