Want to learn a new skill? Take some short breaks - <AUTHOR> https://www.ninds.nih.gov/News-Events/News-and-Press-Releases/Press-Releases/Want-learn-new-skill-Take-some-short-breaks <comment><USER3> This is something I've found true in my own personal experimentation over the past few years. Any time I've been training something, if I take a break from it, I come back and I have more skill than I had previously.

Recently this occurred with my handstand practice. It's something that I've been working on the past year or two on and off, but more heavily recently. I've made some great strides, but the past week or two I've had a number of things distract me from my normal practice.

Jumping back into it this past week, I've found my balance and strength is or order of magnitude better.

This is only a single anecdote - but I've felt it rings true every time.

<comment><USER4> Speaking of handstands, I've been wanting to get started with that too as an item on my skills-to-acquire list. Any tips for a fellow beginner? I could never seem to get past the point needed to balance. I kick my body back and it stop right before the balance point and my body slowly goes off center and comes crashing down. Have you found it easier to do with trying to keep your body straight and stiff or feet tucked in a bit? Is it easier to learn with using your head against the ground or going for it with your arms straight? Any supplemental exercises or methods that you've found have helped?

<comment><USER5> The one trick that helped me quite a bit was to focus on alternating pressure between the tips of your fingers and the base of your wrist.

<comment><USER6> As a former (rather mediocre) college gymnast I would agree that is essential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best piano teacher I ever had, left me with a little trick like this.

When I was working through a song, getting the next few bars in my fingers lets say. If I got it right without mistake I had to stop immediately. lift my hands of the keyboard, and reward myself with a little breath - and tell my subconscious _that_ was it.

Before that I would just practice the loop over and over.

<comment><USER8> Sounds curiously like dog/animal training. The training session ends on completion of a task (eg fetch), followed by some sort of reward (food, play...).

Part of the art is recognizing when the animal isn't into it anymore. If that happens, and you go into another repetition, the last rep is frustrating and/or unsuccessful and it's hard to end on a satisfying success... which is counterproductive. Much better to skip that last rep and get the optimal reinforcement.

It occurs to me that whether training an animal or yourself, this needs to be a conscious plan. It's more natural to continue when things go well and quit when they stop.

<comment><USER9> Horsemanship is like this as well. Short lessons, end on high note. Get off and praise.

I use compounding as a model, where I evaluate the risk of pushing past comfort level based on whether I have the ability to return to a calm high note ending if my gambit goes sideways.

Regular small improvement yields a higher and more reliable trajectory than grinding toward inconsistent leaps that exhaust a lot of wasted effort. I'm learning there is a cargo cult around work and effort in that it is a substitute for the tact and intelligence you get with a lighter approach.

Like managers who think they are getting results by having staff work through suffering, and point to how hard people are working as an indicator of their ability to lead. Whether it's horses or people, it's always a disgusting spectacle.

My trainer likes to say, "go slow, I'm in a hurry."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The "rest periods" were ten seconds long. This doesn't generalize into anything meaningful; when was the last time you focused on a new skill so intensely that you didn't have ten second pauses?

<comment><USER11> Yes but the work periods were also ten seconds. So the suggestion seems to be that we should spend 50% of our time resting, with many very small rest periods interspersed between many very small work periods.

<comment><USER12> So, if i'm teaching myself to do unit testing I should take a 10 second break by checking HN and then go back to the task?

<comment><USER4> Probably better to do a walk around the room and reflect.

<comment><USER13> This. I think what you do in that break really matters. If it's taking a sip of coffee, browsing HN or answering a question then it's not going to help.

I have learnt to race cars over the past 5 years. I can lap and lap and lap, but the greatest improvement comes from the breaks between sessions, which can be minutes, hours, days or weeks. I stumbled upon the most effective strategy the other week when training in my simulator: I was doing a small number of laps, say between 7 and 10 then returning to the pits. I'd reflect on how the "stint" felt for a couple of minutes and then have a look at the telemetry, comparing laps and correlating my memory of the on-track experience with the sensor outputs that I could see in the telemetry. After doing this for 20 minutes, decide on some small setup tweaks and jump back in for another 7-10 lap stint, rinse and repeat.

I spent maybe 3 hours doing it and drove maybe 50 laps during that time (I could have done over twice that number if I hadn't taken my approach), but the improvement I got from it by the end was far and above anything I've tried before.

I can also relate it to another time in a real car where I was learning a new track and car in a short 20 minute session. I had done ~15 minutes on track and the session was stopped. I got back to the pits and sat in the car. I asked my engineer about the time I'd done in relation to other drivers and just sat there in the car thinking through my laps and where I could be "better". I went back out on track for the final 5 minutes and made a huge improvement, finishing top. It wouldn't have happened without that brief period of reflection.

TL;DR Do what you're doing for the shortest meaningful period of time. Stop and _reflect_ on what you've been doing and what you could do differently/try/better. Let your mind relax whilst you're doing this - <USER2> shouldn't be an intense process. The go back in and put your reflection into action.

It's important that you try to make adjustments to your performance, even if they fail. If you just do the same thing over and over again, you're missing the opportunity to diverge from your current behaviour, which is probably suboptimal given your experience.

<comment><USER14> What you're describing here is really what Ericsson refers to when he talks about 'deliberate practice' (from the 10 000 hours meme). You correctly recognized that instead of doing more laps some of your time was better spent on deep analysis.

If we stick with the racing analogy I think what the article talks about is that you would've seen solid gains if you had tried to run a single lap perfectly, stopped, stayed in your car, and just relaxed while your subconscious got some time to process everything that just happened, without your bombarding it with new information. If you were to follow the instructions to the letter you'd hang out for a time equivalent to your lap time, but they left it as an open question if this mechanic scales beyond the 10s repetitions used in the study.

I hope they do more of the studies because the required time of rest could plausibly scale in different ways:

1\. Your subconscious can only remember so much stuff to replay and learn from while resting so a break beyond X isn't beneficial.

2\. The rest time needed is linear with the stimulus.

3\. Long action sequences are such a rich source that the subconscious can mine them for a long time. Beneficial rest time scales exponentially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I drink tons of water, I try and drink my 32 oz bottle once an hour when I'm working. I feel more productive for two reasons because I do this: 1. I'm not dehydrated, 2. it forces me to get up to use the restroom a lot more than usual. This forces me to have lots of mini breaks almost every hour or so to walk and fill up my bottle and use the restroom.

<comment><USER16> > I try and drink my 32 oz bottle once an hour when I'm working.

Seriously, how do you get any work done? Thats like a sip every 30 seconds.

<comment><USER17> I refill my 26 oz water bottle about once every hour. It's not about sipping, I drink about a third or fourth of the bottle every time I pick it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems to fit with the spaced repetition learning curve. By default, Anki (spaced repetition software) will repeatedly show you new facts on a minute- long interval. Once you've got it, that interval becomes ten minutes, and then a day.

This stuff _works_. I've used it to study Japanese and Chinese with great success.

I'd love to see more studies as to _why_. If we understand the biochemistry, perhaps we can enhance it.

<comment><USER19> As a Japanese learner who would also like to learn Korean, what do you constitute great success? Are you conversational in each? Can you read in each language? I find Anki pretty boring, but want to like it. After studying the basics, I've had better success with extensive reading.

<comment><USER20> I started with Anki(1), but had trouble sticking with it. I moved to a Leitner system with handwritten flash cards, and it's much more comfortable to use — something about working with physical objects makes it much more effective. I've also played with the contents of the cards much more than I would have with Anki, because I don't have to deal with the templates.

As it turns out, most of my cards are either Cloze deletions from known-good texts or reciting declension tables.

For the declension tables, I have one card for each row and column. That's a lot of work, so I only have these for irregular words and a few representatives of each regular patterns.

For the Cloze deletions, I'll read an article or a book chapter straight through without stopping to look anything up, and highlight 1 or 2 sentences on each page that seem interesting and come back to make flash cards out of them (and look up words I don't know) after I'm done reading. Sometimes I'll delete entire words, sometimes everything except the first letter, and sometimes drop the dictionary form in place of the declined one - The goal is to get my brain trained to choose the right word or word form without me having to think about it consciously.

For new words that aren't obvious in context, I'll look them up in a native- language dictionary. If I can understand the entry, I'll make a Cloze card from that as well, usually just deleting any form of the word (especially the heading itself). In my dictionary, there's generally an example sentence and I'll transform key words there into dictionary form so that I have to remember which case, gender, etc I have to use.

(1) For learning Icelandic, not Korean or Japanese, but I suspect the concepts will transfer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A couple of anecdotes:

I went to a group rhythm workshop in San Francisco called TaKeTiNa wherein a group of 50 of us learned, over the course of a few hours, to perform a stomp/clap polyrhythm (that is, a sequence that is really the combination of two sequences with different time signatures) that I wouldn't have guessed we could learn in a single session. The facilitator guided us through by starting with an approachable subunit of the pattern, added to it piece by piece over a few minutes until we fell apart, and then gave us a few minutes of laying-down closed-eye rest time. When we came back, the previous segment seemed relatively easy, and we moved into further complexity. By the end, I was both exhausted and impressed at how much we had learned.

I played lacrosse in high school (West coast, believe it or not). Several times we were in a rut a few days before a big game, and our coach would cancel the intervening practices. We'd show up to the game and be astonished at how well we played. (I realize this is a very different time scale of effect, and is perhaps better explained by higher level psychological factors rather than a lower level neurological/memory-formation mechanism, but, then again, maybe it applies at multiple scales.)

<comment><USER22> San Francisco really is a different planet

<comment><USER23> I'd say that something similar would be possible in any city with a big artsy kind of people. Berlin came to mind immediately when I read what the workshop was about, for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In my experience, this effect is most noticeable while learning an instrument.

Practice until you start to see diminishing returns, take a short break, and then return to practicing. You'll notice you're slightly better than you were before taking a break.

<comment><USER25> I really notice this during video games. As soon as I feel stuck/frustrated I try stop, take a 15 minute break, then quite often nail it on the first retry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are you telling me that checking Hackernews every couple hours is going to pay off?

> _take a 10 second break_

I guess that's the next browser plugin, instead of blocking Reddit/HN/Facebook/Twitter, limit them to 10 second bursts.

<comment><USER27> I have a feeling breaks where you're doing something relatively mindless (walking around the block, washing a dish, taking a shower, etc) would allow the mind to "breathe" and "digest" a bit better than a break on social media or the news.

All conjecture but it plays well for me when I'm using pomodoro to get up, move, get water, do a dish, look out the window; as opposed to when I check reddit or hacker news for whatever new information has come out in the last two hours or whatever.

<comment><USER28> Meal prepping between my work has done me wonders. I'm still being productive, but it's mindless enough to the point where I return back to my work feeling refreshed and more efficient than if I had stuck it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good study. The phenomenon is also well documented and explained in George Leonard's book Mastery:

[https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term- Fulfil...](https://www.amazon.com/Mastery-Keys-Success-Long-Term- Fulfillment/dp/0452267560)

James Clear has a nice summary here:

[https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/mastery](https://jamesclear.com/book- summaries/mastery)

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if this is related to desirable difficulty [1] Ironically the idea is that making your task more difficult by making yourself less familiar with it helps with the learning process. One of the main concepts, the spacing effect [2], shows that spreading out learning over time improves learning. However, the interesting thing is that laving a long "lag" time (time between repetitions) is _better_ than having a short lag time. I should note that this effect is similar, but different than the similarly named "spaced repetition" [3] Most spaced repetition systems use the SM2 algorithm [4] to determine the amount of lag time. This achieved a recall rate of 92% in Wozniak's studies, however as far as I know he never justified that target. It's always been interesting to me to consider the possibility that increasing the lag time in order to increase the difficulty (reduce the recall rate) might actually increase learning rates. I've never gotten around to trying it.

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

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect)

[3] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition)

[4] - [https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm...](https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/english/ol/sm2)

</comment><comment><USER31> Sounds good, the problem is in social settings (at work) if you take a break i.e. play a game during work hours people think you're lazy.

<comment><USER32> I think playing a game during the break (I assume video game?) would be counterproductive.

It is not at all the same as taking a "resting" break, as described in the article.

I actually have some experience here, as I have for several years played the same video game on my phone every time I go on break at work and, anecdotally, actually feel it has not helped me in this area.

I've recently decided to avoid the game except on my longer lunch breaks, and attempt to have 'restful' breaks instead. We shall see how it goes :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anecdotally found this to be totally true, particularly with muscle-memory. I'm currently learning to play the drums, and I could be beating my head against a wall trying to get a certain fill down over and over with no success, but the moment I get up and take a walk around the room, I sit back down and nail it!

</comment><comment><USER34> With both this article and the propranolol one, it sure seems that resting (both short breaks and full sleeps) really help a lot.

Wonder why every CEO's boasting 4 hour nightly sleeping schedules?

<comment><USER35> Lies and testosterone? It also allows you to do more work that you already know how to do, but makes any new work frustrating and difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have been trying to remember 15 thousand words for the last 3 years during which I have similar experiences.Several times, I pushed myself hard to keep learning for hours, but ended up with efficiency decreasing as time went by. I may be unable to take in anything after two hours of intense learning. Then I try to rectify my own approach to find the most suitable method for myself. Following is my own experiences. Whether the break is needed depends on my specific task. Whatever task I do, I try to keep doing it without any break for at least about 45 minutes. If I'm coding, I need less intervals of break, and I can keep coding as if I enter a status called the mind flow. While if I'm reading and digesting a whole book, I need to stop sometimes to think. Well, if I'm remembering and digesting plenty of words and its usages, it's better for me to take a break more frequently, maybe I will watch a short video about 20 minutes every 45 minutes, to clear my mind.

IMO, it all about the ability to keep oneself concentrated. I've heard that some people can stay concentrated for a very long time, like several hours, and I'm not this type of person although I once experienced this state for two days and lost it forever. And I get exhausted more quickly when I am less concentrated than I am.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sounds a bit like the Pomodoro Technique.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm curious how the learning effect would have changed if the breaks had been 20 seconds. What if they had been 5 seconds?

</comment><comment> ciaran-ifelse Barbara Oakley's book "A Mind For Numbers" talks about this.

</comment><comment><USER39> Learning is a physical process. The brain needs time to form connections. Like building muscle, the best we can do is stimulate and then give time to grow.

</comment><comment><USER40> Making a break not only gives you time to reflect on what you did, but it also prevents you from meaningless repitition.

</comment><comment><USER41> The title is rather misleading. The outcome of the research, as per the writeup, is correlation in a particular set of circumstances, at best.

Although I find science fascinating and would want this to be true, stuff like this is what leads people to disbelieve in legitimate science.

If someone can say that breaks improve memory, for sure, 100%, definitely (but actually only, you know, maybe), then someone else could say that vaccines cause cancer, and that would be totally believable. Game over.

</comment><comment><USER42> this reminds me when i was younger and i would tell my mom that i need to take breaks because "knwoledge needs to rest in my brain"(sentence translated from spanish) , now i can tell her science backs me up.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think the key is sleep...

<comment><USER44> The article is about research that shows the key _isn 't_ sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Sleep = Backpropagation + Updating "weights"?

</comment><comment><USER46> In other words, for humans batch learning improves results over online learning.</comment>


NaNoGenMo - Spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2019/ <comment><AUTHOR> A few days ago I discovered this initiative that I found very interesting and fun: during the month on November you have to develop a program to generate a novel of around 50k words. This is the 7th edition of the event.

I started reading the dev-logs (GitHub issues) of the past editions and discovered some great novels both in term of technology involved and also content.

Some gems:

* MARYSUE ([https://github.com/catseye/MARYSUE](https://github.com/catseye/MARYSUE)), which aims to create an interesting novel with a plot and everything else (and the related write-up "A story compiler" ([https://git.catseye.tc/MARYSUE/blob/master/doc/Overview%20of...](https://git.catseye.tc/MARYSUE/blob/master/doc/Overview%20of%20a%20Story%20Compiler.md\)))

* LIFE OF THE AZAR ([https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/issues/39](https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/issues/39)), an archive/enciclopedia of some sort of an imaginary city of a couple of thousands of citizens describing the people, their relationships, events that happens in the city and much more

* THE DESERT OF THE WEST ([https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/156](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015/issues/156)), a generated guide of imaginary worlds together with a map generation alghoritm with rivers and erosion ([http://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/](http://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/)) and a generator for city names based on natural language theories ([http://mewo2.com/notes/naming-language/](http://mewo2.com/notes/naming-language/))

* MEOW ([https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/50](https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues/50)) meow meow meeeooow mew

Some projects are based on Neural Networks, some on Markov Chains, some on simulations, some on Tracery grammars ([https://tracery.io/](https://tracery.io/)), some on Prolog, some on "plain" text processing and some on a mix of all of these. (I found an overview of the approaches for the 2016 edition here [https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2016/issues/154](https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2016/issues/154))

I find all of this very fascinating and might start my own adventure with text generation in the next days.</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for a Windows 7 Update curator - <AUTHOR> In the past few months Microsoft has been pushing Windows 7 users hard to upgrade to Windows 10 and I understand they will be pushing harder still in the near future.  Even after I have disabled and removed the GWX nags, other updates restored them.  At best this is a game of whack-a-mole, but I consider it a violation of CFAA, because by removing GWX I told Microsoft I don't want it but they reinstalled it anyway and so that is an unauthorized access.  (People have been prosecuted for much less.)
They are also adding what they call telemetry, but which I classify as spyware.  Spying and ads are what some people accept as a consequence of receiving free hardware or software, but I paid for my computers and licenses, so I expect my OS vendor to respect that.
It's not necessary or useful to debate me on these issues.  These are my current opinions, and until I learn otherwise I intend to manage my systems accordingly.
An inadvertent or forced upgrade to Windows 10 would be catastrophic to our workflow.  Also, I will not be ceding control of my systems to unstoppable updates like we all have been forced to accept on our phones.  Therefore, I turned off automatic updating, and now I am being forced to update manually, all because Microsoft blended their threats into their security update channel.
Sadly, the task of reviewing each update to evaluate whether it is benign or harmful is daunting.  Microsoft's KB pages can sometimes help but are also very opaque and I would rather place my trust in a third party.  I have accumulated a list of updates to avoid, mostly by combing through various forums.  This method is inefficient and very likely fail-prone.
So, I just joined HN to ask: Does anyone know of an authoritative and trustworthy website that reviews Microsoft updates and provides lists of updates to avoid?  Basically, I'm looking for a Microsoft Windows 7 update curator.  What are my hacker friends doing about this? <comment><USER2> You see, I decided to give W10 a try and I actually think it is a decent upgrade. I would go further and ask for ways to gain further control over W10. I've blocked most of Microsoft communication via Firewall but you never know what the company will push with their updates.

As for your update curator I'd say there's a market for a software to deal with unwanted changes or useless updates. My two cents.

Finally there's always Linux. It's getting more and more attractive with Microsoft getting more and more obnoxious.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've got better things to do than avoid updates. Disconnect your machine from the internet to keep Windows 7. Then when you buy new hardware, just run Windows 10.

I for the life of me can't see how "An inadvertent or forced upgrade to Windows 10 would be catastrophic to our workflow". What is your workflow can you elaborate?

Resistance is futile.

<comment><USER2> Really? We could live without your non-reply.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> ian: We have legacy software that barely survived the upgrade to Windows 7, so we are not going to go to Windows 10 or Linux.

ninja: I agree there is a market for what I seek. I would gladly pay a nominal subscription for such a service.

Does anyone know of such a service?</comment>


Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow - <AUTHOR> http://michael.richter.name/blogs/awhy-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow

<comment><USER2> This is biased. You gain more than what you lost. The questions are challenging and you learn lots of new thing, everyday</comment>


Nvtop: Nvidia GPU htop-like monitoring tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop <comment><USER2> This is great, I'll be using this instead of "watch nvidia-smi" now.

What exactly is "Mo" in the memory column?

      PID    USER  GPU    TYPE           MEM Command
      2324 ubuntu   0 Graphic       1Mo 0.1% /usr/bin/krunner
      2320 ubuntu   0 Graphic      48Mo 2.3% kwin_x11
      2980 ubuntu   0 Graphic      61Mo 2.9% /usr/share/spotify/spotify --type=gpu-process --no-sandbox --lo
      2326 ubuntu   0 Graphic      85Mo 4.1% /usr/bin/plasmashell
      1526   root   0 Graphic     211Mo 10.1% /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg

<comment><USER3> I think it's the French version of MB

MO or Mo = Mega Octet (French) MB = Mega Byte (English)

<comment><USER4> > The byte is a unit of digital information that __most commonly__ consists of > eight bits, representing a binary number.

> The octet is a unit of digital information in computing and > telecommunications that __consists __of eight bits.

French has nothing to it.

<comment><USER5> >In France, French Canada and Romania, octet is used in common language instead of byte when the 8-bit sense is required, for example, a megabyte (MB) is termed a megaoctet (Mo).

taken from [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octet_\(computing\))

French has everything to do with it. it got grandfathered into their system from previous notations while the rest of the world uses megabyte for memory as a matter of practice

<comment><USER6> this is correct. i'm a romanian and both schools and government use the octet. on the other hand private enterprise has long used the bit/byte and "octet" is nowadays mostly confusing people. but it goes a bit deeper than that and it's mostly due to french influences: language is considered at the heart of national identity [0]. this has been detrimental to developing a modern language. one of the effects is actually the slow death of languages that can't adapt to their surroundings. instead we get english words translated in a crude manner to romanian or french. words that no one uses as the english/american versions are not only more popular, but also much more flexible. the french (romanians and others) are highly protective of their language, which is why they're losing the language battles.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/23/langua...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/23/language- french-identity)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do like that it supports multiple gpus. I usually have tmux session up with my training progress (and keras callbacks) on one spit and the other side dedicated to htop/watch -n 0.5 nvidia-smi. Looks like I'll give it a run this week when I'm running models.

</comment><comment><USER8> For a programmatic view we use [https://github.com/jolibrain/gpustat_server](https://github.com/jolibrain/gpustat_server)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love that it shows memory bandwidth and also what generation/speed of PCIe slot is being used.

</comment><comment><USER10> there's something similiar for AMD GPUs: [https://github.com/clbr/radeontop](https://github.com/clbr/radeontop)

but it does not tell which processes use the GPU

</comment><comment><USER11> Does something similar exist for Windows (10) to debug graphics card issues?

<comment><USER12> It's not quite the same, but windows 10 shows some basic gpu utilisation in task manager next to each processes, and some graphs in the next tab (where cpu, memory etc are - there's a new tab for GPU)

<comment><USER13> Sysinternals Process Explorer also has this, and can show you per-'engine' gpu utilization, where engines represent things like shader cores, hardware video encoding cores, etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> An awesome looking tool, however I'm a little wary of building software for an expensive multi-gpu server that isn't fully vetted. Seems like a ripe target for cryptojacking. On that note, people should probably avoid pre-built binaries of this for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER15> sudo apt-get install nvtop E: Unable to locate package nvtop

otherwise great tool!

<comment><USER16> [https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop/blob/master/README.markdown#b...](https://github.com/Syllo/nvtop/blob/master/README.markdown#build)</comment></comment>


Why HN doesn't need a redesign - <AUTHOR> http://jgthms.com/why-hn-doesnt-need-a-redesign.html <comment><USER2> I don't mind the design at all. . .but why would you _want_ to discourage newcomers? Isn't diversity in thought and background good, even within a narrow audience like this one? I think that maybe the newcomers you're thinking of would be discouraged by the lack of images and high "density of information", but there are still other elements that could be improved that would _not_ attract them. Also, is it so terrible to have radical ideas? As long as you're not flaming, trolling, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't agree with this. There's nothing wrong with having the site look better; although it looks pretty good now. I like the minimal design; but some things (like the font used for writing comments) need to go.</comment>


Ask HN: In my messaging side-project will emails or handles work for people? - <AUTHOR>

I'm considering that maybe people want the ease of simply logging in with their email, and the simplicity of entering (perhaps autocompleted from contacts) their friends email to set up a messaging connection with them.
I'm also considering that, maybe emails and spam are already so overloaded, people may value "a fifth channel" they can use out-of-band to chat with whom they choose. Say I can share my handle with a subset of people who may or may not intersect with those who have my email. Or I can publish my handle, while keeping my email secret.
If anyone cares to share some thoughts or experiences, that works. The Q's not asking for a prediction of the future, just a reflection or a tale from the past. <comment><USER2> Offer both. As an example: the Threema messenger gives you an ID (cryptic, but could be a choosen handle as well) and allows you to add phone numbers and mail addresses as identifying information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, that solves it. No need to choose :) Thanks.</comment></comment>


Discovering a New FizzBuzz – The Cheryl Birthday Problem - <AUTHOR> http://opine.me/discovering-a-new-fizzbuzz/

<comment><USER2> stupid pet trick.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch</comment></comment>


Which Stock Photos Convert Higher? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nickkolenda.com/which-stock-photos-convert-higher/

<comment><USER2> _> Brain Images from MRI or fMRI..._

... were shown to boost the credibility of neuroscience-related articles[0], and nothing in the paper hints at reasons why it could be generalized to other topics.

It'll be fun to watch brain images pop up on the sites of people who will have taken that post at face value :-)

————

0\. [http://www.antoniocasella.eu/dnlaw/McCabe_2008.pdf](http://www.antoniocasella.eu/dnlaw/McCabe_2008.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lot's of words, fancy images, tips and conclusions. But no actual data.

Citing research papers from 1979 to decide which photo converts better on a website? Dude, just show me the data of an a/b test.

<comment><USER4> It reads like NLP bullshit through and through. I flagged.

<comment><USER3> Me too. This is what made me flag it:

"I'm always flabbergasted how small—seemingly irrelevant—changes can make a big impact

If that was true, the author would have told us about those big impacts he witnessed. I think it's all made out of thin air.

If he just said "here is a couple of research papers that might be relevant to photos on websites" I would have no problem with the article. But they way it is presented, it's not HN worthy.

This is a topic I am very interested in. I studied many a/b tests on the impact of photos and other elements on conversion rations. The impact is usually surprisingly small.

<comment><USER5> Same here, I enjoy A/B testing often, along with analyzing numbers and data. When I opened this article and saw the A/B/C image at the top, I was excited to see the results. Then... nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The issue I have with this sort of obsession in optimizing conversion is this: shouldn't you be primarily concerned with building a product that legitimately benefits and gives back to both users and society as a whole as opposed to making something that sells as fast as possible? Both the data and psychology driven philosphies have this sense that your work exists to squeeze more money out of people instead of to create something meaningful. Put that extra time and thought into a better product and everyone wins.

<comment><USER7> If your product benefits people at all, then making it better helps more people, but using marketing to sell faster also helps more people.

It's not a dichotomy. Products can be good or well-marketed or both or neither.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I once worked for a company that never used stock photographs; all the website images were of staff, taken and used with their permission on work premises.

Not only did it give a sense of pride and ownership of the site, internally, but we could also add captions like "John S, St Louis Office" and had feedback that visitors appreciated the personal touch.

Other benefits included absence of licensing fees and ability to take custom photos with staff showing the products.

<comment><USER5> Including the name is a great idea. I feel like stock photos of business offices and people are a turn off. Anytime I see them on a site, I figure it's a basement operation being run by amateurs. Why are they posting a photo of a random boardroom and not their own? My only conclusion, they have no office. Why are they showing a photo of a random woman with a headset? They must have no dedicated support in house.

Real photos always stand out. If I'm looking for a webhost, and they show an actual photo of their datacenter, with one of their staff members standing inside, that's a huge plus. They actually have physical access to the datacenter. If I need something, they can get it done. They're not just reselling someone else's service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article references a number of different studies, but I really wanted to see some hard numbers with these concepts being used.

Show me that someone pointing at that newsletter button is 25% more effective than a photo of someone with their arms crossed. Or, show me that smiling asian male in a suit will out perform an attractive business woman in casual clothes.

Take some photos of the same person, in the same clothes, one with them pointing at the call to action, another with them looking at the call to action, another with them standing in a neutral pose, and another with arms crossed. Show me those numbers, and which increases sales.

Otherwise, I'm full of doubt.

[http://www.nickkolenda.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/02/pointi...](http://www.nickkolenda.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/02/pointing4.jpg)

That image freaks me out, it looks like an overly confident guy that is pretending he's well off, and it looks like he's about to give me some awful speech about the 10 secrets to success. I wouldn't want to donate to a kickstarter with that image, because I don't want that guy to get my money (even though it's a stock photo, I associate him with the project).

Then, I look at another example...

[http://www.nickkolenda.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/stock-...](http://www.nickkolenda.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/03/stock-photo-conversions.jpg)

The article says the asian male is probably best, because he's asian, and smiling more. I'd disagree again, I prefer A, the guy looks more down to earth in the casual clothes, and as a late twenties male, he looks very relatable. That's the kind of person I'd want to donate money towards.

This is all speculation though, we need real world numbers, otherwise this article is pointless.

</comment><comment><USER9> Do varying rates of effectiveness motivate us to choose something more relevant to our product, rather than stock images?</comment>


How to get people to work on your project (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2007/08/06/how-to-get-your-project-moving-or-my-ego-is-massive-and-you-should-listen-to-me./ <comment><USER2> This is gold. While I agree with most things the author mentions, I'm kinda meh on this statement.

> Write good code. Go back over older code and rewrite it. Then come back > later and rewrite it again. Make it better.

IMO, just making it work initially is what matters the most. Ship it, get the bug reports, and fix the kinks. While fixing the kinks, maybe refactor a bit here and there. Some could say, yeah but refactoring makes it easier for others to work on the code with you. My response to that is, yes... but this is a chicken, egg problem. You can write the prettiest code in the world where even a toddler can start hopping on and writing code. But, none of that matters if you never ship, pick up some momentum, and actually have people who want to work on the project with you.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand the part about momentum. What's preventing you from rewriting code once it has been shipped?

Besides, while shipping a working version is crucial, it's perfectly possible to plan ahead and refactor early if you're confident that getting to a working version won't be a problem.

<comment><USER4> I see it as: If you've already shipped A, your user-base are using A. Your user-base are now requesting feature Z

You then need to balance Z with rewriting A to B. The workaround to that is to rewrite A to B while implementing Z but the caveat; is there a time-frame to where Z must be implemented? Because if you implement Z ahead of refactoring A to B you now got to rewrite A to B while not breaking Z while letting Z grow because they want feature Y. Not forgetting you need to recode Z because the old code is old code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "actually working on it" part is key.

I'm doing a startup idea with a semi-technical guy I knew from high school. Most of that time that last statement would be a red flag -- most of the time you want technical co-founders -- but this guy has already invested tens of thousands of dollars of his own money building out a product, and already has interested clients.

I'm not going to invest my time if the other party isn't invested and expects me to do all their work for them. If they're working their ass off to make it happen, though, I just might join them.

<comment><USER6> "actually working on it" hurts so much. I have an idea. I think it will be amazing. I love thinking about it and talking to others about it. Yet every night I watch tv, play games, or anything else except working on the idea.

I can't tell if it's a subconscious fear of failure or just general laziness but I can't even write the first line of code and it's been 3 years since I got the idea.

<comment><USER7> For general laziness, in the order of importance: fix sleep (consistent wake up time), exercise, diet (cut out sugar and junk food like potato chips and ice cream, soda etc), vitamin D, blood tests, regulate stress, keep track of coffee, meditate, reduce alcohol, take breaks from social media, porn, addictive games, binge watching etc. Read physical books. Go out in nature without phones.

Such things can help immensely with vague laziness. Don't overthink it, there is no magic quick fix and it's not just about this one weird self help trick to fix your mindset. We tend to forget how much we are biological animals on the inside and the animal needs to be kept well.

Start with waking up at the same time and winding down in the evening early enough to sleep enough. It's much easier to get a grip on such concrete things as waking up at a particular time (or not eating added sugar) vs starting the big vague project, staring at the empty console. Once your routine is set up you will find you have more willingness to face and take on difficult tasks of many sorts.

<comment><USER8> I cannot stress this advice enough. I have ADHD so a healthy routine seemed like anathema to me and it felt like my entire soul would resist it at every turn.

Once I started getting up early at the same time every day, everything else flowed from that positive momentum. I get up meditate, eat, lift weights, then bike to work by 8. I, can crush work all day and I carry that positive momentum all the way till I go to sleep and accomplish many things after work. I have tamed that procrastinating distraction monkey on my back into a tenacious omnipresent will for self improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Summary:

1\. Make a project

2\. Work super hard at it but not to the point of exhaustion (stay optimal/healthy)

3\. If you aren't already, become a good programmer yourself (you really need this, if I'm reading the author correctly)

4\. Test your code

5\. Be capable of dealing with anger, frustration and joy

6\. Your biggest issue isn't time, it's your motivation

7\. Dare to fail

So basically: build a project and talk to people. He writes about it epic/coach-like way (e.g. "Fail hard. Fail with motherfucking gusto. Succeeding, like flying, is throwing yourself to the ground and missing.").

\---

I might need to become good at getting people to work on my project, as I might need to split my codebase in 2 and I would like your input on how to go about it [1].

[1, Ask HN: Diverging products: fork codebase, create config file or other option?] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23562286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23562286)

</comment><comment><USER10> I love this quote at the end:

" Succeeding, like flying, is throwing yourself to the ground and missing."

Cool article and definitely as someone else mentioned, very similar to a locker room pep talk.

<comment><USER11> You probably already know this, but the line is paraphrased from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is an amazing book if you like that style of humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sounds like a coach's locker room speech, with a tad too much vulgarity for my taste.

I would summarize it as: work hard and frequently, test and refactor, embrace failure. Don't give up.

</comment><comment><USER13> Pay them? It's complicated. Sometimes you just don't want anyone or someone but a special one.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Put it up on Google Code, Rubyforge or something similar. Haunt the IRC > channels..

I guess we'd be looking for "something similar" these days. Sad that there is so little competition in that space now (all github)...

<comment><USER15> Gitlab? Source Hut?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Zefrank's video on brain crack really summarizes the core idea of this article.</comment>


Ask HN: is there an app/website that list out all your FB friend's like? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> There's one called "What My Friends Like" that I found after some searching. It does Books, Music, and Movies. Closest I could find.</comment>


How A Used Bottle Becomes A New Bottle, In 6 Gifs - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/06/11/190668206/how-a-used-bottle-becomes-a-new-bottle-in-6-gifs

<comment><USER2> Very neat.

I love that the first one is named _gross.gif_.

Wait a minute, one of them is named _opticalsorter3.gif?_ Why that means...

Yes! Some bonus gifs for us!

[http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm- recycling/optica...](http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm- recycling/opticalsorter.gif)

[http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm- recycling/optica...](http://www.npr.org/news/graphics/2013/06/pm- recycling/opticalsorter2.gif)

When I was a kid finding gems like that online always made me feel really clever.

<comment> X-Istence Off-topic, but related to your post. When I found out hp.com had a website at www2.hp.com I thought I had discovered the second world wide web, and I tried to go to every single other domain I knew and add www2 in front in hopes of finding out more about this second world wide web.

Ah to be young again.

<comment><USER3> For me, it was www3 on the USPTO website back in the early 90s. It seems like the site hasn't changed since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most people aren't aware that the difference in energy efficiency between glass and aluminum recycling is enormous. Here are some choice quotes from National Geographic...

"each 10 percent of cullet in the mix reduces the energy required to make new [glass] containers by 2 to 3 percent"

At 70% cullet (the max), that's only 14-21% in energy savings for glass.

"creating an aluminum can out of recycled materials requires only 5 percent as much energy as creating a brand new can from bauxite ore"

That's 95% energy savings for aluminum. Big difference!

Source: [http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/energy-recycle- gla...](http://greenliving.nationalgeographic.com/energy-recycle-glass- bottles-vs-aluminum-cans-vs-plastic-2376.html)

<comment><USER5> Glass bottle recycling could be much more efficient if we (in the US) still did what we used to do: wash and sterilize the old bottles and then reuse them. (of course, collection costs might also be higher since you need to get used bottles back to the right bottler without damaging them).

<comment><USER6> Some dairies do that, by including a $1 deposit on bottles. At $1, it's actually worth your while to collect and return the bottles to the store where you got them (likely when you go shopping for your next bottle of milk).

<comment><USER7> Norway has a bottle tax ranging from 0.5 to 2.5 NOK I think (been a while since I lived in Norway; 2.5NOK is roughly 43 cents), and a recycling rate for glass bottles of something like 99%.

The key, in addition to the bottle tax, is automated bottle collection machines in pretty much all grocery stores that'll issue receipts to be used to offset against purchases at the till. It's so convenient most people return them, and the bottle tax ensures most of those that gets thrown away gets picked up by kids or poorer people for the money.

Most undamaged glass bottles would be returned to bottlers by volume rather than origin, for washing and reuse, apart from Coke bottles for obvious reasons.

Though these days most of the bottles are still plastic, but are still largely recycled - even if the energy savings isn't all that huge, it still saves a lot of landfill space.

<comment><USER8> In Germany shopw have to charge you 25 eurocent when you buy a plastic bottle which they will return when you bring the bottle back.

No such thing exists for glass bottles but they do get recycled. There are even separate recycle bins for white, brown and green glass. Yes, germans take trash separation seriously (on a related note, people in Japan too).

<comment><USER9> I think you're missing the point. It's 'reusing' versus 'recycling'. When you throw bottles in a recycling bin, you can't reuse them because they're broken. It then takes a lot of energy to turn them into new bottles. It's a lot better to keep the bottles intact, clean them, and fill them again. That's what a few countries have chosen to do. The way it's done in Germany is unfortunately a lot more common.

<comment><USER8> Actually, Germany does both. The 25ct thing is a more recent development.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the use of gifs, although it loads really poorly on my computer. Half of them don't animate, and the other ones stutter. It feels really laggy scrolling through the page.

I wish browsers could handle animated gifs better, and (from an end user perspective) make them essentially work like an embedded Vine.

<comment><USER11> I hate it. It's a lazy way to avoid editing a short video and doing some narration. This is what you get when you have cameras that record quality video on the cheap but people who can't be bothered to learn any of the technique to use them effectively.

<comment><USER12> I disagree, deeply. This is simply a different medium — this is basically an illustrated article, where the illustrations happen to contain motion.

It's not that text and video are that different in terms of information, it's that they differ in timing. For example, a narrated video will likely linger on some images, then cut to something else, and so on, all the while being edited in a particular way, with a particular tempo. And video presents only one frame at a time. With text, I can choose my tempo, and since everything is presented in two dimensions I can skip or skim much more easily.

It should also be said that text can be read much faster than a narrator can give me the same amount of information. Video is seldom information-dense (in terms of useful information, not raw pixels).

<comment><USER11> _ACHILLES: You are right on both counts. But even though the record is there "all at once," as you put it, we can draw sounds out of it bi by bit. The idea behind this is that the grooves pass slowly under the needle, and as they pass, the needle vibrates slightly in response to those very fine designs you earlier referred to. Somehow, in those designs are coded musical sounds, which are processed and passed on to the loudspeaker, to dispense to our waiting ears. Thus we manage to hear the music just as you said, "a bit at a time." The whole process is quite marvelous, I should say.

TORTOISE: Well, it is marvelously complicated, I'll grant you that. But why don't you do as I do just hang the record up on your wall and enjoy its beauty all at once, instead of in small pieces doled out ove a period of time? Is it that somehow there is a masochistic pleasure in the pain of doling out its beauties so slowly? I am always against masochism._

Douglas Hofstadter, _Godel, Escher, Bach_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has anyone had the experience of being told to simply throw away a glass bottle - that it's essentially made of sand, and it's much more efficient just to make a new bottle from the raw material? That's happened to me, from someone working at a restaurant. I get the feeling form this (small) story, that that's not actually entirely true. What say you, HN?

<comment><USER14> I live in a rural areal, and the local recycling center recently stopped accepting glass. Apparently the cost of transporting it to someone who has the facilities to recycle it outweighs the price the recycler will pay. For a time, the city picked up the difference, but they aren't doing that anymore.

My point is that whether or not something is economic to recycle is at least in part dependent on where that thing is. I suppose it seems obvious when put that way; but I don't think its obvious at the outset.

<comment><USER15> I don't know if this is the case, but shouldn't a lot of the transportation costs be happening regardless? The distributor ships product to a store, and when they're done offloading the product, they take the recycled products from the store back to the distributor where they're headed regardless. You'd still have to transport it to a recycling center from the distributor, but I don't see why you can't build recycling centers next to distribution centers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > (We wanted to take a picture of the furnace, but they warned us that it was > so hot that getting close to it could destroy our camera lens. Which makes > sense, given that it was hot enough to melt glass.)

In that case, wouldn't the furnace also be hot enough to melt the photographer?

<comment><USER17> People working near are likely to be wearing suits something like [1]. I'm not sure if there are any fundamental constraints to putting a camera inside a similar shielded enclosure, but I imagine it could be possible that the camera lenses might focus the light sufficiently to damage the CCD. Then again, the bulk of energy is presumably in the IR, which isn't particularly well transmitted through glass (and hence, would be absorbed instead, maybe damaging it or any expensive coatings it has)

[1] [http://www.lakeland.com/h900.shtml](http://www.lakeland.com/h900.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It astounds me that the costs of these plants (plus the costs of getting the raw/recycled material there) can be amortized to some fraction of the $2 we pay for a bottled beverage.

<comment><USER19> A few things a like that. I get 1L bottles of a tomato pasta sauce I like. It costs about US $2. It tastes good and has a custom bottle for the brand. How do they do it? I couldn't grow the ingredients from seed for that price as the seeds alone would exceed that cost. Then making the sauce, the bottle, then shipping.

<comment><USER20> You're paying retail for the seeds, etc. They aren't.

<comment><USER21> but the point still stands - sure the seeds might've only cost you a few cents (or even, free if you know a nice farmer who'll give you some). But think about the time it takes to grow, and the amount of effort required to grow enough to make one jar of tomato sauce...

<comment><USER20> Economies of scale, short supply chains, and automation. It's not really all that surprising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you like this you may be interested in a new waste disposal system being trialled in my city (Perth, Australia) - [http://www.anaeco.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...](http://www.anaeco.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=82&Itemid=55). It basically takes general household garbage diverting approximately 70-85% of it from landfill. Plastics, glass, metals and biodegradable organic matter are automatically separated out at different stages and the whole plant uses biogas generated from the organic matter to generate power (excess power is fed back into the grid).

</comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me a lot of _How it 's made_, except the video is in looping GIFs and the narration is in text form in between.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there a reason other than aesthetics that glass needs to be sorted? Do the chemical colorants not work well together, or is the glass types incompatible with each other? Wouldn't multi-colored glass that looks obviously recycled be a product that would be attractive to "green-conscious" companies?

</comment><comment><USER25> Almost no human interaction.

The concept of a "job" for everyone is going to become obsolete very soon.

<comment><USER21> it just means that one person is capable of producing a lot more by designing smart machines, instead of manual labour. The engineering/thought going into the design is still a job.

Imagine if the entire world didn't need manual labour - what would/could happen? Is it possible that all humans work on abstract things like designing stuff (programmgin/engineering/produce entertainment for others)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The gifs are some of the best ones I've ever seen. They are almost perfectly seamless!

<comment><USER27> Sounds like you would enjoy cinemagraphs. For example: [http://annstreetstudio.com/category/cinemagraphs/](http://annstreetstudio.com/category/cinemagraphs/)

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the link. Particularly interesting is the Q&A post where they discuss HTML5 vs GIF [http://annstreetstudio.com/2011/12/22/the-other- half/](http://annstreetstudio.com/2011/12/22/the-other-half/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Please play this youtube video while you browse this article. It enhances the effect.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-7uLg- DZU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9-7uLg-DZU)

</comment><comment><USER30> I loved the last two gifs. That's an office! Makes the typical startup place look like an infantile playground :)</comment>


Why the Basis of the Universe Isn't Matter or Energy—It's Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> This is pretty interesting. It seems we struck gold with the invention of the internet if information is as important and fundamental as this author says it is. I am hesitant to buy in though, as I still see information as the thing which depicts and explains matter and energy. Twitter and facebook shows us about people, bloomberg shows us about businesses. The information is near nothing without the substance it stands for. Still, We developed math beyond the concrete, so I think this guy might be onto something big. And like math, if we can shape the constructs into something applicable, like calculus to dynamics, this sort of thing can be very useful beyond the purely academic.</comment>


Why haven't we arrived at the AWS Era for Fintech? - <AUTHOR> https://astra.finance/blog/why-havent-we-arrived-at-the-aws-era-for-fintech/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing my article here!

Over and over in conversations with other startup founders and VCs, we kept hearing the analogy of AWS for Fintech. I think it's a really interesting thought experiment, but I haven't seen a breakdown from a technology perspective. What's in place, and what's missing? So I did a write up using Cloud Computing as the framework.

Would love your input!

<comment><USER3> Why should there be a moment? Seems to me money has been around for a while and will be slow to change. Cloud computing was a new concept

Technology is more of an enabler than a driver. Finance is a highly regulated industry, you don't want any Joe Shmoe building applications which handle money, because security.</comment></comment>


Native Navigation in React Native - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/airbnb/native-navigation <comment><USER2> It's pretty neat to see Airbnb contributing a serious amount of work to the React Native community!</comment>


How to Prepare Your Family for Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/guides/201102/how-to-prepare-your-family-for-entrepreneurship.html

<comment><USER2> _5\. Hold regular family meetings....There should be scheduled, structured family meetings with a written agenda._

Ugh. I think I'd rather have my old job back.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure six year-olds love the idea of having to sit down for half an hour and listening to mom and dad talk about cashflow. You can even get them a copy of "Robert's Rules of Order (for Kids!)".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >>4\. Talk openly with family members.

For those with family, talking with them openly should be #1 - before taking the plunge. Unless everyone (esp the spouse/significant other) is on board, you'll sacrifice the relationship or spend too much time trying to patch it.

</comment><comment><USER5> How do you guys do the whole "make time for your family" thing? Thankfully I'm young enough right now where I only have a girlfriend, but I love her and I want to make sure I fit time in to be with her. How do you guys tackle that balancing act?

<comment><AUTHOR> i'm 32 and i'm married with 4 kids. i eat dinner with the family 5-6 nights a week, and am always there at night to wrestle and tuck the kids in. then i'm back to work til 4am or so. also i make a point to take my wife out every weekend. helps keep things sane.

<comment><USER5> But that ISN'T balance. Eventually your health will degrade from (presumably) chronic lack of sleep. There just are not enough hours in a day :(</comment></comment></comment>


Working at 37signals - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1785-working-at-37signals <comment><USER2> One thing that I think 37s is great about (and I don't know this as a fact, but from the outside it seems this way) is that they definitely trust the people they hire to work for them. I'm not sure that many places would hire someone, and then as them to re-design their account screen in their main application in the first week. And trust them to do a good job!</comment>


Apple demands widow get court order to access dead husband's password - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/apple-wants-court-order-to-give-access-to-appleid-1.3405652 <comment><USER2> Tricky, what would a clean solution look like? I don't think family should automatically get full access to the account, and it is an interesting question if the licenses for paid apps can even be inherited.

Joint accounts are something that people do, but isn't part of the design (as in, you can't name multiple people as account holders)</comment>


Piksi - low cost rtk gps receiver - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/swiftnav/piksi-the-rtk-gps-receiver

<comment><USER2> Very cool, but I wonder how the US army will feel about this, seeing as the consumer GPS was deliberately inacurate to make sure it won't be used in guidance systems...</comment>


Iridium Go satellite hotspot review: More like 'Iridium No' - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/3048163/hardware/iridium-go-satellite-hotspot-review-more-like-iridium-no.html#tk.rss_all <comment><USER2> Yet another reminder that we can't count on satellite and other exotic technologies to replace FTTH.</comment>


Army Camouflage That Failed to Hide Its Soldiers - <AUTHOR> https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/army-camouflage-that-cost-more.html <comment><USER2> > it was decided that the design should work in all terrains to be more cost- > effective.

I'm not sure they know what "camouflage" means, because that sounds like it should be impossible.

<comment><USER3> The cynical answer is they didn't care because it was a good contract to throw to friendly companies.

The one that gets me is how the Navy insisted on getting a digital pattern too. What's the point of wearing cammo on a freaking giant ship?!

<comment><USER4> > What's the point of wearing cammo on a freaking giant ship?!

Navy personnel don't serve exclusively on ships, and people on the decks of ships can be individual targets when the ship is within smallarms range of land or another vessel.

<comment><USER5> I know someone who served on aircraft carriers over the past few years, and was in charge of close-in ship defense on one tour. He said the camo was no tactical help at all, but was a real safety issue when people fell overboard, which occasionally did happen.

<comment><USER6> I was on a carrier for a year, and we had a large number of false alarm Man- Over board events. The pilots were incredibly frustrated at the Navy's camo, because they would have to fly around looking for a blue sailor in a blue ocean until we finally finished counting everyone on ship. The reason the Navy has those is because they look cool and "carry the honor and tradition of the US Navy", the reason the military does most things. All in all, it gets kids fresh out of high school to sign up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article got me thinking. Would it make sense to train a GAN to generate camouflage? With the generator generating textures for the objects you want to hide and the discriminator trying to spot them in scenes rendered with a differentiable renderer like "neural renderer" [1]? The 2D-to-3D style transfer examples almost look like camouflage already.

[1] [http://hiroharu- kato.com/projects_en/neural_renderer.html](http://hiroharu- kato.com/projects_en/neural_renderer.html)

<comment><USER8> How good would this be for a 'general' solution to the problem?

Specifically, a good uniform must function across a wide variety of environments; see the USMC uniforms for a good example.

If we had 'active' camouflage that was updated on the fly, this might make some sense?

<comment><USER9> You do get what are effectively very large inkjet printers that can print patterns on materials - might be easier to "print" custom camouflage for a particular environment?

<comment><USER8> Repaint / reprint when deployment orders are received? How durable is the print, though? The current paint used on most vehicles is incredible stuff. You can't even mar it with a super-high pressure water cannon.

As for uniforms; I'm not sure any military regular with clout would be willing to do something as practical as custom uniforms based on deployment environment. Too much change, too much innovation.

<comment><USER9> Well, I wasn't being _entirely_ serious - but did visit a place where they were printing cloth for use in furniture so it looked pretty heavyweight material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> UCP camo blends in well in some areas... [https://i.redd.it/68lxwxjrbe001.jpg](https://i.redd.it/68lxwxjrbe001.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER11> While there's the easy joke about "army intelligence" it's also true that camouflage is hard to get right. Not only do you need to blend in/be non- obvious to the naked eye but also infrared, thermal, and other aspects. This is why JSOC has "Camouflage Scientists" for outfitting their Tier 1 units, sometimes on a mission-by-mission basis.

URL: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/27/photo_camo/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/27/photo_camo/)

<comment><USER12> >While there's the easy joke about "army intelligence"

They did the best they could given that the only colors available were the crayons that nobody had eaten.

The Marines are picky eaters, that's why they got better camo.

<comment><USER8> The US Army got awful uniforms because someone (or multiple someones) were making money from the deal. Never-mind the only thing an ACU pattern blends in with is grandma's couch [0].

[0] [https://www.funker530.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ACU- cou...](https://www.funker530.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ACU-couch- web.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The ACU itself was an improvement over BDUs, despite the UCP being not good for anything other than hiding in gravel roads. For example, getting rid of the absurdity of boot shining and pressing the same uniform you're supposed to wear in the field (and EVERYONE starched their BDUs to cardboard consistency for garrison use).

<comment><USER14> Starching was truly idiotic, it turns your uniform in to kindling, makes it less breathable, and prevents it from absorbing bug repellents. Completely defeated the purpose of having a utility uniform, looking good is what the service uniform was for. We Marines got the same benefits with better camouflage by adopting the MCCUU. Making all our gear coyote was smart too, it takes on the color of the soil around you once you spend some time on the ground. Although that is true for all gear, it works particularly well with coyote.

<comment><USER15> I have always found starching clothes hilarious: cloth was soaked in starch to make it easier to cut and sew; you want to wash it out before use to make it comfortable.

The conceit of _adding_ starch back in later to make something look new is already funny; to do it routinely is absurd.

Of course anyone who has been in the military of any country knows "absurd" is a pretty frequent factor.

<comment><USER16> The effect is more pronounced for someone who has never been in the military, but has had occasion to observe military personnel going about their daily tasks, for the purpose of partially automating their jobs with custom-built software.

I'm not certain that "absurd" is a strong enough word for it.

I was frequently reminded of Tevye the milkman singing "TRADITION!" at the top of his lungs. The only thing worse than participating in absurd and obsolete traditions as an insider is to be forced as an outsider to completely ruin an otherwise rational workflow in order to accommodate them.

If you have ever taken calipers to a software-generated printout, in order to compare it to a paper form that was last revised in 1980, and printed in bulk ever since, you deserve to wear starched underwear.

<comment><USER15> The purpose of tradition and drill is to encourage people to take action without thinking (this is why the officer/enlisted distinction still exists). In addition, idle hands are the devil's tool, and when you have a bunch of young men doing nothing you need to keep them busy.

True absurdity in the military is an orthogonal axis and runs from, indeed, vestigial rules such as you imply, all the way up to ordering enormous weapons systems the military doesn't even want simply for political reasons.

<comment><USER17> Kind of a shame we can't think of better busywork for the troops. Sending them out to patch up roads and bridges or cleaning up streams or something. It's such a shame to spend so much time and effort on obsolete and silly uniform regulations.

<comment><USER16> I'd probably end up turning the Army into a grindy JRPG-style augmented- reality game, and the enlisted would eventually end up referring to civilians as the NPCs.

But we'd also have viable gunblades and dozens of rare uniform crafting recipes, and our military would be well prepared to repel zombie pandemics, space-alien invasions, and goblin sieges, as well as to defeat S-class daikaiju.

...So there is something to be said for letting experienced professional soldiers run the military. They might know what they're doing behind the facade of repetitive busywork, like Mr. Miyagi teaching Daniel-san karate. Or they might not. It's hard to tell from where I sit. A lot of the budget is not freely auditable by the public, and I have certainly seen firsthand a very small portion of it totally wasted on absolute nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article doesn't mention that USMC included their logo in their new and effective camo so other services couldn't/wouldn't use it.

Otherwise, the Army could have used the same patterns developed by the Marine Corp.

</comment><comment><USER19> UCP/ACU is the definition of a horrible compromise.

The only environment where it possesses some applicability is complex urban terrain.

We face exactly the same problem in NZ with our MCU pattern.

Jack of all trade, master of none.

Seeing US ACP/ACU and NZ MCU in forestry/jungle, especially in low light, is like seeing a person wearing a white sheet over their head. Ineffective.

Multicam is the most flexible cam pattern I've seen as a one size fits all.

US Marine Corps' and Canadian Army's two types(each) of digital cam for desert and temperate climates are pretty effective.

Blue navy camouflage I've seen worn by US and Australian Navy personnel make no sense.

You don't want to be camouflaged if you're ships crew, you want to be seen/found. Should be hi-viz.

</comment><comment><USER20> Most military personnel are working in offices anyway, and this new uniform probably saved $5B worth of repetitive uniform maintenance in man-hours (ironing, shining, etc).

I would hope spec-ops in the field aren't just wearing standard issue ACUs but rather are highly adapted to the specific terrain they are working in.

<comment><USER21> I suspect that for on base there was a considerable about of ironing and shining or does the USA not go in for bulling boots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So me andere my friends went airsofting ons time, just for fun. Everyone got issued woodland camouflage and I got the "cool" US camouflage (ie. The camouflage of the article). Wooohooo! ....or so I thought.

The refs came to me mid game and told me to get a normal woodland camouflage because everyone could see me from a mile away...

</comment><comment><USER23> I wore this everyday for 5 years, including in Iraq, and I always felt that it was horrible at actually camoflauging anything. One main reason was that it would get brighter and brighter over time, as the colors tended to fade -- a well worn was incredbily light-looking that Soldiers would pop out at you against a darker background. We were told eventually that you can't use regular detergent on it because it has brighteners, that you should use Woolite. It was also supposed to be a benefit to have velcro for nametapes, rank, and unit insignia so that soldiers didn't need to pay to get things sewn on, but it made for very noisy and inconvenient examples of people sticking to each other in close quarters.

</comment><comment><USER24> UCP looked great as the background of recruiting ads. That was its greatest utility until people realized how stupid it was in practice.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why is using United States citizens as live test subjects with their lives at stake, "cost-effective"?

I often complain about a lack of test coverage in code, but I cannot fathom how testing was COMPLETELY skipped on a $5 BILLION dollar project that directly impacts lives.

Disclaimer: 4 year USAF veteran

</comment><comment><USER26> I called it internet camo and told my friends who were in the military at the time that the USA was preparing to invade cyberspace.

</comment><comment><USER27> > _Military dumps billions into magic multirole capability._ > _It falls and > billions need to be dumped into it 's single function replacements_

You can almost replace UCP with F-35 and have an accurate article.

</comment><comment><USER28> An episode of Shark Tank recently featured a camo design made out of real photographs of natural backgrounds. Does the military not know about this option?

<comment><USER29> Only a small percentage of camouflaged deployments are about blending in with the background; observation, snipers and static roles like that.

Infantry and vehicles move too much to make background-matching practical, so the primary purpose of their camouflage is to break up identifiable outlines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The pop-up video ads after every single paragraph effectively camouflaged the contents for me...

<comment><USER31> Try an ad blocker:

[https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery- extension](https://github.com/ghostery/ghostery-extension)

<comment><USER30> What are my options on Android? Switching browsers and side loaded apks?

<comment><USER32> I use ad-away. It requires root, but it can block ads in any browser or app.

I think Firefox Focus has ad blocking built-in.

<comment><USER33> Regular Firefox Mobile can have uBlock Origin added.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I bet after fiascos such as this, if we had some of the contractors and their Pentagon collaborators executed for treason for endangering our soldiers, the situation with procurement would rapidly improve.

<comment><USER35> If by 'rapidly improve' you mean 'become even more mired in regulation, over- analysis and responsibility-shedding behavior' then sure, I guess.</comment></comment>


Shitty Media Men spreadsheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/10/12/why_it_s_reasonable_to_feel_a_queasy_mix_of_emotions_about_the_shitty_media.html <comment><USER2> > But if a woman has been raped, who's to tell her she has no right to scream > his name from the rooftops?

Three little things: Presumption of innocence[1], Separation of powers[2] and Right to a fair trial[3]. The first tells us that every person is innocent until proven guilty, the second mandates that the ones with the power of proving guilty are not the same with the power of arresting or writing the laws, the third says that, to be proven guilty, one has to undergo a fair trial, and that, among the other things, the accusers can't be the judges.

By allowing public firings and spreadsheets of "guilty people", we're actually allowing bypassing all of these three points. People are accused, trialled and condemned by enraged crowds, without even being able to defend themselves in a legal seat. And if you try to underline this point, you're treated as a monster. Good job on restoring mob justice and making it pass as "normal".

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

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_a_fair_trial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_a_fair_trial)</comment>


Replacing React with Rails - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jacobwgillespie/replacing-react-with-rails-6e874fdc6889 <comment><USER2> > _tl;dr — I replaced a ReactJS application with Rails + UJS. You will most > likely identify this as a case where React was overkill, and I would agree._

LOL, isn't it usually the other way around? That is, React being just a view later, Rails would be "overkill" as it provides model and controller along with the view? That said, the term "overkill" is right in one regard in that Rails is most definitely easier to just build out from scaffold than it is to cobble together React on top of Middleman and Node.

But I think even Rails might be a bit too heavy if you're just building something for fun and not as a MVP. Skimming through his site at basicman.co, it seems like the site basically acts as a list of pages that act as a light wrapper on Amazon.com and its Cart API -- checking out with your cart sends you directly to Amazon.com. Thus, a database isn't needed, just some backend process to persist a session cookie, which the OP was doing via Node. There has to be a middle ground between going React+React Router and Rails that would mitigate OP's SEO issues.</comment>


Direct Evidence Of Role Of Sleep In Memory Formation Is Uncovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090915174506.htm

<comment><USER2> Original article: [http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.238...](http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.2384.html)

I was inclined to be skeptical---breaking news, shocking the brain during sleep impairs performance---but they used three different groups of rats:

      ...we tested the role of SPW-Rs on memory consolidation.
      Three groups of rats (test group, n = 7; stimulated
      controls, n = 7; unimplanted controls, n = 12) were
      trained to find food rewards ... .

      During post-training rest and sleep, all of the online-
      detected ripples were suppressed by commissural
      stimulations in test rats (average online detection rate
      was 86.0 ± 1.3% (s.e.m.) of post hoc detected SPW-Rs;
      ...). Stimulated control rats underwent the same
      protocol, except that a random delay (80–120 ms)
      was introduced between SPW-R detection and stimulation,
      ensuring that the stimulations occurred mainly outside of
      the ripple episodes.

Now check this out:

      Thus, these control rats received the same number of
      stimulations as test rats, but their hippocampal
      ripples were left largely intact. The global architecture
      of sleep and the local field potential power in distinct
      sleep stages were not modified by the suppression of
      SPW-Rs ... .  As stimulation outside SPW-Rs had
      no detectable effect on task performance ..., the two
      control groups were pooled and compared with test rats.
      Performance of the test rats was significantly impaired
      ... .

Cool experiment design with an intriguing result.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that. I was going to include the link to that, but when I clicked for the full text it asked me to subscribe.

Now that I've gone back, I was able to grab the PDF.

</comment></comment><comment> a-priori In doing research for another comment I posted here, I came across an article that does a very good job of summarizing the current state of research into the role of sleep in memory consolidation.

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7063/abs/nature04...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7063/abs/nature04286.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> _"Sharp wave ripples are intense, compressed oscillations that occur in the hippocampus when the hippocampus is working off-line, most often during stage four sleep, which, along with stage three, is the deepest level of sleep."_

I'm not an expert on the subject, but how can two stages both be the "deepest"?

<comment><USER4> Both stages have delta waves in the same range but induce different effects on the brain. They're both characterized by the same measure for depth (of sleep).

To clarify with more, specific information: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-wave_sleep>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Sharp wave ripples are intense, compressed oscillations that occur in the hippocampus when the hippocampus is working "off-line," most often during stage four sleep, which, along with stage three, is the deepest level of sleep."

So do people who practice polyphasic sleep have awful memory?

<comment><USER6> The way I understand it, Polyphasic sleep is designed to trick your body into skipping the first two stages of sleep, so you spend all the time in the last two, where the biggest benefits are.

<comment><USER5> That seems a bit off, trick your body into skipping the first two stages by...staying awake?

<comment><USER7> Not quite, you try and sleep at set times and after some time you adjust to actually sleep during those times. Since the sleep period is typically very short (~30 minutes), the idea is that your body adjusts. From what I've read, people who've tried it (for longer than a month or two, ie they actually adjusted properly) found they were just as rested as everyone else.

Having said that, who knows what negative effects it may have on them...

<comment><USER8> I've read multiple accounts of people who _tried_ it and _claimed_ they were just as rested. But I emphasize try because they no longer do it, and I bet the reason is they were not just as rested.

edit: polyphasic sleep discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=652650>

<comment><USER5> <http://www.supermemo.com/help/faq/polyphasic.htm> This was a great find, thanks for the link. Pretty much proved all my thoughts true

<comment><USER7> Interesting read.

There was that guy (though I cannot remember who it was) who claimed to have sustained polyphasic sleep for 9 months and only stopped it because he found it hard to interact with people and socialise because his schedule was too different from everyone elses. But, I have no evidence, so.. that FAQ seems reasonable though.

<comment><USER9> Steve Pavlina?

[http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep- on...](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-one-year- later/)

he has a ton of articles on his blog describing his experience

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that was probably who I was thinking of. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Those rats that selectively had all ripple events eliminated by electrical stimulation were impeded in their ability to learn from the training, as compressed information was unable to leave the hippocampus and transfer to the neocortex._

Probably remembered being electrically stimulated instead.

<comment><USER11> I think the experiment design eliminates that possibility. Why would this group of rats do worse than the ones that were electrically stimulated, but not in a way that disrupted the ripple events?</comment></comment>


Kubernetes liveness probes are dangerous - <AUTHOR> https://srcco.de/posts/kubernetes-liveness-probes-are-dangerous.html <comment><USER2> I don't know how many times I see devs put database checks in their liveness checks. The database blips and and the containers restart. Awesome!</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for paypal alternates, recommendations? - <AUTHOR>

As the title says I'm looking for alternates to paypal for my subscription based startup.  I'm running this from Canada, with services available worldwide. <comment><USER2> Here are previous threads

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=948036>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=432284>

</comment><comment><USER3> What would you guys recommend for

\- non US based company

\- selling to companies

\- subscriptions of $100 - $1000 per month

I care more about reliability and customer experience than a few % transaction costs (it's nothing compared to taxes ;)

Ogone [<http://ogone.com/>] seems like the only option...does anyone have experience with them?

<comment><USER4> 2checkout is an option. We use them for Visual Website Optimizer.

Though their transaction costs are high: 5.5%

<comment><USER3> Thanks I will check them out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dwolla is a local startup here in Des Moines, IA

<https://www.dwolla.com/>

Here's my interview with the founder -> <http://prairiecast.com/guest-ben- milne-of-dwolla-episode-2>

</comment><comment><USER6> You might checkout dalpay.com. Global payment site here in Iceland, decent rates.

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out Spreedly and their list of gateways: <http://spreedly.com/info/payment-gateways/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Chargify.

</comment><comment><USER9> Google Checkout

<comment><USER10> Terrible customer service (Paypals is better, but only by virtue of existing :))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Moneybookers.

</comment><comment><USER12> you could check out recurly.com</comment>


Ask HN: What silly esoteric IT thing would you name your child after? - <AUTHOR> Just to be clear, JSON is a copout. <comment><USER2> Who would do that to a child? If you need to use an IT in-joke as a name, that's what pets are for.</comment>