Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice - <AUTHOR> https://commoncog.com/blog/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/ <comment><USER2> I figured out something very similar in flight school. When I did my instrument rating, I realized my instructor, Sean, wasn't perfect. No pilot is. But, I believed he could pass an instrument check ride. I could not.

I decided that rather than figure out if everything he did was the best way or "worked for me", I would just do my best Sean impression. I still had the opportunity to get even better by learning from other instructors or coming up with my own ideas. That could wait until after I got my rating.

He actually noticed. At the beginning of an early lesson he showed me his check routine during taxi. He flowed through all of the instruments and controls. The next flight, I did my best impression. It wasn't perfect, but it was close. When I was done he told me no student had ever gone through the whole thing the next flight. Most don't even try. Even the better students just grab a few things and end up with a routine close to his by the end of training.

It all ended up working. I passed my check ride with just about the legal minimum amount of training time.

Writing this all out and talking about what a great student I was feels pretty egotistical. Ironically, that's the opposite of what this method is about. Just copy the closest person next to you who is better than you. They don't even have to be that great. Then, find someone better, and copy them. Save breaking new ground for later in your journey.

<comment><USER3> You never become exceptional this way. And if you run into situations you've never seen before, it's harder to react competently. With coding, if you only ever use a style you copy, then everything looks like it could be solved in that way. This works and may help you up the corporate ladder. But it will never produce massively positive results

<comment><USER4> That may or may not be the case, but note that there are many (most?) domains where the positive payoff is bounded, but the negative payoff is not. This method seems particularly useful for those scenarios -- if you have "adequate" performers to copy from.

<comment><USER2> Instrument flying is actually a great example of this. There are no instrument flying competitions. Well, I guess there's one every flight. First place, you make it there. Second place, you diverted. Third place, you crash and probably die.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. I have never really given this subject much thought.

In thinking about it, it seems an important part of teaching tacit knowledge is to establish, or cause, conditions that encourage the learning — the experiencing — of the specific things you want to teach.

Thinking back, I realize my own example of successfully teaching tacit knowledge was when I taught my son the first part of how to drive a car with a manual transmission: getting the car moving without killing the engine or burning up the clutch. I took him to a large level area, a huge parking lot, and told him he can do whatever he wants as long as he never touches the throttle. It only took a couple of hours before he had mastered knowing exactly how to modulate the clutch "bite" so that he could get the car moving without stalling, even with the engine at idle. That the car was an older Toyota Corolla with very little torque only helped him better master the finesse required to release the clutch exactly as needed.

We then moved on to modulating the throttle and clutch together, shifting, starting out on hills and all that but, by then, he already knew how to deal with the dark art of the clutch.

<comment><USER6> I do something similar with guitar. I can teach chords and notes, but I can't teach you how to hold the strings down properly in the first place. "Go play with this until you make the notes every time without a buzzing sound" basically.

<comment><USER7> I wish I could gift my callouses to beginners. It takes some time to build solid finger tips that can fret consistently at different angles, at the most discouraging part of the learning curve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >>> He gave me a long explanation about software engineering principles. I waved him away and asked how he did it in five seconds. He said "Well, it just felt right. Ok, let's go to lunch, you can fix it afterwards."

Yes. I do a lot of coding on feel, and just today was explaining why something could be done one of two ways but one was better. It took about 30 seconds for my concious brain to work out why it was, even though my unconcious brain knew it straight away.

Weird. Try getting that in an expert system (which might be why they never took off).

And of course try getting that into a CDN without equivalent of twenty years practise.

How do we label good and bad business decisions? Every day?

(side note: actually this is a serious thing I am hoping to work on next year. I think the next big stage of human computer work is computer coaching or feedback on our behaviour. Easy things like our spending habits but heading towards coaching on interpersonal actions - could we for example film a great manager day in day out and identify their activities - and then get them to label the actions - who they spoke to who they encourage why they took that negotiating stance. Do it enough times and you have a real training base.)

<comment><USER9> So much of coding and seeing good and bad design patterns is unconscious pattern matching and unconscious heuristics. I have the same experience of trying to put into words why one design pattern is better than another and it definitely is frustrating because from experience I do have a tacit "feel" about why something is wrong but to convey that to someone else is a challenge.

<comment><USER10> Would we call that "intuition"?

<comment><USER8> yeah, but we want to analyse this - is my intuition same as most other 20 year experienced coders? Is it good / correct intuition? is it transferable - can I see same patterns in a different language ? how far away from one language do we go before it breaks down (ie php -> python > java > clojure.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So many amazing thoughts in this article that apply to the world of software engineering.

If tacit knowledge is as important as the author makes out, then hiring "young guns" is always going to have a cost over hiring people that have done it before. As an older developer, that's interesting to me. A contrary point, however, is that maybe all businesses are new domains of exploration, so you might as well pay the cheapest person to develop your domain specific tacit knowledge.

If tacit knowledge is not something you can get by reading, then training and mentoring is much better (dare I say vital!) than documenting it all in a wiki, or just making sure everything is done asynchronously in a well written pull request.

If tacit knowledge is that important, then getting it is a privilege. If you are in a position where you can be paid to develop those skills and don't just have to read up in the evenings after your kids have gone to bed. Many people don't have that privilege but the software industry prides itself partially on the idea that you just have to self teach yourself; if you aren't doing that, you won't be successful in your job. Tacit knowledge is not that.

<comment><USER12> _If tacit knowledge is not something you can get by reading, then training and mentoring is much better (dare I say vital!) than documenting it all in a wiki, or just making sure everything is done asynchronously in a well written pull request._

This is a weird thing to argue. Productivity could be something like [system- knowledge] X [tacit-knowledge-of-programming] so just tacit knowledge wouldn't get a team maximum productivity.

Altogether, it seems like what's tacit in programming or tacit in any complex domain is "how to integrate different complex and sometimes contradictory things". It's important but hardly important in a "you can discard everything else, this is the magic" sort of way.

<comment><USER11> I agree with you.

But, tell me if you think I'm wrong: I'm arguing that most software companies have a mentality like you describe: "you can discard everything else, this is the magic" about wikis, PRs (so they generally ignore mentoring and training, or at least don't want it on their employees schedules).

I think you are saying I'm saying that I think that mentoring and training allow you to throw the rest away. I'm not saying that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems we rediscover Gilbert Ryle's knowing-how vs knowing-that distinction every few years.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle) or if you are so inclined

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge- how/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-how/)

Note: if you have a computer and it can be "told" once and forever remember it, then converting know-that into know-how by teaching it 100s of if-then rules was, at one point, considered a worthy research program.

<comment><USER14> It's funny that several thousand words that laboriously reinvent the wheel about tacit knowledge could be summed up in a handful of words of declarative knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If, in a mood of theoretical reflection, you make articulation in written or spoken language the criterion for "knowledge", it comes as a disappointment to think of all of the cases where we speak of someone knowing something (e.g. how to ride a bike) even though they are unable to train someone to do so entirely verbally (e.g. by written instruction, or over the phone).

But adding the epicycles of "tacit knowledge" and "rules followed unconsciously" clarifies nothing. The mistake was in the overly restrictive definition of "knowledge".

I've surveyed some of the critiques of the "tacit knowledge" concept in this article:

[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8267598](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8267598)

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you familiar with the Recognition Primed Decision Making Model, or the field of Naturalistic Decision Making? NDM is a field of research that focuses on taking expert intuition (which I refer to as tacit knowledge in this piece), extracting it out of the heads of professionals and then creating training methods to enable less skilled operators to learn these tacit skills on their own. The methods are primarily associated with and deployed in the military.

I think the most famous paper from this tradition is Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman's A Failure to Disagree, which lays out the conditions necessary for expert intuition: [https://www.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/sites/default/files/Kahneman200...](https://www.fs.usda.gov/rmrs/sites/default/files/Kahneman2009_ConditionsforIntuitiveExpertise_AFailureToDisagree.pdf)

(The two are intellectual rivals, but they put aside their differences to write this piece, over a period of about 6 years, IIRC.)

If you want to get at a definitional debate about the computing applications, that is fine by me. If you want to argue about the philosophical problems with Polanyi's formulation, that is also cool. But understand that I don't particularly care for either debate. I am interested in instrumental outcomes. The discovery of tacit knowledge and the methods found in NDM have been incredibly useful to me in the pursuit of skill acquisition. This was mostly what I was getting at in the post.

<comment><USER16> I just realized that Klein and Kahneman conditions are a good argument for apprenticeships in programming.

One condition is that the you get quick feedback about your decisions. For example, if a surgeon makes a mistake then blood splatters. In programming, if you make a syntax error the compiler immediately complains. However, a design mistake might only bite you months or years later. That is a big obstacle for developing an intuition. However, if an apprentice programmer makes a design mistake. His master can give quick feedback.

I can imagine that the lack of such feedback not only results in slower learning. It might mean the non-apprentice programmer is unable to ever acquire an intuition for design no matter how many years of experience.

<comment><USER17> > I can imagine that the lack of such feedback not only results in slower > learning. It might mean the non-apprentice programmer is unable to ever > acquire an intuition for design no matter how many years of experience.

Yes! This is also worsened by the fact that changing jobs frequently is so common. This makes me appreciate my first job, where good design was a priority, so much more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Misleading title: the thesis is more accurately "Tacit knowledge is why NDM methods are more useful than deliberate practice".

It also doesn't actually do much to explain that thesis, dismissing delivered practice with the quick an for shallowly-addressed claim that it only works in field with established pedagogy, which may be the case, but most of the fields that it dismisses deliberate practice for on this basis have established pedagogy (with, sure, some pedagogical controversies, but that's true if the field that it acknowledges have the requisite established pedagogy for deliberate practice, too, so it's not at all clear what, if anything, the distinction being drawn is), and doesn't actually do much to establish that NDM methods are particularly useful for developing tacit knowledge. Basically, the piece is an extended discussion of the idea of tacit knowledge, with the whole primary argument, to which most of the piece is only tangentially relevant, rushed through at the end as if it were an afterthought.

<comment><AUTHOR> > dismissing delivered practice with the quick an for shallowly-addressed > claim that it only works in field with established pedagogy

This is the _actual definition of deliberate practice_. As in, Ericsson explicitly says deliberate practice CAN ONLY exist in domains with a long tradition of pedagogical development.

Go and read the original papers by Ericsson. Or the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Or his popular science book Peak.

One of the nice things about writing a blog is that you get to bring an audience along on a journey of discovery. In this case, you don't actually have to go very far — the blog has done the work for you. This is a 5k word- ish summary of Peak: [https://commoncog.com/blog/peak-book- summary/](https://commoncog.com/blog/peak-book-summary/) ... and this is a 5k word summary of all the criticisms arrayed against deliberate practice, also linked from the piece above. [https://commoncog.com/blog/the-problems-with- deliberate-prac...](https://commoncog.com/blog/the-problems-with-deliberate- practice/)

If you want to read about NDM techniques — surprise, surprise! It turns out that the techniques are described in about 10k words over at [https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to- practice...](https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-practice/) and [https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to- practice...](https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-practice- part-5-skill-extraction/)

And those posts are _also_ linked from the piece.

(Edited to remove snark).

<comment><USER19> I think there is room for nuance here. True deliberate practice is easiest to apply in those domains, but there are some lessons from Ericsson's work that can be applied using the NDM framework. I think the point that people miss often is that it is _deliberate_ practice, not just practice. While we may not be able to practice like a potential chess grand master, we can deliberately challenge ourselves and look to learn from our mistakes. If you squint hard enough, some of what Klein writes about in "The Power of Intuition" seem like attempts to deliberately practice something in a field without that long tradition of pedagogical development (or fields that don't train for tacit knowledge). His paper with Peter Fadde, "Deliberate Performance" also talks about this. That said, you sometimes don't learn the right lessons, and if the situation changes too dramatically, all your tacit knowledge might work against you.

One tangent comment to go with this: One of Klein's occasional coauthors, Robert Hoffman, co-wrote a book on expert weather forecasters that I really liked. Weather is hard to predict, but one thing they found that what the best forecasters did was to look at the data before looking at what the computer models predicted. Once they had an idea of what they thought the weather might look like, they compared with the model. This kept their skills sharp and ensured that they continued to learn.

<comment><AUTHOR> In Peak, Ericsson seems to finally settle on one definition, which was what I used in the end. He calls what you just describe "not being able to deliberately practice like a grandmaster" a completely different thing — purposeful practice.

There's a whole chapter in Peak where he tries to talk about what to do if you are in a field with badly developed pedagogical methods. It's basically a badly written copy of The Power of Intuition (Klein). I was incredibly dissatisfied with it, because I was mostly interested in putting DP to practice, and his recommendations were far from practicable. I wish he had just referred to Hoffman or Klein, both of them practitioners in NDM, and therefore both more familiar with attempts to design training programs for fields where no pedagogical rigour exist.

I know you're inclined to give Ericsson a pass, and pass things off as deliberate practice even when his definition clearly excludes said thing. But my view is that we should call a spade a spade and use the exact definitions the man used. If he thought it was good enough for his popular audience, it should be good enough for me.

<comment><USER19> That makes sense, a couple of years ago there was a lot of misleading interpretations going around, precise definitions help clear things up. I read Peak a while back, and I must've forgot that distinction.

I found the Klein book you mentioned more useful than Ericsson's as well, that Fadde/Klein paper I mentioned was also pretty helpful. I need to reread both, and put them into practice more than I have. I read too much, and I don't get the tacit knowledge that comes from experience...

Another good book is Surpassing Ourselves by Bereiter and Scardamalia. They studied how students developed writing skill. Their definition of expertise is a bit different than Ericsson's, but I think it is more useful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the recommendations! Adding to my toread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Teaching college students how to program my first year of grad school, I realized that it's not possible to _make_ someone understand something. In a real sense, I could not _teach_ them to program. Learning how to program is learning a new way of thinking, and there was no way I could force them to start thinking in this way. I was more trying to guide them to have many personal epiphanies - through a combination of socratic method style questions and giving them specific actions to try with the hope it would improve their mental model.

<comment><USER21> Exactly my experience slowly learning to code as an adult. My partner sometimes explains a programming concept to me that just won't sink in.

After some practice and time, I can feel my thinking rearranging itself around the concept until it's second nature. Personally it's a feeling I enjoy, part of the reason I like taking up new hobbies all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tacit knowledge is what I've always thought of as "intuitive feel". As you grow in experience in a field, you start getting this feel for what will work and what won't work. This can be a great advantage, or a great disavantage. I had occasion to work with a fairly bright scientist. He said the reason that most great discoveries were made by relatively young people is because they hadn't developed these prejudices yet, so were unaware that it wasn't suppose to work this way.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice article! I guess it's obvious in retrospect, but I hadn't known of all the systematized study devoted to this topic. I'm happy to learn about it because I've found myself thinking about effective teaching and learning pretty often (I'm an academic), and what to do about "the stuff where, when you try to explain it concretely to someone else, your explanation doesn't really make sense unless the other person already knows what you're talking about".

In subjects I've tried to learn and teach, my experience is that talking to someone with a lot of such knowledge really only gives you an idea of the sub- topics and considerations you should try to understand better on your own. It is helpful in narrowing down what you should prioritize and maybe giving you a useful point of view to organize your thoughts from, but that doesn't save you from doing the thinking and understanding for yourself.

I agree that emulation helps somewhat by forcing you to make choices that are reasonable even if, as a beginner, you lack the knowledge to choose wisely yourself. But if the ultimate goal is to come up with new ideas using the knowledge, I think there's such a thing as too much emulation. You don't want to become a carbon copy of your mentor either.

I agree that deliberate practice and acquiring tacit knowledge are not the same thing. To me, deliberate practice is about repeating a certain activity -- one that you typically _can_ describe in words to someone who doesn't already know it -- enough times that it's available to you as a tool, eg playing scales as a musician, times tables in elementary school math. Tacit knowledge has more to do with how you decide to apply those skills to best effect.

But my experience has been that they have kind of a symbiotic relationship. If you didn't have some tacit knowledge to begin with, you wouldn't know what to practice, or when you had practiced enough to be good. At the same time, it may not be possible to acquire enough tacit knowledge to become an expert if you don't have an immediate command of certain skills developed through deliberate practice. I.e. there's feedback -- more tacit knowledge should make your deliberate practice more effective, and better skills make it easier for you to acquire tacit knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER24> The reason tacit knowledge exists and is essential is because the brain is immensely complex, and most of what it does is outside consciousness.

To take just one well-studied example, in vision photons hit visual receptors in the retina, and then go through the optic nerve which is a complex computer that analyses the signals in stages, like picking out points, then lines, then shapes, and so on, and then it is sent to several different visual areas of the brain, each of which pulls out different features, like motion, colors, 3d shapes, faces, and emotional expressions, and then finally it arrives in consciousness. Something similar is true for every other sensation, and how they are integrated to give us our perception and understanding of the world.

As a consequence, children from birth learn all sorts of things without explicit instruction and often even much focal thought, include the great majority of the rules of language itself.

All of this is subjectively experienced as a sort of feel or intuition. It is described by philosophers such as Michael Polanyi and various phenomenologists. I studied with one of them, Eugene Gendlin, who developed a method called experiential focusing for helping people make use of their tacit knowledge (he called it felt meaning). You might want to take a look at his book Focusing.

One more point. The idea that all knowledge can be clearly explicated is an example of the denial of human finitudes that is common in much of Western philosophy, but that are affirmed by other schools Western philosophy, such as pragmatism, existential-phenomenology, and post-Wittgensteinian analytic philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is interesting. Wittgenstein argues that this idea of 'tacit knowledge' has no meaning. What the article describes is practice.

'My point is that their explanations would not lead me to the same ability that they had.' is a very Wittgensteinian thing to say. See i.e. the parable of the wayward pupil in the Investigations on what role understanding/practice even play in the context of a statement like 'would not lead me to the same ability that they had'

'But the more I pushed, the more exceptions and caveats and potential gotchas I unearthed.' W argues that this is a result of our concept of what it means to understand. Can you name an idea where this doesn't hold? W uses a great example of your knowledge of the Natural Numbers. Just because you hadn't thought of the number 10324 beforehand, does that mean your knowledge didn't encompass it? Before you attempt to foist the problem onto mathematical logic (it doesn't work, but the answers become longer than an HN comment) consider your concept of the color 'red'. What shape is it? Did you a prior have in your mind the shape of red? Is there a color that I could show you which you might consider red and someone else would not?

The core problem is this idea that 'explanations' in the source are implicitly able to be fully specified or that any knowledge exists without practice. See i.e. W's theory of language for a mind blowing explanation.

I think the real question I would pose to the author is, what knowledge do you think qualifies as 'explicit'? I think you will find your answers supremely unsatisfying. If you don't, try Kripke's 'Wittgenstein's Paradox' and Goldfarb's (admittedly much more dense) 'Rule Following'

</comment><comment><USER26> > Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.

This definition is slightly wrong. Tacit knowledge can't be described in words alone, but it can be captured through words alone.

One of the reasons we built FWD:Everyone ([https://www.fwdeveryone.com](https://www.fwdeveryone.com)) was to capture the tacit knowledge contained within email conversations. When you can see the entire conversation, you learn how people interact with one another and you can learn to model your own communication based off of that. That knowledge isn't contained in any individual sentence, paragraph, or message, but rather as an emergent property that's only apparent in the context of an entire conversation or many conversations.

There is a ton of value in this that can never be captured in a wiki, for example.

<comment><USER27> > you learn how people interact with one another and you can learn to model > your own communication based off of that.

This strikes me a little like "By reading lots of good code, you can learn to model your own code based on that". It probably helps, but a lot is dependent on context.

The blog post goes into this with the long quote about choosing tools and techniques for an appendectomy. How do you capture that sort of context in an email thread? Annotations like "Based on X and Y factors, I chose to write Z", where X and Y are not explicit in the email text?

I haven't looked too closely, but it seems to me that the primary value of these email threads (in terms of learning communication) is to provide a body of real-world examples - but there also needs to be applied experience (with feedback) with written communication for the lessons to really sink in.

<comment><USER26> > The blog post goes into this with the long quote about choosing tools and > techniques for an appendectomy. How do you capture that sort of context in > an email thread?

I mean in terms of our tool, the knowledge is either already in an email or it isn't. It's meant for retaining knowledge that's already being created anyway. You certainly could purposely capture knowledge in email for the purpose of being viewable and searchable in our tool (and some people do), but in that case there may be other better tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Been waiting ages for literally anything posted on commoncog.com to get traction on HN, because it's all interesting deep writing about meta-human issues, useful for "us lot" and invokes good discussion.

When I see a new post from commoncog, I don't read it right away. I think "right need to carve out half hour of quiet uniterrupted time for that later".

It's one of the few I have on my mobile phone RSS reader, the others being quanta magazine, and another interesting blog I found through HN.

So that's my praise, I recommend you add it to your readers too :-)

</comment><comment><USER29> We have neural networks in our brains which for some reason cannot be trained without practice in real world. No amount of reading about riding will train those real-time feedback loops that operate on much lower latencies then you can formulate conscious thoughts.

This is a limitation of our brains and not fundamental property of knowledge or information.

In AI neural networks which can ride bikes or recognize objects are easily introspected and copied. In humans this isn't implemented ;)

<comment><USER30> Isn't what we call thinking simply an introspection layer on top of our neural network hardware? Sometimes I wonder whether the entirety of what we call the mind is just an epiphenomenon that attempts to explain the workings of our neural network _after the fact_.

<comment><USER31> If that were true, then cognitive behavior therapy and meditation would have no effect. It's more likely a feedback loop between introspection and the neural network. Sometimes you need the slow, deliberate planning that comes with conscious thought.

<comment><USER30> But what if the urge to seek CBT is itself a part of our ex-post-facto narration?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I believe this is how you learn:

* I watch you do it. * You watch me do it. * Then I do it.

I have to watch someone else undertake a task to understand it. After, I attempt to undertake the task and receive feedback from the individual whom I watched first. Then after I've gathered the knowledge I can do the task. The context I learned about this approach was when I learned to use a chainsaw. But it has served me extremely well in both learning and teaching other topics over the years.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know of a service or website that matches mentors with apprentices?

I know there is [https://www.apprenticeship.gov/](https://www.apprenticeship.gov/) but I am thinking something more informal and online, e.g. a marketplace where you can match and pay $X/30 min. of quick and focused Q&A.

<comment><USER34> [http://codementor.io/](http://codementor.io/)

I've used it a couple times to get help with roadblocks and such..

Getting a second pair of eyes on your code is nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >> The process of learning tacit knowledge looks something like the following: you find a master, you work under them for a few years, and you learn the ropes through emulation, feedback, and osmosis — not through deliberate practice.

I feel fortunate to have stumbled into an organization where this was the case as a junior engineer. The company wasn't ever wildly successful, but I feel lucky to have worked with very smart people when I was very green, and couldn't make heads or tails anything.

Patience was certainly needed on their part I'm sure, and such frustration is likely what leads people to become pedagogical at times.

</comment><comment><USER35> As a bit of a thought experiment; would Simulation be the closest we have towards "Transmissionism"? I'm not arguing that it is or isn't, but whether we can approach those non-verbal and tacit knowledge as encoded through programs and data?

To throw out an easy counter-argument, we could say that Simulation/Programming is like comparing Words to an Image, aka nothing of the sort. Additionally, there is the difference between Simulation and Reality, where simulation simplifies or glosses over many elements of reality. Looking up the definition indicates that Passivity seems to be the key, and simulations are anything but passive.

To give a concrete example of what I mean, in my early career I worked at a defense contractor building a training simulator for a weapons platform. The training was to mimic the same training on a gun range. Soldiers were graded by the simulation as if it were the instructor with a sharp eye and a stopwatch. It tested everything from how long you held the trigger (at least three seconds), how you swiveled your head to scan for targets, identifying targets and relaying them to your vehicle commander, etc.

I would argue that it goes beyond Transmissionism, as it now corresponds far more to an actual reality than mere metaphors and words. However it does make me wonder where the line might be, if it even exists.

</comment><comment><USER36> In high school physics class there was one kid that seemed to be really good so one day I asked him what his trick was and he said, "I just pretend I'm the teacher". I thought that was a really clever trick. During class he was figuring out ways of how to copy the teacher and it seemed to work. He would consistently get top marks on tests. He was accumulating tacit knowledge whereas everyone else was copying formulas and drilling problem sets.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wrote my master's degree on innovation management. Tacit knowledge was termed by Michael Polyani and Nonaka and exploded this sub genre of knowledge management and innovation management. I recommend reading their seminal papers.

But it's all down to the type of knowledge involved in skills you have acquired such as biking or walking, and things where you can extoll an intuition versus explicit knowledge such as a pizza baking recipe.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is actually how knowledge was transmitted traditionally. As an apprentice/student you just copied the master who would steer/nudge you in the right direction occasionally. Otherwise you just did the activities blindly until slowly you self-regulated and moved onto deliberate practice stage. This can be most clearly seen in the study of martial arts. Musashi called it _Heiho /Hyoho_ in his _A book of five rings_.

I believe the key here is to focus learning on the overall activity (i.e. systems view) rather than the constituent individual pieces. Focusing on the latter just overwhelms you with too much detail leading to doubt and confusion. For example, in Software Development, if you try to focus on every single aspect like Correctness, Error handling, Generalization, Optimization etc. in the beginning you simply will never get anything done. Instead focus on just getting "a program" done using whatever knowledge you have. Once that is ready, then modify it deliberately for meeting all your other criteria.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is why language/framework design is so interesting. After enough time spent with one a developer will be running off tacit knowledge.

Extending/patching that doesn't fit in with tacit knowledge is also dangerous. React has done a great job of that, it looks much different than a few years ago, but the changed behaviors never felt "wrong" internally.

</comment><comment><USER40> When I finally learned how to ride a bike, I was annoyed that nobody had told me "to keep the bike balanced, if you start to fall to one side, turn the steering wheel in that direction".

\---

It's a good exercise to frequently try to verbalize your tacit knowledge. The alternative is to constantly be appealing to your own authority.

Lots of people have faulty tacit knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER41> Michael Polanyi's "The Tacit Dimension" is a good starting point on the concept.

</comment><comment><USER42> Tacit knowledge sounds like an untestable phenomenon, and simply lacking the words to describe certain neuromotor techniques doesn't mean that it cannot be communicated explicitly in theory. Perhaps in the future we'll have a way to stimulate the brain in exactly the right way in order to communicate how to keep your balance on (aka "ride") a bike.

Furthermore, articles that downplay the importance of practice, to me, seem like a bad idea. In my experience, people who claim a high level of general comprehension (but not technical) tend to lack the ability to implement any facet of their "tacit knowledge" at even a basic level.

</comment><comment><USER43> Dear bloggers. I hate it when you spend several paragraphs explaining your personal reasons for wanting to write about a topic, particularly when those reasons have nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Don't talk about it, be about it.

<comment><USER44> _I hate it when you spend several paragraphs explaining your personal reasons for wanting to write about a topic_

Literally the point of a blog. That's why it's _their_ blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> A long time ago in a philosophy of math class, our professor offered this problem: upon hatching chicks have to be separated by sex. Experienced poultry farmers know how to tell them apart from feel but it's not a process they can describe. The problem then was: how would they teach it to a new hire? The solution offered was that they have the rookie hold the chick in their hands and guess while the experienced farmer corrects them. This was a great example of how tacit knowledge is acquired.

</comment><comment><USER46> And explicit knowledge (that you can explain to others) is more important than tacit knowledge, if you're trying to coach or teach someone

Isiah Thomas was one of the best of all time, but was a disaster as a coach [https://www.sbnation.com/2015/5/5/8553115/isiah-thomas- new-y...](https://www.sbnation.com/2015/5/5/8553115/isiah-thomas-new-york- liberty-knicks-raptors-pacers-cba-fiu)

<comment><USER12> I don't think "knowledge that can't be put into words" is a good final definition of the skills that allow people to achieve excellence. It's an OK "first order approximation" but when it implies "nothing you can say will be useful", it seems more like a hindrance than an insight.

I've studied martial arts and body work. Naturally, many of the skills involved are taught hands-on rather than through a verbally specified sequence of actions. And it's definitely true that balance or an effective stance can't be taught by just sequences of positive commands ("stand straight, chin out" or whatever). However, high level (or more effective) skills _can_ be taught through a combination of hands-on direction and verbal direction telling the student to "explore", to "relax", to "be aware" \- these verbal direction represent internal, non-verbal processes ("balance centers", etc) and tells the student to yield to these. That yielding lets these processes get the skill and knowing how to so yield lets the skill be available. It's not avoidable verbal but it's not a simple rationalistic recipe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> "When I pushed these people on their judgments, they would try to explain in terms of principles or heuristics. But the more I pushed, the more exceptions and caveats and potential gotchas I unearthed."

It is a popular believe that being an expert on something doesn't mean you will be an expert on teaching that thing, but in this case it could also be that any number of implementations was possible, and the seniors had more clout or were more pushy.

<comment><USER48> I think of it the other way around: Until I can teach the thing to someone else, I am not yet an expert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It seems as if I've been using a different definition of deliberate practice to the author. They seem to imply that deliberate practice requires a regimented study program, but I've always seen it as "identify the things you are weak at and drill those things, rather than repeating tasks you are already comfortable with". Is there a name for the type of practice I've been doing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, K. Anders Ericsson (he of deliberate practice fame) calls it 'purposeful practice'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I believe deliberate practice can work in the same direction if the practitioner is aware of the fact that there will be huge gaps in the knowledge acquired through practice.

I like the idea of discarding the results of exploratory processes that GeePaw Hill elaborates very well. It removes the incentive of trying to reuse artifacts that were created "while learning" and just bring back the lessons learned.

</comment><comment><USER51> Most of my software design is "wordless." Part of it is because I have a brain that is wired a bit "funny." I'm sort of "on the spectrum," and get into a "fugue" when I code.

In fact, after coming out of the "fugue," I can have trouble with verbal articulation.

But when I am in the "fugue," I can actually design a pretty intense system, without writing down a thing.

</comment><comment><USER52> One very helpful thing to understand wrt this idea of "tacit knowledge" especially in terms of understanding and managing personal relationships...

You or someone you know may very well become aware of (i.e., _come to know_) what are your personal defects (insecurities, unproductive behavioral predispositions, etc) -- but this is in no way _at all_ means that you will be able to _change_.

</comment><comment><USER53> The John Boyd example is super interesting. My understanding is that he essentially built a framework for thinking about dogfighting, the OODA loop. Very similar to how the author put kids on tiny bicycles. You can't tell someone what to think, but you can _design a system_ that makes it so that they think about the right thing at the right time.

<comment><USER54> This is how we "teleport" thought from one person to another, we have to replay the same series of events that enable them to have the same thought patterns. Communicating and educating is basically replaying the stage for the same thoughts to form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> "For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."

― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4184-for-the-things-we- have...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4184-for-the-things-we-have-to- learn-before-we-can)

</comment><comment><USER56> This is why every attempt to "systematize all human knowledge" cannot succeed.

<comment><USER57> Tacit knowledge concept connects a lot of dots. It was a missing piece of the puzzle.

Really interesting article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Amazing post! I didn't know such type of knowledge existed. Eager to learn more.

</comment><comment><USER59> See [https://www.youtube.com/user/troygrady](https://www.youtube.com/user/troygrady) . Troy Grady is an extremely successful externaliser of tacit knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER60> > "Because we want to use it as a database layer. Quite risky ah."

Singapore represent!

</comment><comment><USER61> I kinda think he's talking about intuition. It's the non-verbal understanding that underpins mastery in any domain. If deliberate practice is the means, then tacit knowledge is the end.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm agreeing with the idea of the article, but I believe that Tacit knowledge which can't be attained with practice would call Talent or In-born gifts. For example, no matter how much chess I'll play and deliberately practice for 20 years I can't beat Fischer, Kasparov, Karpov etc.. since they are talented (Tacit knowledge) that doesn't mean they can't open their talent through books like "Bobby Fischer teaches Chess" or books about chess by Karpov (but who would do that during matches of chess). Deliberate Practice is the best way and most fast method for acquiring a skill

</comment><comment><USER63> Deliberate Practice leads to Tacit Knowledge.

Or rather the former trains the acquisition of the latter.

</comment><comment><USER64> Is having a mentor necessary ? Can't it be gained in other ways ?

</comment><comment><USER65> Deliberate practice builds tacit knowledge. Uninformative article.

<comment><USER66> Immersion builds tacit knowledge. Deliberate practice may or may not require immersion.

<comment><USER65> I can see that. I just don't (didn't?) see deliberate practice as not immersed. Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Tacit knowledge is the result of deliberate practice.

</comment><comment><USER68> Isn't there already a long philosophical analysis of this phenomenon — know- how vs know-what?

</comment><comment><USER69> In general, I agree with the notion that tacit knowledge is often more important than explicit knowledge - and that it may actually be the very essence of human expertise. However, it seems the author mixes some things up.

First of all, deliberate practice rests to a high degree on a) pre-existing knowledge on the structure of acquiring a skill and b) an established feedback standard that allows to evaluate your performance. These are obviously crucial aspects. If you don't know what characterizes expertise and if you don't know why you're not doing well - then it's difficult to make actual measurable progress. That said, it doesn't mean you can't become an expert at all in a field that does not have those elements currently available. It may just be that you need to put more effort into doing it, seek a mentor known for relevant skills or develop feedback mechanisms to evaluate your performance [1].

Thus, I don't think the distinction made between tacit knowledge and deliberate practice is really helpful. From my understanding, the concepts of "tacit knowledge" and of "deliberative practice" operate on two different levels. Tacit knowledge (or originally tacit knowing) refers to the implicit character of some knowledge. Its counterpart is explicit aka codified knowledge. Conflating deliberative practice with (the acquisition of) explicit knowledge seems counterproductive to me. It seems to me that the author wants to argue that deliberative practice only contributes to explicit knowledge.

I get that explicit knowledge may be needed to create learning environments (and gained before through codification of tacit knowledge) that respond well to the principles of deliberate practice. From my reading of Ericsson that does not mean, however, that deliberate practice only works to build up codified knowledge. Tacit knowledge is in itself a vague concept that is hard to grasp. I wouldn't be confident to assert that building up tacit knowledge happens without building up codified knowledge. Maybe someone knows more about that?

Another aspect of the article that concerns me represents the part about the acquisition of knowledge and expert systems. There seems to be another conflation of concepts. It is referred to Klein who (in reference to humans) warns about the overreliance on fixed procedures for decision-making. I agree with that but nevertheless I'm having a hard time with the argument in the article's context. For me this seems to be more of an argument about having a human making a decision than about the superiority of tacit knowledge over deliberative practice or even codified knowledge applied by a human. I get it, humans can build up tacit knowledge and therefore have an advantage over expert systems in previously unknown situations ... I just don't get the relevance for human acquisition of knowledge here which the article wants to be about.

A similar issue I have with the argument about the scope of deliberative practice and NDM as better alternative. Now I have to say I heard about the term NDM for the first time today (and I'm glad I got introduced, thanks!) but from what's written down in the article, it doesn't really seem to be in conflict with - or even that much qualitatively different compared to - deliberative practice: "you find a master, you work under them for a few years, and you learn the ropes through emulation, feedback, and osmosis". This seems to be possible under the concept of deliberate practice as well.

To get a better understanding, I've read another article from the same author [2] but I'm a bit confused. In the end, NDM just seems to offer more concrete procedures to acquire effective and adaptable mental models (in terms of deliberative practice) that help you to make better decisions. But that can't be the catch of NDM, is it?

[1] I'm currently reading Ericsson's book "Peak" and he mentions the Top Gun academy of the US Air Force as an example for the possibility to develop a "deliberative practice"-like environment.The program was designed to enhance figher pilots' performance by having those pilots surviving the initial air fights in Vietnam to become teachers to new pilots. Establishment of good practices took place through the constant exposure of the teachers to new recruits and constant training on usual fight situations.

[2] [https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to- practice...](https://commoncog.com/blog/putting-mental-models-to-practice- part-5-skill-extraction/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This might help clarify my problems with deliberate practice somewhat: [https://commoncog.com/blog/the-problems-with-deliberate- prac...](https://commoncog.com/blog/the-problems-with-deliberate-practice/)

<comment><USER69> First of all, thanks for your post! It was an interesting read and I've subscribed to get updates.

Yeah, that was really helpful. I think the argument you make about 'fractionated pools of expertise' is actually the most important. I'm still a bit confused about the differences between "practice" and "decision-making" and their relationship to knowledge (either codified or tacit) but I guess that will now be part of my list of things I want to learn more about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Blog posts are like youtube videos, you have to skip the first 30% to see the "actual" start.

</comment><comment><USER71> >[...] every time I touch on the topic of tacit knowledge, inevitably someone will pop up on Twitter or Hacker News or Reddit or email and protest that [...]

One of these is not like the others.

</comment><comment><USER72> Tacit knowledge is the lowest rung of understanding. It's the understanding that cats and dogs form, unable to talk but able to listen and consider. The main difficulty is that, because one cannot express tacit knowledge, one cannot reform or improve it.

Part of why operationalization is so important in the hard sciences is because it gives us access to otherwise-inacessible things, including tacit knowledge. The only knowledge that is tacit for the typical person is the knowledge of how to move muscles. For example, to whistle, the tacit portion is the pursing of the lips, but the rest of it is music theory which can be communicated and taught using language.

<comment><USER73> > only knowledge that is tacit for the typical person is the knowledge of how > to move muscles.

Thats's not really true.

If you are a native English speaker, it might surprise you to learn that English adjectives have a default order. We normally say "the big red ball" but "the red big ball" sounds decidedly odd unless there's an explicit contrast ("No, not the blue one. I want the _red_ big ball"). This is apparently taught in ESL classes, but neither I nor any of my native-speaker colleagues remember learning it in school.

You have an "intuitive" model of physics in your head that allows you to rapidly determine if piles of objects are stable without grinding through balance-of-forces calculations. It's not exact, and deviates from reality in interesting ways, but it's there. [https://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18327.short](https://www.pnas.org/content/110/45/18327.short)

You have all kinds of implicit priors that help you make sense of sensory input. You have some idea of the speed and smoothness with which things move, how an object's apparent size changes as you move towards or away from it and how it might look under different lighting conditions. People share some, but not all of these priors, and they're hard to elicit, hence the endless discussion about The Dress that was either black/blue or white/gold.

<comment><USER5> The Royal Order of Adjectives.

[https://www.lavc.edu/profdev/library/docs/Adjectives-and- adv...](https://www.lavc.edu/profdev/library/docs/Adjectives-and-adverbs.aspx)

<comment><USER73> Exactly. There is a rule but I would venture that very few native English speakers know it or were taught it; it's learned implicitly instead. I only found out there was a rule because I stumbled across the phenomenon doing a computational linguistics project.

My broader point (which I made poorly) is that native levels of language proficiency require a mix of explicit and implicit learning. There are certainly explicit rules for verb conjugation and agreement. Some things can be learned either way, like adjective order. Others seem to be mostly implicit: I can't give you a general rule for why "I asked her to marry me and she agreed" sounds fine but *"I asked her to marry me and she concurred" sounds weird.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introduction to Algorithmic Information Theory  - <AUTHOR> http://szabo.best.vwh.net/kolmogorov.html

<comment><USER2> Quote "2. A truly random string is not significantly compressible; its description length is within a constant offset of its length. Formally we say K(x) = Theta(|x|), which means "K(x) grows as fast as the length of x". But any finite random sequence can be found at some point in a pseudo-random generated sequence of sufficient length; thus can always be described by the generator function and the seed.</comment>


Creating cool pictures with a few lines of code - <AUTHOR> http://www.chriscoyne.com/cfdg/

<comment><USER2> Hey, I know that dude. I used to work with him. One of the guys behind SparkNotes/TheSpark, OkCupid, and now CrazyBlindDate.com.

Also check out Deliver the Dis [<http://www.chriscoyne.com/dis/index.html>] if you're into Context-Free Grammars and insulting people.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be interesting to use this with a supervisor program which receives a rating from the user about whether an image is appealing and then attempts to make images with similar characteristics.

<comment><USER4> Something like <http://www.electricsheep.org/> ?</comment></comment>


[Ask HN] what would the mileage of the Tesla be? - <AUTHOR>

I've seen many pictures like this in the recent past and thought.
http://teslarumors.com/News-2012-02-25-013.html
"What if they just added a steering wheel to that?"
How much would the mileage/efficiency increase? If the body/seats and all the misc... were removed and it was used as pure transportation scooter traveling at a reasonable speed, how far will it go? 2x, 4x, 10x?
Would love to hear from anyone that has a guess.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I have a guess concerning the street-legality of such setup.</comment>


Who submits and comments on HN? - <AUTHOR> Just out of curiosity I'd like to see statistics over where my fellow HN users are from.<p>Is this available anywhere? <comment><USER2> Some older posts/polls made on HN provide some interesting demographic facts, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332) Look also at [http://hnstats.appspot.com](http://hnstats.appspot.com) .

There are many various HN statistics on different blogs out there, I personally liked this one 3y old [http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report- social-network-de...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social- network-demographics-in-2012/)</comment>


Adobe's Ichabod and The Headless Search of Flash, AJAX - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adobe_ichabod_flash_ajax.php

<comment><USER2> This is all fine and well for content created with Flash and Ajax, but it just doesn't make sense to me to criticize Flash and Ajax because Google can't index a menu bar within applications built with the technologies.</comment>


Anywhere to see Y Combinator Founder Bios? - <AUTHOR>

I'd love to see what other stuff the Ycombinator founders created before they started their YC companies. I know the backgrounds of a few of them, like Drew Houston and Jessica Mah, but are there any sites that have more information? <comment><USER2> <http://www.startupsopensourced.com/e-book/>

Lots of YC companies in there

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks awesome. Thanks.</comment></comment>


China's chipmakers could use RISC-V to reduce impact of US sanctions - <AUTHOR> https://technode.com/2019/07/24/chinas-chipmakers-risc-v-sanctions/ <comment><USER2> > the competitors are beginning to sweat, even if it is just a little.

That's a big statement to make without backing it up. I haven't heard the competition ever mention RISC-V, let alone show any sweat at all over it. You'd expect at least a mention in their SEC filings if there was even the tiniest amount of sweat to wipe away. For now it is a completely silent non- issue.

Maybe the author is trying too hard to be a cheer leader. RISC-5 has potential to be big. But making stuff up about it doesn't lend well to the author's credibility.</comment>


Probably the best programming language blog. - <AUTHOR> http://this-plt-life.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> Not really a blog at all: just a collection of snarkily titled animated GIFs...</comment>


Ask HN: Would you be interested in a "cyberpunk" inspired news site? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I've been thinking about starting a blog / news site covering topics like privacy, cryptography, robotics, software etc, with a critical view on their evolution and potential effects on society at large.
Ideally it would be made of long form, researched,  in depth articles and interviews with experts in those fields.
I'd also like to feature regular "hackers" doing cool stuff (like the guy who traveled to shenzhen to build his own iPhone)
What do you think of this idea ? Would you be interested in reading such a site if it existed ? <comment><USER2> Everything I have read and heard about successful blogs is that people write regularly for a year or two or more and eventually people care enough to pay attention. There are probably several reasons:

1\. Writing and publishing everyday or so over a sustained period of time improves a person's skill at writing in general and writing for an audience in particular.

2\. One of the ways popular blogs capture first time readers is with a back catalog of other interesting posts that suggest the site is worth book- marking/revisiting.

In terms of news sites, pick a topic to start because I can go just about anywhere for a random mix of subjects. Making one is probably harder than a blog because a news site is competing with Tom's Hardware, Hacker News Reddit, Google News, Facebook, and so on. Without staff, that will be really hard.

Good luck.

<comment><USER3> >I can go just about anywhere for a random mix of subject

You're not wrong that this is short-term easier to establish an audience, but your long-term goal is to get to a point where a hypothetical reader of your blog will say "Well, yeah, you could find that topic anywhere, but personally I'm more interested in $NAME's opinion on the topic".

The best way to establish that is put out really good content until you've built up enough blogger 'cred' that you can tell me about other parts of you and I'll just wanna know.

<comment><USER2> The quoted phrase was made in regard to creating a news site. I interpreted the original question as considering a news site to be an alternative to a blog. My apologies for the confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that of course most people here would be generally interested in reading such content, and if you can make a compelling case that there is a niche or intersection of interests that isn't well represented at a level of depth/complexity, then you have an interesting proposal.

However, you are describing two very different things. With a blog, one simply begins to write blog posts. There is no other approach to take, as you must before anything else establish your credibility as a writer within a domain of knowledge.

A news site is a far different proposal. Before you put a lot of effort into it, you need to figure out what might be crassly termed a 'business model', which in more general terms is simply, "here is my vision: what work is required to make it a reality; how will that work be done; who will do that work; why will they chose to do that work; how do I expect to benefit from this; do I still like what I am envisioning."

I think there's still lots to be dissatisfied with in the current landscape of content providers and aggregators.

For instance, a lot of nominal 'content providers' bulk up their content flow with hasty recapitulations of content elsewhere; that this activity avails them at all is, I believe, in particular, indicative of an unfilled niche in content aggregation. One frequently sees, out in the boonies of the not- directly-for-profit internet, knowledgable and useful summaries and introductions of content hosted elsewhere. Fleshed out more thoroughly with a contextualization of what something means, how and why it matters, and what it should lead the reader to anticipate, such material could facilitate reader access to expert opinion and information that would otherwise be beyond them.

As another example, editorial oversight, in particular, is in a state of near- crisis, everywhere. This is crucial, as it is the lynchpin of journalism. A different model of quality assurance would be transformative.

<comment><USER5> A blog can be the first step to something bigger. "Just start" would be the blog version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the market might be saturated. There are 2 cyberpunk news sites that I know of and they mostly report the same events.

Sites: [https://www.neondystopia.com](https://www.neondystopia.com) [https://n-o-d-e.net](https://n-o-d-e.net)

<comment><USER7> Looks like [https://n-o-d-e.net](https://n-o-d-e.net) is written using org- mode. Also who is the author, i am not able to find any about link.

<comment><USER8> His name is Chris, he's a friendly guy if you shoot him an email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That sounds really great. I think that the day-to-day "breaking news" style reporting on this subject is common, but longer more visual pieces that get into the nitty-gritty are rare.

I'm a designer and journalist very interested in similar areas. I just started releasing a podcast focusing on similar subject matter: [http://metaverse.audio](http://metaverse.audio)

If you end up moving forward I'd love to chat. firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely ! Btw I love the podcast, totally worth a listen. Production quality is top notch. Definitely on par with Motherboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel like lainchan.org is related, you can often find these kinds of discussions there. Site was recently reset so it looks a bit empty.

The community publishes a magazine (lainzine), but I have personally not read it yet. If you want to do this kind of stuff just for fun and don't mind a smaller audience, you could look into that.

<comment><USER11> don't forget lainchan.jp ;)

<comment><USER12> hmm the .jp international clique really does spread far and wide...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Like [https://www.exolymph.news](https://www.exolymph.news)?

<comment><USER14> This is good, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's already available at [http://rekall.me/](http://rekall.me/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh God, this is brilliant. Thanks for the bookmark !

<comment><USER16> If you like that, this might sideline you for weeks:

[http://randomghost.tumblr.com/](http://randomghost.tumblr.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I find HN (and most of modern life in general) pretty cyberpunk as it is.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. We are only already often blind to that fact, think about how many years have passed since "Snowden" alone..

2013 has been a pretty seminal point in time imho – ubiquitous mobile computing/internet, Google basically buying a DARPA owned Boston Dynamics, etc, etc.

It has only been accelerating since then (artificial wombs anyone?). We are fully living in "hardcore" cyperpunk times already for sure..

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Do you mean cypherpunk?

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

<comment><USER20> They probably meant cyberpunk, since they mentioned the combination of techology and social impact.

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

<comment><USER21> Cyberpunk is an aesthetic, Cypherpunk is sociopolitical.

Thematically there is very little different between cyberpunk and steampunk.

<comment><USER22> You might enjoy this essay I wrote about cyberpunk politics: [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/10/27/the-cyberpunk- sensibil...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/10/27/the-cyberpunk-sensibility/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So basically a longer version of [https://twitter.com/thegrugq](https://twitter.com/thegrugq) \+ hackaday ? what technical level you would target for your audience ?

</comment><comment><USER24> If you create solid, original content that is interesting, people will respond. Focus on how to market the content if you are confident you can create something people want to read.

</comment><comment><USER14> For anyone interested in cyberpunk and electronic music [http://www.legowelt.org/cyberzine.htm](http://www.legowelt.org/cyberzine.htm). An outstanding magazine by Danny Wolfers. We need more in depth stuff like this and less thumbnail blogs and tweets.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hi, I've written for n-o-d-e.net, exolymph.news, and 2600 (all gratis, hopefully neondystopia.com soon). I'd be very interested in your site and to do some writing if you'd have me. Hit me up at email@example.com or @Famicoman if you'd like to chat.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sort of an above ground version of the barely underground 2600? Sure. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly)

</comment><comment><USER25> <zabana>: The threshold question is: do you want to make money on a "cyberpunk-inspired" news site operated as a business, or is your "cyberpunk- inspired" hobby site expected to lose money--as hobbies typically do?

I've started both and worked as a journalist for both. Hobby sites are more fun. News sites are more work.

If you can make a decent income from this site, then you might be encouraged to write for it when you might otherwise be uninterested or unwilling (and you also might be able to hire freelancers or a staff). On the other hand, as anyone following the digital media business knows, making a decent income from an online news site is a non-trivial task.

</comment><comment><USER26> Can you say more about what definition of cyberpunk you'd be using for determining if content was relevant for that topic? If you mean "topics like privacy, cryptography, robotics, software etc, with a critical view on their evolution and potential effects on society at large", I'd be interested if there was well- curated content in these areas.

If I can make one suggestion, it would be to honestly ask yourself if you are able to get and curate this content in a way that'd be compelling for others and not just yourself. If it seems like that may not be the case, perhaps get others involved in helping to curate? Not sure if that's the answer.

</comment><comment><USER27> Cyberpunk is "high tech" \+ "low life". In a sense, the app-driven gig economy is to me the embodiment of that combination, but that's still boring and not really news at this point.

Now if you want more drama, you could talk about more sensational stuff such as how drones are making their way into organized crime, for example how the Japanese police and the Yakuza are starting some sort of evolutionary arms race around drones that transport illegal goods. Also how 3d printing is making into lockpicking and weapon manufacturing... stuff like that.

</comment><comment><USER28> Who is making the critical views? That would make 90% of my decision with the remaining 10% being writing style/ability.

I already know of a handful of people that comment on those topics that others may describe as wearing a tinfoil hat - If that's the style of criticism then no, absolutely not. Not interested. If it's more positive but pointing out where it's possible to go wrong I might give it a go.

Personally speaking too, I'd much more likely subscribe to a podcast than consistently read articles - My downtime is mostly only during commutes.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yes. This isn't even a question. The answer is yes. The ubiquitous 'clean, modern, "Tech is neat! :D Business and advertising! :D Everything is safe! :D" aesthetic' is wrong. It's a monolithic lie, and we all know it.

The biggest contributing factor to the decline of the cyberpunk aesthetic in the 80's-90's was how quickly it became realism. If you read a William Gibson novel now, it would be like reading William Faulkner in the 1800's.

(I know Faulkner didn't publish in the 1800's. don't go there, this is my reply and that means I decide how time works here.)

The implications of the use of the advanced tools we build on the individual, and the species as a whole, is rarely considered with the gravity it deserves, at least by the vast majority of end users, I believe, in large part, because capitalism is predatory, and subsequently the tools it uses to accomplish it's end must be uniformly masked, behind a layer of safe aesthetics. A revival of the cyberpunk aesthetic in general, which paints technology as dangerous, empowering, and hints that the deeper into the technical details you get, the more empowered you become, would be a welcome return to realism from the magazine glossy, UI/UX of modern services. I mean seriously, this "Mumblecore" jargon and friendly faces on services which, let's be frank here, are simply the injections of profit and information siphoning mechanisms (the successful ones anyway) into monetary transactions for goods and services, and exchanges of information, between people, which already existed, in exchange for a razor-thin layer of convenience, and a gross distortion to their psychological faculties for perceiving value, to the end of contributing to the centralization of money, thus access to resources, and data, thus the ability to derive information, into the hands of a few, and creating (I'm trying my best to tone down the hyperbole here) impermeable veil of branding, that obfuscates as completely as possible, what anything actually is, or does.

(Don't go there. It's my reply, that means I can nest as many clauses in a statement as I want.)

If your blog even piques someone's curiosity, or contributes peripherally to a compulsion to dig deeper into how the layers of complex systems underlying the mechanisms we use to interact with the world now work, it was worth every minute you spent on it up to that point. Seriously, do it.

Speaking from personal experience, if you had shown me an ad for a "coding bootcamp" when I was 10, I would have chosen.. literally anything else to get into. Fortunately, I got my hands on a copies "Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller", and "Shadowrun" instead. The sentiment of that art, the feeling of those ideas, with regards to technology, has kept my interest alive through day after day of questioning whether or not this specific impending bout of 'meeting business requirements' in which I am about to engage means I am a terrible person.

Just do it dude. You know you want to.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd be interested in helping out. Please get in touch! [https://apeace.github.io/contact.html](https://apeace.github.io/contact.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> _...covering topics like privacy, cryptography, robotics, software etc, with a critical view on their evolution and potential effects on society at large. Ideally it would be made of long form, researched, in depth articles and interviews with experts in those fields. I 'd also like to feature regular "hackers" doing cool stuff (like the guy who traveled to shenzhen to build his own iPhone)_

That's Wired magazine.

<comment><USER32> Wired is a shell of what it once was. I've got issues going back to 1998 and it is sad. Today it's mostly fluffy pieces with maybe one longhorn, and 75% sponsored content or advertising.

<comment><USER33> Ars Technica then? That said, Cyberpunk to me would be more deep dives on brain-computer interfaces, signs of the robot apocalypse or not (probably mostly not), and weird but not quite fringe science like DIY Life Extension.

But like another posted said, just go do it and see if it attracts an audience IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> oh "cyberpunk" ! so long time I didnt' hear this term. How many lost illusions. Amazon and Facebook is what we have instead, and billions of consumers..

do it

</comment><comment><USER35> That idea sounds fantastic! I would definitely be interested. I'm sure I would end up spending a significant amount of time on the site.

</comment><comment><USER32> Only if it meets the following criteria:

1) Apolitical. No editorializing. No political opinions what so ever. Just the absolutely facts.

That's it. There is enough out there already that you're way behind the curve. However, IMHO, if you produce something that is apolitical, and stays on the facts without allowing your personal political ideology to bleed through, it would be really wonderful.

<comment><USER5> Privacy, cryptography, and even _the uses of_ software in general are almost by definition political. By claiming "cyberpunk," it sounds like OP is proposing something exactly opposite of what you're suggesting.

Not that there's anything wrong with what you're suggesting, but it sounds like you're at the city counsel meeting for the new zoo, and you're saying "OK, but no animals."

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I also make one of these (I don't write the articles but I aggregate them): www.glitchet.com

</comment><comment><USER37> Absolutely would - if you're talking about original content.

However if what you're suggesting is 'lets be the 50,000th site to cover the guy who built his own iPhone' \- then little point, already follow too many sites that regurgitate the same content.

</comment><comment><USER38> So basically something like Boing Boing?

If your execution is equally good, sure, I'd read that.

</comment><comment><USER39> You might want to take a look at [http://neuromaencer.com/visualise/](http://neuromaencer.com/visualise/) to get your fix of Cyberpunk aesthetics

</comment><comment><USER40> From the technical angle, we're well-covered.

From the cyberpunk angle, there was a Facebook page I used to follow doing this sort of coverage; but ended up being too high-level.

I _personally_ don't think I would read it.

</comment><comment><USER41> You mean like [https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Yes; my life isn't as exciting as I let on though so you might be disappointed..

TBH most of the content on theintercept feels pretty cyberpunk to me though...

</comment><comment><USER43> Seems as good a place as any to mention: [http://archillect.com/](http://archillect.com/)

</comment><comment><USER44> All things that I love. I'd read that.

</comment><comment><USER45> Stop thinking and do it, the worst thing that could happen is that you just learn something new. =]

</comment><comment><USER46> "...but the street finds its own uses for things."

Is surely the epitome of the hacker mindset.

Please do, I will read.

</comment><comment><USER47> Cyberpunk in the William Gibson sense?

Or Cypherpunk?

</comment><comment><USER48> Yes, probably so. Sign me up.

</comment><comment><USER49> Write it and they will come!

</comment><comment><USER50> Sure! That sounds great.

</comment><comment><USER51> Sounds like Slashdot.

</comment><comment><USER52> I would read it.

</comment><comment><USER53> Very much so!

</comment><comment><USER54> +1 from me.

</comment><comment><USER55> yes!

</comment><comment><USER56> yes please

</comment><comment><USER57> Please do it. You could crowd source some writing and act as editor.

</comment><comment><USER58> No. Go figure out how to cure cancer. Or dig us out of this bat-shit crazy populist-nationalist insanity sweeping the planet. Or bring jobs to the millions of unemployed young Arab men who are apparently hot, bored, and unemployed enough to wage jihad. Or install solar panels in the desert. But for the love of all that's holy, please, don't waste your precious life on producing another niche news site.</comment>


Simply Statistics - <AUTHOR> http://simplystatistics.org/2013/05/06/why-the-current-over-pessimism-about-science-is-the-perfect-confirmation-bias-vehicle-and-we-should-proceed-rationally/ <comment><USER2> Title of the post: "Why the current over-pessimism about science is the perfect confirmation bias vehicle and we should proceed rationally"</comment>


Show HN: Wear it Her Way – Clothing recommendations for guys from girls - <AUTHOR> http://www.wearitherway.com

<comment><USER2> I thought it will be a cool blog with cool clothes chosen by girls...but see nothing!

I have AdBlock, I suppose the Facebook login is hidden, but where are the outfits?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. We have aggregated all the clothes from multiple online stores. You sign up and can pick out what you like as a list and then submit it to the girls for them to review. They will review your choices based on what you are looking for and your profile which is populated from your facebook. I wasn't aware that AdBlock hides facebook login. I'll definitely look in to this.

<comment><USER2> Oh, so that's completely the opposite of what I've thought. Nice idea, too bad that I personally hate browsing clothes, would be more keen to choose from outfits pre-approved by girls my age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea. One initial question -- why wouldn't the girls just say yes to all items to get max commission?

<comment><AUTHOR> The way it works is that you get commission when someone buys an item from a list you have reviewed. Even if you disliked the item. When lists are submitted they are shared with a limited number of people so that the commission isn't split too many ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Show HN: Wear it His way - Clothing recommendations for girls from guys.

Sexist?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, any feedback on my site/idea appreciated..

</comment><comment><USER5> is the facebook integration strictly necessary? Does it work without?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi you can now sign up without facebook integration here [http://www.wearitherway.com/users/sign_up](http://www.wearitherway.com/users/sign_up)</comment></comment>


BPF at Facebook and beyond - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/801871/c81eb8656543805f/ <comment><USER2> Excuse me while I shill for my employer but we're indeed big fans of BPF at Facebook.

Our L4 load balancer is implemented entirely in BPF byte code emitting C++ and relies on XDP for "blazing fast" (comms approved totally scientific replacement for gbps and pps figures...) packet forwarding. It's open source and was discussed here at HN before [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17199921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17199921).

We discussed how we use eBPF for traffic shaping in our internal networks at Linux Plumber's Conference [http://vger.kernel.org/lpc- bpf2018.html#session-9](http://vger.kernel.org/lpc-bpf2018.html#session-9)

We presented how we enforce network traffic encryption, catch and terminate cleartext communication, again, you guessed, with BPF at Networking@Scale [https://atscaleconference.com/events/networking- scale-3/](https://atscaleconference.com/events/networking-scale-3/) (video coming soon, I think.)

Firewalls with BPF? Sure we have 'em. [http://vger.kernel.org/lpc_net2018_talks/ebpf-firewall- LPC.p...](http://vger.kernel.org/lpc_net2018_talks/ebpf-firewall-LPC.pdf)

In addition to all these nice applications we heavily rely on fleet wide tooling constructed with eBPF to monitor:

      - performance (why is it slow? why does it allocate this much?)
      - correctness (collect evidence it's doing its job like counters and logs. this should never happen, catch if it does!)

...in our systems.

<comment><USER3> > \- performance (why is it slow? why does it allocate this much?)

One of the pieces of fleet-wide tooling that heavily uses eBPF is PyPerf, which we talked about publicly at Systems@Scale in September ("Service Efficiency at Instagram Scale" \- [https://atscaleconference.com/events/systems- scale-2/](https://atscaleconference.com/events/systems-scale-2/) \- video also coming soon, I think).

<comment><USER4> Is there any public code for these perf tools?

<comment><USER2> [https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/tree/master/examples/cpp/pype...](https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/tree/master/examples/cpp/pyperf)

<comment><USER5> woah I hadn't seen that.. sounds like PySpy but implemented in BPF. That's crazy and cool: [https://github.com/benfred/py- spy](https://github.com/benfred/py-spy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Facebook, he began, has an upstream-first philosophy, taken to an extreme; > the company tries not to carry any out-of-tree patches at all. All work done > at Facebook is meant to go upstream as soon as it practically can. The > company also runs recent kernels, upgrading whenever possible.

I was chatting to a Facebook engineer on their use of BPF this summer and heard the same thing, which was surprising to me. There seem to be a number of companies that take advantage of Linux being licensed under GPL and keep their own forks/patches of the kernel that they use internally (anecdotally, I've heard Google does this), and the they stay on some old version, which apparently Facebook doesn't do.

<comment><USER7> I can't wait until this is the norm. Facebook (and presumably, Google if they wanted to) can do this with an army of engineers and some excellent continuous deployment systems. I'm hoping these kinds of systems become commoditized over time and regular companies can stay close to the latest kernel version at all times

<comment><USER8> Google can't necessarily upstream everything because of social problems in the kernel process. For example their datacenter TCP improvements have never been accepted by the gatekeeper of the net subsystem, which was a significant motivation to develop QUIC.

<comment><USER9> Reinventing TCP over UDP is sortof silly, I hope they have a better reason than "they don't want to upstream our changes" lol.

<comment><USER8> Isn't it a pretty good reason? gRPC is terrible in a datacenter context without Google's internal TCP fixes that Linux won't adopt (and which have been advocated for in numerous conference papers since at least 2009). If they are steadfast cavemen what other workaround exists?

<comment><USER10> What parts of gRPC are fixed by using it over QUIC vs. TCP (presuming intra-DC traffic and equally long-lived flows)?

<comment><USER8> Latency caused by packet loss. TCP needs microsecond timestamps and the ability to tune RTOmin down to 1ms before it is suitable for use in a datacenter. With the mainline kernel TCP stack you are looking at, at a minimum, a 20ms penalty whenever a packet is dropped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> BPF is awesome. We build a full rust toolchain that targets it [https://github.com/solana-labs/rust](https://github.com/solana-labs/rust)

<comment><USER12> That looks cool! Any chance it gets upstreamed into rust proper? And if so, is there a place to keep track of that progress?

<comment><USER11> We would love to, maybe in a few months as we stabilize the changes.

One challenge is that bpf upstreaming is much harder. We had to add support for relocations, spilling, multiple return values, and a few other things that might not be needed by the C bpf folks.

<comment><USER6> > We had to add support for relocations, spilling, multiple return values, and > a few other things that might not be needed by the C bpf folks.

I'm curious why C BPF programs wouldn't need this.

<comment><USER11> There is no Linux usecase asking for it. We happen to be using bpf outside of the kernel.

<comment><USER6> Ah, that explains it. To be clearer, I should have probably instead asked why you needed those things ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Bounded loops and concurrency management sounds pretty awesome. Can't wait till Cloudflare's next write up on BPF with these new features.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a difference between BPF and eBPF?

<comment><USER15> Short answer: no, same thing

Original bpf is a much simpler bytecode. Ebpf extended it and made it essentially x86_64 assembly (semantically). Then we all decided to call ebpf bpf for reasons.

<comment><USER16> Isn't it the case that you still need original BPF for seccomp?

<comment><USER17> The old classic BPF is still used by seccomp, but in the kernel transparently converted into eBPF. In the kernel we dropped the notion of eBPF and just call everything BPF (as the old classic BPF is pretty much a thing of the past and not extended / developed any further).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is there a easy to use Golang library for eBPF? I do know that Cilium / cloudflare are attempting to build one but I gather that the project is not yet ready

<comment><USER19> Can you define ready? The functionality of the library is solid, it's based on code we're using in production. We've not committed to a stable API however.

(I'm one of the maintainers of said library.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool that the term isn't defined once in the post.

<comment><USER21> It's hard to decide what we need to define and what we don't. In this case, I kind of opted for assuming that the readers know what BPF is, given that a fairly high percentage of our articles seem to be about BPF these days. Still, I'll try to include a link next time, sorry.

Meanwhile, the LWN kernel index ([https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Berkeley_Packet_Filter](https://lwn.net/Kernel/Index/#Berkeley_Packet_Filter)) will lead you to more information about BPF than you ever wanted.

<comment><USER22> This is what the HTML <abbr> tag is for.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Perl coming back? - <AUTHOR> Is perl coming back? Is it still a good career path to choose for exp or new coders?<p>http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html <comment><USER2> This kind of question comes up a lot, not just about Perl, but about Ruby, Cobol, PHP, Java, Haskell, etc. Unfortunately, it doesn't really have an answer for two reasons.

Firstly, the popularity of a language in no way predicts your potential future earnings if you learn that language. PHP is probably the world's most widely used language, yet the average salary for a PHP developer is lower. I found learning VBA immensely useful, but it was a frustrating language to use. I love using Ruby and Python, but PHP work is much easier to find. Ruby taught me a lot about programming, so it was definitely worth learning.

Secondly, developers are not good or bad because of the language they use, but because of the value they provide. You could be a shockingly bad developer, but excellent at explaining difficult concepts in VisualBasic to the rich and powerful - you'll probably get rich.

Essentially, you need to reframe your question, and then answer it yourself. What are you hoping to get out of programming? Do you want to be rich? Do you enjoy solving problems? Are you happy to work every hour of the day, or do you want to get out at 5pm every night? Which areas of programming make you feel most comfortable - writing CRUD apps or complex algorithms? Do you have any types of company you would refuse to work for (say gambling or finance)? Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Do you prefer to work in a small company or a large corporate? These kinds of questions will narrow your choices and help you to choose a career path.

So... you might learn Perl, which causes you to get a job you end up hating but introduces you to somebody that recommends you learn Haskell, which gets you the job you love for gazillions per year. In other words, how the $%&# should we know?

</comment><comment><USER3> Perl has been around for a long time. Given its popularity as a language used for simple web services and system administration there has been a lot of code written. A lot of code written also means there's a lot of code to maintain.

When it comes to programming you should pick a language you are comfortable with and use it often. Once you have mastered simple programming methodologies, moving between languages will be relatively easy.

If you want to learn something that's going to get you a job quicker, go to indeed.com or simplyhired.com and search the various languages in the job listings in your local area or where you want to work. You'll get a better gauge of what hiring managers are looking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> i check dice, indeed and simplyhired and openings are pop up alot, but its hard to tell with HR people posting the Jobs and they know nothing about the field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i'll defer to alan perlis on this: "a language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

does perl offer something distinctly different from other, younger languages? IMHO, not really.

there _is_ a bunch of perl code out there that needs maintenance, which is why i learned just enough perl to _read_ it. but who truly gets into programming to maintain something that's already built? might as well learn COBOL if that's how you think.

</comment><comment><USER5> Perl 6, a new language inspired by Perl, is coming. ;)

IMO; Neither it or Perl 5 provide particular advantages as a general career path at this point...aside perhaps from getting out in front of Perl 6 on the chance it suddenly becomes the next big thing.

That's not to say Perl and Perl 6 are not worth knowing and using. I find The approach to errors in Perl 6 to look like an attractive future. But a lot of Perl's traditional strength in regular expressions appears in other languages. and I'm not sold on the idea that Perl's contextual evaluation semantics outweigh the textual complexity it introduces when reading source code.

</comment><comment><USER6> [Ignoring that the methodology can be completely flawed ...]

It's difficult to estimate the errors without finding the complete dataset and being a statistician, but let's try anyway.

We can look at the lower curves and assume that they are wavy because of some noise error. The curves of the VB and Python (and close languages) go up and down between .5% and 1%, and that value is similar to the monthly change.

So my guess is that the noise for the languages in the lower part of the graph is close to 1%. Then a variation of .2% of Perl is not meaningful. Don't get too happy now, and if next month it goes down .3% don't get sad.

</comment><comment><USER7> It really isn't coming back, and I hope it never does. Becoming a Perl expert is pretty career limiting, because you will need to learn another language at some point, and none of them are perl-like so you gain no advantage being a master with perl.

<comment><USER8> Actually, JavaScript is a lot like Perl. [http://www.ocpsoft.org/opensource/javascript-is-the-new- perl...](http://www.ocpsoft.org/opensource/javascript-is-the-new-perl/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> perl was never gone baby!

</comment><comment><USER10> No.

</comment><comment><USER11> I never trust in tiobe. Never ever ever :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Not if you believe in using the best tools for the job.

<comment><USER13> Are you implying that Perl is never the best tool?

<comment><USER12> Perl is rarely the best tool.

<comment><USER14> Any single language is only rarely the best tool. Or do you have discovered the silver bullet of programming languages?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Publishing Your Ebook For Nerds – Lessons Learned - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2014/02/publishing-your-ebook-for-nerds-lessons-learned.php

<comment><USER2> That's great - thank you for sharing, Daniel.

I'm interested though in why you chose video as your chosen format? I've read lots of your writings through the years here on HN and you're clearly a writer. What's the reason behind the Youtube option? Just curious.

Thanks again - shared.</comment>


Saudis Back Travis Kalanick's New Startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudis-back-travis-kalanicks-new-startup-11573122604?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> Makes sense. Why get the blood money via proxy through Softbank when you can simply get the blood money straight from the source?

<comment><USER3> perceived Japanese politics-neutral stalking horse I intermediary allows you to get Trump endorsement [0] while superficially obfuscating ties to Saudi money.

[0] [https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/28/masa_son_...](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/28/masa_son_im_voluntarily_investing_50_billion_in_us_because_im_impressed_by_trumps_passion_energy.html)

<comment><USER4> Who let their Markov chain in here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This could actually be a viable business if they don't overextend themselves. However I question whether operating their own restaurants within the kitchens really makes sense long term. If they're doing it to test out the concept that's fine, but longer term it places them in direct competition with their prospective virtual restaurant customers (tenants).

</comment><comment><USER6> Can somebody explain what a cloud kitchen is? What a terrible use of the already overloaded cloud.

<comment><USER7> Delivery only restaurant space. They provide the Kitchen and associated accessories, You (The chef) cook and use delivery platforms to make money. It could work, real estate costs are huge for restaurants.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it includes anything to actually.. cook with like a stove.

<comment><USER7> I didnt see stove on their website but it has listed these things :

Three Compartment Sink, Hand Wash Sink, Shared Dry, Cold & Frozen Storage, Commercial Exhaust Hood, Stainless Steel Work Benches, Commercial Refrigeration.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Firing mods and stealing content: Stack Exchange cooperating with community? - <AUTHOR> https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333965/239121 <comment><USER2> This combined with the new CEO and the previous issue regarding third-party ads fingerprinting users most likely means they're circling the drain and are desperately trying to save the ship.

It's a shame as I feel they had a decent shot at profit with Careers/Jobs as well as running their own developer-focused ad network with vetted ads and no tracking.</comment>


Our Comrade the Electron - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/talks/our_comrade_the_electron.htm <comment><USER2> Great read, centers around Lev Sergeyevich Termen, or Léon Theremin, who invented a great many cool things, such as a listening device that is effectively the precursor to RFID tags.</comment>


Show HN: An opensource, distributed app store - <AUTHOR> http://appshare.co <comment><USER2> The use of the VB6 logo can cause you problems. It's more in the abandonware field, but big corps lawyers sometimes enforce the trademarks just in case. Also, at first look I thought it was a warez site.

Anyway, I tried it and it was a form editor that is similar to the old VB6 form editor. Very nice, I still miss it when I need to make a simple form with two buttons, a textbox and some simple logic behind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, your right, I have already been asked from someone at MS (not in an official capacity though) to take down the VB6 logo. Ok, good to hear that you found it similar to the old VB6 form editor. I guess I am on the right track then. I'll continue and try to make all the VB6 style controls in November

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Appshare is a distributed appstore which distributes apps as a HTML file. Ask me any questions you may have here.

<comment><USER3> the mobile handelling is lacking, ill check it out when im at a desktop

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it doesn't work on mobile yet.</comment></comment></comment>


C/C++ Extension for Visual Studio Code - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/03/31/cc-extension-for-visual-studio-code/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for this. If this is similar to the C++ debugger I remember from my use of VS years ago, I'll be very pleased and switch my students learning C on Macs from XCode to VS Code.

It seems to me that this should be announced on the VS Code discussion forum. It would probably generate a lot of excitement with users encouraging others to try it, a lot of useful feedback, feature requests, and discussion of the feature requests, users helping other users understand the features, and so on...if only VS Code actually HAD a real discussion forum to post it to, that is.</comment>


Announcing Source Code Pro - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro.html#more-2946

<comment><USER2> Cool a open sourced font biased towards programming language charaters.

of note on the release to many will be this:

"Where are the bitmaps?

I understand that many coders prefer working with bitmapped monospaced fonts. If you fit this description, I regret to inform you that you will be disappointed at the Source Code fonts in this regard. In today's rendering environments of Retina displays, DirectWrite, Clear Type, and font smoothing we decided to target antialiased rendering environments only. ".

But I suspect there are more than enough bitmap fonts abound out there already to abuse, so at least people can at least start to learn how to use fonts that wont induce a change release every new display that come out. Also easier to scale.</comment>