Just How Is Apple's App Store Subscription Policy Good for Users? - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/02/23/app-store-subscriptions <comment><USER2> There hasn't been any confirmation from Apple regarding SaaS and similar though has there? Do you see Netflix/Hulu/Pandora and others sticking around? I really don't. If their cut is effectively nil, they end up spending money to have users from iOS devices, that just isn't smart business.</comment>


Stop obfuscating your email address - a geek mistake - <AUTHOR> http://www.mindscape.co.nz/staff/johndaniel/index.php/2009/11/stop-obfuscating-your-email-address/

<comment><USER3> I have a pet peeve, it's people thinking that my situation is the same as theirs, and giving me advice that is wrong for me.

I get around 2400 spam a day. I've tried three different spam filters recommended to me by people I trust and who generally know about these things, and they get about 97% to 98% accuracy. Worse, they produce false positives. With 50 spam per day, plus having to trawl through the spam bin to look for the false positives, I decided to write my own.

My spam filter is highly tuned to my traffic and I get about 10 spam through per day. More, there are about 2 false positives per month, although that's very hard to quantify.

The problem with putting up a form is that people want a reply, and yet they can't type their own email address properly. About half the emails I get through my various forms have subtle and not-so-subtle misspellings of the return address, and it can cost me hours to track them down.

No, obfuscated email addresses is still my best tool in this situation.

<comment><USER4> I'm using Gmail for my domain and received zero spams in well over a year. My email address is all over the web. What are you using for your spam filter?

<comment><USER3> I can't use gmail because I have the requirement to create email addresses on- the-fly. I have my own domain and can do that. The result is I need good spam filtering.

My filtering now achieves around 99.6% filtering, and about 1 detected false positive per month. It would be interesting to see how gmail copes with my 2400 spam per day, and what accuracy it achieves, but it's a non-starter because of how I use email.

<comment><USER5> I do this all the time with Google Apps to track who sells my email address, creating a new one for each place I signup.

1\. Create a catch-all address for the domain you're going to use that isn't the normal postmaster one.

2\. Pick a three- or four-letter combination of letters that rarely appears in normal conversation (like dcj, for example).

3\. Set a mail filter on the catch-all account to forward all mail that has your three-letter combination as a part of its recipient list to your real address.

This means that for every service you sign up for, you can create a new address (I always use domainname.code@mydomain) that is trackable and gets to you. For example, I just signed up with Via Rail's online system - using the address viarail.dcj@mydomain. It will get forwarded to my real address (since it's got the dcj in there), if I start getting spam on it I'll know where they got the email address from, and if it gets really bad I can just change my filters to block all email to viarail.dcj@mydomain.

You could do something with Gmail's plus-addressing, but I find that many services don't accept those email addresses.

<comment><USER6> Yahoo Mail offers a service called AddressGuard that does exactly this, but it's only available to paid accounts. You can also easily use these as your from address, so even in direct correspondence, you still shield your primary address from the recipient. (This allowed me to verify that eMusic sells their subscriber list to spammers.)

A free alternative is SneakEmail (<http://www.sneakemail.com>) which allows you to set up disposable addresses that forward to your primary account, and allows you to set up pre-forwarding filters. They also create a unique address for the sender of each email, and you can set up your SneakEmail filters to insert this as the reply-to address of each email you receive.

<comment><USER5> SneakEmail is great; it's what I use when I'm seriously suspicious of who I'm sending mail to.

For 95% of the things I sign up for, however, I'm not that paranoid - <USER2> slight decrease in security is offset by the added convenience of not having to log into a third-party service (like SneakEmail) to get what I'm doing done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This will create a pretty mailto link encrypted with javascript that the bots can't pick up: <http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/form>

I've used it for years with good results. People will even email me thinking that I've exposed my email address to spammers encouraging me to use the blah [at] blah dot com style.

<comment><USER8> Do you ever reply that while you never see spam, you frequently have to deal with other kinds of unsolicited e-mail, hinting softly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My spam avoidance scheme is to own my own domain, and then have *@mydomain.com go to my inbox, so i can create disposable addresses for any use at any time.

For instance, I always sign up with [servicename].email@example.com and only ever give out my personal e-mail to people i meet in person.

The great thing is that if a [servicename].account address starts getting spam, i know which service sold my address and i can just blackhole that address.

That way, i never have to obfuscate my address, since i'll always just create a new one for the specific need. It's probably not for everyone though...

</comment><comment><USER10> I always thought this sort of systematic obfuscation ( /@/at/s, /\\./dot/s, etc) was as machine-readable as an actual email address. I've just gone on the assumption that there are spam harvesters out there using regexes that catch "bob at domain dot com" as well as firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER11> Sure, there are. But given the huge number on unobfuscated addresses on the web how many bother? Ten percent?

EDIT: This experiment shows it to be _much_ less than that (based on volume of spam received) [http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to- obfus...](http://techblog.tilllate.com/2008/07/20/ten-methods-to-obfuscate-e- mail-addresses-compared/)

<comment><USER12> Given the large number of blog, wiki and CMS engines which use the same cargo- cult security idea, it's probably considerably higher than 10%. If you're getting paid to harvest addresses, wouldn't you write a single regexp to increase the number of good addresses?

<comment><USER11> Sure _I_ would, but like most half-way decent programmers, you couldn't pay me enough to code spam bots.

I've blocked a huge volume of comment spam on my sites by blocking certain malformed HTTP headers. The authors couldn't be bothered to check if they were getting it right. I don't think most spam bot authors are A) very well paid or B) very good.

<comment><USER13> Don't forget that it's a dynamic system. As more of the low-hanging fruit emails get picked by spam email harvesters, then there is more value in the harder to decode emails since they haven't been spammed. There is a tipping point where it would be "worth it" for someone to start to decode the harder other types of obfuscated emails.

<comment><USER14> Possibly, but couldn't you argue that the low-hanging fruit email addresses are more likely to be profitable to spammers? Which of these two internet users is more likely to buy your replica rolex: firstname.lastname@example.com, or AOL: danny (or danny at aol, or danny+don'tspamme at teh a oh l's dot com)?

My point is that users smart enough to disguise their emails from spammers are more likely to be wary of their wares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Add a plus to your name whenever you put your email address into a form on a website. It will continue to show up as though the +whatever were not present.

firstname.lastname@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.com, firstname.lastname@example.com

If you start getting a bunch of spam to email@example.com, filter out all email to that address.

<comment><USER16> I try to use that all the time, except that everybody likes to roll out their own email validation, and they are all wrong, they do not allow the + sign as they should.

The RFC is extremely permissive, even spaces (yeah, spaces) are allowed in email addresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm in the same boat as many people here.

I just use Spamassassin with my domain name and I get about 2 spam messages in my inbox per day, but the spam box gets around 1000 per day. I post my email address on websites because I want to have zero barriers when a customer or lead needs to contact me. It's NOT THEIR PROBLEM that I get spam.

So I agree, just get a good spam filter.

</comment><comment><USER18> My objection to it is that it would be trivial for email crawlers to decode the obfuscations most people use.

<comment><USER19> Especially obfuscations like "bob at gmail dot com". If I were a spambot I would just read until the first space and append "@gmail.com" and "@hotmail.com" and 5-6 other mail providers. This would break through 90% of people doing that, and they're high value targets too - they feel secure with their clever obfuscation and chances are their other anti-spam tools (and reflexes) are weaker.

<comment><USER11> But you're not a spam bot author. Based on what I've seen, most spam bot authors are pretty bad programmers.

Also, I would debate that these are high value targets. I'd wager that people who go out of their way to obscure their addresses are much less likely to purchase fake pills or fall for a phishing email than the average user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No, spam filters are not pretty good. Instead, email has now become an unreliable channel for me. I get so much spam that I have to enable automatic filtering. That means I probably miss non-spam emails occasionally. And some spam still slips through the automatic filter.

</comment><comment><USER21> I couldn't agree more with the post. I've had my primary email address sitting out on my contact page for years and have never spent a significant amount of time dealing with spam. At this point, obfuscated addresses are as archaic as animated "under construction" GIFs and the blink tag.

Using the de-obfuscation process as a gating mechanism is arbitrary and perhaps a bit arrogant. There's no reason to assume that familiarity with this convention equates to intelligence or value. Even now, I still run into plenty of people in businesses outside of the tech industry that confuse website and email address formats. That doesn't make them "unworthy" of contacting us; it just means they have a different skillset and knowledge than we do.

Meanwhile, email spammers and scammers are _most_ likely to understand these conventions, since it's their "job" to do so.

</comment><comment><USER22> The two main suggestions to allow people to contact you without getting lots of spam:

1) Use Gmail. Google has written their search engine to know how to detect spam so they know how to stop spam from reaching your email address. I don't think I have ever had even a single spam message even reach my spam folder, and that's thanks to Google. I could put my non-obfuscated email address all over the place and not have to worry.

2) Write a custom contact form. It is not that hard if you know even a little bit of PHP. And if you don't you can always use Zoho forms or some other free online form creator. I never put up contact emails because they are, in my opinion, just as unprofessional as an obfuscated contact email. Contact forms are much more professional.

<comment><USER3> And what do you do when someone mis-types their return address?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> OP has it all wrong.

      e d w 5 1 9   AT   g m a i l

is not meant to upset anybody.

It's a IQ test.

If you can't figure out how to contact me from that data then you'd probably be wasting my time anyway.

Self-solving problem.

<comment><USER24> Exactly.

The author cannot be bothered to decode such email addresses. If that is the case I probably did not want his email in the first place. Ipso facto, my filter worked.

<comment><USER25> I especially like where he says the _writer_ is lazy for expecting him to spend 2 seconds decoding that address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One possible solution to the problem is to use dynamically generated throw- away email-addresses. You can also encode some kind of signature. Then just hide the monstrously huge address behind a pretty "Please Email me" Link:

mailto:email@example.com

If Spam increases (or, say, whenever more than 3 emails have been received at one particular address), you shut down the address.

I once implemented the receiving, hmac/signature checking, part for the exim mail-server and a general address-generator class in python and php. But never actually put it to use.

</comment><comment><USER27> If I display my email like the way this fellow detests, it obviously means I anticipate my readers to have enough reason to type an email address out!

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks like we miss some important question here. How spammer got the emails ? Do the Spam bots really crawled to every web pages ?

Some note that i learn from Internet to minimize spam emails:

\- _Never_ use third party proxy or anonymous network (i.e. Tor). I once work for company that not allowed to use any port except 8080, so for several months i use Tor. Suddenly, after several weeks my spam folder increased with junk emails.

\- Make sure you clear all your caches and cookies _before_ and after browsing for pr0n. duh! :)

\- Never use any third party application from Facebook/MySpace/any-social- networks, unless you using your non-private mail on your Facebook/MySpace/any- social-networks account.

\- Do not read spam email. If you know that email is spam just check it and delete, or let the system delete it automatically, like Gmail do. I do not know anything about SMTP protocol but there is one feature that make your email notified to sender when you read it, by opening your email you just notified the spammer that your email is, at least still, active.

Spammer, in context of the emails gatherer, is not stupid. They know what their doing.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wouldn't obfuscate the support or billing contact address for my company, but on my personal site? Or code documentation posted on the web? You betcha.

There's a big difference between pushing work on your customers and pushing work on people who don't know you and are trying to contact you the first time.

</comment><comment><USER29> obfuscating is useless:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=at+gmail+dot+com>

Collect enough patterns and you can harvest tons of email addresses like used to be.

<comment><USER30> There's a difference between what can be done, and what will be done. The point in the article is that simple obfuscation actually works.

<comment><USER31> Yes, but that's like hiding behind your finger. It is so easy to de-obfuscate that it is just a matter of time.

<comment><USER32> A matter of time is plenty good enough for the time being. It's an email account, not a bank account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Unless you are really desperate for people to contact you, forcing them to "decode" the email address might be a nice velvet rope that keeps out those who aren't worthy of your time.

Obviously this might not work if you have a customer support email.</comment>


Google Starts Selling Its Titan Security Key in Canada, Japan, the UK and France - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/2/20752253/google-titan-security-key-available-canada-japan-uk-france <comment><USER2> Aren't these just re-branded Feitan security keys? Any reason I should trust this over something like a Yubikey which is manufactured in a country with a slightly less atrocious attitude towards digital security and privacy than China?

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure how I feel about Google entrenching itself in yet another part of the technology stack

</comment><comment><USER4> How do these things work? They stored the password or private key?

</comment><comment><USER5> $50 dollars for something that may be less safe. No thanks?</comment>


4 a.m. Is the Most Productive Hour - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-4-a-m-is-the-most-productive-hour-1471971861?mod=e2fb <comment><USER2> I recently started waking up at 4 a.m and go to bed at 8-9pm. It has done wonders for my life. I realized I was confusing my personal task list with my work task list - the two should not be confused. I complete all my personal tasks in the morning, such as, studying a new language, practicing a musical instrument, learning to draw, and a couple other skills I want to learn and improve. Then when I'm worn out and it's time for work, I'm greeted with a mile high todo list that never ends, but I feel satisfied knowing that at least I accomplished my goals for the day, which is all that matters. The mile high work task list will be there tomorrow... it'll always be there. It has allowed me to put myself first.

<comment><USER3> Some years ago I started my day at 4 a.m. to exercise. While it worked, this kept me from having any social life outside from talking to coworkers. Getting a drink with friends in the afternoon is impossible if you want to keep this schedule, so I stopped. Being productive isn't everything in life. I'm only 30 but I doubt I will ever look back wishing I worked harder alone in my room instead of being with my friends.

<comment><USER4> Well getting drunk with friends in the afternoon doesn't seem like it's the answer to life either. I'm 31 and wake up at 5am during the week. Get to the gym before getting into the office at 7:30. Definitely have enough time to get drinks with friends here or there. I'm not staying out all night partying by any means, but there is certainly a way to make it work.

"Looking back over a life of hard work … my only regret is that I didn't work even harder." \- H. L. Mencken

Sorry, I don't mean to troll, I just dislike the strawman argument of "[being productive/working/etc] isn't everything in life."

<comment><USER5> > Top 5 Regrets of the Dying: (2) I wish I hadn't worked so hard. (4) I wish I > had stayed in touch with my friends.

<comment><USER6> I suppose that people on their death bed are pretty much biased, hardly less than average population. Human memory is quite imperfect and selective.

<comment><USER7> Inevitably, some day, you will empathize.

<comment><USER6> Definitely! I have hard time understanding my future self, and my future self may have hard time understanding me as of now. People change, and what feels important at medium term (a few years) also changes. There's hardly a single right answer good for all ages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For anyone deciding if it's worth clicking through: it's mostly a list of anecdotes about early-riser CEOs & people who workout as soon as they wake up. I didn't see anything about those who work through the night.

[I personally find 4am is often productive for me, but that's because I work at night, and I'll only continue coding at 4am if I'm already in the zone. If I'm not making progress, I'll want to crash to sleep long before then.]

<comment><USER9> When do you sleep?

<comment><USER8> I generally sleep 3am - 10am, but it varies. Midnight is about the earliest, and 7am if I'm still in the zone / peak concentration. I try to sleep 8 hours every night, so if I go to sleep at 7am I won't wake until 3pm.

I'm a solo developer, mostly working on my own projects, but even when I work with remote clients I maintain what they call "vampire hours". Since I'm based in Australia, my weird productive hours naturally align with Berlin time.

_asummers asked about socializing - being naturally nocturnal makes it easier to go to nightclubs & concerts, or invite friends to restaurants or a moonlite all-nite diner. It's great if you have insomniac friends!

I also track my time/concentration using a program called Vitamin-R for Mac [1]. I've found my peak productive coding hours are 10pm - midnight. (4am - 7am is my actual 'peak', but I think that's because I only work those hours if I'm already in the zone.)

[1] [http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/](http://www.publicspace.net/Vitamin-R/)

<comment><USER10> I wish I had your life. My DREAM is to work on my own projects, in my peak productivity time, which is naturally from 10pm to around 3am.

That's my dream, and one I strive to achieve before I'm old and tired. I'm 28 now.

Working a 9-6 just isn't fun when it's a) not my project b) not my peak productivity time.

If you don't mind me asking... Are you retired?

<comment><USER11> I have a similar schedule to the GP: I frequently start my day around noon, start working around 3 pm, get a break around 7 pm for a couple of hours (to interact with my SO, who is back from work then), then work well into the night. That schedule is only disturbed when there's an important meeting during the day.

Funny thing is I don't even work 100% remotely (well, I sometimes visit the office...) - I just work for the company which couldn't care less about when I work as long as I deliver. So, while I'm not working on my own projects I still can choose when and how I work. It's been this way for 3-4 years and I just turned 30 a couple of weeks back.

So what I want to say is that you don't need to be retired or be an entrepreneur to have a freedom to choose your working hours. It's actually a good thing for the company because my working hours overlap with working hours of people half a world away, for/with who we frequently work.

So don't give up, search for opportunities and you'll sooner or later find a place where you can work according to your own schedule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was really hoping for more anecdotes on night owls.

2am-4am is definitely the most productive time for me and I regularly stay up that late, deep in the programming zone.

Of course, I shouldn't really have expected the WSJ to highlight night owls. We've turned sleep schedules into a morality play, where waking up at 4am is somehow impressive and virtuous while waking up at 10/11am is slothful (even if you spent all night getting lots of work done).

<comment><USER13> We're hackers though, you're one of us.

From pg himself:

"I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called 'business stuff.'"

[http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

<comment><USER14> I did a similar thing for a while, when working on my startup. Actually, I free-wheeled it. I stopped trying to go to sleep, and just slept when I needed to. I'd typically crash between 4am and 8am, sleep for about 4 hours, get some business work done, take a 3 hour nap, and then get into my night routine.

It was fantastic for when I had solitary work to get done. Not so great for social life. I could go out, but that would be like taking half a day off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was obviously written by a "morning person."

Like most engineers and other creatives, 4 AM is when I'm just starting to get my deep sleep (which peaks at 6-7 AM).

12-2 AM is the most productive time of the day for me.

<comment><USER15> > Like most engineers and other creatives

Free yourself of culturally-assigned norms ("engineers and creative people work best at midnight, with lots of coffee") and consider a wider breadth of experience.

The most productive and effective person I know, a computer engineer, typically starts working before I'm even awake. The premise of the article is that 4 a.m. is both outside most of society's normal waking period AND it's immediately after you've had a solid night's sleep, while 12-2 isn't really such an unusual time to be awake _and_ , for most people, it comes at the _end_ of the day.

As someone who woke up at 5 a.m. for many summers so I could start work on the farm before dawn, I know that you can definitely accomplish a lot of work before most people even roll into the office, but I also know that sleeping in is incredibly satisfying :)

<comment><USER13> Wait, you're literally arguing that the "culturally-assigned norm" is working late and sleeping late, instead of vice-versa, Benjamin Franklin's "early to rise, makes a [person] wise" from America's agricultural roots that birthed the normed 9 AM start time for the salaryman for centuries?!

In high school, I had to wake up at 6 AM every day; you can imagine I was tired as hell -- and it's because of my biological chronotype (I am genetically from a family of night owls -- late risers). It had nothing to do with culture, other than the fact that I was forced against my will to go against what my body was telling me was healthy (sleep at 6 AM and awake at midnight).

Modern science has JUST caught up and realized that chronotypes are a thing, but culture has definitely not (despite the "late start" school movements for adolescents, whose biologically clocks are even FURTHER ahead than us).

<comment><USER16> I thought about this a while back, and it occurred to me that if you had a tribe of primitive humans, it would actually be advantageous if not everyone had the same biological clock. It might be useful to have a few people usually awake at night, guarding the camp, instead of everyone passing out quickly after sunset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In the context of this article, I recommend my fellow HN community members to read a wonderful book on the same topic:

[https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Morning-Not-So-Obvious- Guaran...](https://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Morning-Not-So-Obvious-Guaranteed- Transform/dp/0979019710/) (NOT a referral link)

Before, here's me trying to plan something, usually stuck on a petty issue, that is dependent on something else, and this task would be put aside for so long. My body is used to talking to clients late night and waking up late. The only thing I became in this process is tired, obese and lost self-confidence (though personal, I am willing to share this openly).

Once I started practicing waking up early on, I realized everything is very clear. My mind knows exactly what to be done and if there's a problem, how I can solve it efficiently. I could easily grasp new concepts, plan for my future more clearly and efficiently get tasks done.

I use a pomodoro timer and I noticed that tasks that would take 2 hours in the night would take just 45 minutes or less early in the morning. At least for me, it just feels like my brain has access to all the information it needs so quickly. Combining this with another book "30 days of discipline by Victor Pride" I was able to reduce my body weight, finish an Saas prototype and finally live a structured life and gain back my confidence.

Posting this hoping it will benefit someone. Cheers.

<comment><USER13> Our point that you're missing is: yes, people can train themselves to shift their sleep +/\- a few hours, but people are biologically wired to have certain "chronotypes" that you cannot "will" yourself into defying.

I woke up at 6 AM for six years, and I never "adjusted." I don't feel well- rested unless I sleep until 10 AM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here I thought I'd be getting some validation for being a night owl.

4 AM is _my_ most productive hour. It's just that I haven't gone to bed yet then. What's this "up before the sun rises" stuff? It's productive because the day is just coming to a close.

<comment><USER19> Same here. I assumed the article would be about someone who discovered the joys of being a night owl. I tend to head to bed around 1 or 2am, but if other life constraints allowed me to stay up later I almost certainly would.

Once when I was in my early 20s I had a magical period of 2-3 months where there was no work, no school, and not really even social or family obligations. I would go bed when I was tired and wake up when I woke up. What I found was that every night I stayed up about an hour later than the night before. After 24 days my sleeping cycle went lapped the clock. At the time I interpreted it as, biologically I had a 25 hour cycle. No idea if that was true or not. Probably not. Regardless, if left to my own devices I always tend to stay up into the wee hours.

If there's an opposite of a morning person, I'm it. My entire life, I've felt completely wrecked after waking up, and it takes up to an hour to feel awake and alert. I get progressively more productive until it's time to go to bed again. Apparently it's the other way around for most people.

<comment><USER18> Very likely true. There've been a few cave studies where they shield the experimental subjects from all natural light, and then time how long their "biological" day is. It usually ranges from about 23.5 hours to around 28, with an average of about 25. It varies significantly by person, but was not at all unusual for someone's cycle to be longer than 24 hours.

(Personally, my natural sleep cycle seems to be about 25-26 hours; I'll usually go to bed 1-2 hours later each night until I reset at some point.)

<comment><USER20> I wonder if there's some control-theory reason why one's unsynchronized circadian rhythm is on average slightly longer than a day? Intuitively it seems that one might actually have more consistent synchronization with the solar cycle if upward pressure from a natural setpoint is balanced by downward pressure from end-of-day environmental signals (light levels, etc). Or in other words, the body has evolved a slight margin to allow for adjustability "in the field" via feedback loops.

But that's just a guess and I can't seem to find anything in a quick search... anyone know more about this?

<comment><USER21> There is also the fact that in most places in the world, the length of the daytime hours change over the course of a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm one of those unlucky types that have the hardest time waking up and getting going in the morning. Mentally I'm at 50% or less. Is there anyone else like this who's found techniques or other methods of overcoming the slow start?

<comment><USER23> I used to be like you, then I had a baby.

Now I go to bed at 8 and get up between 4 and 5.

A little human screaming and kicking you in the balls every morning is a power incentive to get up and do stuff.

Turns out it isn't even that bad. I get to play with the kid, I give him a bath and have some breakfast, and get some reading in when he has his first morning nap, then off to work. Going to bed at 7:30 or 8 seems to be key, though

<comment><USER21> I was thinking all these people talking about their night owl schedules and sleeping whenever they were tired clearly don't have kids.

When you HAVE to get up early, you start getting tired more early, too.

I had a similar experience, where I used to hate the mornings, but now love the bonding time with my daughter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Only tangentially related, while I don't like _having_ to wake up at 4, being out and about in town at 4 a.m. is a pretty enjoyable experience, especially on say a Sunday morning. I love driving through foggy streets as dawn is just starting to break, and the only other people around are gas station attendants and the occasional extra-early rising farmer.

<comment><USER24> There is a certain appeal to being out and about at that time - that appeal starts around 2am and ends about 5-6am. I miss 24hour restaurants for that reason, and used to rather enjoy super-early morning "breakfasts" as dinners. Nice and peaceful.

But not enough to get me to wake at those times, as I wouldn't enjoy it in the same way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There was a nice Ted talk on 4AM.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_a_museum_of_4_o_clock_in_the...](https://www.ted.com/talks/rives_a_museum_of_4_o_clock_in_the_morning?language=en)

</comment><comment><USER26> Unpopular opinion here. I also don't think that 4 am is special in some kind. But I believe that getting up early increases productivity. The reason is that in the evening I at least do less productive stuff, sometimes nothing meaningful at all. But after I wake up I usually do my todo list. So focussing a longer part of the day on the morning hours makes me spend my time more reasonably. From my personal feeling getting up at 6am is the best. Earlier and it feels really painful (especially getting to bed before 10pm is hard). Later and I'm losing time.

PS: Right now I'm more on a late schedule, starting to get productive between 10 and 11 am. Trying hard to get back to a good morning routine though.

</comment><comment><USER27> I expected the article to have some kind of research to back up this claim. The anecdotal evidence presented could just as easily apply to 3 or 5 a.m.

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting article!

The Rishi's and Yogi's in India always woke up at 4 in the morning. In the Hindu Yogic philosophy this time period is also called the Brahma Muhurta. If anyone is interested, you can read more about it here:

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

and

[http://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/537/what-is- the-...](http://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/537/what-is-the- significance-of-brahmamuhurtha)

<comment><USER29> I HATE INDIANS FUCK YOU

<comment><USER28> You created an account just to post this asinine comment? How jobless can one be!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is an interesting correlation here with some ancient wisdom:

Most schools of Indian philosophy borrow the term `guna` -- literally "quality" but in context[0] meaning "mental texture" to refer to three main states of mind:

Sattva: equanimity, poise, contemplativeness, objectivity

Rajas: frenzy, agitation, result-orientation

Tamas: indolence, lethargy, sloth, sleep

It's interesting to note that Brahma Murta[1] falls between 4am-6am and is indicated as the predominance of sattva[2]. The predominance of other gunas may be observed by looking at the nature of activities during other times (6am-6pm = rajas), (6pm - 4am = tamas).

Those interested in further reading might consult the Vedanta Treatise[2] by A Parthasarathy.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a#Samkhya_school_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu%E1%B9%87a#Samkhya_school_of_Hinduism)

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

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Vedanta-Treatise-Eternities- Parthasar...](https://www.amazon.com/Vedanta-Treatise-Eternities- Parthasarathy-ebook/dp/B00I8D4ZFM)

</comment><comment><USER31> Sounds like more cargo culting to me. Oh look, CEO XYZ does it, maybe if I do it, I'll be as successful as him!

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm very much in the early morning camp too. Most days I'm up at 3 or 4 to get through personal items, at the gym (a short walk) by 5, and am home and ready to cook breakfast for the family by 6:30. Getting up early is the only way to clear the deck for things I need to do.

This has come at a cost.

\- I need to get 6 hours sleep, so a 3-4am wakeup requires a 9-10pm bedtime. If I don't plan for this, the worst thing happens, which is 2 hours of alarms as I don't get out of bed until 7.

\- I can't survive after a drinking binge. No more than 2 or 3 drinks the night before, and ideally 0.

\- It doesn't always jive with family who are night owls.

This isn't how I lived in my 20s, but it works for me now. In my 20s there was still a decent chance of good things happening at 1am. Now there is rarely anything that happens from 10pm to 1am that I miss. :-)

</comment><comment><USER33> I just happened to do this last night because I was exhausted from overwork and passed out the night before at 8. I woke up about an hour before sunrise.

In the quiet and still of the morning, tucked into a muffled corner of my couch, with hot coffee and cream at-hand, I set about a detailed refactoring of my home project that I had been planning.

Once I got in my groove, I found I was starting medium-sized tasks that I would normally hesitate to start because I couldn't get them done in one sitting. Not only was I completing these tasks quickly, but I was making mental leaps that turned out to be correct in-hindsight once the refactoring was done.

I'm normally overworked and have much less energy to develop to my home project. It is pleasant to develop code on a full mental tank of gas, especially when it's my IP.

</comment><comment><USER34> looks like only 15% of american adults are awake at 4 am. ppl like to sleep in!

[http://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of- ameri...](http://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-americans/)

<comment><USER35> Which is precisely why it's easy to be productive at that time in the morning - fewer people around mean fewer distractions.

From the article: _By waking up at 4 a.m., they've essentially wiped a lot of those distractions off their plate. No one is expecting you to email or answer the phone at 4 a.m._

<comment><USER34> unfortunately for me, all my distractions come from within my own mind :\

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Research shows that on average people are most productive and focused early morning. Get your creative things done first, get most important stuff done first in the morning. Leave meetings and routine where you don't need to think much for the afternoon.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, _if_ you are average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Use of the early morning hours as the most focused and effective are nothing new for night owls.

What makes the 4 am wake up really special is when you go to bed at 8-9 PM and get twice as much done in the middle of the night as you would when pulling an all nighter.

Being a life long night owl who has become an early(ier) morning guy... imagine your best all nighter ever, with double or triple the productivity due to having your full force of energy to solve problems with zero interruptions.

The only trade off, like a lot of things is that there is some things you can't do as a result like have late nights too often.

</comment><comment><USER39> Well, not if I've stayed up all night to get there...

</comment><comment><USER40> That is ancient Hindu knowledge too. It is called Bramha-Muhurta. I remember as a child my parents use to wake me up at 4 am to study.

</comment><comment><USER13> I need to write a book to start fighting the cultural over-current:

"How To 10x Your Productivity By Staying Up Later and Waking Up Later"

</comment><comment><USER41> This might work for me, except that I want to spend some of my day with my partner and she wouldn't do this. So I can't

</comment><comment><USER42> Adalbert Stifter once said: The work of a poet is done before the first tram passes by.

</comment><comment><USER43> Funny, I'm reading this at 4am.

</comment><comment><USER44> Who the heck gets productive within 1-2 hours of waking up?

Sure, those hours are great for ingesting what has happened since the last cycle but not really for creating new value.

Edit: I just realized I wrote this the wrong way. What I meant was that I can't imagine people being productive _during_ the first 1-2 hours after waking up.

<comment><USER45> It depends how quickly you get through the morning routine doesn't it? For example: If you work from home, you have no commute, you don't need to get dressed, etc. Roll out of bed, slug down some soylent, do some jumping jacks to get the body warmed up, and start catching up on yesterday. With that minimal morning routine, you could easily be in the zone within 1-2 hours.

<comment><USER44> See my edit please.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I love those early morning hours. Getting up a 4 am, I can walk the dog, go to the gym, play in my garden, read a few chapters, make breakfast, and catch up on the news before the rest of the world even starts.

Even better on the days I don't have to come into the office, since I can start work at 7:30 or 8 and get most of a day's productivity in before the deluge of emails and meetings hit, rather than spending the better part of an hour hating everything on the commute in.

</comment><comment><USER47> The article is paywalled.

<comment><USER48> Pro tip: click the "web" link below the article title. It will take you to a Google search for the article, whose link circumvents the paywall.

<comment><USER49> It doesn't work for me, link in result still paywalled.

<comment><USER50> Make sure your browser sends a Referer header?

<comment><USER44> And maybe right-click the link and select "Open link in incognito window" to make sure the site doesn't know if you've visited them before or not.

<comment><USER51> and put these lines in your /etc/hosts...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> 4 am is a different beast depending on where in the world you are and the season.

</comment><comment><USER53> Wow, remind me not to hire you for a job then.

As an employer I am paying you to put my work ahead of yours.

I am paying you to be productive so that with the collective production of the employees, the company can outmaneuver the competition.

This lackadaisical approach and work-ethic means that, of course the mile high task list will always be there. It'll never ever get done!

<comment><USER54> If you believe you are hiring him for that reason, then I see why you felt the need to use a throwaway.

You're buying his time and experience for agreed upon hours. You don't have the ability to make him put your work ahead of his anymore than you have the ability to make him put your work ahead of his family, personal life, education or retirement savings.

In discussions like this I tend to fall on sympathizing with employers because until you've taken the risk, hired and managed people you don't fully appreciate just how hard it is or how difficult it is to keep people happy.

What you're describing is closer to buying his life - which would be an understandable arrangement from a business partner but not an everyday employee.

<comment><USER55> Of course, you're forgetting the most important part!

People get paid for all sorts of reasons. If you are being paid specifically to put work in front of your hobbies, then _that_ is your job! Think database uptime employees who are paid to get up in the middle of the night to fix a bug, etc. Heck, I even paid a friend to eat a shoe once; you can pay people to do all sorts of things. Paying someone to put work in front of hobbies is hardly novel or extreme.

Of course, this should be clear in the job description!!

<comment><USER56> _" If you are being paid specifically to put work in front of your hobbies"_

...then it is most probably illegal in quite a lot of countries. Labor codes exist for a good reason. Most people are a) employees b) not willing to put life ahead of work and c) not willing to be forced to by competition from desperate/workaholic co-workers.

Database uptime employees work shifts, so even they should not be forced to put life before work.

<comment><USER55> I suspect you are wrong about legality, but lets put that aside.

Do you think it's reasonable to expect a CEO to put work in front of hobbies?

<comment><USER57> Not as a goal in itself, no. In the case of real priorities, yes. In the case of apparent priorities, no.

Nevertheless, how numerous are CEOs compared to other employees?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The W3C asks for help finding Prior Art to two Apple Patents. - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/2010/12/cfpa

<comment><USER2> Be careful with this, according to the Debian patent FAQ prepared by Software Freedom Law Center (<http://www.debian.org/reports/patent-faq>) you can get tainted by reading patents:

 _Unfortunately, U.S. patent law creates disincentives for searching through patents, even though one of the main justifications given for the patent system is that the patent teaches the public how to practice an invention that might otherwise be secret. Willful infringement subjects the infringer to enhanced damages when they are aware of the patent and intend to infringe, and reading patents increases the probability that subsequent infringement will be found to be willful. Moreover, we find that developers often assume that the patents they discover are broader in scope than they actually are, and thus such developers become overly or needlessly worried. If, despite this, you do intend to conduct a patent search, you should seek legal advice first._

That said, I'm happy to live and work in Europe where we don't need to deal with this crap.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, you still need to deal with this crap, thanks to the Patent Cooperation Treaty, and more broadly the Paris Convention. While it goes without saying that neither of these treaties means that a U.S. patent is enforceable in Europe, a party with deep enough pockets can file an international application in all the Paris countries, entitling them to the protections afforded by those countries. While the PCT does not mention anything about patentable subject matter in international applications, you still need to be familiar with your jurisdiction's patentability requirements.

Thankfully, Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention is pretty sensible in that it does not regard discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, and "schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers" as patentable subject matter.[1]

[1] [http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal- texts/html/epc/2010/e/...](http://www.epo.org/law-practice/legal- texts/html/epc/2010/e/ar52.html)

<comment><USER4> Wait ... I want to verify if I read this correctly ... Europe does not have software patents?

<comment><USER2> Correct. The way it is limited may of course depend on the local law. For example in Finnish patent law only "real things" can be patented, not _products of human intelligence_ , which limits stuff like algorithms, software, business models etc. outside the scope of patentability.

There have been several instances, however, where large American companies have tried to get Europe to allow software patents. Luckily so far all of these have been blocked:

<http://eupat.ffii.org/log/intro/>

<comment><USER5> > _There have been several instances, however, where large American companies > have tried to get Europe to allow software patents. Luckily so far all of > these have been blocked:_

Nonsense. We have software patents in Europe too.

<comment><USER6> It's somewhat complex, but in general most of the contentious US software patents wouldn't be valid in the EU, which is why Europe has only seen a handful of software patent cases over the last decade.

See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What we really need is a crowd-sourcing platform for prior art research

Something where someone could submit a piece of prior art and for each of the claims in the patent describe how the prior art invalidates that claim. Plus some sort of discussion forum for people to discuss the prior art.

A few companies did launch in this space about a decade back (offering bounties that would be paid by companies getting sued over the patents), but no-one seems to have really succeeded in gaining traction.

<comment><USER7> > What we really need is a crowd-sourcing platform for prior art research

Commercial example: <http://www.articleonepartners.com/> "The World's Largest Patent Research Community"

Though apparently they've filed a patent application for crowdsourced vetting for compensation... [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/11/startup- crow...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/11/startup-crowdsources- patent-vetting-for-profit.ars)

<comment><USER3> I just checked PAIR and as of March 5, 2011 it's with an examiner. Most recently, on June 12, it looks like the USPTO wants them to restrict the claims in the patent to a single independent and distinct invention; i.e., it doesn't look like they'll get their way with having their patent broadly cover _all_ forms of reward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish these quests for prior art didn't always happen after the damage was done.

The Patent Office itself should crowd-source the software community looking for prior art before a patent is issued in the first place.

<comment><USER2> Nope, the patent office should adopt a more sensible policy on what can or can not be patented. As another HNer pointed out in this thread, the European policy is pretty good:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807082>

<comment><USER9> How would this be for a policy?

1\. Software for a general-purpose digital computer is equivalent to a mathematical algorithm, and therefore not statutory material for a patent.

2\. If the all the novelty and non-obviousness in a claim is contained in software, then that claim is not patentable.

3\. Software as an element of an otherwise patentable claim does not make the entire claim unpatentable. This is nothing more than the complement of 2. Don't read it in any way inconsistent with 2.

4\. Don't read 3 in a way that's inconsistent with 1 and 2. Pay attention to 1, 2 and 3. They are the policy.

Like my policy? I hope so, but they'll never listen to it. If they don't listen to the Supreme Court, they won't listen to anyone. 1 is Benson, 2 is Flook, 3 is Diehr, and 4 is Bilski.

<comment><USER10> I'm not for software patent but I always found the "Software is a mathematical algorithm" thing annoying. I don't think it's a really good argument against software patents.

<comment> wes-exp On the contrary. Since software source code is (at a fundamental level) math, it is purely informational in nature. One of the goals of the patent system in the first place was so that information would be shared rather than kept secret. The patent holder makes the information public, and in exchange he is granted a temporary monopoly over the _physical_ manifestation of the information. But not the information itself.

This makes it really strange then when you attempt to patent a software algorithm. What is the physical part? Am I allowed to make a book containing original descriptions of patented algorithms? How is that different from sharing code on the web?

Patenting software algorithms is akin to patenting speech itself, which is protected under the first amendment. So I think the "math" thing does matter. A lot.

<comment><USER10> I just don't believe most software patent fit the description of an algorithm. The real problem with them is they are patents for idea an not for implementation as an algorithm might be considered.

When Amazon patented A 1 click button. They were not talking about an algorithm, they were talking about the idea of having a button which purchases the object I want with 1 click. Implementation of this is wide, this patent tells me nothing of what the process behind the patent should be. If it did then you could get around it. That's the fundamental issue with those patents as you've pointed out. I can't figure out what is or isn't an implementation of this patent because no real useful implementation instruction was given.

On the other hand The Marching Cube algorithm patent does fit what you are talking about, the is instruction on how to implement the algorithm and those kind of patents have some issue for sure too. The claim against it was that it's a completely obvious way to solve the problem. There are alternatives to this algorithm such as the (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_Tetrahedrons>) which is just redoing the same thing another way, so it's at least better to me than the 1 click patent.

Software patents in general are wrong, I'm not arguing against that but saying all software patents do is patent algorithms is not strong enough an attack in my view. When people will look at it they will see putting multiple algorithms together to solve a problem in a non obvious way is in a way no different then putting a bunch of smaller components together to create a new device. I don't believe patenting either really helps promote innovation. (I'm pretty much anti all patents).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> On a small tangent, does someone maintain a graveyard of software patents as they become invalidated? Since there are lots of duplicate patents, this might be helpful when people need to defend against patent trolls.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't quite understand what's happening here. Could someone summarize it in layman's terms?

As far as I can tell, Apple has patented something that has been produced before, and the website is requesting evidence of that to undo the patent?

</comment><comment><USER13> Patents in Europe are much, very much, less restrictive than in USA: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention)</comment>


The Evolution of Diet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of-diet/ <comment><USER2> The paleo dogma needs to stop.

Eating whole, unprocessed, natural foods is great, but the science behind the paleo diet being "the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup" - I mean if that literally doesn't sound like dogma, I don't know what does.

There is no "one and only" stone age diet - you ate what was around you! The Inuit aren't eating oranges and spinach, that stuff doesn't grow in the tundra. Similarly, you won't be eating deer and bison in Greece, but you will be eating fish and olives.

There are societies across many geographic regions with long life expectancies, and their diets vary wildly.

The Grecians eat lots of fruits, veggies, olive oil, fish, goat milk and wine. The Japanese eat soybeans, sweet potatoes, white rice, seaweed, and fish. Sardinians eat lots of game, goat cheese/milk, beans, and barley. Each is home to peoples with the longest life expectancy on earth today, and each has at least one staple that is not considered paleo friendly.

Alan Aragon did a great talk critiquing the paleo diet, which you can read more about here[1].

[1] [http://www.nsca.com/uploadedfiles/nsca/inactive_content/prog...](http://www.nsca.com/uploadedfiles/nsca/inactive_content/program_books/ptc_2013_program_book/aragon.pdf)

<comment><USER3> > Eating whole, unprocessed, natural foods is great, but the science behind > the paleo diet being "the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic > makeup" - I mean if that literally doesn't sound like dogma, I don't know > what does.

The paleo straw manning needs to stop. Most people I know that use paleo as a standard to live by don't think it's the be all, end all. That if you eat anything you couldn't get 60,000+ years it's automatically bad, that isn't how people that actually follow paleo go about it.

> There is no "one and only" stone age diet - you ate what was around you! The > Inuit aren't eating oranges and spinach, that stuff doesn't grow in the > tundra. Similarly, you won't be eating deer and bison in Greece, but you > will be eating fish and olives.

The fact that you put this out as an argument against further proves what im saying, I really don't see how this applies to anyone but the hardcore strict paleo which doens't really exist outside of the ones who write and sell books.

> There are societies across many geographic regions with long life > expectancies, and their diets vary wildly.

Yes, these kind of conversations are the ones I find myself having with paleo- minded people more often. About trying to work out what food our bodies work better with, I really am stumped as to why you are seeing this is a knock on paleo.

> The Grecians eat lots of fruits, veggies, olive oil, fish, goat milk and > wine. The Japanese eat soybeans, sweet potatoes, white rice, seaweed, and > fish. Sardinians eat lots of game, goat cheese/milk, beans, and barley. Each > is home to peoples with the longest life expectancy on earth today, and each > has at least one staple that is not considered paleo friendly.

If you read the book outliers you would also know that food isn't the only contributing factor to life expectancy by a long shot. The example in the book about the greek town who by any dietary standards was eating incredibly faty and unhealthy foods had extraordinary high life expectancy, believed to be due to their extremely high happiness due to their tight-knit social structure.

> Alan Aragon did a great talk critiquing the paleo diet, which you can read > more about here

I don't see why I should even bother when you start off your comment talking about the dogma needs to stop and you throw out a bunch of half assed arguments which don't address paleo directly.

This dogma needs to stop.

<comment><USER4> The point being that humans are generalists: diet, activity, everything. There is no one perfect diet that works for everyone. The mess of evolution has left us with intestines and behaviours that will generally keep us alive for as long as possible under most circumstances.

"Eat food. Mainly plants. Not too much."

"Specialisation is for insects."

Both those quotes are trite and not without problems, but these are the Occam's razors I'd take to most discussions of diet and lifestyle choices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > It's this shift to processed foods, taking place all over the world, that's > contributing to a rising epidemic of obesity and related diseases. If most > of the world ate more local fruits and vegetables, a little meat, fish, and > some whole grains (as in the highly touted Mediterranean diet), and > exercised an hour a day, that would be good news for our health—and for the > planet.

I believe this is accurate, but the cynic in me says the obvious solutions by in large aren't going to be adopted.

1\. The idea that a balanced diet that largely avoids processed foods is likely to be most healthy is logical, but it's not very sexy. More extreme Diets (note the captial "D") gain mainstream popularity because they are usually based on a seemingly compelling narrative. Paleo, while hardly the worst Diet that has been popularized in the last decade, is a good example of this.

2\. The reality is that most people aren't going to exercise an hour a day _and_ maintain a healthy diet[1]. There's also the issue of how the average person exercises. While I wouldn't suggest that everybody jump into HIIT or train like a professional athlete, a lot of what you see in a typical big box gym is the fitness world's equivalent of processed foods: people aren't getting a whole lot out of what they're doing. There's not enough intensity, far too much emphasis is placed on isolated/non-functional exercises, etc.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/15/t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/15/take- off-that-fitbit-exercise-alone-wont-make-you-lose-weight/)

<comment><USER6> This is a great point. My poison of choice is the rowing machine. A good erg piece is _hard_. The correct pace makes you think, "Shit, I don't know if I can do this" at the halfway point and makes you beg for a quick death at the 3/4 point.

I get weird stares from the folks who flounce around on the elliptical on the lowest resistance setting for twenty minutes and wonder why they aren't losing any weight. Like, I get "baby steps" and all that, and I get the fact that doing _anything_ is better than nothing at all, but for me, the entire point of getting in better shape is to push myself even harder. If you're not pushing yourself to improve, why are you even showing up at the gym to begin with?

I joke that I'm not even getting any fitter; I'm just increasing my capacity for suffering.

<comment><USER5> To elaborate on your comment: part of the challenge is that without professional assistance, it can be difficult for the average person to develop a fitness plan that will produce meaningful results in a safe fashion. Lots of people are limited by existing injuries, and others create injury by jumping in and pushing themselves too hard too fast.

Another challenge is that true fitness requires you to push yourself in different ways. Far too many people work out in a one-dimensional fashion. It's easy to jump on a treadmill or do the same free weight exercises day in and day out. But there are real limits to what most people can achieve without a well-rounded plan. One-dimensional workouts are why, for instance, you have guys walking around with impressive biceps, pot belly stomachs and chicken legs, and who can't do 10 minutes of moderate intensity steady state cardio without huffing and puffing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > We have gotten so good at processing foods that for the first time in human > evolution, many humans are getting more calories than they burn in a day.

Uhm... That statement seems a little odd/imprecise/unqualified.

I guarantee every single one of our ancestors was able to, on average, obtain _more_ food-calories than they needed... for all of the days and years it took them to grow up and procreate your next ancestor.

<comment><USER8> _every single one of our ancestors was able to, on average, obtain more food- calories than they needed_

I think what's lost in the discussion when looking at food consumption from a calorie-centric view is that non-processed foods require energy to process them. This is due to sugars/carbohydrates being trapped in matrices of cellulose, which require a lot of chewing and digesting to extract the maximum amount of energy.

Processed foods on the other hand are just that, _processed_. A machine has pre-chewed and pre-digested your food into a neat package. Now the energy required to extract the maximum amount of value has been lowered significantly, so you wind up with more energy than you need. But it gets worse...

Glycaemic Index. When sugars/carbohydrates are slowly extracted from a thick matrix of cellulose, they're delivered slowly but surely to your system. Highly processed foods have done away with most of the cellulose or at the very least broken it down significantly. Eating these processed foods you get what's generally called a sugar _rush_. Your blood sugar spikes, insulin is released to deal with this incredible spike however the spike only lasts for a short period - now you're having a sugar _crash_.

You lose your temper easily, you can't think straight...you reach for another soda, burger or fries. The cycle repeats.

This doesn't even touch on what happens to your digestive system when you remove a significant amount of fiber from your diet by eating highly processed foods. Not only does fiber clean your digestive system and keep things moving smoothly, your gut-flora converts the fiber into short chain fatty acids, which play a role in mitigating intestinal inflammation [0].

Don't eat food-machine excrement.

[0] [https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=short+chain+fatty+ac...](https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=short+chain+fatty+acids+inflammation&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=iTJdVd2nFIPn8AWc_oGIBA&ved=0CBoQgQMwAA)

<comment><USER9> Not everything that has been processed is bad. Just like taking an aspirin pill works much better than trying to get pain relief by eating white willow bark, some processed foods are concentrated goodness. Whey protein, resistant starches and partially defatted coconut flour are all absolutely amazing ingredients that are significantly healthier than the whole foods they came from.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many non-techies are employed in software for every engineer? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering if anyone has stats or stories about the number of non-engineers who have jobs as a result of the work of engineers.<p>A casual look at job postings these days shows a huge number of openings for sales, finance, customer support, marketing, HR, and managers, but I'm not sure there's a corresponding increase in engineers. It seems the number of non-techies working in the tech field is increasing while the number of techies isn't growing at the same rate, at least in software-driven companies. <comment><AUTHOR> And a corollary question: how many US engineers in US companies are employed for every non-techie? My experience has been that the more non-techies come on board, the more inclined the company is to offshore development.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9999935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9999935) ("On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs")

</comment><comment><USER2> Well..you can't hire more developers if you're not getting customers, keeping them happy or paying your suppliers. So those other roles matter just as much as hiring a huge conclave of developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but that's not really the question. I'm trying to find out how many non-techies are supported by each engineer, and my hypothesis is that the number is increasing.

My hypothesis for US companies is that the number of non-techies supported by each US citizen engineer is going up at an even greater rate.

Your comment is based on the assumption that engineers cannot do any of the non-technical tasks a company has, and as an English major who is also an engineer, I think that's a false conception being perpetuated by people outside of engineering.</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley housing official resigns because she can't afford housing - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/11/silicon-valley-housing-official-resigns-california-home-prices <comment><AUTHOR> Only in Silicon Valley would a mayor have as one of his objectives to 'slow job growth'.</comment>


Teach your lawyer to sign contracts electronically - <AUTHOR> http://blog.patientsknowbest.com/2009/06/17/how-to-work-with-your-law-firm-for-electronic-contracts/

<comment><USER2> """ First of all, there is only one version of the document, so no one is ever unsure if they are editing an old draft. [...] Second, version tracking is built-in so you lawyer can see what changes you made, and spend time looking at those changes rather than rereading the whole document. """

Wow, sounds like lawyers really need to learn about Revision Control Systems. I suppose they don't work as well (diff'ing, etc) on documents that are effectively big binary blobs (like .doc(x)) - but that just makes me think they need to learn how to use LaTeX ;-)

Incidentally, am I understanding these online 'e-signing' services (e.g., <http://www.echosign.com>) properly? Isn't a user basically trusting their private-key to the service?

<comment><AUTHOR> They understand revision control because it is built into Word... But my previous lawyer would send the document to me and to my CFO, each of us would make changes and I would talk to the lawyer on the phone. Soon there were three versions of the document, so there were threads going back and forth around "which is the latest document".

As for EchoSign, they authenticate that the person who signed the document must have at one point clicked through a link which went to their e-mail address. This is much better than the authentication of written signatures, i.e. that someone could scribble something on a piece of paper in the same way that you did it.

<comment><USER3> Outlook as revision control ftw. No seriously, lawyers must first get off the habit of marking up documents by hand. Everything else can come later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Er... do these lawyers still exist? Fortunately I never met one, and if I did, I could never afford their inefficiency. Every lawyer I ever worked with used Microsoft Word for all their documents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone should point the FSF at this :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> I've never had any experience with any of this, but this sounds very practical in theory.

</comment><comment><USER6> I read this as "Teach, you lawyer, to sign contracts electronically." :)</comment>


Terraform Tips and Tricks, Issue 1: Format, Graph and State - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbhZJreR6ww <comment><USER2> I didn't know about Terraform graph. Thanks for the tip!</comment>


Previous Evidence of Water on Mars Now Identified as Grainflows - <AUTHOR> https://www.usgs.gov/news/previous-evidence-water-mars-now-identified-grainflows <comment><USER2> > This new research finds that these RSL features are flows of granular > material and thus, align with the long-standing hypothesis that the surface > of Mars lacks flowing water. Small amounts of water could still be involved > in their initiation in some fashion, as hydrated minerals have been detected > at some RSL locations. The authors conclude that liquid on present-day Mars > may be limited to traces of dissolved moisture from the atmosphere and thin > films of water.

So, this article says there's no water on the surface of Mars, rather than underneath it.

Though it looks like this suggests that water beneath the surface is unlikely to be there as well?

<comment><USER3> Liquid water anyway. We know there is a lot of water ice locked into glaciers on mountain slopes etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What was it that made them think it was water rather than grain flows in the first place, on this dry grainy planet?

<comment><USER5> Did they simply went with the visual look of it? Probably did some simulations on a computer and compared and decided its water. I would be shocked by such low quality of Science behind it if that was the case. Extra ordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence.

<comment><USER6> Problem is if they actually suspect it's water they aren't allowed to bring their rovers or probes anywhere near as they don't want to risk contaminating it with Earth microorganisms.

<comment><USER7> And yet Elon Musk is going to build a colony?

<comment><USER6> I don't believe he is bound by this, or maybe wouldn't care if he was. [https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/about](https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/about)

[https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/](https://planetaryprotection.nasa.gov/intpolicy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What would it mean for us if Mars were without water or life?

<comment><USER9> We'll bring both.

<comment><USER10> How do you propose we relocate any significant volume of water?

<comment><USER11> Science fiction has proposed a number of possible-if-difficult ways.

Comets, to start, are mostly water. If you're patient, you can redirect some very sightly while they're in the far end of the system and have them impact Mars. Takes a while though. Also, big boom when they arrive.

Really though, there's plenty of carbon <edit>oxygen, in the form of carbon dioxide</edit> on Mars- you just need hydrogen. Jupiter is mostly that. With a very large fleet of ships, you might be able to bring some to Mars. Solar sails might help keep costs low, and ideally they're fully autonomous. Heck, if that works, you'd probably want to start doing the same trick and pouring hydrogen into Venus while taking away CO2.

I'm sure there's other ways too. Plus, we know there is some water on Mars already. If we can use it carefully, reuse exhaustively, it could sustain a large population.

<comment><USER12> You need oxygen, not carbon, to make water.

<comment><USER11> Ah, teaches me for trying to write before my morning caffeine.

Oxygen. Oxygen is what Mars already has, in the form of CO2, carbon dioxide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it like the Sailing Stones we have observed in the desert but with grains of sand?

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

<comment><USER14> Those rocks move because they're carried by thin ice sheets every once in a while:

> rocks move when large ice sheets a few millimeters thick floating in an > ephemeral winter pond start to break up during sunny days. These thin > floating ice panels, frozen during cold winter nights, are driven by wind > and shove rocks at up to 5 m/min.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting that the release doesn't address the seasonality of the effect unless it falls under the possible initiation handwave. Is there some other temperature dependent effect on such flows?

<comment><USER16> Actually the seasonality is addressed:

"The preference for warm seasons and the detection of hydrated salts are consistent with some role for water in their initiation. However, liquid water volumes may be small or zero, .."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think it's funny they say it's a new theory that mars didnt have water.</comment>


Wages for college graduates across many majors have fallen since the recession - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-30/u-s-college-grads-see-slim-to-nothing-wage-gains-since-recession <comment><USER2> It's amusing that the suggested solution is to go and spend more money on a graduate-level degree. That feels eerily similar to the conventional wisdom that every single high school student should go to college majoring in a STEM field, which seems to be losing a little steam over the recent years.

<comment><USER3> PhD is the new MS

MS the new BS

BS the new HS diploma

I should have stayed for my PhD 22 years ago, but back then it was only for acedemia track. These days there seem to be plenty of freshly minted PhD. Maybe that will soon be the minimum job qualification.

<comment><USER4> And, unfortunately, knowing how to code is _not_ the new literacy.

<comment><USER5> But having an MS in data science without being able to write six functioning lines of python is already common.

<comment><USER6> And people on HN wonder about the disconnect between the pay of the Big 4 and their eternal complaints of 'we can't find any engineers'. Maybe they aren't just greedy, maybe there is a nugget of truth in their statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Undeniably this has been a trend downward in wages into wage stagnation. The share of GDP to workers is on a near 50 year decline since the mid-70s[1]. Wages and raises, once a staple of America and working hard to achieve a good life, has become lost and efficiently worked out of the system.

Wage stagnation for 15 years heavily and 40 years overall does a number on the wallet while the costs of everything are far beyond inflation[2].

America has lost the ability to give meaningful wage increases to keep growth going in a consumer based economy. When the consumer based economy is low on fuel (cash in wallets and accounts) then it sputters.

Back in the day America viewed wages as a sign of good work and companies saw benefits of increasing workers pay. This led to more money in the system, employees that buy and recommend where they work, better customer service, better informed employees and more.

To "Make America Great Again" either raise wages as a function of work over time/productivity or drive down the dollar so Americans can get raises again. In both cases the wealthy will have to be willing to pay their part, but they didn't get rich by paying.

[1] [https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/06/2393/](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/06/2393/)

[2] [http://fortune.com/2015/09/01/heres-the-real-reason-you- dont...](http://fortune.com/2015/09/01/heres-the-real-reason-you-dont-make- enough-money/)

</comment><comment><USER8> The number of newly graduated college students per year has increased approximately 50% in the last fifteen years. A reduction in average wages would be expected from supply and demand alone.

However, I don't think an "oversupply" is the correct explanation. At least in the technical, engineering, and manufacturing fields that I know, companies are desperate for more good people. And this is even as STEM graduation rates are at an all time high.

Looking at it from the the graduate's side, every single clueful person I know that graduated in the last five years is employed, and quickly so.

How can can average wages be going down, even demand increases?

The key is that we are talking "average wages". College graduates in any field are not a uniform bunch.

The number of new competent individuals graduated seems to be holding steady, while around them grow an increasing sea of people who don't show up for work, or have a clue about getting actual work done in their profession.

<comment><USER3> Yep, you nailed it. Number going up; quality number holding steady. Probably people going into it for $ with no passion for it.

<comment><USER9> It's hard to be passionate when wages are going down, jobs are getting concentrated to a handful of urban centers, cost of living(especially in housing) is going up like crazy, and companies work you as much as you can and show no loyalty, all while the profits of those companies are larger than ever. Oh yeah, and the fact that you start out your career $40k-$100k in debt to get a piece of paper because middle class jobs have been outsourced kind of puts a damper on things.

My generation's apathy doesn't come from nothing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I live in Europe, I'm about to finish my Bachelor that I don't care about. I study engineering and don't think I have learned that much and have pretty much been a waste of time.

But before I went to University I was unemployed, working as a industrial cleaner, working as a seller in a little Ice cream parlor, and customer support ( through the phone ) and more unemployed.

So yes my degree is just to get in the door, it's ridiculous but it's the world we live in. Maybe I could have tried harder, maybe this and that. But I'm not the only one in my class that thinks like me and had the same experience.

<comment><USER3> The material presented to you is only the tip of the iceberg. If you didn't bother learning the material, then why bother going through the door?

<comment><USER10> Because I really don't care, because I just do it to get a job. And my grades are pretty much average in everything so shouldn't be worse off than the rest.

I just do it to not be unemployed or work low paying jobs for the next 40 years.

<comment><USER11> As an American, my perspective is that this right here is why bachelor's degrees are becoming worth less and less.

By your own admission, you've learned little. You've put in just enough effort to pass your classes. You aren't seemingly interested in the field. And you're not motivated to learn more on your own in a field where knowledge is rapidly obsoleted.

The credential of a university degree was previously a signal of having learned about a topic, having worked hard in doing so, having interest in the field, and (at least in this field) being interested and/or capable enough to continue learning as necessary.

If it's no longer a strong indicator of these things, why should employers value it as highly? My own experience mirrors your admission here: fresh university grads frequently lack even the bare minimum ability that would be expected to be productive. Many don't follow this pattern, but they're the exception rather than the rule. And they get hired while the others don't.

It's not the degree that gets you the job, it's the ability. And if you have a degree but little ability, you're not getting the job. The focus on going to university should be about getting the _ability_ , but it's become about getting the credential, even though the credential was never really the valuable part to begin with.

I want to be clear here that there's no judgment on my part of you or your character. You're doing what you think is best and/or necessary in your life and it's not my place to try and find fault with that. I'm only trying to point out that your approach seems symptomatic of a larger problem — and one that I don't have meaningful solutions for. I do worry though that just getting the credential won't be enough to give you the chance of success you're hoping it will, but I wish you luck regardless.

<comment><USER10> I actually agree with just about everything you say, I see the problem with it as well. But since I don't see any other solution and lack the ability to change society on the fundamental level needed to solve this problem, then I feel like I "Have to play the game".

Yes we don't know at all how it will turn out, but I at least think that I can't be worse of than if I hadn't gone to university.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm talking about Europe (where college is in general more affordable and there is no stigma associated to getting your degree from a public school), but if you are looking for employment as a professional at an established company, with no previous experience, not having a degree will definitely make it harder:

\- To get an interview in the first place.

\- To get a decent starting salary.

\- To get into management positions as you progress.

<comment><USER13> I'm very early in the process of looking for a job in Europe, and lots of things do indeed seem to be different. Here are some things I've been asked to provide prior to an interview (that none of my US-based employers have requested) :

        * Full life-long gapless CV
        * marital status
        * family status
        * hobbies
        * original college transcript
        * multiple references
        * picture

To your point, there definitely seems to be more stigma against those without college education. I once accidentally sent a resume without my college info, and was asked matter-of-factly if I was "uneducated". In the US, most employers don't even seem to care about my schooling anymore since I have 5+ years of professional experience.

<comment><USER14> Several of those things are inadvisible / effectively illegal for US employers to ask due to anti discrimination laws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> FWIW, I never graduated from college but turned out quite successful, at least as far as job position and compensation goes. I make well over average at a popular software company in the Bay Area.

Still, for the past 3 years I have been using my weekends and evenings to work on my BS in CS. And, while surely I was able to be successful building software without it, a new clarity has come that had never been there before. Perhaps it's because I have industry experience to draw on but I regret not having done this earlier in my life (I'm 39). So my point is, if you're in college reading this now, please do yourself a favor and see it through to completion. You're in a fortunate position (even though the daily grind sucks), take a deep breath, pause, and enjoy it.

<comment><USER16> Is it possible that people just get a clarity with age? I'm 37 and also feel like I have had a fog lift this decade.

I would like to hear a few other folks here share whether they felt a general increase of clarity and insight as they have come into their middle ages.

My dad always said he did his best thinking in his 40s. He said that he knew he wasnt as fast or as sharp, but still having a lot of that, plus a really good working model of the world by that point, left him with the best product of those factors.

Or maybe it's just obvious and not true at all.

<comment><USER15> It could be. The clarity I'm speaking about came more from being led deeper into areas that I'd never had a need to explore in my job. E.g. How computers truly work, physically and mathematically, the specifics of scheduling algorithms used in operating systems, the utility of bit masking in assembly... I never had a need for any of that. To your point though, I may not have appreciated it when I was 18-22. I think I might have just gone through the learning motions, like when you learn the fundamental theorem of calculus; it doesn't immediately strike you as how amazing it is unless you've got the mind for that sort of thing (I don't) or you have a teacher that forces you to pause. In any event...

<comment><USER17> Going back to school after being in the software industry seems like it's more effective. I had similar sentiments with how during college I just went through the learning motions. Now going back and going through the material after some industry experience, everything makes so much more sense and is more engaging. Knowing how the concepts immediately relate to my work helps motivate and solidify my learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "College graduate" means almost nothing anymore. When not having a college degree became a social shame, the US government decided it needed to socialize the pride of achievement that true college grads used to get to feel.

<comment><USER19> > _" College graduate" means almost nothing anymore."_

Exactly. I have 2 degrees, obtained about 8 years apart, so I've spent a few years doing undergraduate work. Not sure what it's like in the US, but here in Canada it's nearly impossible to flunk out of University. Between the ability to find "bird courses" with the help of technology to rank and rate classes and profs, to the garbage incentives of "if this person flunks out, there goes next year's tuition" pretty much everyone can scrape by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When everyone has a degree, it just shows that undergrad level should be tought in HS. Oh and yadda yadda 'everyone has a degree, except subhumans with GED' is partly becoming true in peoples eyes...

</comment><comment><USER21> This article talks about wage growth for college only. There's no comparison to high school grad's wage growth or those with graduate degrees. You are jumping to conclusions about the value of a college degree without accounting for alternatives.

Most high school grads won't become programmers. They will work in warehouses, low level healthcare jobs, etc. The wage growth for high school graduates is worse than college graduates. It's a problem with the whole economy, not colleges specifically.

<comment><USER22> Its easy to say that those who go to college make more, which is true, but those who go to college generally have higher goals and will work for years in suffocating living conditions. Not that they knew of that beforehand (gotta leave that out to get that special debt money), but they adapt. I don't think college creates success in programming, its yourself. In fields such as Medical or physical engineering, I completely agree that schools dedicated to that play a significantly bigger part, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Supply and demand.

Solution: Don't waste money one college.

<comment><USER24> Rather, don't waste money on a (financially) useless degree. If you want to learn arts or history or gender studies, there are much much cheaper ways than to dump $100K on your education.

I got downvoted before for stating that position, but HN has been a little hypocritical on that matter. On the one hand, when discussing issues of automation, many state that there will always be enough of jobs, we just have to educate people better and in the right fields.

On the other hand, I often see the statements that people should be able to learn (and get paid for it) anything they want.

I disagree with both of these positions.

<comment><USER25> The problem is that the value of the degree is dropping significantly. I'm unemployed right now because all the tech support positions require a bachelor's degree. I already have a year and a half experience. Why should I have to go to college to get a position that should be entry level?

<comment><USER20> Tip: Ignore that 'requirement' as we all know its not one. Apply as usual, if it comes up, state your experince and enthusiasim are equivalent. They may pay you less, but seldom will the lack of degree in IT be a hard stop. The only trick is to bypass HR filters. I find talking first to the hiring manager before floating a cv works best. They can bypass the bs, and many are impressed that you did more than shoot another email in to the abyss.

<comment><USER9> The fact that this is the case is pretty terrible. And the only reason talking to the hiring manager first works is because it's not the norm. If everyone does it, the value is lost.

Same with the degree. When everyone has a degree, it's not special anymore. It's merely a way to get people in debt and transfer the cost of job training to the employee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't see how anyone can be hired "straight after college" unless they come straight to Google or Goldman Sachs who can afford _extensive_ training programs.

College education these days looks more like a luxury good, not a job prerequisite. It is of more value if you want to do research or work on bleeding edge fields like advanced artificial intelligence or biotech, but if you just want to be a decent software engineer, it doesn't make economic sense anymore, in my opinion.

(Disclosure: worked 10 years in the industry before finally getting my degree — because I wanted to move to R&D).

<comment><USER27> Most of the degree is waste if you want to be a software dev (IMHO).

The industry could do really well out of recognizing that it's a vocational occupation and switching to an apprenticeship model.

<comment><USER28> In my experience, your point is valid regarding some software jobs, but not all.

As I've worked my way into more technically demanding roles, it's been very useful to have a foundation of big-O analysis, the expressive power of different levels in the Chomsky hierarchy, (mathematical) optimization theory, graph theory, compilers, and/or computer architecture.

Many of these topics could be learned by a bright person on-demand.

However, some of the topics are important to be familiar with before taking on a project, because they let you avoid costly, time-consuming mistakes.

<comment><USER29> Going to university doesn't mean you will learn any of these.

<comment><USER30> However obtaining a Computer Science degree should imply that you _have_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>