Procrastination Has Nothing to Do with Self-Control - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/smarter-living/why-you-procrastinate-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-self-control.html <comment><USER2> This whole thing about character flaws and self control reminded me of the following passage from Raymond Smullyan's "This Book Needs No Title":

 _I know one woman who smokes. She says: "It's not that I have to smoke; I choose to. I could easily give it up any time I wish to, but I see no reason why I should. But I can assure you, I could if I wanted to." Her husband says to her: "That 's only a rationalization! You couldn't give up smoking even if you wanted to. You are not strong enough to give it up; you have to smoke. So to make yourself feel better, and to avoid having to confess your own weakness of character, you fool yourself into believing that you choose to. But it's only a rationalization!" I know another woman who smokes. She says: "It's not that I want to smoke; I can't help myself! I have tried several times giving it up, but I have failed! I'm afraid I just don't have a very strong character. I would love to stop, but I simply can't." Her husband says to her: "That's only a rationalization! You certainly could stop immediately, if you really wanted to. No, you choose to smoke (after all, nobody is making you) and you feel ashamed and guilty for doing that which you know to be harmful. So to avoid any moral responsibility for your acts, you fool yourself into believing that you 'can't help it. But this is only a rationalization." My only question about all this is: "Why are people so incredibly stupid?"_

Pity he didn't expand on the last line, but I think deep introspection is required to understand what is really under our control

<comment><USER3> I used to smoke until I was about 26 or so.

I really wanted to quit, but I couldnt "chose to quit" \- so I went a different route that worked well for me, but with an odd cost:

I convinced myself that "smoking will make you nauseous" \-- and then, when I attempted to smoke, I would feel sick to my stomach, and I would gag a lot.

This worked for me - and I was able to quit nearly cold turkey.

The cost, is that now, any time I smell cigarette smoke, I begin to gag and I cant control it. Further, now my gag reflex is so strong that brushing my teeth makes me gag heavily....

<comment><USER4> Interestingly, I use the same method to stick to my diet. I repeat to myself and others how gross fast food is and just say things like yuck, eww, etc when I think of eating it. It took a short time before I just naturally avoid it and have no desire or cravings anymore. And this is from someone that once consumed at least 1, most times 2, meals a day from fast food places.

<comment><USER5> My problem with dieting was different, I eat normal food, I just eat a lot of it, even if I'm not hungry. I realized this was because the long-term gain of not eating is just too long-term, so I set up a points system where I reward myself with points any time I eat less than maintenance, and I lose points whenever I eat more. It's been working quite well so far!

<comment><USER6> I've done something in the same vein, but not so detailed. Say I'm out for dinner and they offer desert. I have a sweet tooth, so I look at the menu. If it sounds absolutely great, I'll give in. But if it appears to be just OK, I say to myself "I'll save those calories for something better another day."

Likewise, if potato chips are served with a meal -- if I ate them I'd get some marginal pleasure from it, but I can think of 20 ways to get more pleasure from the same number of calories.

Mentally, I'm not denying myself pleasure; I'm banking it for future pleasure. The overall effect is I have fewer low-yield calories and fewer calories overall.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting, I'll try to keep that in mind as well! Especially since I just ate a goddamn can of Pringles out of gluttony.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find the article to be a bit misleading.

The title says that procrastination has "nothing to do with self-control", which is obviously an appealing sentiment.

However, the first paper that they reference says that "...if we have a great deal of self-discipline and dutifulness... we may exert the self-control necessary to engage in the task in a timely manner despite the lack of immediate reward or the negative mood that the task elicits. Procrastination, however, is the lack of this self-control, whether as a state or trait. Procrastination is the self-regulatory failure of not exerting the self- control necessary for task engagement... this failure at self-control may be the direct result of a focus on regulating moods and feeling states in the short term."

Overall, a better argument would be that a lack of self-control isn't the driving force behind our decision to procrastinate. Rather, what causes us to procrastinate are things such as anxiety or fear of failure, and a high degree of self-control is what allows us to overcome these issues.

If anyone is interested in learning more about the factors that can cause us to procrastinate, such as anxiety, perfectionism, and reliance on abstract goals, check out this article: [https://solvingprocrastination.com/why-people- procrastinate/](https://solvingprocrastination.com/why-people-procrastinate/)

<comment><USER8> _" what causes us to procrastinate are things such as anxiety or fear of failure, and a high degree of self-control is what allows us to overcome these issues"_

Self-control seems to be a behavior rather than a characteristic, quality, or a skill. When one has controlled oneself, one has exhibited self-controlling behavior by definition. But what causes someone to exert that self-control?

<comment><USER9> Right. "Self-control" is a _process_ , a system of habits and procedures for handling various situations.

But our language of self-control is about morality, and "lack of self-control" is seen as a _character flaw_ , not a problem that can be solved with repeatable processes.

In other words, "lack of self control" is a failing of society, not a failing of individuals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sleeping has a _huge_ impact in procrastination. The lack of sleep translates into an hyperactive amygdala (which has a big influence in processing emotions and impulses) and an under-active frontal cortex (which influences our rational thinking, etc) [1]

According to my experience, a good night of sleep is the best cure for procrastination, sadly, our current society don't optimize for sleeping well.

\---

1: [https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking- Dreams/dp/1501...](https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking- Dreams/dp/1501144316)

<comment><USER11> Hm. Not convinced of the link between the two. The article is arguing that procrastination is the proactive delay of making a hard decision to the detriment of our mental wellbeing. A good night's sleep isn't necessarily going to make you want to confront that decision.

<comment><USER7> Research has shown that there is absolutely a connection between sleep and procrastination, with low-quality sleep increasing the likelihood that people will procrastinate, particularly among people who are naturally prone to procrastination.

This is attributed to the fact that sleep is crucial when it comes to replenishing the mental resources that you need in order to self-regulate your behavior effectively.

This article contains a summary of research on the topic which came out recently: [https://solvingprocrastination.com/study-procrastination- sle...](https://solvingprocrastination.com/study-procrastination-sleep- quality-self-control/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The way I usually formulate these lines of thought is as follows:

I have the desire to play video games (a waste of time), but I wish that I did not have this desire. I want it, but I do not want to want it.

If we do not have strong enough character to regulate our short term desires, our long term goals suffer. This tradeoff is implicit in how we spend every second of our day. Ultimately, actions reveal preferences.

If your long-term goals are unclear, or if your working conditions/ social circle are not congruent to your long-term goals, you will remain anxious over failing to progress towards these goals.

<comment><USER13> Apparently this phenomenon predates video games:

"For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (Paul of Tarsus, circa 57 a.d.)

<comment><USER14> Reads like a prologue to the new offering in town around then (Jesus Christ)

<comment><USER15> It's an Epilogue. Paul of Tarsus is St Paul the author of many letters in the New Testament of the Bible. The text is from Romans 7:15-24. Verse 25 says "Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

<comment><USER16> Thank you for finishing the quote. It's arguably the most important verse as it offers the solution.

<comment><USER17> It _asserts a_ solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know he's not for everyone but Nassim Taleb's quote is salient - "Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity."

<comment><USER19> I could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that humans were procrastinating well before the first nail was hammered into the first plank of the Procrustean bed of modernity.

<comment><USER20> Procrastination was much more difficult before the modern age (1960+)

<comment><USER9> Why do you think that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Recommended related: If Self-discipline Feels Difficult, Then You're Doing It Wrong [1] by author of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life"

1\. [https://markmanson.net/self-discipline-youre-doing-it- wrong?...](https://markmanson.net/self-discipline-youre-doing-it- wrong?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=social- posts&utm_content=2019-02-08)

2\. [https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8529755.Mark_Manson](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8529755.Mark_Manson)

</comment><comment><USER8> _" Cultivate curiosity: If you're feeling tempted to procrastinate, bring your attention to the sensations arising in your mind and body. What feelings are eliciting your temptation? Where do you feel them in your body? What do they remind you of? What happens to the thought of procrastinating as you observe it? Does it intensify? Dissipate? Cause other emotions to arise? How are the sensations in your body shifting as you continue to rest your awareness on them?"_

This sounds very much like meditation, and while it may well be beneficial, someone with a serious procrastination problem may have problems following through with their intention to meditate like this as well, and instead just compulsively do whatever makes them feel better.

<comment><USER22> Moreover, if anhedonic depression is involved, it can exacerbate that - serious anhedonia is a sensation that shares a lot with mindfulness meditation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The particular nature of our aversion depends on the given task or > situation. It may be due to something inherently unpleasant about the task > itself...but it might also result from deeper feelings related to the task, > such as self-doubt, low self-esteem, anxiety or insecurity.

That may be what I'm doing with something right now. I have a couple of publishers interested in something I've designed, but I need to update a couple of things first before I submit it, and I keep putting it off, saying I'm too tired, not in the right mindset, I have too much other things going on. Might be because I'm worried they're going to reject me, though, and as long as I haven't submitted it yet they can't reject me.

I do have a lot going on though and it does seem like it's getting in the way. Work is being stupidly demanding of my time, and I had a job interview pop up last week that superceded all other tasks, and I was out of town for half the weekend and needed to pull my weight around the house and bring it back from the sty it got into from the past week of preparing for the interview the other day.

<comment><USER24> What helps me in those situations is to make a list of arguments for and against doing it now. This seems silly, but view it as communication between your subconscious and your rational self. Your subconscious self feels that its obviously not a good idea to do it now, and your rational self feels that it obviously is a good idea. The arguments against doing it now are actually the most important part. Try to articulate why your subconscious feels that way, even if those arguments are silly. Recognising that they are silly is the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am a terrible procrastinator, and for me procrastination seems to be very much like writer's block. The problem isn't doing something so much as it is _starting_ something. In the case of writer's block, I try to start by free- writing. I start writing with the intention that it's going to be crap and I'm going to throw it away. In fact, I might even start with complete gibberish.

Along with general procrastination and writer's block I also suffer from the closely related _coder 's block_. I address this the same way: instead of free-writing I start "free-coding", where I write code with the intention that it's going to be crap, and I might even start writing gibberish, before I move on to writing code that compiles and maybe runs, but does nothing useful. The goal is just to get started.

In the case of both free writing and free coding, once I start I pretty quickly move on to writing stuff that's decent even if it's not great. That's something I can work with, and once I get in that mode I have much greater resistance to distractions.

To circle back to procrastination, I might use a similar approach. Say I need to clean up my work area, and I just don't want to (even though I also do want to). I need to reduce the scope of the problem to something absurdly simple, or maybe even just absurd. So I decide I'm just going to move all the loose items on my desk to another table so I can dust the desk. But I'm not even going to dust the desk, I'm just going to move the stuff off of it. For the immediate moment that's all I've got to care about it. Just moving stuff around.

But once the desk is cleared, dusting it and wiping it down is easy. It's so easy in that moment that that's all I care about. Then once that's done, I move the stuff back. But as I'm moving the stuff back it's easy to address each item one-by-one. Old papers can go in the trash or recycling, the books can go back to their regular place on the book shelf, the stapler can go back in the desk drawer where it regularly resides, etc. Then I realize now would be a good time to wipe the dust off my monitor, sort through the nearby stack of mail, etc.

Now mind you, I still procrastinate way more than I should, but these techniques work for me and I procrastinate a lot less than I used to.

<comment><USER26> Reminds me of Raymond Chandler's technique:

"Raymond Chandler and I discussed this once, and he admitted to the most bitter reluctance to commit anything to paper. He evolved the following scheme: he had a tape recorder into which he spoke the utmost nonsense – a stream of consciousness which was then transcribed by a secretary and which he then used as a basis for his first rough draft. Very laborious. He strongly advised me to do the same … in fact became so excited that he kept plying me with information for months about the machine that helped him."

(from an interview with S. J. Perelman)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Procrastination isn't a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your > ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and > negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, > frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond.

<comment><USER28> Yikes. That's a lot of negative emotions. But don't we judge our characters and other's by how we manage despite that ? So it's back to square one and procrastination is a character flaw ?

<comment><USER8> _" But don't we judge our characters and other's by how we manage despite that ?"_

 _Some_ people do judge, but maybe they shouldn't be so judgmental, as it's not clear how much control people have over their own behavior, and without such control one can't be blameworthy.

<comment><USER28> Why can't they be judgemental ? I mean, it's not clear how much control they have over being judgmental.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I noticed that my tendencies to procrastinate greatly reduced (though never completely vanished) upon me taking antidepressants, after a very unpleasant conversation with my boss (at the time) telling me that I was underperforming, and it could lead to me being fired.

I remember the feelings I had then; there was this feeling of "I'm not stupid, why am I constantly pushing things off to make it seem like I am?", and it became this vicious cycle of "I do poorly because I'm depressed, and I'm depressed because I do poorly". I could definitely see it as an act of "self- harm", as this article describes.

</comment><comment><USER30> How many visitors to HN or Twitter are often here because they reached a hard or tedious part of their task and you rationalized "giving yourself a break"?

I know I have. I added the _noprocrast_ setting to HN to interrupt this habit and I often try logging out of Twitter so I would actually need to login to use it. But this article rings true that often I'm using that "break" as a coping mechanism to avoid doing something I assume will be hard.

</comment><comment><USER31> Tim Pychyl, one of the quoted researchers, is fantastic. If you want to hear more from him, this is a great article by him (I was the editor for it): [https://medium.com/s/the-complete-guide-to-beating- procrasti...](https://medium.com/s/the-complete-guide-to-beating- procrastination/how-to-use-psychology-to-solve-the-procrastination- puzzle-6e6a56cdd535)

<comment><USER32> Seconded, Tim is both wise and kind. His podcast is also well worth checking out for anyone currently stuck on the horns of the procrastination bull: [http://iprocrastinate.libsyn.com/webpage/category/general](http://iprocrastinate.libsyn.com/webpage/category/general)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So say you're a procrastinator. Do you?

a)read the article so you don't have to do xyz

b)not read the article because learning how to stop procrastinating feels like self sabotage

c)start the article but don't finish it because you have ADD from surfing the internet as a means of procrastinating

d)something else.

edit: e)skim the article and write an HN comment about it.

<comment><USER34> d.) something else - I didn't read the article because I've wasted enough time in my life figuring out why I procrastinate and it doesn't bother me any more. But I still read most of the comments because I enjoy learning about the range of human experience around procrastination, because I do acknowledge it's something I cared about in the past.

edit) also lurking in comments is my preferred method of wasting time. Though I'm not wasting time to procrastinate at the moment. I'm just waiting for a scheduled event to start which I prepared for already. I think that's different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This makes me think of the book _Atomic Habits_ , which is all about how to form good habits and break bad ones. Procrastination can be seen in many cases as a lack of habit triggers to start down the path to work.

Keeping a daily to-do list (I use bullet journaling, but other processes can work) has done wonders for my procrastination. I have a habit of writing down everything I need to do _that day_ \- even if I've already done it. I have a habit to check at the end of the day to complete what isn't yet done. I have a habit of marking things completed. So my to-do list habit leads to not procrastinating. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than where I was.

I also have a habit of taking my journal and a pen with me everywhere. I'd rather be without my phone than without my journal.

I don't use a phone for my reference calendar or (especially) to-do lists, because a cell phone is full of all sorts of nasty bad-habit triggers, many designed by giant corporations that prey on my attention for money. It's basically a digital crack pipe I carry everywhere. So marking my tasks for the day without also checking email, weather, facebook (removed that app entirely and went cold turkey), etc... it's very difficult.

Paper is how I manage my time. It gives me positive habits and positive reinforcement.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wrote something on a related topic recently: [https://dimitarsimeonov.com/2019/02/13/how-people-turn- their...](https://dimitarsimeonov.com/2019/02/13/how-people-turn-their-life- around)

"""

We like to refer to that effort as willpower. But, from the point of view of looking at emotions fighting for dominance inside our brains, willpower is simply the strength and effort of the constructive emotions. The emotions which lead to long term happiness and comfort, even at the expense of short term pleasure. Logical, sober thought is one such constructive emotion, and we call it willpower whenever we are able to make our actions agree with the constructive emotions.

Yet… there is such a thing as "destructive" willpower. You might have seen it under the name of "rationalization". It is what destructive emotions use to take over our action. If people say and think "I'm gonna be OK to drive with one drink," that's their drink addiction emotion convincing them to drink. That's destructive willpower. It's not the absence of willpower, but the redirection of willpower towards a destructive emotion.

"""

</comment><comment><USER36> I mostly associate procrastination with the inability to make myself want to deal with chores that seem alienating and dumb and like impositions from a boring bureaucratic external system that makes fundamental demands on me as a person with no personal connection—bookkeeping, entering long numbers into bank web apps, registering my residential address by filling out a form, going through KYC questionnaires over the phone, writing a report I know nobody will read, etc. And it's worse the more the task is imbued with some kind of fake urgency by prudish pedantic adults while I also know that the negative consequences of not doing the thing on time are likely to be rather tame like a small fine or just a little bureaucratic slap on the wrist. I procrastinate with the same chores that might make me imagine dropping out of society to live on a homestead or as a monk. Probably I would get through these things easier if I had some "ADHD medicine" as the kids call it these days.

</comment><comment><USER37> Chronic procrastinator here. Procrastinating feels like an addiction for me because it offers instant pleasure. Right now I am procrastinating instead of trying to fix a dumb JavaScript bug. When it comes to "bad mood," I've noticed a pattern from my self-centered ego: 1). The work is "beneath" me, and/or 2). The work threatens my ego.

</comment><comment><USER38> > _"It's self-harm," said Dr. Piers Steel, a professor of motivational > psychology_

I'm in the unfortunate position of being a layman who disagrees with an expert, but isn't it a bit inaccurate and confusing to call it "self-harm"? Doesn't that term already have a specific meaning?

As I understand it, self-harm ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self- harm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-harm)) is a behavior where someone seeks out pain (such as by cutting themselves). It can be because focusing on pain allows temporary escape from other thoughts, or maybe for other reasons, but in any case the pain is something the person seeks out and is an essential part of the process.

It seems like "self-destructive" might be a better term to use when talking about procrastination. If I put off cleaning my bathroom, I'm avoiding something I can't/won't face, and that is going to come with feelings of guilt or shame, but I'm not seeking out that suffering as a tool for dealing with something else. It's just a side-effect of the choice to avoid something.

Or, if it really is (a non-physical form of) self-harm, can someone explain how? Are they saying the feeling of guilt over not cleaning my bathroom alleviates the feelings of unpleasantness associated with having to scrub the shower?

That doesn't seem right, but maybe there are two types of procrastination, a "light" one where the task is just unpleasant and says nothing about you (cleaning the shower) and a "serious" one where the task might reflect on you (learning to do something you don't think you're capable of)? I could imagine how self-harm might fit in with the "serious" form because maybe guilt over not trying could serve a purpose distracting you from the more-unpleasant feeling of doubt over whether you actually can do it.

<comment><USER39> The presumption here is that the task you are avoiding is - somehow - in your best interests (directly or indirectly, e.g. going to the gym directly makes you healthier while completing that report for your boss might not directly help you but it is certainly in your best interest to have a job and not be fired) or otherwise you wouldn't be doing it.

Not doing something that is good for yourself is doing something bad to yourself, i.e. self harm. If it were phrased as "someone throwing a fit at work and insulting everyone with the intention of getting themselves fired so that they would no longer have a means of income," I think we can both agree that going out of your way to not have a job (not just _this_ job) is definitely self-harm. It's in the same vein.

<comment><USER38> I'm trying to make a distinction between harmful (or self-destructive) behavior and self-harm. As I understand it, "self-harm" is a term with a very specific meaning that goes beyond making choices that lead to bad consequences.

<comment><USER39> I guess I wasn't clear. I understand that, "self-harm" is a very specific psychological term that encompasses activities like cutting and attempted suicide.

I meant that certain non-physical, indirectly harmful activities could be interpreted as falling under the category of self-harm while not meeting the classical definition. As I mentioned, if someone _with the intention of hurting themselves or causing theirself pain_ (and not with that just being a side-effect/result) instigated a fight at work to get themselves fired and out of a job, you don't have to squint too hard to see it in that light.

e.g. classic self-harm: someone feels like they don't deserve to be happy or need to feel some physical pain to wake up or what have you, and engages in cutting, directly bringing that harm to themselves.

Someone feels like a fraud (without having engaged in any deception or the equivalent that would objectively result in others labeling them as such) and decides that they don't deserve the job they have with its pay and benefits, and so takes measures to make sure they are out of a job and a livelihood, and end up homeless and eating out of trash bins. Self-harm, no?

Someone gets angry at a boss/colleague and can't restrain themselves from starting a physical altercation and gets fired/loses their livelihood.. not so much self-harm.

So it's a question of perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder if procrastinating may be a healthy response to having too little leisure time and being over committed to too many things.

We are evolved for more immediate concerns. The TPS report lacks the same importance as catching dinner.

Unfortunately in the modern era the TPS report _is_ what you catch dinner with.

What to do.

<comment><USER41> Eat the rich.

Admit that our lifestyles are designed to drive the consumption based economy, rather than to actually make life more enjoyable.

The Australian Aborigines has a stable, sustainable civilisation for tens of thousands of years. European "civilisation" is set to make the world uninhabitable within two thousand years of inventing the steam engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have two objections:

1- It says we procrastinate against our better judgement. But isn't the science gearing toward the fact that it is not the conscious brain that is controlling our behavior and actions? In that case, you can't solve procrastination by simply being aware of it.

2- Quoting from the article

> We really weren't designed to think ahead into the further future because we > needed to focus on providing for ourselves in the here and now.

Yet, every night I go to bed and I'm dreaming about a better future. Obviously the scenarios I'm dreaming about can't be for tomorrow and are quite distant in the future (better country, top job/career, traveling but mostly a hotter girl with big/nice house).

<comment><USER43> To point one: What's the objection here? You do something (like say, posting on HN instead of driving home from work) instead of doing the thing that you feel would be better for you. If you hadn't felt the 2nd option was better, either in the moment or in retrospect, then you wouldn't feel you procrastinated. You just did something. And the article isn't suggesting that being aware of it fixes it, it's saying that it has more to do with anxiety or other causes than simply not wanting to do something. It's trying to say WHY you're on HN instead of driving home.

2- What does your example prove here? The human mind almost always prioritizes immediate needs over future needs and has poor understanding of how to achieve long term goals. This is very well understood by psychologists and sociologists. It's part of why people find game theory so interesting. It's why people act against their own self interests. Saying "I want things in the future" doesn't GET you those things, so you haven't really proven that you're great at planning a future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I normally don't read NYTimes articles but this one was pretty good with a couple of useful external links.

But then they dropped this line:

"On the other side of the coin, Ms. Rubin also suggested that we make the things we want to do as easy as possible for ourselves."

So what you're saying is I should tweak my vimrc file to make it easier to write code instead of working on my next project, got it!

Jokes aside though, it's worth a read if you're afflicted by procrastination and its related friends.

</comment><comment><USER45> rather unsurprising that a psychologist describes procrastination as a mismanagement of 'emotion' rather than a dysfunction of the dopaminergic reward systems. as someone taking ADHD medication, i can tell you that procrastination is fundamentally just a failure of dopamine management.

For some unlike me perhaps it is true that there is a 'one little trick' to make your brain act rationally. I don't know, maybe it's possible via the brain's sheer neuroplasticity to evolve a dopaminergic flaw from a psychological failure or trauma.

But at the end of the day, procrastination is very much neurological, with a fairly clear pathway and a chemical which is objectively known to drive it.

More people absolutely need to know procrastination has nothing to do with self control, but psychological research like this will always appear to show the issue stemming from a psychological issue when this is known to be virtually always untrue. Treatment of ADHD with psychological approaches like CBT have a nearly non statistically significant effect, but ADHD medication has a 70%+ success rate.

<comment><USER46> Is "treatment of ADHD" the same thing as "treatment of procrastination"? Are you suggesting anyone who is displeased with a regular procrastination habit has ADHD?

Are you recommending medication for anyone who is displeased with their procrastination?

I don't think the OP is suggesting there is "one little trick", but if, alternately, medication is in fact "one little trick" that worked for everyone, that would probably be welcome news to everyone!

<comment><USER45> ADHD is a diagnosis based on a group of issues primarily owing to dopamine management. ADHD at the end of the day, is just a word.

The way I see it, there's a spectrum of procrastination issues and those that are explosive enough to be diagnosable get the ADHD label and medication. If you have ADHD symptoms but they're not bad enough to warrant a diagnosis you get nothing.

It's well known that ADHD medication is incredible for procrastination -- statistically speaking any student should be able to tell you that.

<comment><USER46> So you are in fact recommending that anyone with procrastination problems take medications prescribed for ADHD, if they can? (And that they should be able to?) Any downsides in your opinion?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I've often found myself procrastinating when working on a project where I've been thrown in not knowing enough and thought I could figure it all out. Often the solution is to step back and learn the technology/library/tool first, then I dont procrastinate any more and get the job done. I haven't seen this explanation, but I suspect it occurs often.

<comment><USER38> I think this is definitely valid and real, but there also is a danger of pretending you're in this situation when you're not.

For example, suppose you have some electronic item you want to repair but you're horrible at soldering, so you put it off because you don't want to face the negative feelings of failing at soldering again or the negative feelings of destroying that item you think you should have been able to repair. You could get past this by watching some videos on soldering, getting some better equipment, or practicing with a friend who's actually good at soldering. Once you don't suck at soldering, the negative feelings around fixing your electronic item are gone, and you can stop procrastinating. (And you can do it faster and better.)

On the other hand, maybe you need to write a complicated and annoying SQL query that is going to be tricky to get right, and you already know SQL, but you go off on a huge tangent reading SQL documentation looking for a function or trick that will make it easier when there really isn't one. Pretty soon you're just learning about esoteric SQL functions that don't have anything to do with your problem. But maybe one of them could if you read long enough, so you keep reading and reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Self-harm in the sense that is causes you pain, but it is really just not doing what others want even though you know that they will hurt you. It is intellectually dishonest to to portray people not doing something that they don't REALLY want to do as an issue with their brains and leave out the brains causing the harm. Not self-harm, just not protecting the self.

</comment><comment><USER49> meditation to slow down turmoil, and be able to reflect on your thoughts

sports to revive mental strength and thoroughness

life rhythm for efficiency

on a higher level: desire to deflect procrastination as a metalevel trick to find pleasure in doing something depth first

</comment><comment><USER50> Is this why amphetamines make avoiding procrastination so much easier?

</comment><comment><USER51> It has everything to do with genes.</comment>


Jimmy Wales: coders irrationally have near zero respect for non-coders - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Entrepreneurship/How-important-is-it-for-a-start-up-founder-of-a-tech-business-to-know-how-to-code/answer/Jimmy-Wales

<comment><USER2> It's not a totally false stereotype in that it happens frequently , and has happened a lot historically, that non-technical people somehow convince technical people to implement their vision and then take credit for all of it if it takes off, or, conversely, blame the technical people if it doesn't.

That said - in these cases, it is partly (or mostly) the fault of coders who display poor business acumen by somehow allowing themselves to be wrangled into something, well below their market value, that isn't theirs, by a charismatic individual.

That said as a coder I have respect for actually good business people who may not be technically minded. I have respect for their ability to make business decisions analytically, and to understand how the end-user sees their technology without necessarily knowing how to build it. Steve Jobs is a good example of this. I do not think I could do what he did, no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER3> Coders have near zero respect for other coders. It's an industry where work is taken very personally.</comment>


What port should I use? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailgun.com/25-465-587-what-port-should-i-use/

<comment><USER3> It's nearly 2015, we are in a post-Snowden, and yet we are still considering the design pattern of "start with untrusted/unencrypted connection, and then just use an optional 'upgrade' command to make it encrypted/secure" acceptable.

One Word: SSLStrip

We have had to completely overhaul HTTP/HTTPS because this "start insecure, go to secure" just does not work. And even then, its been a series of hacks like Strict Transport Security, preloading lists for HSTS into browsers, OSCP Stapling, hard coding revoke lists, etc.

And now we need to go through all this pain again for mail?!?!

This is incredibly stupid and short sighted. Any network protocol that is sending personal/private information, or sends authentication credentials, needs to do so over an encrypted channel. New protocols get a single port, encryption is required. Legacy protocols which do not have an encrypted channel, like SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, HTTP, need a separate, dedicated port number for the encrypted version.

<comment><USER4> In reality, it doesn't really matter much if TLS is used. Most MTAs will use TLS by default when it is available (i.e. if it sees the "STARTTLS" verb in the server's response) but (also by default) most won't attempt to validate the SSL certificate provided by the server -- it can be self-signed, expired, have a messed up certificate chain, or have a hostname mismatch and it will still be accepted.

Proper validation can be enabled, of course, but it is typically not by default. Of course, connecting over a "plain text" connection and then "upgrading" to TLS has its own problems, as you pointed out. The most significant is that a man-in-the-middle can simply filter out the "250-STARTTLS" response from the server and the client will not attempt to use encryption.

Unfortunately, in order to be RFC-compliant, an MTA cannot refuse to transfer mail just because encryption (TLS) is not available.

I wholeheartedly agree that the e-mail protocols need updated -- or perhaps even completely overhauled -- but I think it will be a long time before we see that happen. Besides, even if new protocols were introduced tomorrow that fixed all of this, it would be years before there was 100% adoption meaning that we'd still have to support the current protocols until then.

I don't think you can say, fairly, that "this is incredibly stupid and short sighted", though. I've been working professionally in I.T. for nearly 20 years and SMTP was still around way way before that. The problems that we are currently trying to solve simply did not exist then and almost certainly could not have even been imagined that long ago (recall that RFC733 was authored in November 1977 and RFC822 in August 1982).

Overall, SMTP has proven to be a fairly robust protocol but, as with anything, it needs to adapt.

<comment><USER5> I think you are missing something here / a clarification.

Almost all mail clients (MUAs) I've seen will validate the TLS certificate.

Almost no mail servers (MTAs) will validate the TLS certificate. This is because a) TLS isn't required, so a MITM could just strip the STARTTLS and everything would need to continue to work, and b) It doesn't provide any security.

TLS on the client is really securing the client credentials - not the email. TLS on the server is per hop - not to the final destination, so it doesn't protect a MITM attack.

If you want encrypted email, encrypt the email - don't use per hop encryption.

<comment><USER4> > _Almost no mail servers (MTAs) will validate the TLS certificate._

Right. This is what I was referring to -- sorry, I could have been more clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I went through the whole stack of SMTP RFCs just this week and the takeaway was this.

      TCP/25 if you are talking directly to the recipient's mail server,
      though it's discouraged if you are not a mail server yourself.

      TCP/587 - the same as above, but you are a mail client. In particular,
      it's the port for talking to "your" server, which you are tasking with
      relaying your email to the destination.

      * If you have username/password and want to "login", you want TCP/587.

On the other hand

      TCP/465 is a deprecated way of *securing* an SMTP connection.

It's just SMTP over TLS. Deprecated, discouraged, but still widely supported. Functionally it can be either TCP/25 or TCP/587, depending on the setup at the server end.

To secure 25/587, you first speak a bit of SMTP and then initiate the TLS handshake with STARTTLS command. It's all actually really simple. _Much_ simpler than it seems when you are looking at the SMTP configuration UI in a typical mail client :)

      --

(Re-edit) Nevermind. Let's keep it on-topic.

<comment><USER7> And for those that still aren't familiar with TLS yet, think of it as simply SSL but newer and better. So, even though SMTP starts unencrypted the STARTTLS command initiates an encrypted session.

Most mail servers these days use TLS. So, there is a good chance that the email you send with your confidential pricing lists is being sent encrypted over the network. Unfortunately, there really isn't a good way to tell if that happened (at best you can view the mail headers which some servers add headers that show a TLS session was used between mail servers).

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's usually possible to tell just from the Received: headers.

For example, here's a (slightly censored) Received: header from a recent e-mail received by my personal mail server:

      Received: from mail.foo.com (mail.foo.com [192.0.2.8])
      	(using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits))
      	(No client certificate requested)
      	by mail.bar.com (Postfix) with ESMTPS id MX8675309
      	for <firstname.lastname@example.com>; Mon, 20 Oct 2014 18:31:26 -0400 (EDT)

N.B.: "with ESMTPS".

I'm sure that others will correct me if I'm wrong (please do!) and this almost certainly isn't foolproof (and I'm likely missing some and there are probably exceptions as well), but just from my own observations: "ESMTP" refers to a standard, unencrypted SMTP session (25/TCP), "ESMTPS" to an SMTP session where _STARTTLS_ was used (25/TCP), "ASMTP" to an authenticated SMTP session where "full" SSL/TLS was used (e.g. 465/TCP), and "ESMTPSA" to an authenticated SMTP session where _STARTTLS_ was used.

Of course, you can't see these on any outgoing messages you send, only incoming mail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This information is outdated. I quote here from the Using TLS in Applications Working Group @ IETF, and their current draft <[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-uta-tls- attacks-04>](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-uta-tls-attacks-04>):

 _2.2. STARTTLS Command Injection Attack (CVE-2011-0411)_

       Similarly, there are attacks on the transition between unprotected
       and TLS-protected traffic.  A number of IETF application protocols
       have used an application-level command, usually STARTTLS, to upgrade
       a clear-text connection to use TLS.  Multiple implementations of
       STARTTLS had a flaw where an application-layer input buffer retained
       commands that were pipelined with the STARTTLS command, such that
       commands received prior to TLS negotiation are executed after TLS
       negotiation.  This problem is resolved by requiring the application-
       level command input buffer to be empty before negotiating TLS.  Note
       that this flaw lives in the application layer code and does not
       impact the TLS protocol directly.

SMTP and IMAP clients are affected by this, so best practice is to use their encrypted ports. The use of STARTTLS-type techniques in future protocols is deprecated due to the downgrade risk.

This of course has a bit of a problem as 465 was a private assignment, later unfortunately reassigned to a Cisco protocol ("URD, a transitional technology for IGMPv2/IGMPv3 & SSM"), and some routers could mess it up: "routers running URD intercept all packets using port 465, regardless of destination". (You do NOT, however, want to run URD, and if you ever see it on the internet… well, think the whole thing through… if you have a Cisco, and find you have trouble with 465 through it sometimes, and haven't turned on URD yourself, maybe get your router forensically examined! <g>) That was on the whole not a good day for the IETF/IANA.

I have limited time this morning: so here's the thread on UTA, see for yourself. [https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/uta/current/msg00176.h...](https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/uta/current/msg00176.html) Long story short: using 465 is probably OK, lots of people are doing it (I am). Maybe use another port, too, in case you find a crazy misconfigured Cisco in-path, which complicates a dual- assignment.

The advice in the article is wrong: you are _not_ in breach of an RFC if you use port 465 - and you probably should, but there's no clear consensus or resolution yet, so it may just get another port assignment (have I overlooked that happening?).

</comment><comment><USER9> I think there's some history missing here.

"The RFC proposed a split of the traditional message submission and message relay concept."

What this is misses is that the former specifications never accounted for message submission in the first place. In the beginning, an MTA was installed on every system, and "sendmail" was used to get email submitted into the MTA. So there was no need for any other protocol to do this. But this only worked on Unix.

When less-well Internet-connected hosts came along (eg. Windows), there was a need to be able to submit mail to an MTA that was on a different host, since one was no longer present locally. Lacking a specification for this, MUA implementers just re-used (and overloaded) SMTP, by making the MUA pretend to be an MTA.

This caused a mess because MTAs were liberal in what they accepted (Postel's law), so they needed to tidy up badly formed submitted email such as fixing up headers. But this broke MTA to MTA transmission because email flowing that way ended up getting modified in unexpected ways, breaking old assumptions that MTAs generally only added headers.

And finally, more recently, the spam problem meant that MTAs needed to authenticate clients requesting relaying, since they didn't want to be labelled as spam originators.

Proposing "a split of the traditional message submission and message relay concept" was really just about sorting out the mess that we de-facto ended up in.

</comment><comment><USER7> Since we are making progress to use secure mail transports, why are we not seeing more use of S/MIME to secure the contents of the message? I set up signing/encrypting on my mail clients, but have yet to see anyone, or any company, use it.

<comment><USER10> Your last sentence is the answer to the first.

<comment><USER5> Plus the UX sucks and there is absolutely zero demand for it, except within an organization.

Inside an organization, Exchange will perfectly happily do secure mail - <USER2> works, it's nearly hassle free and novice users can do it.

Outside, you have a pile of Web of Trust problems which novice users don't understand, and no pushing requirement.

<comment><USER7> Zero demand? Wouldn't it be nice to send confidential email to business partners and know that it's secure?

I am surprised that large businesses have tolerated this for so long. Maybe SMIME isn't the answer, but it's surprising that we haven't seen some method to guarantee secure delivery of mail between companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's unlikely that anything anyone has to say using "Mailgun" needs much security. It's basically for spamming, after all.

Yeah, I read the "transactional email" bullshit. That usually means spamming to somebody who at some time in the past had some vague connection with you. The fact that Mailgun touts their own API as a means to send more email fast means they're marketing to spammers. Most businesses don't do enough transactions per second to have this as a problem. Amazon and eBay do, and they don't use Mailgun.

<comment><USER12> I send registration welcomes / email confirmations via Mailgun. Likewise, my company does the same thing with a different provider. It's not spam, just handy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had to use port 465 for the Outlook that comes with the Lumia phone.

<comment><USER10> Email configuration on Windows Phone is very confusing in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is also 925.</comment>


The more time that children chat on social media, the less happy they feel - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/09/social-networks--children-chat-feel-less-happy-facebook-instagram-whatsapp <comment><USER2> > shows that the more time children spend chatting on Facebook, Snapchat, > WhatsApp and Instagram, the less happy they feel about their school work

Maybe they have spent less time on the school work because they spent more time chatting.

> However, the economists were surprised to find nothing to support the > popular theory that time spent on social networks had an adverse effect on > children because it left them less time to do other, potentially more > rewarding, activities.

Well there are only twenty-four hours in the day, so if they spent X hours on social media that only leaves 24 - X hours for other activities, so that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.</comment>


Show HN: Finding profitable bets on over 40 different bookmakers - <AUTHOR> http://tradematesports.com/ <comment><USER2> If this works, would it not be more profitable for you to exploit it rather than sell it as a saas and make the bookies aware of their mispricings?

<comment><USER3> This way they get a lot of upside without any of the downside ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read the description and the blog post but I'm not totally sure what your product does.

What are "true odds"? It seems like its calculated based on gambling meta data, not actual analysis of the sport matchup itself?</comment>


MIT creates an AI to predict urban decay - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2017/07/14/random-people-teach-mit-robots-how-to-solve-urban-issues/#.tnw_vWrAwiCk <comment><USER2> The problem with this analysis is that it's completely aesthetics driven. It will fail miserably at predicting areas that are prime for gentrification since those forces are usually market or location driven. It should more accurately be described as a bad neighborhood detector.</comment>


A startup escape path - what advice would you add to this? - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2011/12/15/startup-escape-path?src=tw <comment><USER2> It's a good list.

 _Register a business_

Check.

 _Connect to the local startup community_

Hmmm... That assumes that there _is_ a local startup community. For many people in many locations there won't be. Even when there are startups, there may not be a startup community yet (that's pretty close to true where I live for example - although we're beginning to change that).

Maybe "Get involved in the startup community, the more local the better. If there isn't a local one - consider starting it".

The local business community can also be, accidentally, quite startup unfriendly. You're not going to get the right sort of advice for a web-based technical startup, where most of the local businesses are light industry, or franchises, etc. You have to know enough to figure out when advice is good, and when it only good for people in a certain context. That can be tough at the start.

 _Read Hacker News regularly_

Is only good advice if the kind of startup you're interested in starting is the kind of startup hacker news folk are relevant for :-) For example I've been spending some time over the last year with a good old fashioned hardware- technology startup. They've been spending the last seven years developing a new kind of sensing technology (it's cool - they have GIANT LASERS :-). Relevance of hacker news to their business - pretty much zero.

Reminder of points.... Great if you're an internet web-based startup. Not so great if that's not where your tendencies lay :-)

Although I think I'd take "Sell something online" and "Sell something intangible in person" and move them _way_ earlier no matter what the business. Being able to talk to customers and sell stuff is a vital skill. If you can't or don't want to do that - the startup world isn't for you.

Actually - thinking on it - maybe "Talk to customers face to face" should be the early point. Forget the selling part. Just getting out and talking to folk is a bit step.

</comment><comment><USER3> Registering a business is a waste of time and money until you actually have a business to register.</comment>


Show HN: My summer project - simulated CPU built from NAND gates - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/IsaacLewis/NAND-CPU

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a project to teach myself more about the inner workings of CPUs, so I'll need to learn a lot in the course of this project.

So far I've just defined some basic components (logic gates, adders, latches), working from class notes, Wikipedia, and the computer built in Wireworld. If any HNers can point me in the direction of better resources, it would be much appreciated.

<comment><USER2> Another direction you might want to explore is to learn VHDL or Verilog and implement the CPU on an FPGA board.

You can get a prototype board for around $100 and should be able to build something to cover most of, say, the MIPS instruction set.

This would be a more engineering oriented project; I would follow along an 'introduction to computer organization' style course from a university (just google and you can determine the required textbook, exercises etc).

It's exciting to write some C code, compile it to mips instruction set with gcc (I had to do some fudging here because my cpu didn't implement the entire instruction set) -- and then run it on the fpga and get the right numbers.

<comment><USER3> That's definitely a great way to learn more about CPUs. In school we designed a simple 8-bit CPU and loaded it into an FPGA. This included coming up with a simple assembly language and building a compiler.</comment></comment></comment>


What Will Save the Suburbs? - <AUTHOR> http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/what-will-save-the-suburbs/ <comment><USER2> _"... These insta-neighborhoods were not designed or built for flexibility or change ..."_

I remember being critically aware of this when looking for a house and choosing an area that was around 100yrs old. Doing this has a number of advantages, pre-built infrastructure, transport, a variety of different shops (remember main streets in towns?). So the idea was to find a place that had already spent the dollars in the past. In these types of environments you don't get mono-culture inhabitants. There is also a diversity in the ages of the inhabitants which counter-acts the decline that naturally occurs as population ages.

 _"... And after decades of renovation-obsession that has simply gotten out of hand, it seems a prudent time to swap Viking ranges for double-paned windows and high-efficiency furnaces. It's the perfect moment to fix what we've got. Despite their currently low numbers, green homes typically re-sell for more money than their conventional counterparts. ..."_

I don't see this happening yet. The costs involved are high and the expertise in re-building houses so they a) capture the water from the roofline, b) capture the suns heat for hot water and power and c) keep the heat out in summer and keep the heat in winter is simply not there, yet (Melb, Au is dry and hot in summer, wet & cold in winter). I think the biggest hack would be if new house designs could somehow be cheaply be modified before construction to achieve efficiency.

Especially water.

<comment><USER3> _The costs involved are high and the expertise in re-building houses_

Water tanks and solar hot water seem quite prevalent in Melb - what's the cost/experience gap that you're referring to? Afaik you still get a federal rebate for installing a solar system. In VIC you get rebates for installing tanks, showerheads, etc in existing buildings.

But yeah, I broadly see your point - the two construction issues that get to me are (1) no verandas and (2) no trees. A veranda makes a big difference, and a couple of properly placed trees can make a big difference to the amount of (summer) solar radiation hitting a house.

<comment><USER2> _"... Water tanks and solar hot water seem quite prevalent in Melb - what's the cost/experience gap that you're referring to? ..."_

If you want re-cycled water with minimal waste. Solar power hooked into the grid selling back to the power companies. Houses re-fitted with better insulation, access to high efficiency white-goods. Proper citing of properties with north facing aspects. This all takes money.

To get the desired outcome, you have to think decentralised rather than the centralised reliance we have now. Adding tanks & restricted showers is a 1950's solution to a much bigger problem. Btw where I grew up ~ [http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157612299413869...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/sets/72157612299413869/) a large portion of my school mates lived on tank-water and generators for backup ~ <http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/245135326> So water tanks are nothing new.

What I'm suggesting is a more radical thinking of dwellings, having the capacity to capture and store drinking water. Installations of solar heating and electricity. Power that feeds back to the grid during the day & pulled off during the night. There is no effort like this being undertaken in Melbourne save a few enviro-houses. This kind of redesign cannot happen without the combined work of architects, local planners and local government. It's not an easy task because

 _"... But yeah, I broadly see your point - the two construction issues that get to me are (1) no verandas and (2) no trees ..."_

That is a problem. I think there is a definite disadvantage living where you cannot add trees or verandas. The other is water. My current geo location gets on average 20% more than the rest of Melbourne.

<comment><USER3> _If you want re-cycled water with minimal waste. Solar power hooked into the grid selling back to the power companies. Houses re-fitted with better insulation, access to high efficiency white-goods. Proper citing of properties with north facing aspects. This all takes money._

Yup agreed - tanks and solar hot water are still a good idea, although I'll agree they are only a step towards.

 _It's not an easy task because_

Not sure what you were going to say there :) .. What's the best mechanism for this? Is water and energy just too cheap? Bump up the cost of both (with a safety net) and put it into subsidies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there any way to turn suburbs into small towns?

I never understood the mentality of people so against the convenience of walking to the corner to buy a gallon of milk that they zoned properties in such a way to make it impossible. I guess it's some masochistic thing, that would just make life too easy.

The debate seems to be suburb vs. big city, evil vs. good (or vice versa). But I grew up in a small town, and never realized what a privilege it was to walk to my elementary and high schools, ball fields, play grounds, library, grocery store, pharmacy, even friends' houses without crossing major highways.

Can we all just admit now that the people who invented suburbs were idiots and find ways to make a subdivision more like a very small town? I'm afraid the answer might be no, but maybe hope I'm overlooking some way this could work.

<comment><USER5> _"I never understood the mentality of people so against the convenience of walking to the corner to buy a gallon of milk that they zoned properties in such a way to make it impossible."_

If you build retail close enough to housing to walk to it, then people will walk to it. If my house is near that retail, people will walk near my house. People commit crimes. Walkable retail means I will get robbed.

Or at least that's how I assume their thought process goes.

 _"Can we all just admit now that the people who invented suburbs were idiots and find ways to make a subdivision more like a very small town?"_

People are trying: <http://www.cnu.org/>

One such development that I've been paying attention to: <http://muelleraustin.com/>

It's closer to the center of the city than what most people would call a suburb, but it's in the midst of plenty of suburban density, segregated-use development. The part that has been built is really pleasant to walk around. Instead of giant garages being the primary architectural feature, the garages are in the back on alleys. There aren't driveways every couple of feet with cars blocking the sidewalk like there were in the neighborhood I grew up in. When the "town center" part gets built, the neighborhood should be a pretty amazing place to live.

In the Bay Area, Palo Alto's not so bad. You can't really walk anywhere unless you live really close to downtown or the Middlefield shopping area, but at least you can bike places without cheating death.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Before (urban) warehouses and lofts became popular they were used by artists/startups (i.e. people more on the fringe) because they were so cheap... Vibrant communities developed, they because popular (and eventually the artists moved/were forced out).

This was the case here in Australia anyway, but I'm sure it applies in a lot of other areas.

Surely this could be the case for the suburbs too? A whole suburb taken over by people doing startups would be an interesting place.

<comment><USER6> I think the main problem with that idea is that the warehouses and lofts of most cities were located in the run down downtown areas and often near the waterfront of the city, as most cities old warehouses were originally used in shipping. Suburbs on the other hand, and especially the ones in concern with this article are in the middle of nowhere.

Artists/startups wanted to be located in the city and close to the things they needed because, as with wanting cheap place to live, they didn't have money for cars. The majority of these now abandon suburbs were entirely designed to be used by cars. They are bedroom communities with nothing in or around them but houses, and poorly built houses at that.

<comment><USER3> I think there is a counterpoint to that - in that there are a lot of artistic communities that spring up in unexpected (often rural) areas.

I think the issue really is critical mass - Access to the city is great, but I think what is required most of all is access to like-minded people. If you get enough of that going, then the rest will (generally) come.

... All that said - I get your point - even these areas had something going for them (e.g. the environment, surrounds, etc, etc).

<comment><USER7> The Heidelberg School was one such example, albeit from a somewhat different time.

<comment><USER3> Exactly the one I was thinking of :)

<comment><USER8> I love the fact that victorian's have just about taken over this conversation.. (Although with population trends, etc - we're not likely to have abandoned suburbs/houses any time soon). (As a point of note - my brother in law - carpenter - is working heaps of overtime at the moment - partly in Marysville, but the rest in the outer-outer-South-East... When the FHOG dissapears, we will see what happens..

On the energy conservation note - Does anyone have some quick tips for how best to utilise / retrofit a water tank? Last winter we filled an (existing) pool with rainwater - and now I need to do something with the pipes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actually why do suburbs need saving?

<comment><USER10> Because we've bulldozed wetlands and prairies and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in non-renewable building materials to put them there? "Save" might not be the best word here, though.

<comment><USER11> Just basic economics.

The Law of Sunk Cost: if you abandon a project, then all the money you sank into it to begin with is lost! Therefore, never abandon a project, always throw good money after bad.

<comment><USER10> I'm sorry, I wasn't writing well. I'm saying, the point of the article is that not all of those costs are sunk costs; some of it is reclaimable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Despite their currently low numbers, green homes typically re-sell for more money than their conventional counterparts._

Until there's a way to measure it I certainly wouldn't get my hopes up. To illustrate the issue, go to <http://www.zillow.com/> and try to select a house for sale that you believe would be efficient or otherwise more suitable for the "new future" -- it's basically impossible. It's not Zillow's fault either, generally MLS services have such awful data that it's hard to trust anything beyond the number of bedrooms. Until there's a way to look up your rating and look down at your neighbor's, I wouldn't expect the people who currently inhabit suburbs to make it a priority.

Furthermore, except for a few localized situations I believe that the suburbs are safe for the forseeable future. There has long been the assumption that fuel costs are inelastic, but 2008 has shown that to be untrue. America is, for all intents and purposes, treating oil as if it's free -- the suburbs drive to work one person per vehicle in passenger cars in the midst of a horsepower war (Cadillac has a 550hp product in the "compact sedan" segment and BMW's smallest cars, the "1-series", are available with a 300+hp engine!), or trucks that make the commercial trucks of the 70s (not to mention the 40s!) look downright weak. The 2009 F-150 (at one time called a "half-ton" pickup) has a 1.5 ton payload capacity and can tow almost six tons. This vehicle is routinely ignored by construction contractors and macho wanna-be alpha-males who go straight to the "Super-Duty" models, capable of hauling _three_ tons and towing _ten_ tons!

For all of the wankery we've heard recently about the end of life as we know it, we've yet to begin to even try. There's a lot of easy belt-tightening to do before people have to give up on their version of the American Dream.

On the flip side, all of the attention toward green living should hopefully generally raise awareness and stimulate development of greener products, definitely a win for everyone. We've needed a shock like 2008 for about 20 years now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Are there really that many abandoned suburbs out there?

In Texas, suburbs are still going strong.

<comment><USER14> In the exurban counties around the Twin Cities, yes.

High enough cost of gasoline could probably kill off a lot of suburbs, especially in places with traffic congestion such that commutes are already annoying. When commutes are both annoying and unaffordable, the suburbs that are only bedroom communities will be abandoned for places with a job base.</comment></comment>


How I make Django Easier - <AUTHOR> http://www.danielnill.com/blog/how-i-make-django-easier/

<comment><USER2> Here is how I made django easier: <http://amitu.com/importd/> :-)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here, I would be interested to hear how others automate django project creation.</comment>


California blue whales, once nearly extinct, are back at historic levels - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2014/9/8/6122867/we-nearly-hunted-blue-whales-to-extinction-now-theyre-bouncing-back

<comment><USER2> If they were hunted to nearly extinction and have recovered now, we're going to be seeing some of the founder effect: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect)

</comment><comment><USER3> Shush people will just use this as an excuse to roll coal!

</comment><comment><USER4> I saw some on an excursion to the Farallones. Just briefly saw their backs as they came up for air, nothing spectacular, but well worth the cold and sea sickness.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would be suspicious of any claims to returning to "historic levels" \- hunting whales got serious in the 1800s, lighting and powering the industrial revolution, long before we counted the numbers sensibly.

<comment><USER6> The article addresses this.

> Prior to the late 19th century, blue whales were simply too big and powerful > to pursue... Roughly 380,000 blue whales had been killed in all, and the > species was at 0.2 percent of its initial numbers.

Given that they couldn't be hunted until fairly recently, and having a decent idea of how many got killed, it should be possible to get very reasonable estimates of pre-hunt populations.

<comment><USER7> > Among other things, they calculated that there are currently about 2,200 > California blue whales today — and _that that 's about 97 percent of the > carrying capacity for the eastern North Pacific_. It's a full recovery.

I wonder if that carrying capacity isn't lowered by years of human fishing as well - although based on the rest of the article it seems likely that the researchers did take the full historical context into account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well I'm glad we all learned a lesson from Star Trek IV.

<comment><USER9> Oh god I'm going to be that guy, but, those were humpback whales.</comment></comment>


Hiring data scientists to cure HIV - <AUTHOR> https://www.amfar.org/Magnet-Grants-RFP/ <comment><AUTHOR> Have to partner with an HIV researcher, saw this on Reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/dmggms/cur...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/dmggms/curing_hivthis_is_where_you_come_in_research/)</comment>


Show HN: Corona Cases - <AUTHOR> https://vis.pandemic.events/ <comment><USER2> I don't know where you're getting your data for Colorado but it doesn't match the numbers on the Colorado government website.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, CO has an awesome site. The source is at the bottom of the OP site and is not coming directly from CO. One thing I've noticed is that we had a couple of days recently with Zero deaths! Woohoo, but this data does not show that fact

[https://covid19.colorado.gov/data/case- data](https://covid19.colorado.gov/data/case-data)</comment></comment>


Language Study: What is a foreign language worth? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/03/language-study <comment><USER2> I realize the article is pro-multilingual, but I disagree with the notion that time spent learning a foreign language is time not spent learning another subject.

My son was in Spanish immersion preschool from age 2 until 3 years 4 months. He can speak and understand Spanish and understands that he speaks a language that my wife and I don't. Then we moved and put him in Mandarin/English bilingual school. He's 2.5 months into the program and can already count, follow basic instructions, and make basic requests.

Learning a language at that age has basically been a free layer of learning added on top of his education and growth. To him, it's not even "learning" it's just talking and playing and singing.

There's no opportunity cost at that age to stacking blocks with English instruction or some other language. Why wouldn't we take advantage of that time in our kids' lives by immersing them in another language?

Of course it could just be that my son is the smartest kid in the whole world. That's probably true, too.

<comment><USER3> I think the training you child recieves is an interesting combination and I don't want to criticize you on that. What I want to add are some observations I've made in the past about myself and others around me (so purely anecdotal).

I speak three languages fluently and a bunch of others to varying degree. I also hold a PhD in Physics. What I've noticed is that my brain manages very well if I have prolonged periods of intense "sciencing" and it also works well if I take some time to learn languages.

However, if I try to do half a day of thinking about algorithms and then half a day of language learning, I will get a headache and slight nausea! Might be that this only happens to me because of some "manufacturing error", but I've tried it repeatedly and it invariably happens.

This has lead me to form the following, highly unproven, high-level working heuristic about the brain: The brain might be just like the rest of our body. You can train to be a weightlifter, or you can train to be a marathon runner. If you do both over the course of your life, you can become good at both, but you'll probably never become the worlds best at any of the two.

If you do intense training on both without a resting period in between, you'll hurt yourself.

So that's my weird theory, for what it's worth.

That said, I think your child has a lot to gain from the broad knowledge he receives. I can tell you from experience that this is the age of interdisciplinarity, and it's a lot of fun.

<comment><USER4> I also speak three languages, and I'm learning another two. I'm also a hacker. I find programming and foreign languages highly complimentary. In both cases I'm supposed to communicate ideas in a specific vocabulary and grammar.

Also, my two geeky pre-teen sons equally like learning Python and French (on Duolingo).

Of course, I learn languages because I'm interested in the culture of the people who speak those languages. In the same way, I learn programming languages to broaden my way of thinking about computing.

<comment><USER3> Again, it might very well be that my observations are specific to myself and my body/brain.

What I'd like to add to my previous post is that the effect appears when I do both things under heavy load. Especially the language learning method I have is much more strenuous than what most people use.

Here's what I do: Obviously there are times where I learn the basics of the language and basic vocabulary. The main part of my learning effort, however, consists of watching movies/television.

What makes this so hard, is that I start doing so when I have only a very basic grip on the language, so that I understand very little of the language I'm trying to absorb. While watching, I force myself to actively try and understand/infer as much as I can. By this I mean that I touch my cognitive load limit.

When I'm "fresh", this is realy exhausting. When I mix it with complementary strenuous work (say, designing a numerical algoritm), it causes headaches and slight nausea.

I want to stress that this method I use is not suitable for everybody and I'd really recommend against trying to do it for the first foreign language. The reason I resort to it is that I am more of a speech person than a written text person and I am also somewhat lazy regarding textbook language study.

It might also be useful to note that, while my method takes less learning time than using a book or working with a tandem partner, it requires much more reconvalescence. So my net learning speed might be on par or even slower than the speed of somebody using duolingo or doing an advanced university course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so silly!

Thanks to my ability to speak Russian, I am able to employ a team of Russian speaking developers all over the world, and therefore build things more efficiently and for less money than I would hiring local developers.

That right there created a huge amount of value not just for me but all the users of our apps, and made the whole thing possible.

<comment><USER6> This. Most people are unfortunately unaware that having a unique skill set (be it a second language or anything else) puts them at an advantage if applied in tandem. However, you often have to invent your own job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It may be a 2% premium on average, but in the US, it's probably more like 0% for the vast majority of people, and quite a sizeable increase for a very small number. So the average isn't very meaningful, when it hides such extreme variation.

I know a _lot_ of professional people here in the US who are fluent in two, three, even four languages. Only one of them actually uses a second language as a part of their job. I mean, how many jobs require significant international communication with people who don't speak English? Not many.

(Being from a non-English speaking country, and learning English, is a whole different thing though.)

<comment><USER8> > I mean, how many jobs require significant international communication with > people who don't speak English? Not many.

Well, there is more to a language than just words and grammar, right? Learning a language is also a crash course in terms of cultural studies. If you happen to be in contact with other cultures this might be quite helpful to deal with colleagues and/or customers.

We're living in a world where a majority of people communicate. Cultural understanding is more important than ever and even though English seems to be the global language, everyone should be willing to learn at least one foreign languages and basic concepts of other cultures with it.

There's also a small test about this: if you happen to be in a foreign country just try to learn the local phrases for "Hello" and "Thank you". Use it when checking in at the hotel, eating in restaurants and dealing with local people - you'll be amazed what those simple words can archive. It's a sign of respect and that you made an effort to learn about their culture.

To sum it up: cultural understanding is getting more important as the whole world (regardless of national borders) communicates. Learning a language comes with learning about a different culture and reflecting your own. This is an essential thing when dealing with foreign people and everybody should have basic knowledge about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Putting a thing like language learning in terms of ROI is pretty moronic. Ok, that's a simplified vision to understand if time spent learning a foreign language is actually well spent. What isn't really taken into consideration, though, are the indirect cultural advantages of learning a language.

That's an experience that goes beyond the act of learning grammar rules and a new vocabulary. It's a complex process made of many different intellectual and cultural enhancements that help you get the world in a better perspective, and in the end gives you an unquantifiable advantage over the mono-lingual.

Apart from that, I agree that Spanish may not be the better choice in the US, since the position of superiority the non-Latin still has when it come to fluency for professional purposes. Even for the Romans it made no sense to learn the language of the inferior populations they had around them, and you'll know how it went down. Learning Saxon languages certainly had a bad ROI back then.

Furthermore, if you really had to follow this skewed line of ROI-based reasoning, where the hell is Chinese? I have the hunch that, as an US-born American, knowing the pretty obscure language of one of the biggest traders in the world might give you a pretty big advantage.

</comment><comment><USER10> Being from Europe myself, I can't help but smile at this article. It's such an American way of thinking! "Return of investment in dollars", lol :-)

When I started learning foreign languages, English being one of them, it was because I was interested in different cultures and to be able to experience the world at large in a more sophisticated way. Never in a million years would it have occurred to me that I should do it to boost my career.

<comment><USER11> Not to dismiss your experience, but The Economist actually is a British journal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I speak Spanish/French/German and to be completely honest, the majority of their usage to me is chatting up girls from those countries I happen to meet.

I've never met a programmer who didn't speak English better than I spoke their language.

That being said, the ability to chat up girls, and the fact that I just love languages, makes the endeavor entirely worth it to me...

<comment><USER13> >>I speak Spanish/French/German and to be completely honest, the majority of their usage to me is chatting up girls from those countries I happen to meet.

I'm currently single. You just sold me on it, man.

<comment><USER14> Be careful about causality there; I'm conversational in 6 languages and am hopeless with women.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article uses misleading numbers. Sure, that 2% bonus is worth $60k if you compound it over 40 years. But that number is almost _irrelevant_. What's relevant is the _opportunity cost_. If you spent that time (likely hundred or thousands of hours) working on more valuable skills, you'd likely get much more than 2%. Put another way, the value of that time, when compounded over 20 years, is enormous, probably more enormous than $60k. To compound the value gained from language but not compound the value of the time is extremely misleading - either use present values for both, or use comparable future values for both.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds like somebody's measuring the wrong thing.

Sure, we'll grant you that foreign languages don't help your male pattern baldness, nor will they get you out of trouble with those unpaid parking tickets. But that's not why you learn them.

You learn them so that you can sling your hammock on a river boat going up the Amazon from Iquitos and spend a good week getting to know a bunch of locals for whom that's the only transport to or from their village.

You learn them so that when you get a flat tire on your rented motorbike in Trang Provence and the local fisherman stops to help, you can share a few words of conversation and he'll invite you back to his stilt house amid the mangroves to meet his family and share a meal of dried fish and seaweed over rice.

I've done three laps of this world now, and can safely say that the best experiences I had were the ones interacting with local folks in remote areas that didn't really meet many westerners. Hell, I spent a month in China and by far the two most interesting and enjoyable days were the ones where I had the good fortune to be shown around by friends who were fluent.

Speaking English, I could pull off a tourist bus to the Great Wall. Speaking Chinese, I was eating Bao Dze from a little unmarked hole in the wall on a back street in Beijing after watching the sunrise over a part of the city you don't normally get to see.

So yeah, I'm not sure how many dollars I got out of any of that. But if anything, I wish I'd spent _more_ time learning foreign languages.

</comment><comment><USER17> Totally makes sense, but Spanish is still one of the easiest languages for learn for English speakers. So if you are planning to learn a new language, do give Spanish a try. One of the best books for learning Spanish is - Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish. French is a little more difficult, and German is way more difficult. Probably that's another reason for the difference in the returns over time?

<comment><USER18> I'm Spanish and I'm curious about what you said. I feel that English has much easier grammar than Spanish (just think of the verb conjugation in both languages!), but much more difficult phonetics (just how many vowels do you have? Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"? Half-kidding only); so I can write in English far better than I can speak. I expected that a native English speaker learning Spanish would have the same imbalance sensations that I had, just reversed.

By the way, I found that learning German was far easier than English. I wish I had time to keep doing it.

<comment><USER19> > Is there really a difference between "backwards e" and "upside down v"?

They're called schwa and wedge. This is actually a discussion I've had (not particularly fruitfully); schwa, being a reduced vowel, is sort of notionally only available in unstressed syllables. So you'd want to say a stressed syllable uses the wedge. But indeed they don't seem to be pronounced differently for many people, or at least not differently enough that there's an obvious answer. Merriam-Webster seems to use schwa even for stressed syllables like "stuff".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Too bad it's anglocentric, I expected something a little more generic. As a non-English native speaker, a can assure you that the ROI of learning English is _much_ higher than two percent.

Aside from that, I'm really sad to read about what to study in terms of what's it worth economically, instead of culturally. Then again, when it comes to studying, I'm too much of an idealist.

<comment><USER20> Sure, but there are parts in the world where people do favour other languages as lingua franca.

For example, I had more luck with German in Eastern Europe than English.

As a non-English speaker, I enjoy being able to speak 7 languages, although not fully fluent in all of them.

You won't find many people even bothering to learn English, if you go outside big cities in most countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I took two years of a foreign language in high school. I only learned a little bit of vocabulary, and conjugation in only a couple of tenses. I don't think it much improved my ability to communicate with non-English speakers (and anyway, I haven't encountered any, so it's kind of irrelevant).

Then I had to take more foreign language in college to satisfy a graduation requirement. I'd already had it in high school; I'd already learned that I wasn't good at it and didn't enjoy it. Me sitting through that college class was an utter waste of time and effort for both me and the professor.

Not everybody is good at, or cares about, learning languages. If a student's had a few months of foreign language instruction at some point in their life, you shouldn't force them to take more.

<comment><USER22> Now replace "foreign language" with "math" and consider that many have spoken out about how the typical mathematics curriculum is backwards and gives the wrong impression about what math is really about.

I hate learning languages in a school setting. Yet I have gained a minor interest in languages now many years after high school, and can appreciate learning it on my own premises.

<comment><USER21> An interesting analogy, so I upvoted you. But I would argue that foreign language and math are in some sense _opposites_.

If I forget that the quadratic formula is the string of symbols "(-b +- sqrt(b^2 - 4ac)) / (2a)", I can hack around that gap in any number of ways. Re-deriving the formula, or solving a specific quadratic equation by completing the square, factoring, or graphical/numerical methods would all be viable solutions.

If I forget the word for "take", or I don't remember the sequence of characters that turns the base word for "take" into "you (plural) took", there's no way I can reconstruct that information from other knowledge.

It's easy to learn things in math because the new things are a natural extension of what you learn.

Foreign languages are memorizing a lot of words and conjugations which don't fit together in any meaningful way.

For me, it seems like math is much easier to learn because the connectedness of everything means the entropy content of new material is very low, and any particular hole in your memory is of little consequence since you can easily fill it back in. But I can see where other people whose minds work differently might be scared by the nearly infinite rabbit hole you can get into in mathematics by starting somewhere and going related places, and might do much better with memorization of lists of words and conjugations.

I've also heard that foreign language gets a little easier and more connected once you have some critical mass of vocabulary and grammar, but I've never been able to stand the pain of the early stage long enough to get to that point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I heard the podcast and skimmed this article. I found that their findings and conclusions are totally irrelevant for me and I think for many people in my situation/location.

I am from Slovakia, where you are never more than 3 hours by car from some border. Sometimes the neighbors speak similar language like Polish, sometimes you stumble into totally different like Hungarian. And not the mention the minorities in Slovakia.

Now I am living in Denmark, that is not much different So the list of languages that I yearly get in contact with is: Danish, German, Polish, Hungarian, plus languages I speak: Slovak, Czech and English.

I can see the profit of learning any one of them.

</comment><comment><USER24> I use my undergraduate Italian to find recipes for foods and liqueurs on Italian Google, among other things.

</comment><comment><USER25> The opportunity cost of not learning more code for everyone here is really, really high. In whatever time it takes to learn just 1 single foreign language, you can add +$20K per year to your salary FOREVER. ($60K goes to $80K, $80K to $100K, $100K to $120K, $120K to $140K, $140K to $160K, $160K to $180K).

In that sense foreign languages have a huge negative value as an investment - but then, so does reading literature.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm a native English speaker who learned Mandarin 10+ years ago, and I can honestly say it has not added a cent to my income as a programmer.

<comment><USER27> Do you work on projects that get Chinese localizations? It might help to work for a large or non-web company, so that you have a hope of selling into China instead of having a local company clone your product and sell theirs instead.

My Japanese and other language skills are very useful for QAing our app's localization, even though we have an unquestionably professional translation team to do it. In the end I understand the meaning of the app's text better than them, since I worked on the actual engineering.

<comment><USER26> _Do you work on projects that get Chinese localizations?_

Yes, I do.

 _It might help to work for a large or non-web company_

True, but then I'd be earning less. Hence my original point.

 _so that you have a hope of selling into China instead of having a local company clone your product and sell theirs instead._

This bit confuses me and sounds like common naysaying. Yes, China isn't known for its innovation at the moment (though it does exist) but then neither is the UK, Taiwan or Korea, and you don't hear people endlessly repeating that yarn in their direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Learn another language, gain another soul.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love the use of compound interest to increase the value, and I've never had the chance to reference an xkcd comic until now [http://xkcd.com/947/](http://xkcd.com/947/)

</comment><comment><USER30> One happy benefit of being able to read Russian is being able to use Yandex as a second or third point of view when researching a topic primarily through Internet search.

There also seems to be variation between Wikipedia articles in different languages that I would not ascribe to incompleteness. Does generally-accepted cultural "truth" about a topic or incident really differ so much?</comment>


Music Labels Reach A New Low, Sue Developer For Using Seeqpod API - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/25/music-labels-reach-a-new-low-sue-developer-for-using-seeqpod-api/ <comment><USER2> whew! we dodged that ugly mess...</comment>


What I learned from doing a Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://mcbennett.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/kickstarter/

<comment><USER2> I think the author is making this sound a lot easier than it really is. From my experience, which didn't do so well, I came to the realization that these projects are more of a popularity contest than a discoverability (if that's a word) one, i.e., it's all about who you know.

Even trying to get the media to cover it was nearly impossible because they won't even reply back to your email unless you have a huge following and social network.

Not to sound like a negative nancy, but at least from my own personal experience, it did feel like having a great idea, even a game-changing idea, won't take off unless you know the right people.

<comment><USER3> I disagree.

Certainly having a social following / media connections pre-launch (either for the idea or personally) can help greatly, I believe that it can be completely overcome by hard work and a really good product.

Calling it a popularity contest trivializes the effort that many people put into their campaigns.

Source: I launched a Kickstarter campaign that did ~$500k on a $20k goal this year. No media connections, no social following pre-launch.

<comment><USER4> Can we take a peak at the campaign?

<comment><USER3> [http://kck.st/VxaN0O](http://kck.st/VxaN0O)

<comment><USER5> Really cool idea. Just backed a pair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is the kind of posts I'd like to see more of on HN. So many of the posts here are titled "How I did X" or "Why Z matters" and then neglect to go very in-depth at all with how X was accomplished or the importance of Z.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I still have lots to add, but so much of this was alien to me previously. Would love to know your thoughts/additions/subtractions.

<comment><USER7> Very insightful, thanks for writing. I'd love to be able to provide other feedback, but so far haven't got any hands-on experience with crowdfunding, especially not with Kickstarter since I live in an EU country they currently don't support. If I do ever decide to launch something in the near future, I'll apply your advice to Indiegogo most likely.

<comment><AUTHOR> They are ways to do Kickstarter even if you don't live in the US or UK, most involve a little extra cost of setting up a company or finding a friend you trust. (Have never done it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very interesting stuff. With the crowd sourcing market getting so crowded you really do have to work to get noticed it seems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree - there was a time when merely being on kickstarter was a news item and viral on social media.

<comment><USER7> Btw, is fabsie.com supposed to display a blank page? I was about to bookmark it.

<comment><USER9> Broken for me too. Just a white page. Redirects to some launchrock site with some javascript in viewsource, but nothing shows.

<comment><AUTHOR> Launchrock recently migrated their platform fabsie.com works launchrock.fabsie.com works www.fabsie.com seems to be broken. will figure it out as soon as I can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An interesting Kickstarter to learn from is Planet Money's, which earned nearly $600K after only asking for $50K.

Even more remarkable, there was only one level of gift: a $25 t-shirt.

I'd say Planet Money, which is kind of like an "American Life" type brand focused on economics, would've made its goal simply by virtue of brand power. But I'd say its huge success is a result of a kickass product and more importantly, a compelling story. I would pay $25 for that t-shirt design simply to support NPR. But the story itself - that the t-shirt would be used as a starting place to investigate the global economy, was just too good to pass up. I didn't even watch the promo video though I imagine its production value is quite good.

Anyway, a little OT, but just wanted to bring up this example as it's the only Kickstarter I've backed where the product itself was ancillary to my desires...I mean, I think the shirt's neat, but I won't be heartbroken if it's a year late. I'm much more excited about the journalism that will be produced.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love their video. Also must be taken into account that many campaigns have strong existing communities such as this one.</comment></comment>


Mercedes-Benz offers subsidies to retrofit older diesel cars in Germany - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-daimler-emissions-clients/mercedes-benz-offers-subsidies-to-retrofit-older-diesel-cars-in-germany-idUSKCN1WL075 <comment><USER2> Desperation to make the maintain - repair - replace internal combustion dance continue</comment>