Why time appears to speed up with age - <AUTHOR> http://everything2.com/user/Professor%20Pi/writeups/Why%20time%20appears%20to%20speed%20up%20with%20age <comment><USER3>
      This makes sense; for instance when you are 10 years of age, a year
      represents 10% of your life, and seems like a very long time. However,
      when you are 50 years old, one year has reduced to only 2% of your
      life, and hence seems only one-fifth as long.

Interesting hypothesis, and he makes it _look_ very scientific with the formulae and all, but it's still a wild crazy guess that delivers no actual falsifiable prediction. I think for claims of such magnitude, there should be a modicum of neurological or information-theoretical basis involved - <USER2> we get to read repeated statements about how groundbreaking the idea is.

The article makes claims that at 30 life is essentially 3/4ths over which to me, while holding no subjective truth as far as I can tell, at least exhibit some self reference in the way that after three lines of statements the article's content seemed 75% over yet the actual text went on for much longer.

Subjectively time seems to go by faster the older we get, but that doesn't mean these bold claims are necessarily anywhere close to the truth. Personally, my relationship with time has certainly changed over the years, including the perception of a speed-up, but I also notice that some activities or states seem to last just as long (if not longer) subjectively as they did when I was 16.

 _My_ pet hypothesis is there are multiple factors involved in "the speedup", and that a large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well. This would mean as we get more experienced, an increasingly bigger amount of the average day consists of things we already did many times before so we don't store those moments in memory. That would result in increasingly large memory holes over time, which our brains then glance over as they piece together our past - thus resulting in an apparent speed up. This would also explain why days with unusual content seem to last much much longer than others (at least that's my experience).

<comment><USER4> "A large factor of it would actually be that our brains don't store repetitive events very well."

My theory, which is logically consistent with yours, is that as we get older we spend more of our cognitive cycles thinking in terms of abstractions rather than using our senses to process direct experience. This is partly because as we get older we tend to immediately place things we experience into categories and then move onto processing these abstractions rather than continuously observing reality directly and unfiltered. So the other part of the theory would be that when we think in terms of abstractions, time goes by much faster than when we focus on direct sensory experience. It's likely that novelty also plays a role here as a mediating variable, in that we tend to pay more sustained attention to novel phenomena rather than immediately placing them into conceptual buckets and moving onto the next thing.

I also like this theory because it's consistent with how drugs that alter our sensory perceptions and make us focus more on our perceptions also tend to subjectively slow down time. Anyway I have no idea whether this is correct, but IMHO it's a much better theory than the original, which isn't especially logical and doesn't even really make sense.

<comment><USER5> I've often thought the same thing. It has me thinking cautiously about the sociological implication rapidly expending 'senior' demographic, growing life expectancy, and the rapid pace of world changing technologies. Is there a point where senior citizens can't keep up cognitively, despite the medical advances that may keep their bodies younger? And further, is there a point where their dominance as a percentage of society means we need to slow our adoption rate of consumer technologies to account for neurological barrier?

I also think about the people who want their brains crygenetically frozen after they die. Assuming they die old, with this cognitive scaffolding adapted to life today, I can only imagine the impact of 'waking up' into a world 100-300 years in the future, with such a drastically different world. That sounds psychologically crippling to me.

And finally, are there techniques I can take advantage of now, when I'm [comparatively] young, to keep my brain receptitve to new ideas, mental models, and raw sensory input? Meditation? Arts? Travel? Literature? All of the above, and if so, where do I find time for it all, while advancing my career?

<comment><USER6> > All of the above, and if so, where do I find time for it all, while > advancing my career?

As the cliche goes, if you don't find time for it now, you'll pay for it later.

Walking with bare feet and/or walking on uneven ground +1

<http://www.ori.org/Media/pressreleases/release01_05_04.html>

Art +1

"For Healthy Aging, a Late Act in the Footlights"

[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/for- healthy-...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/for-healthy- aging-a-late-act-in-the-footlights/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As someone who's in his fifties, I can say that while this is an entertaining concept, it doesn't really map correctly. At least not for me.

The passing of time has always seemed to me to be more of a function of memory.

When I was younger, my memory was _much_ better. And much more vivid. It was in HD. I noticed by the time I was in high school that not only was my memory worse, but that it was of much lower quality. Interestingly enough, though, I noticed that early memories, while less vivid than I remembered them, were often still more vivid than more recent memories. By the time I was in my 30s, things were much worse. My doctor assured me that this was normal, and by the way, expect it to get worse still.

My father, who is now 96, can remember things vividly from 80 years ago and more, but can't remember what town he is living in at the moment. He can remember chemistry and physics he learned long ago, but now he has trouble working the new flat panel TV we bought him. (This is only partly the fault of age, the UI experience on the TV is worse than abominable. Steve Jobs would puke.) This is interesting, because he _built_ the first radio that he ever owned, back in the 1920s.

The most heart breaking thing recently, is that my mother passed away a few months ago. She'd been with him constantly for the last 65 years or so. And he keeps looking around for her, and then after a moment remembers she's gone. He often doesn't remember the event, but it is still fresh as a state of being, even after several months.

So for my father time's passage seems instantaneous _and_ never changing.

Duration is yet another issue.

Current time, you know, right _now_ , passes for me at more or less the same rate. It's much more effected by things like boredom and engagement than anything else. If I'm waiting on something, things can take forever. If I'm doing something, it can go by in a flash.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if the memory effect is related to emotional state - strong emotions result in stronger memory formation (I think I read this as a research finding as well). Strong emotions, in turn, are caused by new, challenging, and meaningful experiences. As we get older, our emotions tend to level out as we sort of "find ourselves" and settle into a routine. Break the routine, and memory formation snaps back to what it was in childhood.

Personally, I haven't noticed the same effect as you. I'm in my early 30s. I remember watching Perseids last Tuesday with a date much more vividly than watching them last Saturday with my friends. I remember my spring semester junior year of college (spent abroad in New Zealand) much more vividly than fall semester (spent in the same dorm that I lived for sophomore year). I remember 2009 (moved out to California, started working for Google) much more vividly than 2006 (lived at home and worked for the same company as in 2005). I remember Oct-Nov 2009 (spent on leave at home as my dad was dying in the hospital) much more vividly than Jul-Sept 2009 (settling in, nothing in particular happened).

<comment><USER4> "I wonder if the memory effect is related to emotional state - strong emotions result in stronger memory formation"

Emotion is definitely highly linked to memory. E.g. you may be familiar with state-dependent memory:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_learning>

This is where certain memories are best recalled (or can only be recalled) when one is in the same emotional state as when the memories were created. And I don't think there's any question that events that occur when emotions are stored the most strongly; that's basically half of what emotions are for.

It's difficult to say exactly how the density of memory is linked with perception of time. I would posit though that experiencing a variety of strong emotions on a regular basis is important for maintaining both good mental health and a well-functioning brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Probably not the article I needed to see after coming home from moving my oldest into his dorm. Guess I might as well go get a rocking chair on the lawn.

Actually, I think this article is wrong in one important way. It doesn't take into account the effect of laying down new memories. The more, new experiences you have, the slower time appears to have passed [past tense, how it's remembered], while, paradoxically, making it pass [present tense, while experiencing] go faster.

So, spend all your time on the couch, watch time pass slow but evaporate. Go do something new and different, watch it fly by while having had more there.

Memories play weirdly with verb tenses...

<comment><USER10> Good observation on the memories.

During intense periods of memory-forming activity, you feel like time passes quickly, because more things are packed into less time and you move on from one thing to the next (think camps in your childhood when everything was exciting, there was a competition to prepare for, etc.). Once it's actually over, you felt like it just zoomed by so quick, but was packed full of stuff.

It's the same with the grade/primary-school years: each year feels so full of experiences, but before you know it you're in primary/grade 6 and at the start of a new phase, wondering how you got there so quickly. I used to be almost scared by how quickly I moved through the school years, thinking I'd be an adult in no time.

I think young people just tend to have much more packed into their time, which makes it feel longer. You literally live more when you have more different experiences in the same time. That's why I regret it when I think back and realise I haven't been doing anything much different over the past week. I'm going to have to schedule better and make some time for salsa/whatever classes.

So yes, I strongly agree with your conclusion:

> Go do something new and different, watch it fly by while having had more > there.

Wring life out of every day.

<comment><USER11> I also agree. When we get older, we establish a routine: get up, go to work, do errands, etc. When we're young, yes, we might have some routines but we're constantly meeting new people, learning new things, and facing fresh, new situations. For me, ever since I graduated, the past 6 years have been one HUGE blur...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had come across this concept about a year and a half ago. Read some article about how our brain works to store new experiences and therefore time slows down. That's around the time that I left my full time job to travel full time! I even wrote an article on our travel blog about it:

<http://bkpk.me/were-getting-younger-time-dilation-is-real/>

This guy has definitely done a very quantitative analysis of my qualitative hunch. Subjecting myself to new experiences, new places and new environments everyday has definitely made time slow down.

My last birthday actually feels like it was a LOOONG while ago. That's because I threw in a bunch of interesting and new experiences over the last year.

I think the real way to feel like your 'real age' is to subject yourselves to new experiences as much as possible. Take a new route home, go to restaurants or parts of your city that you've never been to, learn a foreign language or salsa, learn a new sport, or if possible, travel! :)

<comment><USER13> > _This guy has definitely done a very quantitative analysis of my qualitative > hunch. Subjecting myself to new experiences, new places and new environments > everyday has definitely made time slow down._

That's interesting, because most people would say that time _seems to go faster_ when subjected to intense learning/experiences.

For example, from another article on HN's front page right now: <http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/>

> _The next day, I arrived at the meeting location. I faced four YC partners > and a barrage of questions about how my business worked and why it would > succeed. We talked for almost an hour, but it felt like just a few minutes. > I answered questions non-stop._

Perhaps when looking back, time _seems_ to have stretched out during those learning-intensive experiences? But at the moment of the experience, time sped by?

<comment><USER12> I suppose it depends on the experience. Time does fly by when you're having fun but I suppose it has to do with the richness of experience as well.

If you're subjecting all your senses to new experiences (say.. eating a new dish in a strange place - sensory overload for smell, taste, sight and sound), maybe your perception of time is slower.

It's hard to put a number on how we perceive real time I guess, but boring tasks do tend to stretch out into infinity.

I think the article is however discussing the way you remember time. It all has to do with our brain processing and storing memories. That ability can only be jogged by having new ones I suppose.

These topics could make for an interesting study, not much is yet understood about our perception of time.

<comment><USER14> Interesting, this reminds me of a quote from Josh Foer's book about memory: "Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next-and disappear. That's why it's important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This reminds of of a similar calculation I did in college when thinking about big computing problems.. I called it "hurry up and wait".

Assuming Moore's law continues (computing power/$ doubles every 18 months), and you have a big computation to do, should you start now or should you wait?

If you have $1000 to spend on a computer and a problem that's going to take 3 years for it to compute, you can actually wait 1.5 years before you start. The computer you buy then will be twice as fast, and you'll finish at the same time.

On any problem that takes more than 1.5 years, the fastest thing to do is just wait until you can afford a computer that can complete it in 1.5 years.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is anyone here but me old enough to know what _J. Irr. Res._ is? [1]

This comment thread makes me wonder.

According to the chart in the article, I have precious little time left. Please try not to suck all the joy out of my remaining few minutes.

\---

[1] Or maybe I'm the last one on Earth who still reads the footnotes?

[2] This is the famous recursive footnote. [2] Please enjoy your trip through the stack.

[3] This tail-recursive footnote should really be optimized into a loop. [3]

<comment><USER17> You needn't be old to know what J. Irr. Res. is; you only need to be paying attention.

<comment><USER18> Journal of Irresponsible Research?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My theory is different. Our brains work like film cameras, the faster the camera is rolling the slower time in the film seems to be going during playback. Because less time has passed since the last frame was captured. The slower the camera is rolling the faster the film seems to get when you play it back. Our perception of time is based on comparing what we last remember while we were conscious with where we are in time currently. This is why daydreaming while driving makes your trip seem a lot shorter.

I call this "Brain Idling". When we're young our brains have a lot of grey matter and we're addicted to information accumulation, talking, chatting, and being mentally stimulated. As we age we stop learning (no school, no collage, nothing new going on in life), have less grey matter and start going on auto- pilot. When we drive to the store, when we shop for groceries, at work, at home. We've memorized our lives so well we no longer think about what we do, we just naturally do it on auto-pilot and our minds start to "idle" a lot more that usual. The film in our camera-like brains is snapping images at a much slower pace. A lot of time is passing between mental snap-shots. So when we look back (playback) the events of the day (all the things we remembered) it feels like time has flown by at light speed.

I freaked out over how fast time has flown by after I hit 21 and tried out an experiment. I installed "talking clock" for windows on my pc and made it announce the time every 5 minutes. Yes. For the whole day. Every day. After the 2nd day of using this technique time slowed down by massive amounts. A day felt like a week. A week felt like a month. It was insane. I felt like I was young again and the world was moving at a glacial pace. There are downsides of course, it's unsustainable. You have to take breaks every other day or so otherwise you get used to hearing the time and ignore it. It can also get exhausting when your brain can't take a break and daydream or idle and think about nothing. But it does work. I wanted to write a nice big article on it but I'm so swamped by work on projects and new clients needing UI/UX consulting that I just keep putting it off. On the plus side I've discovered a way to slow down time (at least for me).

<comment><USER20> Could you please email me? I was unable to find contact info on your web site. Thanks! :)

<comment><USER19> Well that's no good. I'm a ux/ui person. I must have failed. It's the mail icon (next to the twitter, skype, and kickstarter icons) in the sidebar on my website.

localpa/AT/gmail/DOT/com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Subjectively a good way is to remember how long summers felt when you were a kid. A summer felt like forever in the first couple of grades. Now think how long summers feel now, they just sort of fly by. It is kind of scary.

Remember my grandma sometimes got confused what day or week it was and as a kid I could never understand that. How can you miss such a long period of time like a week and not notice, but now I start to sort of understand.

<comment><USER22> To be fair summer vacation is shorter in most areas than it used to be due to an extended school year. The standard used to be 180 instructional days for kids, per year but it keeps creeping up there every year teachers renegotiate their contract for a raise.

<comment><USER21> It is more than that. Summer felt as long as a year feels now, it is not just a couple of days of difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Note that this is a joke paper written for the Journal of Irreproducible Results: <http://www.jir.com/>

<comment><USER24> I can't find any evidence for this on either site.

<comment><USER25> You did not look very well.

The article by T.L. Freeman exists. It is in: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Best- Journal-Irreproducible-Result...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Best-Journal- Irreproducible-Results/dp/0894805959)

<comment><USER24> You're not looking very well either. The author / pen-name / anything sounding anything like the article isn't in any of the information on the Amazon page, nor is it anywhere in JIR's list of 'selected pseudonyms'. Google searches of www.jir.com find nothing, nor does going through a large portion of the site that I could find.

To be clear, I admit it's possible, maybe even likely. But nobody has shown _any_ evidence that it's true, just a claim and a link to a page that does nothing to support it.

<comment><USER25> It is not on the internet, so it doesn't exist?

I happen to have that bundle somewhere in my basement but won't bother to dig it up. I remember that joke-publication quite well.

Even if it's not to be found on the web, it's at least referenced by others. That's an easy find.

<http://acacia.atspace.eu/papers/FeelOlder.pdf>

Note that that one was published in '91, so before the article by Professor Pi.

<comment><USER24> Not at all. But if it's not on either site pointed to as evidence, it's not evidence. It's like saying "unicorns exist, see here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wombat> ". Or "unicorns exist, I have a photo in my basement". Why would I expect anyone to take that as proof?

<comment><USER25> No, you pose this as an argumentum ex silentio instead of a simply asking for a link to the reference or even a copy of the article. So why should I be bothered to dig this thing out of my library?

Well, at least I gave you a reference to the article. Finding that reference should have taken you no more than two minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The answer to "Why time appears to speed up with age" is to be found in the messy details of neurology, genetics and evolution, not in an aesthetically pleasing mathematical formula.

<comment><USER27> I'll just pick this one: it's almost as if this article was partly whimsical, and the idea was to inspire, not prove anything. And the aesthetics of both the formula and the argument are actually the point here. It's a kind of entertainment, not really science, and that's how it's supposed to be.

Also, this is Everything2, the article is from 2001, when there still was 3 people who knew what Everything2 is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Groundbreaking? Maybe in that someone actually worked out the math for it (which seems trivial enough) and submitted it somewhere. A very large number of people I've chatted with from 10 years old an on have come up with this same theory, relatively independently, they just never worked out the full numbers because they realize that it's a gross oversimplification.

More specifically, this seems to ignore a small thing called 'nostalgia'. How long were the blissful summers of our youth _without_ this rose tint?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I remember hearing the "Time moves faster when you're older because it's a smaller fraction of your lifetime" theory from my 3rd grade teacher, and then in college I made the "And then if you integrate that rate over time, you get a logarithmic progression, which matches with experimentally observed fetal & childhood development, and OH MY GOD I'M BRILLIANT!" connection. Then my friends thought I was weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Time seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable and less surprising. When you're growing up, life is filled with novel and surprising experiences that are used to anchor our memory because of those aforementioned qualities. Psychological time is directly related to the formation of new memories. As we grow up, everything gets into a routine that we barely notice at all. Just think of how much you remember of your daily 9 to 5 for example.

This phenomenon has been studied several times. In 1890, William James wrote the following in his 'Principle of Psychology': "In youth, we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn out…But each passage year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse."

</comment><comment><USER28> My father always says life is like a roll of toilet paper. The further you get on the roll the faster it spins and the less of it you have left the more you cherish it.

Time is clearly a solid and measurable component of our physical world but our perception of it is warped by our own personal experience.

My wife can sit next to me for 8 hours and futz around the house etc while I sit with my headphones on and code 'in the zone'. I come out of the zone feeling as if I had just experienced only maybe an hour of zone time and she will laugh and point out the window at the dark night. :-)

I have six children, a daughter-in-law, a grandson and two cats. My life is clearly not moving any faster then my children but I do keep reminding them that as they get older they keep making me older!

I would argue that actually life goes slower the older you get. You have more context against the rest of your life and the OP might be using that as the reason we perceive life going quicker. But to me it's more like the "weight" of my life to date allows me a lot more perspective, I often measure an event against the birth of a child, a marriage, a house I used to live in etc. Less about the MM/DD/YYYY and more about the "Around this event this happened".

When time seems to have moved quickly is when you're talking to your mom and dad about your grandson and the day your baby girl was born and how they're going through all the same things you did when you were having children. It's the reference points that stun you. That somehow 25 years just vanished in a flash of light. But the reality is this is the same as this group talking about TRS-80 Model I's with 4k of memory. A lot has happened since then even though it was sort of like yesterday for those of us who lived through 300 baud modems and 16k memory upgrades.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would argue that the effective age of people vary with their behaviors and environment.

For example, I've seen 60 year old in australian outback on horses doing heavy work, as if they're 40. And I've seen 60 year olds in australian capitals barely doing anything of their day.

Which do you think will go extinct first?

I'm going to argue that simply "we are what we repeatedly do". Some people act old at 50, some people act young at 70.

For example, my uncle in Europe has acres of property, works in it every day, goes dancing with the local "brotherhood" and would drink you under the table any day of the week. And he's close to 75.

Trying to explain people with mathematics is similar to trying to explain women with science. It may work, barely. (no pun intended, just a cheeky joke)

</comment><comment><USER30> The key to slowing down life is variety. As a child every year was distinctly different: even today I can remember each school year because I had a different teacher, a different homeroom, etc. As an adult each of my jobs has been on average 4-6 years. Each job is a bit of a blur; the years at the same job are difficult to distinguish from each other. To slow down time, make sure you do different things each year: trips, projects, roles at work, etc. The more your mind can distinguish the years, the slower time seems to move. Try it - it works!

</comment><comment><USER31> I've always held the opinion that time is the number of events, realizations, ideas, and new experiences.

When you're kid, everything is new from what happens on the sandbox to school to friends to foods to afternoons alone to crossing over your old boundaries in general, in both physical and emotional sense. So much happens in a month that it equals five years for an adult.

When you're an adult, much of everything is something you know. The fraction of new things in your life depends on your own activity. Even if you wanted to be on the bleeding edge of life, you generally still have a job and a lot of routines in life—routines that might not be set by you but will still affect you. And routines and repetition doesn't count.

The key to adult time is to realize that the mundane things aren't the same, ever, even though they seem like it. You never know what will happen: there _is newness_ every day, in everything you do, if only you can unlearn to dismiss it.

The other path—the path that isn't sustainable—is to start reaching for experiences intentionally: after you've climbed all the mountains and dived to the deepest caverns of the waters, done the craziest roller coasters and raced the fastest races, you're still not much more ahead of where you started. Those things can be done _for fun_ but what I'm referring to is the trend of experience-hunting which is a reaction to the pace of finding new things in life that has slowed down since childhood.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article and concept reminds me of thhe beautiful "game" by Jason Rohrer, "Passage"

<http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/>

</comment><comment><USER32> The fluff in Freeman's article (Journal of Irreproducible Results, I think) is the same cheerful fluff students were subjected to in the non-honors physics class at my high school in the 1980s, where the point of using physics _predictively_ went out the window (leaving only untestable _descriptive_ math, which isn't a waste of time, but could be applied to something testable), and with the same fundamental failure of simply not caring whether there might be an underlying mechanism related to the impression of _remembered_ time versus the subjective speed of time currently.

A change in behavior can also have a huge impact on how fast current time is flowing. A simple hypothesis that the subjective rate of time passing is related to the intervals between encounters with the unfamiliar easily leads to a more fruitful set of thought experiments than Freeman's weak exercise. And potentially one that could be rephrased in biological terms.

I've noticed that when I take trips to elsewhere in the world, the more different the place, the more time dilates, both while I'm there and in memory afterwards. Doing only the familiar is the recipe to time slipping by, unmarked and unnoticed, like driving to work and realizing upon arrival that one has no memory of the trip.

So the question is: What should _you_ do to extend your subjective time?

</comment><comment><USER33> The premise is completely wrong. If you are young, you don't know what percentage of your life one year is.

More likely explanation is the compression of memories: if you experience things that are similar to things you have experienced before, they won't use up as much memory. Think about your daily commute to work: can you remember every single day you commuted? Or did all the commutes blur into one?

</comment><comment><USER34> The brain changes with age and perceives the passage of time differently. Just like your face changes with age and perceives touch differently.

The pop science is here:

[http://www.quora.com/Why-does-time-feel-like-it-goes- faster-...](http://www.quora.com/Why-does-time-feel-like-it-goes-faster-as-we- get-older/answer/Vilan-Natanzon)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAcjvfBsz_4>

Not as lazy as the article's speculation. There is an experiment!

The experiment is people of various ages are asked to estimate a minute with their mind. Older people overestimate, children underestimate.

Your brain has a clock, a set of neurons that fire at a relatively consistent interval and help synchronize the rest of the brain. As you age this brain clock's interval gets longer.

Forming fewer new memories because of lifestyle changes is speculation. Without widespread changes in the brain making new memories more difficult to form, you'd still form a lot of new memories, even with your boring adult lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER35> What is this SEO spam garbage? Every single link including the _reference_ goes to junk pages and the article itself is cut & pasted all over the internet.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=T.+L.+Freeman+discusses+the+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=T.+L.+Freeman+discusses+the+relationship+between+actual+age+and+effective+age)

<comment><USER36> everything2 is most definitely not SEO garbage. I'm pretty sure it predates the concept of SEO. It has a very genuine community, and its content is pretty close to 100% voluntarily user-generated.

It's kind of like a proto-wikipedia, without the requirement for maintaining a neutral point of view, supplemented by freeform creative content. Maybe more like the collective journal of a certain type of young geek from the first half of the last decade. Lots of essays and painfully earnest poetry. It was initially associated with Slashdot.

As for the content being spammed all over the internet, I would guess that E2 is a reliable and extensive source of high-quality, human-generated text, with a dense network of contextually valid links included. Why not just scrape wikipedia? I'm not sure.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2>

[http://www.everything2.com/title/Everything2%20is%20not%20Wi...](http://www.everything2.com/title/Everything2%20is%20not%20Wikipedia)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Brian Skinner, physicist and basketball analytics extraordinaire, wrote a really nice blog post about this 3.5 years ago [1]. Mining the comments from that post shows it's been banged around numerous times before that [2][3].

[1] [https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/parenting-...](https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/parenting- and-the-feeling-of-time-my-eight-lifetimes/)

[2] <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21qna.html?_r=1>

[3] [http://web.archive.org/web/20071116094344/http://ourworld.co...](http://web.archive.org/web/20071116094344/http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jmkenney/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Here is my take. When you experience something new, your brain works overtime to learn new things. Thats why in a familiar setting time flies by. I guess thats why some people are adventure seeker and travelers. At old age most of the things become routine. Here it is argued that the whole life of a person is counted. I simply think, life is divided in various threads. You do something new and a new thread is created. Its along a single thread that you may measure your perception of longevity. If you do something routine then it seems to be fast to you as it becomes routine.

Also I remember a link on HN that explained how time virtually stopped for Near Death Experiences.

</comment><comment><USER39> What about simple time lapse? With images and video the larger the time lapse the faster things appear to be moving especially with blur. What if something similar held for memory?

The key memories that are remembered will typically have longer lapses for the older than for the younger. Cognitive expectations might then correct this gap by fudging a perception or sense of elapsed time, creating a quickened time lapse like effect for experiences, which strengthens as you get older.

It would be interesting to ask people with autobiographical memories how they perceive time - according to my analogy it wouldn't change since they maintain most 'frames'.

</comment><comment><USER40> From an experience:

Difficult time passes more difficultly, i.e feels longer. Example on a day if you are fasting, time always seems earlier than what you expect. For example on days I may think 'Gosh its still 12 PM, still 7 hours to go before the fast breaking time!'

Only yesterday, the fast breaking time was 6:54 PM. And my wife called at me from down stairs to come down for it at 6:53 or so (I work from my SOHO on the upper level), I thought gosh 1 more minute, how can I wait!

So it could mean that the perceived time (that has passed) is also a function of how frequently we sample it. Or if differently said, how much we 'live in the moment'.

Edit: minor rephrase for clarity.

</comment><comment><USER41> About 15 years ago (that long already? ;)) I saw a documentary state that scientists had done studies showing that time perception could be manipulated by changing their temperature. The warmer it was, the more slowly time seemed to pass. The colder it was, the faster it seemed to pass. They hypothesized that since people's core body temperature dropped as they age, that it could be a factor in why time seemed to pass faster as we age. For some reason I've always favored this solution.

</comment><comment><USER42> For anyone interested in how humans conceptualize time and what effects this has on language, I highly recommend "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Truly one of the most interesting books I've ever read.

For a brief overview of the approach they take to the problem, the Wikipedia entry for _conceptual metaphor_ is a good start: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor>

</comment><comment><USER43> With it being published in the Journal of irreproducible results i assume this is a joke, right? Still, I think the hypothesis is not correct. Time seems to run faster when you are occupied. People get more busy after their 20s so i guess that's why time seems to fly. If i can judge from myself, time seemed to run pretty fast on a 9-6 job (i was there 20-26). Working independently (26- ) has definitely made my days longer, much longer, sometimes irritably so.

</comment><comment><USER44> Marcel Proust wrote a profound series of books that investigates memory, personal change, and the subjective feeling of time called, "In Search of Lost Time." He had an exceptional memory and recalls his own perceptive and idiosyncratic feelings starting from early childhood. Some of his observations are universal though, and you'll be delighted when he helps you remember them for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER45> Another thing this would neatly explain is why it seems harder to make new friends when you get older.

With someone I meet at 15, when I'm 20 i'll have known them for 5 effective years. If I meet someone new at 30, on the other hand, I won't have known them for 5 effective years until I'm 40.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is math describing the effect not the cause, so the title is inaccurate and misleading.

</comment><comment><USER47> off topic:

why is equation rendering still broken on the web?

<http://everything2.com> uses pre tags, wikipedia uses rendered png images.

is this just another ie work around or have we really not implemented a standard yet.

googled it myself <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathML>

edit: thanks mbell! mathjax looks great

project to get mathjax working on wikipedia ~> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nageh/mathJax>

breakdown of mathml support ~> <http://caniuse.com/mathml> (only firefox and safari)

<comment><USER48> Also see <http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/tex.html>

Used on the most math heavy site I frequent: <http://electronics.stackexchange.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Don't worry. Its probably going to get get excruciatingly long at the end.

Seriously, its the thinking too much about the past and the future that lead to this perception.

You probably just thought about it a lot less when you were young.

</comment><comment><USER50> Not sure but according to Von Bertalanffy, brain "frequency" tends to slow down with age anyway. The same amount of perceptive events are spread onto longer periods of time thus appearing speeding up.

</comment><comment><USER51> My grandfather, who died last year at 93, used to say that when you were 2 going on 3, that was 33% of your life. At 49 going on 50, though, that's 2% of your life. 33% goes a lot farther than 2%.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder what the formula would look like if it took into account the fact that life expectancy is increasing. According to people like Ray Kurzweil, it's increasing exponentially.

</comment><comment><USER53> He claims so, but he is not removing any parameter... And why such a (rather trivial) linear model is considered as a proved theory?

</comment><comment><USER54> my own subjective data:

in my childhood, a day seems to go pretty slow, probably because of just "messing around" tends to get boring. However I never felt the years as passing at a different rate than they do now (in my mid 30's).

I'm the type of person who "looks to the future" however so maybe if I was past-oriented I'd feel different.

</comment><comment><USER55> Because you heart rate decreases. Other internal clocks also seems to be reflected with the age.

</comment><comment> DanI-S I always liked to think that our perception stays the same - it's just that time is speeding up.

</comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone here managed to defeat this effect somehow? How did you do it? Meditation?

</comment><comment><USER56> This is why I love HN. The comments are better than the article.

</comment><comment><USER57> Because you get slower.

</comment><comment><USER58> No real evidence beyond this theory.

More likely, as peoples' lives get more complex, and as they get older and more able to separate life into compartments, the individual compartments get less time and therefore time seems to go faster. Children have one "life thread". Adults have a ton of them for various relationships, interests, and aspirations. For one example, since most people only get to spend about 2 weeks per year in the "travel thread", time from that perspective seems to go 26 times faster. If you have a summer house and show up in June and it feels like the last time you were there (September last year) was yesterday, that's what's at play. In that thread, it _was_ yesterday.

Minute to minute, time seems to be going at the same rate. It's when you step back and take a macro perspective that there's a difference, because our lives accumulate complexity that we couldn't have imagined when we were children. Because our lives are a lot more complex, there are contexts in which 5 years isn't an eternity in the way it would be for a child, so from a macro perspective, long time durations aren't nearly as long.

</comment><comment><USER59> Here is my take on the question...

1\. Kids are bored too often so time seems to take forever.

2\. Career life and building a family is so busy that time flies by.

3\. Retirement and empty nesting seems to go by fast because you think more about your pending demise and also have nothing to show for your life day after day (career goals ETC.)

</comment><comment><USER60> whoosh</comment>


Urbit crowdsale is now live - <AUTHOR> https://sale.urbit.org <comment><USER2> "Datalife streams", Stars and planets... This sounds more like Scientology than a product... I really don't understand all these things about "building a new internet", especially when they are building it on top of the existing one. If the existing internet is so broken what the hell would Urbit do to fix it?

<comment><USER3> Just from watching the video, they're not exactly saying the existing internet is broken, they're confusing terms. They're claiming the web is broken (that is, tim berners lee's http web), the hardware-internet-network is fantastic (that is, all cables, routers, everything but the software layers). For some reason, they also claim to dislike tcp/ip.

All I can gather from their video is that they're trying the internet again with a different approach (built-in encryption, tools to far more easily build decentralized applications, your data is yours, and a point about API stuff that I don't quite grasp yet.)

Their goal is to be a self-governing digital republic, whatever that might mean.

As the guy says in the end, it's not up to them what urbit will become, it's up to us (the people who develop for urbit).

That's how I understood their video

Soooo... I'm not too sure why building (arguably?) better tools would result in a "better" internet. Additionally, I'm not too sure what the advantages are for end-users for decentralized applications.

So to conclude, it's up to the developers to find valid use-cases for urbit. Just like how it's up to developers to find valid use-cases for ethereum. Decentralized toolchains (like ethereum, other blockchain-things and urbit) are in their infancy, nobody really knows if they'll sprout useful use-cases or not.

Tl;DR Experimentation and uncertainty

<comment><USER2> From watching their video i couldn't understand anything it was utter techno babel.

From reading the whitepaper it seemed like they were building a distributed network where everything is somewhat abstracted.

I thought Ethereum was silly and pointless but I at least somewhat understood what it tried to be, this is like literally something that looks to me that came off [https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/](https://www.reddit.com/r/VXJunkies/)

<comment><USER4> Granted, I may not understand it at all, I only really started reading about it a few hours ago, but here it goes:

It's a decentralized internet, where your computer is the server, and it communicates directly with other computers by calling directly to their addresses.

As a result, e.g. your facebook data is stored on your computer, and other facebook users call your computer for posts.

Because the data is stored locally, and called through relatively universal APIs, any app can be written to call and display from those APIs, combine them, and let them inform each-other in any way you desire.

You can put your facebook in your reddit in your gmail.

That all runs inside a VM which ties your data to your address, so your identity (real or pseudonym) is singular, and uniform across all apps. This creates a real cost to ugly behavior, like spamming or trolling, as addresses are too limited to burn through willy-nilly.

Apps running on that VM are coded in a rather confusing functional language. Lots of people think he made it that confusing to stop newbs from writing for it.

I bought a star.

<comment><USER2> It's a "decentralized" world wide web then. The internet is already decentralized and since you need the internet for Urbit to work let's stop calling it "the internet" anything.

<comment><USER5> You'll have to take that up with the public at large. We use "internet" to refer to the world wide web. Try to sell someone a computer that has "the internet", but won't do tcp/IP, you'll get punched.

As for the infrastructure, that's a rather more esoteric concern. It needs a distinguishing term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> They have already sold 230 out of 1020 stars within an hour of opening up the sale. Unexpectedly high demand.

<comment><USER6> I

<comment><USER7> So, you spent 200 USD or something you don't understand? What's the gigantic return here?

<comment><USER6> I didn't understand bitcoin either but i bought at $40. Plus it's fun to part of something new.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Surprised this is not on the front page. HN, did it get flagged?

<comment><USER9> "Please don't tweet [the sale] or post publicly until 9am PDT on the 29th. But feel free to share privately with friends." Perhaps dang et al. are helping the founders maintain this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Gah! I didn't even notice that. Sincere apologies to any Urbit staff for posting this. Sorry.

<comment><USER9> If the title hasn't been edited by the HN crew you can still delete the story.

<comment><AUTHOR> No delete link, unfortunately.

<comment><USER9> You can email email@example.com, then. Speaking from my experience, dang does a great job responding to user email.

Edit: It looks like the story has been [flagged].

<comment><USER10> Yes, users flagged it. Normally that would also kill the story (i.e. close it to new comments and hide it from users who don't have 'showdead' set to 'yes' in their profile), but once there are enough comments, the software presumes there's an ongoing discussion and spares it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanka dang. I'm curious if the HN software has flagging ring detection in the same way it has voting ring detection.

<comment><USER8> That's a great idea. But I imagine it'd be difficult to differentiate between trash getting flagged rapidly by a lot of people and a flagging ring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Urbit is MIT-licensed. Even on the unlikely assumption that Urbit turns out useful for anything ever, why use this rather than an alt-Urbit? The same way altcoins do an end-run around limited numbers of bitcoins.

<comment><USER12> The value of Urbit is connected to peoples desire to use it, you are correct in assuming that if an alt-Urbit is started using the same code base it would have value in the same manner.

What gives Urbit address space value is the notion of reputation tie to it's addresses which is current IPv4/6 infrastructure where addresses can be reassigned. If you ruin a Planet (read address) by using it to issue spam (just an example) on the Urbit network, services will likely have been designed to stop servicing bad actors and the Planet will become useless.

You will have to ruin more planets to continue your bad behavior. This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted forums for instance.

You may end up getting the benefit of the social pressure that currently exists in our society on the internet, which you currently cannot benefit from (however plenty of people benefit from the lack of such pressure).

Therefore, we can speculate citizens will attribute value to Urbit (and not the Alt-Urbit) based on the fact that we've already done much work in filtering out bad actors. You can imagine automated phone calling machine to push Ads to you on top of a Twilio based service layer on Urbit to have no chance of thriving freeing you from having to waste bandwith and time on such calls in an idealized future.

<comment><USER11> > _This can be extended to many more examples like trolling on Urbit-hosted > forums for instance._

See, it seems nobody understood that _the very first thing_ people do in a new social space is see how it actually works (not just how it's claimed to work) and how the social boundaries work.

For an example of fully rampant typical mind fallacy in Urbit, see the original 2013 version of the security chapter: [http://archive.is/UK8So](http://archive.is/UK8So) About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually watch Yarvin transmute into Moldbug as he starts pontificating on how humans communicating on a network _should_ work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they've actually behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained; oblivious that the _very first thing_ people will do with Urbit is mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creator literally could not foresee (due to typical mind fallacy), though he might reasonably have been expected to (given the entire history of people on the internet).

Yarvin doesn't seem to understand this. He explicitly stated in his blogging as "Moldbug" his belief that order is good and chaos is bad _as a universal principle_ , a _visceral_ belief. (in [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mi...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey.html) )

The trouble is that the real world _doesn 't work like that_, and literally all the interesting stuff happens at the boundary between order and chaos.

(Phil Sandifer's recent book _Neoreaction a Basilisk_ goes into this point about Yarvin's belief system in some detail.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998052)

</comment><comment><USER7> Am I the only one skeptical in thinking that they didn't really sell 200 stars worth 200 USD each and they are making this up?

<comment><USER13> You're absolutely not the only one.

And, now the number sold is up to 340...

Edit: Make that 361 (2 min later).

Edit: Make that 421 (9 min later).

Edit: Make that 471 (11 min later)

<comment><USER14> At this rate, they'll be sold out by the time it's supposed to go "public".

<comment><USER9> I suspect to test whether that would happen was (a large part of) the intention. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is the benefit of owning a star right now? Why is owning a star better than a planet?

<comment><USER16> "A star is not anyone's personal address. It's a block of network infrastructure. A personal address in Urbit is a 32-bit planet. Your star's main value is its power to create 65,535 planets."

so it's a block of addresses

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, their "distributed" system is a centralized identity (and hosting)?

</comment><comment><USER8> Surprised they are taking USD or any fiat for that matter.

<comment><USER2> They need to get paid, and they need to buy the IPv4 addresses that would actually make Urbit functional.

What did you expect them to take shiny sea shells?

<comment><USER8> Many companies are paying their teams in BTC these days. Why do they need to buy IPv4 addresses? I haven't read the whitepaper.

<comment><USER2> I haven't seen many companies paying people in BTC, especially considering that it's not trivial to cash in large sums of BTC these days in many places.

As for the Addresses Urbit needs to run on something, the projec it so vague and the terms they are using are so for lack of better words ludicrous that I can't even understand what they are selling even after reading the white paper.

Data lifestreams, Digital reputation, all of that sounds like complete technobabel to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yet another greed-fueled crowdsale...</comment>


Ask HN: Real-World, complex demos/tutorials for frontend architecture? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to get back into fronted development using react, but I have never built something large with it before. There's a ton of great content out there, but as soon as what you're building gets more complex than a TODO- or Tic Tac Toe App, you're stuck.<p>Do you know of a good introduction/tutorial/demo on how all the pieces fit together in a real-world application? I'm thinking about something like railstutorial.org, but for frontend/react. <comment><USER2> I'm on the same boat. Learning react and going through a course on Udemy, but wanted to see how a proper complexe application is built from scratch.

<comment><USER3> Not sure if it is what you want, but found this git repository seems a decent fit to read. [https://github.com/Sandermoen/instaclone](https://github.com/Sandermoen/instaclone)</comment></comment>


Simple and easy to use Node.js client library for Oauth2. - <AUTHOR> http://andreareginato.github.com/simple-oauth2/

<comment><USER2> So great that there is some alternative to passportjs which isn't easy to get in. Try to repost at a better time or another post (i.e a tutorial)—user authentification/autorisation is one of the most wanted libs on Node

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome package! Why should I use it instead of [Passport.js][1]? Could you explain its benefits?

[1]: <http://passportjs.org/></comment>


Deleted my portfolio, made $30k in my first six months - <AUTHOR> http://robertwilliams.wpengine.com/deleted-my-portfolio-made-30k-in-my-first-six-months/ <comment><USER2> What really impresses me most about what Robert's done is that he's realized that by selling the outcome that most clients want to hear (higher conversion rates, more leads) instead of what designers tend to emphasize (clean design, HTML5 compliance, etc.) he's pitching himself as an investment, not an expense.

"Clean design" doesn't mean "I'll make more money in the long run than I'm spending on this engagement." Sure, better design _can_ lead to that, but it's a proxy.

Many designers and developers can learn a lot from what he's done. Focus on those outcomes that position ourselves as investment vessels, _not_ expenses. This means realizing that — no matter how passionate we are about our hard- earned skills — it usually means diddly squat to our clients. They just want a positive ROI at the end of the day.

So don't think of proposing to a potential client that you'll write "Ruby code." Rather, figure out how writing Ruby code can get your client more customers, more profit, decreased overhead, whatever and sell THAT.

<comment><USER3> This boils down to the very old sales axiom, "sell benefits, not features". It would stand to reason that the more successful designers are good salespeople too.

<comment><USER4> This is not only "sell benefits, not features" thing. There are tons of designers out there who doesn't know what "conversion" means. Hence they don't or care about the conversion.

Why would you get your website designed by someone like that, unless you know conversion very well and design and micro manage the design process?

<comment><USER5> Maybe because marketing is not the job of a designer ? should a system admin know about typography and color theory ? that's plain stupid...

<comment><USER6> Are you making the claim, then, that there's absolutely no overlap between the fields of marketing and design, that conversion is solely the responsibility of marketing, that conversion is completely uninfluenced by design, _and_ that being able to fill multiple roles is a waste of time for everyone involved? Otherwise I'm having difficulty following your train of thought here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ignoring the "delete your portfolio" and "making $30k is great" parts (which I don't really agree with), for me the big takeaway here is having a more active approach to finding work.

If you're struggling to find work as a freelance designer, you should definitely be doing more to contact clients and meet their needs instead of simply showing them pretty pictures.

Then again, if you're Kerem Suer (<http://kerem.co/>) you don't need to do any of that because you've already established your reputation, and you can show up at any startup and they'll hire you on the spot.

Disclaimer: I'm the guy behind Folyo (<http://folyo.me>), the design job board mentioned in the article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Am i the only one who thinks making $30k as a graphic designer freelancing in California for 6 months is incredibly low? In fact less than making at $42k annually as a salaried employee once you count in health care and self employment taxes?

Since when did a blog post about being a barely surviving freelancer qualify for the HN front page?

Sorry for being a bit of a jerk on this, but i don't get it. Maybe he got clients by being good at gaming HN?

<comment><USER9> This was his _first six months_ as a freelancer. Making the switch isn't easy. Clearly he's a smart and determined fellow who has a mindset for optimizing his business. Based on this, I expect to see his income grow substantially quarter over quarter.

It's pretty easy to find a token side point in any post and make a dismissive comment, as you have done. On the other hand, his central point was a useful revelation to me, despite my 20+ years of startup business experience.

His post is excellent, and exactly what HN is about.

<comment><USER10> Totally. I didn't even make $30k a year for the first few _years_ of being a freelancer, although it was just after the dot com boom. Thankfully those days are over and lessons learnt, etc.. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The best lesson to take away here is not to delete your portfolio, but to delete all the things you do that aren't moving the needle in a meaningful way towards whatever goal you have, monetary or otherwise.

<comment><USER12> _delete all the things you do that aren't moving the needle in a meaningful way towards whatever goal you have, monetary or otherwise_

Crap, guess it's time to delete my HN profile. :-(

<comment><USER13> I know this was comedic, but I honestly think commenting (and reading) on HN has improved my employability more than anything besides actual employment. It's open my eyes to technologies I'd never learn about otherwise, it's gotten me contacts, and -- most importantly -- commenting is an exercise of writing, and clear communication is arguably the most important skill one can have regardless of discipline.

A lot of scorn can be placed on HN for its echo-chamber qualities -- most of it fair -- but at the end of the day, arguing too much about JS frameworks is still a better use of one's time than animated cat pictures.

<comment><USER12> _I know this was comedic, but I honestly think commenting (and reading) on HN has improved my employability more than anything besides actual employment. It's open my eyes to technologies I'd never learn about otherwise, it's gotten me contacts, and -- most importantly -- commenting is an exercise of writing, and clear communication is arguably the most important skill one can have regardless of discipline._

Yeah, I kid, of course. I do learn a lot from my time on HN, both from reading the articles and from the ensuing discussions. I have days when I spend too much time on here though. Sometimes it doesn't matter, because I'm stuck on a client site for my $DAYJOB and they don't have anything for me to do, and there's little I could be doing to advance my goals while sitting there, so I wind up goofing around on HN.

Other days, I spend time where when I _should_ be working (like right now!) but nobody can just work, work, work all the time, so I don't mind the occasional "goof off on HN" day here and there. And, like you said, the discourse here is writing practice, and learning to write well is always a good investment.

 _but at the end of the day, arguing too much about JS frameworks is still a better use of one's time than animated cat pictures._

Very true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The 5 Why's

Prospect: I need a designer

... Why?

Prospect: Because my website is ugly and I want it to look beautiful.

... Why?

Prospect: Because a beautiful website give me more credibility with my customers/audience

... Why? Why do you want credibility?

Prospect: With more credibility, I can close more customers and charge each client more.

... Why? Why would you want to charge your clients more?

Prospect: Duhh, so I can make more money.

...There it is!

The saying goes that after you ask 5 why's you'll get to the root or the core reason why your client wants what you're offering.

If you can show that what you're selling will satisfy this often unspoken desire, then you'll make the sale.

The 5 why's is a good way to find out what this desire is.

Bob already knows what his clients desire... Can the same be said of you?

<comment><USER15> I'm sure I don't want to stop on "make more money" as the fundamental answer to "why" - surely there are healthier, more basic motivations than that.

Go on, ask one more "why"...

<comment><USER14> Why?

...

All jokes aside I'll ask 5 or 6 why's so I can get to the core motivations, but I wont go deeper than the 3rd or 4th why in my marketing otherwise you'll risk making your prospect sceptical and weary of your motivations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ugh. I _hate_ to be that guy, but after clicking on the get-started buttom (<http://robertwilliams.wpengine.com/get-started/>) the copy at the start is

 _"Lets bullet-proof your project in 7 days or less. Get started for free right now."_

 _"Lets"_ should be _"Let's"_ (it's a contraction).

I find that really off putting. I guess I shouldn't, but I do.

Super-impressed that it's been fixed so fast. I hate it when people nitpick, but occasionally I feel like it's relevant/worth it. That said, I still feel a bit dirty now.

<comment><USER17> You're not being unreasonable. It's an indicator of lacking attention to detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It is depressing that 'the solution' to finding clients was basically to send spam (highly targeted spam, but nevertheless it was commercial e-mail sent to large numbers of people without prior consent of the recipient - where I live, that would be illegal, and I understand it is also illegal in California where the author of the article is based).

The other options for finding freelancing clients are not very good - I've tried advertising on Google, and found that I pay a high CPC, get a low click- through rate, and despite my ad being clearly worded about providing services, most of the people come through on searches looking for jobs themselves, so it hasn't proved profitable (i.e. my cost to acquire a customer seems to be extremely high through that method).

I have had success with ODesk but it is hard to get clients without spending a lot of time first, even with the highest possible rating, and so effective rates there are very low, and ODesk demands a 10% cut, with contractual terms that mean that you can't do any work for the client without going through ODesk unless you wait two years without doing any work.

It is unfortunate that it is so hard for non-spammy consultants to get in touch with potential clients.

Perhaps cold calling companies might prove to be a more cost effective strategy to acquire customers.

<comment><USER19> I didn't spam, I replied to job postings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's a pretty interesting discussion of this going on over at Designer News:

[https://news.layervault.com/stories/4266-deleted-my- portfoli...](https://news.layervault.com/stories/4266-deleted-my-portfolio- made-30k-in-my-first-six-months)

<comment><USER21> Creator of Designer News here. We hellbanned the author and submitter of the story since this post is a thin veil for a get-rich-quick scheme.

<comment><USER19> WTF... why? for sharing my story? how is this blog post in anyway a "thin veil for a get-rich-quick scheme"? I'm not selling anything, I'm simply talking about what my experience was, and that I decided to focus on other things instead of a portfolio...

I will never again post on your site, no worries.

<comment><USER10> I agree, but what I find odd is how a _submitter_ of a story can also be implicated (ignoring the point the submitter is actually the author in this case, I think?)

Why would anyone want to submit stuff to a site if there's a risk they could get banned if people on the site don't like the item? That's what voting and/or flagging are for. Banning should be for abusive behavior, not poor submissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _"They all had very minimal copy, and usually a short designery phrase like, "Pixel perfection," or whatever. You know, you've seen them. Basically, sites like this:<http://kerem.co/> "_

Kerem is an amazing designer and in very high demand-I would know. He probably makes 2-3X more than this guy. So not sure why he is dissing him.

To be honest 30K in six months is not that great. I'm guessing ultimately he wants to make big money like Kerem one day.

<comment><USER23> I didn't interpret this as dissing him, but just an example of a typical approach to a designer's website. He just wanted to try to do something different. 30K in six months long term would not be that great, but this is his _first_ six months, which includes figuring out how to operate his business - so it sounds pretty good to me.

<comment><USER24> It's a pretty big insult to imply that a designer's work is run-of-the-mill, as the author has done.

<comment><USER25> Looking at that website, what's not run-of-the-mill about it? He may do great work for clients, but that particular website is yawnfully boring, and has employed that terrible current trend of low-contrast text on grey background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Honestly, this is not just something that works with design. Do you know how many programming jobs you can get just by talking to people? One-person design projects are like small, one-off web applications. You don't need a firm to attract business if the jobs end up being done by single individuals anyway.

On the other hand there are good reasons to be a part of a company. The reason I work for a company that gets contracted for web application projects is because I don't like thinking about business, and I'm not good at selling. If you have a head for those things, that's awesome for you - I wish I did. But not having to think about those things too much lets me focus on what I can do and still get a decent salary and benefits.

</comment><comment><USER27> Did anyone kind of feel bad that this guy is happy making $30k in 6 months? I think I'm excellent at what I do and think I deserve every dollar I make. However, I can't help but feel bad for people that are making so much less than me just because I might have been a bit luckier in my career path.

<comment><USER28> Why don't you hire this designer for a project, then? If you really feel bad, he could use your business rather than your pity.

<comment><USER27> Maybe I will Charley. Maybe I will...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Thank you, this reading was really very much inspirational. Anyone in the UK tried that in a similar situation? I feel like it is very rare occasion when people consciously jump from freelance pathway to corp full-time perm path and vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm confused... is $60k/year above the poverty line in San Diego?</comment>


How to Design Classes [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDC/htdc.pdf <comment><USER2> In reality we are never designing classes for a bookstore, shapes, or animals. Often times the problem is new and the classes go through an iterative lifecycle of design/refactor.

Book authors should spend more time thinking about examples. I see this in almost every oo book.

<comment><USER3> > In reality we are never designing classes for a bookstore, shapes, or a > animals.

This 100x. Anyone who has tried to solve real world problems finds out a very small amount of code written fits the model where a class corresponds to a family of physical objects, and probably much less even fits the model of polymorphism.

95% of classes end up just being fairly random containers for data and behaviour and OO just does not offer anything of value.

<comment><USER4> > 95% of classes end up just being fairly random containers for data and > behaviour and OO just does not offer anything of value.

Thank you. I always feel I'm doing something wrong since my OO code always ends up like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a functional-programming-first curriculum? Even though knowing OOP is important (if even just for the vocabulary), I wonder if a lot of pain could be sidestepped by talking about data as a separate concern than ADTs, and state as a fact rather than a place. [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROor6_NGIWU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROor6_NGIWU)

<comment><USER6> I find that it helps me to think of objects as tiny machines rather than places to hold data.

It then becomes easier to reason about which classes make sense and which don't. A "User" class doesn't make sense, but UserTable (machine to access the users) and Authenticator (machine to authenticate them) do. A BlogPost class doesn't make sense, but a PostRenderer (machine to render blog posts) does.

OOP then becomes about decomposing computers into smaller communicating computers, not about lumping together data and all the possible code related to that data. Which incidentally means that there will be things that are pretty much just dumb data / facts (e.g. User)

<comment><USER7> I highly recommend the Domain Driven Design approach.

But I've found it a lot harder to comprehend and make others give it a try (probably orders of magnitude harder than object oriented design or design patterns or normal refactorings).

I like to think about designing classes and aranging them in packets/modules/applications more like creating birocratic systems. You have to think in general terms what an institution/building does, what is its core activity, what it is authoritative over, then you design each room/department with its own mini-authority, make sure there is no duplication of authority/data between rooms, make sure each person inside a room does/knows about only the stuff in that room so they can really perform by being specialized and not commuting between rooms with their arms full of customer/citizen's files.

Make sure, as much as possible that each room knows about adjacent rooms only (or maybe at least at the same floor). At the same time you have to think how the regular citizens use these institutions and what interfaces you provide them with to solve their requests.

You don't want a taxpayer modifying his own tax file, you probably want a clerk to do that; you also don't want a taxpayer visiting 100 rooms to submit his tax files.

Then you have to think about how many customers you would serve, how wide the coridors should be made, what kind of security you need at the entrance and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 666 pages - definitely not a coincidence</comment>


Spaceline: Space elevator alternative achievable with current technology - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09339 <comment><USER2> I published about a "moonthread" idea in Wikipedia and elsewhere in forums more than a decade ago. This notes that such a thread could be used to get cargo from geostationary orbit much further out. Useful.

More lately, I've been advocating in Facebook forums that such a thread be used not as an elevator (there are better ways to move cargo from the moon in the absence of an atmosphere) but as a stable anchor for a moon Lagrange station.</comment>


Show HN: SafeRequest – How we built E2E encryption in a file transfer service - <AUTHOR> https://saferequest.net/en/p/how-we-built-end-to-end-encryption-in-a-file-transfer-service <comment><AUTHOR> We've built an end-to-end encrypted file transfer service. It is different than other file transfer services: you send a person a request to deliver files. When you for example need privacy sensitive documents from your clients, you can provide them with a secure solution. This way you are sure your documents end up at the right person. We would love to hear your feedback!</comment>


Big Brother is not watching you - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1095609/Big-brother-NOT-watching-Cash-strapped-towns-leave-CCTV-cameras-unmonitored.html?ITO=1490

<comment><USER2> I work for a company in this space. Our product tracks and describes things of interest (faces, text, moving objects), and allows the user to search for similar items at other times and on other cameras. It doesn't make security guards obsolete by any stretch, but it can make reviewing past footage much less tedious.

The whole "intelligent video" industry is in its infancy. An interesting point, though, is as these analytics improve, so does our ability to limit the scope of video that can be watched. Irrelevant footage can be made off-limits, faces or license plates obscured, etc.

It's not going to happen overnight, but the trend is clear: surveillance video is going to become more structured as time goes on. But this can be used to uphold personal rights as easily as it can be used to bypass them. Laws will just have to adapt in the face of technology.

<comment><USER3> I'm afraid it's much easier to bypass personal rights than to uphold them. Even though the technology for either is there, the panopticon is a design pattern that keeps occurring in political space.

I'm curious, though--does your company do the kind of thing covered by Steve Rambam in his talk at The Last HOPE _? ie, recognition of activities as well as of faces, text, etc.?

_ [http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speak...](http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speaker_- _Steven_Rambam_)(Part_1).mp3 [http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speak...](http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speaker_- _Steven_Rambam_)(Part_2).mp3

<comment><USER2> Activity is an awfully vague term.

I know of one company that's hired professional actors to act out different scenarios, in the hopes that they can distill the essence of suspicious activity, and thereby automatically detect it. I'm not optimistic about their chances.

However, it's relatively straightforward to detect people tailgating at security entrances (using one passcard to let two people in), or walking the wrong way into the exit gate at an airport. In both these situations, though, the environment is controlled, and the difference between proper and improper behavior is well-defined. Neither of these things are true on, say, a street corner.

Human interaction and body language is _complicated_. I expect we'll have a good way of automatically detecting behavior sometime around when we have general artificial intelligences, and not before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's debatable... if they store the footage and are able to produce it upon a law enforcement/court request then Big Brother is still watching, when it matters.

Might be a good opportunity for a real-time image analysis start up, though...

<comment><USER5> The cameras can't look everywhere, without operators helping to guide where they should be looking there are lots of things they miss, or potentially incriminating evidence they miss.

For example, if a crime is committed but the criminals face isn't seen, it's the camera operators that track them until they run into another camera on the system that has been angled to see their face. A system running on autopilot is going to miss a lot of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to work in automated surveillance.

Studies show a trained operator will miss 90% of events looking at a single feed after just 20 minutes. It's even worse over a longer time and over multiple camera feeds.

No one is really watching.

Once automated surveillance gets better, that won't be the case at all. The systems are only currently useful for after-the-fact forensics.

</comment><comment><USER7> They monitor(ed) the CCTV footage _on the spot_?

Jesus, that makes it even worse. The only places I've heard that at is high- security corporate and military locations. Certainly not town squares.

<comment><USER8> Yep, they definably did in my town — cause they had massive speakers attached, and the people monitoring the cameras could (and did on many occasions which I witnessed) shout at people for littering and causing trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish the original site was included in the RSS feed then I wouldn't have to read anything from this "news" source any more, I hereby coin the phrase Mailrolled.

</comment><comment><USER10> Eventually, computers will be able to do the job of the human, and 4 million cameras won't be a problem to watch.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is not Reddit thankyou.</comment>


Preliminary documentation on uWSGI Clustering infrastructure available - <AUTHOR> http://projects.unbit.it/uwsgi/wiki/Clustering

<comment><USER2> anyone here using uwsgi? care to share experiences with it?

<comment><USER3> I am using it for the site <http://www.quotezuki.com>. It has been working out pretty well, and Roberto the main developer is very good about helping people out on the mailing list.

I use it with nginx since the uwsgi module is included in nginx starting at 0.8.40.

I should point out though that if you are using uwsgi_pass within your nginx config, you will have to use uwsgi_* configuration variables instead of fastcgi_* variables for things like read_timeout.</comment></comment>


The Magic of strace - <AUTHOR> http://chadfowler.com/blog/2014/01/26/the-magic-of-strace/ <comment><USER3> Small, somewhat nit-picky critique: the man pages for system calls are in section 2. If you want to see the docs for the "read()" syscall, and not the bash builtin "read", saying "man read" w̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ may not (see follow-up) do what you expect. Instead, you should say

      man 2 read

This should probably be mentioned somewhere.

Otherwise, great writeup. Thanks for sharing!

(edited)

<comment><USER4> There's a manpage bash-builtins in section 7, but I've never seen a system that had manpages for the individual builtins, let alone having them in section 1. "man read" on every system I've used opens the read manpage in section 2.

<comment><USER3> My local CentOS 6.2 VM has bash-builtins in section 1, which is where "man read" takes me. Same with a RHEL 6.4 machine in the colo.

This might be a distro-specific thing.

<comment><USER5> Same with OSX: "man read" opens the builtin(1) manpage. However on Debian 7.3, it opens read(2).

<comment><USER6> You can configure the priority of the sections in /etc/man.conf or similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't forget it's userspace equiv (strace is syscalls), ltrace. This tracks all lib calls made by process.

Under windows, strace is an SSL/TLS monitoring tool (also hella useful). It shows payloads passed to CryptoAPI/CNG libs so you can easily troubleshoot explicitly encrypted protocols like ldaps. Especially useful if you use client authenticated TLS where is is not possible to use a TLS mitm proxy to snoop the layer 7 data.

<comment><USER8> Shameless plug: if you want to trace Windows applications you can take a look at my company products SpyStudio[1] and Deviare[2]. Before downvoting me try them to see how powerful and unique they are in the Windows ecosystem.

VMware is using SpyStudio for creating and troubleshooting application virtualization packages, this is, for example, a twitter post from a VMware escalation engineer: [https://twitter.com/DooDleWilk/status/428562701313662977](https://twitter.com/DooDleWilk/status/428562701313662977)

[1] [http://www.nektra.com/products/spystudio-api- monitor/](http://www.nektra.com/products/spystudio-api-monitor/)

[2] [http://www.nektra.com/products/deviare-api-hook- windows/devi...](http://www.nektra.com/products/deviare-api-hook- windows/deviare-in-process/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks, it actually works quite well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mac OS X has a suite of tools built on a similar package called dtrace—opensnoop and execsnoop. Gives really nice real time lists of all files opened on the system and all binaries executed, respectively.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for those, very cool and useful! Every time I see blog posts like the above, and comments like yours and others, it reminds me just how much stuff I either don't know or should learn more about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So what happened with the Lotus system, and how did strace help?

<comment><USER13> Got re-written on top of Eclipse.

Running version 7 on my work laptop. :(

<comment><USER14> The client was rewritten on top of Eclipse, not the server.

<comment><USER13> You are right, I should have been clearer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for the writeup! strace should definitely be in your toolbox. There is also systemtap, which I like a lot as well. It has some problem on Linux though, especially only being widely supported of Linux > 3.5 if the distro you are using does not ship with patches. Custom userspace probes are a real strong point.

I wrote a short article about stap using Rubys probes as an example: [http://www.asquera.de/blog/2014-01-26/stap-and- ruby-2](http://www.asquera.de/blog/2014-01-26/stap-and-ruby-2)

<comment><USER16> To clarify, systemtap needs UTRACE or UPROBES kernel support to trace user processes. Without those you can still inspect kernel functions. IIRC UTRACE was mainly supported by Redhat, and available intheir kernels for quite a few years. In 3.5 the UPROBES functionality was merged in to mainline. Other tools, like perf, can use UPROBES support as well.

<comment><USER15> Yep, thats the detailed story. A lot of Linuxes (especially current Ubuntu LTS) ship without those patches, though, which makes the whole exercise of compiling the kernel yourself (and maybe a debug image to go along with it) a tedious one, and probably not fit for a production environment.

Thats why I decided to focus on Linux > 3.5, which will be available with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, where installing gets much easier if you know the right packages. I definitely wanted to make sure that people can start playing around with it in a few minutes.

Also, UPROBES are in my opinion one of the most interesting features to grab with strace. It allows you to easily combine detailed kernel-level tracing with tracing of your application.

(Not that I want to suggest that compiling your own kernel is hard to do, it just takes the fun out of "let's trace!")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can use Process monitor [http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/bb896645.asp...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx) to see a similar overview of low level activity. You won't see all the system calls, you can't pipe the output directly, but there is a UI and you don't have to look up file descriptors

<comment><USER8> If you want to see the DLL calls, exceptions, etc, you can use the tools I posted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7156160)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you think strace is useful, wait until you try dtrace.

<comment><USER18> or systemtap [https://sourceware.org/systemtap/](https://sourceware.org/systemtap/) or ktap [http://www.ktap.org/doc/tutorial.html](http://www.ktap.org/doc/tutorial.html) for GNU/Linux

<comment><USER19> or LTTng with both kernel and userspace tracers [http://lttng.org](http://lttng.org)

Disclaimer: LTTng developer :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone heard of a program that will take strace (or dtrace) output and create a pretty diagram showing which commands call which commands and which files they read or create?

We've got a fairly complicated bioinformatics pipeline that calls about 100 other programs, and creates or reads about 100 different files. I'd love a way to create a picture of what's going on. Which files each program uses, etc.

If such a program doesn't exist, would that be worth building? Could it be something I could potentially sell?

<comment><USER21> Sounded like an interesting script, so I just wrote it in about a half hour. You're welcome to sell it if you want... (also, there's probably a default recursion limit of 100; unroll the recursion in walkpid to go farther) Collect logs with 'strace -o pids.log -e trace=process -f [specify your process here]', run with 'perl printpids.pl < pids.log'

      #!/usr/bin/perl -w
      $|=1;
      use strict;
      my (%pidmap, @order);
      while ( <> ) {
          chomp;
          if ( /^(\d+)\s+(\w+)(.*)$/ ) {
              my ($pid, $syscall, $args) = ($1, $2, $3);
              if ( $syscall =~ /(^clone$|fork$)/ and $args =~ / = (\d+)$/ and $1 > 0 ) {
                  my $clonepid = $1;
                  $pidmap{$clonepid} = { -parent => $pid };
                  push(@order, $clonepid);
              }
              elsif ( $syscall =~ /^exec/ and $args =~ / = (\d+)$/ and $1 == 0 ) {
                  my $exec = $args;
                  @order = ($pid) if !@order;
                  $exec =~ s/^\("([^"]+?)",.*$/$1/g;
                  push( @{ $pidmap{$pid}->{-exec} } , $exec );
              }
          }
      }
      foreach my $pid ( @order ) {
          my $spaces = walkpid($pid);
          print "    " x $spaces . join("\n" . ("    " x $spaces), map { $_ . " ($pid)" } @{ $pidmap{$pid}->{-exec} } ) . "\n";
      }
      sub walkpid {
          my $pid = shift;
          my $c = shift || 0;
          if ( exists $pidmap{$pid}->{-parent} ) {
              return walkpid($pidmap{$pid}->{-parent}, $c+1);
          }
          return($pid, $c);
      }

<comment><USER20> Wow that's amazing! Can I have strace launch the program? Or does it already have to be running?

<comment><USER22> you can, last strace argument can be a command you want to strace

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "perf top -e syscalls: _statfs_ "

particularly when you don't know which process is calling all the syscalls.

Mix "perf record" and "perf trace" & you have the next generation of strace tools.

<comment><USER24> So they integrated that upstream, I always wondered what happened to the tool announced here: [http://lwn.net/Articles/415728/](http://lwn.net/Articles/415728/)

      perf --help
        trace           strace inspired tool

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I use strace all the time doing ops at Crittercism. Some of the random things it's helped with/taught me:

\- allowed exploring forking behavior of daemons, in particular the nitty- gritty of gunicorn's prefork behavior, and understanding the rationale behind single- and double-fork daemons generally (very important to understand for job control e.g. writing upstart/init.d jobs)

\- isolated hot reads to memcache in situ, by identifying the socket associated with the memcache connection, and finding which key was read the most by a process (we built better logging after the fact, but sometimes there's no substitute for instrumenting prod during tough perf/stress problems)

\- let me explore the behavior of node.js's several threads, and find one of them sending "X" over a socket to the other (still not quite sure what this is, some kind of heartbeat/clock tick?)

\- helped understanding "primordial processes" and the exact details of how forking/reparenting work on linux

It's a great tool and one that every ops/infrastructure engineer should be familiar with.

<comment><USER26> It's still no dtrace. Something that I hope enters osx soon.

<comment><USER27> dtrace has been in osx since 10.5 :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Quick strace command that I use all the time to see what files a process is opening:

        strace -f <command> 2>&1 | grep ^open

Really useful to see what config files something is reading (and the order) or to see what PHP (or similar) files are being included.

There's normally other ways to do this (eg using a debugger) but sending strace's stderr to stdout and piping through grep is useful in so many cases it's become a command I use every day or 2.

<comment><USER29> Hey, that's really useful! Cheers :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> For OSX you need to use dtruss, for NetBSD and FreeBSD ktrace is what you need.

<comment><USER17> ktrace is a little more broad and has much different invocation; truss is most comparable on FreeBSD and SysV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Strace is easy to use, commonly available, and very useful in many situations.

More modern tools such as dtrace for the solaris and systemtap for linux addresses similar problems but with a broader coverage.

</comment><comment><USER32> Also check out ltrace... Shows the calls to other libraries the process is making...

I'd also like to point out that a key to using strace successfully is the result column... Programs that fail often make system calls that fail right before they exit... You can often tell what the program is trying and failing to accomplish...

</comment><comment><USER33> In case you're curious, this is how ltrace (strace's library equivalent) works: [http://www.opersys.com/blog/ltrace- internals-140120](http://www.opersys.com/blog/ltrace-internals-140120)

</comment><comment> Anthony-G I've used strace before to help diagnose issues with buggy software I was using and I thought this was a great article.

I just thought I'd let people know that it can be a lot easier to read strace's output if you read the output log file using Vim as it contains a syntax file which can highlight PIDs, function names, constants, strings, etc. Alternatively, if you don't want to create an strace log file, you could pipe the output to Vim and it will automatically detect it as being strace output, e.g.

      strace program_name 2>&1 | vim  -

</comment><comment><USER34> strace taught me that glibc never does what you think it does behind the scenes!

</comment><comment><USER35> Totally agree that strace is an awesome tool. I've even used it with Java apps that were behaving wierdly, just attach and see what it is saying to the kernel.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Bending to the will of the people, I have appended a conclusion, clarifying the fate of the Lotus Domino server. [http://chadfowler.com/blog/2014/01/26/the-magic-of- strace/](http://chadfowler.com/blog/2014/01/26/the-magic-of-strace/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Just a few hours ago, a newly minted Ubuntu binary was crashing due a library version mismatch. I thought I had updated the shared libraries to point to the new versions. But definitely something was still hooked to the old version. I just couldn't figure out how/where. ldd wasn't of much help because everything was OK according to it. "If only I can get a bit more info when the binary is running and spit out everything before the crash."

Tried my luck with gdb. Sure enough...there was libQt5DBus pointing to the old libs leading to the crash. If you are feeling particularly adventurous, you can step one instruction at a time after starting. Even without debug symbols, there is quite a lot of info that be used while troubleshooting.

</comment><comment><USER21> There's a lot of fun to be had with strace. I wrote a tiny perl script that spies on the file descriptors of another process and outputs it to your terminal: [https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/blob/public- bin/src/sy...](https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/blob/public- bin/src/system/dumpfd.pl)

</comment><comment><USER37> Even in the 90s Java decompilers existed, so the "We had no source code" excuse sounds a bit strange :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh we used those too, but in this case there were also native libraries. I was a regular user of jad, even sometimes recompiling and replacing stuff (ooooweeee) in production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's instructive to see how much simpler the strace output for a simple program is when the program is statically linked. Especially if you use an alternative libc like musl ([http://musl-libc.org/](http://musl-libc.org/)).

</comment><comment><USER39> Don't forget that sometimes strace is overkill, and similar more easily parsed things can be used instead, for example, /usr/bin/time (vs bash time) has been coming in more and more handy for me.

</comment><comment><USER26> The first level up on java is being able to tell useful things about it via simply straceing it. Once again another win for dtrace.

</comment><comment><USER40> Useful article. But the background of the blog flickers rather badly, it's pretty migraine inducing.

</comment><comment><USER22> my favorite use of strace to learn which files (especially config files) are being open by a new daemon/tool: strace -f -s1024 2>&1|grep open

also remember also useful 'ltrace' \- libraries tracing

</comment><comment><USER41> Unix tools? You mean Linux....

</comment><comment><USER42> Please see

ftp://126.96.36.199/pub/release/website/tools/trace-20140126-x86_64-b95.tar.gz

This is a tool called ptrace - which does everything that strace does and a lot more. You have working binaries in there, and most of the source - <USER2> havent extricated the full build dependencies so it all builds, but this includes extra facilities like reporting summaries of process trees, showing only connections or files, and shlib injection into a target process.

If people are interested more on this, contact me at CrispEditor-a.t-gmail.c-o-m

<comment><USER43> I am a bit paranoid about downloading a binary from a site without a domain name.

<comment><USER44> ftp://crisp.dyndns- server.com/pub/release/website/tools/trace-20140126-x86_64-b95.tar.gz works too if it makes you feel any better.

<comment><USER45> dyndns ain't much better.

<comment><USER34> Indeed. Dyndns tends to be the source of much Internet clap...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>