dtran

We definitely see parallels with co-working spaces. How did that co-working space work for you? Do you work out of any coffee shops or other places like that now (if that's possible given restrictions where you live)?

Pre-pandemic, I would often sit at a Starbucks before going into the office to knock out one specific task since I always knew as soon as I got to the office, I'd usually have to sync up with a coworker on something. Again, I know everyone has their own preferences, but something about the energy/ambiance of a coffee shop has always helped me get focused much more than a library or completely silent corner. One issue with co-working spaces is that sometimes it's not clearly delineated when people are trying to get focused work done vs. chat, and we felt the same pain with unstructured co-working Zooms that we did at the beginning of the pandemic.

Thanks Andyxor! We have a weekly writing session that my co-founder hosts and I'm going to host a couple of coding-specific sessions soon. Even more specific tasks like leetcode/interview prep would be super interesting. One of our members hosts a weekly reading session—during busy weeks, that's basically the only time I'll make progress on a book, so that's been delightful.

Thanks orky56! I'm an avid runner and can't stop seeing similarities between fitness/training and work (and specifically startups). Wrote about some of them here: https://www.flow.club/blog/how-to-work-like-elite-athletes-t...

> In my world, I need less discipline for vision work and more for tedious activities.

That's definitely a big use case for Flow Club—getting to inbox zero or writing an email that you've been dreading.

Re: increasing the intensity, we do have some 90-minute and 120-minute sessions, which are super challenging for me even after hundreds of Flow Club sessions and years of using pomodoros. There's also some interesting ideas in this thread that my co-founder responded to re: ways to increase the intensity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28223257

Thanks for checking it out and the kind words re: the idea qnsi.

>I think there is no real accountability (I can imagine pathological procrastinator might lie that their session went well, when in reality they browsed FB).

That's a good point— a "pathological procrastinator" could definitely do that, but they'd mostly just be cheating themselves since they're not here to pretend to work for their boss. To your point though, some users have requested a way to share their screen for extra accountability, and we've even had a couple members do this with virtual cameras. At the end of the day though, we're building a community that celebrates the process and gradual progress made by time-blocking and goal-setting to do our best work, so if someone feels this way, I think the community can help them. To bring in another perspective, I'm an avid runner, and occasional cheating (course-cutting during races or faking Strava data) does happen within that community, but besides the shame of getting caught, if you're running every week with a community, cheaters will either self-select out of the community, or hopefully see the emptiness that comes with achievements they didn't earn.

Thanks for checking it out! I don't think that it's because "[you're] just old"— it's definitely a matter of personal preference, and we know this style of working isn't for everyone.

Re: open offices, that's a good point— I actually think open offices are distracting if people are walking around behind you or chatting in the background. But if everyone else is also hard at work (and therefore not really watching), I definitely feel a small lift from that ambiance/energy.

Thanks so much for trying it out and for the kind words Dan!

> setting goals for the hour, seeing the faces of six strangers on mute, and a timer ticking down. It drove focus and accountability.

Goal-setting is so powerful and yet so difficult— clarity of goals + setting the right level of challenge for the time period are two of the key characteristics of flow state (as defined by the great Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Re: "seeing the faces of six strangers", we think that this experience becomes more powerful as you come back to Flow Club over time—you'll do sessions with some of the same hosts and a mix of new faces, acquaintances, and friends, both from outside Flow Club as well as ones that you make in Flow Club.

David from Flow Club here— I'll be hosting a few Hacker News-only sessions today and tomorrow. I remember attending a HN meetup in Palo Alto back when I was an undergrad back in 2009 and it was super cool to hear what people were working on—not just the high-level pitch, but literally what they were debugging that day. That's been my favorite part of Flow Club as well.

I've been a big fan of pomodoro and time-blocking, but for a long time was convinced that it didn't work well for coding until I experimented a bit. Wrote up some of my thoughts here: https://www.flow.club/blog/makers-schedule-2021 Would love to hear if any of y'all try to time block for writing code and will be around to answer any questions!

Love the room cleaning operations example! Would have never thought of that operation use case for a no-code tool. Congrats Bruno and Jestor!

When are those meetings scheduled? Are there ways you can get into flow state faster after/in between meetings?

Flow Club | Full-stack or Frontend Engineer | Full-time | Based in San Francisco, CA + REMOTE

Flow Club is creating a world where anyone can access deep, focused flow. We’re growing quickly and hiring the founding team to intentionally design a future work environment that is better for the 1B+ knowledge workers everywhere.

We’re seed funded and looking for a full stack engineer and frontend engineer excited by the prospect of building the software that powers the most productive work environment.

Experience with Typescript, React, python, and WebRTC are not required, but are a definite plus.

https://www.flow.club/jobs

jobs @ flow (dot) club

I did see one such study that looked at emotional expressions/body language rated on a Joy-Sadness Display Scale by 5 trained observers in addition to self-reported measures: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233265431_Experienc...

Of course, this wouldn't really work for a longitudinal study.

I think "being productive" vs. "time well spent" and "doing things that really matter" is a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be this way. I know that's a statement from a position of privilege— not every has a job where they can feel like they are in a flow state while working, but do you have any side projects or hobbies where you feel both productive and feel like it's time well spent?

Coming to this pretty late, but I've been fascinated with the concept of flow recently, which researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihaly described as:

  “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile”

Again, not everyone is in a position to do this, but I think we should de-emphasize number of hours spent in "work mode" albeit inefficiently or without great focus or working on things that aren't super important and more time seeking deep focus and then time completely off to relax, recharge and let ideas background process/percolate.

Great work Wenbin! What's the hardest part about maintaining this API?

Posted the Bloomberg article before realizing that it might be paywalled for some— alternate link: https://decrypt.co/38255/jay-z-blockchain-alchemy-public-lau...

Super excited to see Alchemy launch publicly. I was part of the early team before leaving in December to start a new startup. If anyone has questions, I can ping someone on the team!

./run startup.code I write about running, (writing &) running code, and running startups https://www.davidtran.me

Thanks for reading! Whoa, do you still play BW once a month, or is that SC2? I never started playing SC2, so I actually had to look up Artosis pylon. I def remember Manner pylon though :)

And hmm, I actually didn't think I'd find ANY readers at the intersection of startups, CS, SC, poker and basketball. Assuming most people on HN are interested in startups and computer science, I'd imagine that the limiting area of intersection would probably be SC ∩ bball (at least more so than SC ∩ poker or poker ∩ bball), so it's pretty awesome that we share all of those!

I started this post with the Starcraft campaign example, and then as I kept writing, was thinking that I might have to backtrack and get rid of SC completely.

To be fair, the campaign is very contrived, but in most 1v1s, I feel like strong opinions were the way to go, with the “unwanted adjustments” you talked about, like waiting a few seconds longer to take your natural after your opponent’s scout leaves. It’s also why after many thousands of games, I sort of lost interest in Starcraft. Based on maps and matchups, besides cheese, most games played out with both players just executing their predetermined builds until one player made a mistake (the game breaks down to balancing economy, army size, tech and army positioning, so a miscalculation along any of those axes). I did enjoy some of the ICCup seasons with new maps before people figured out optimal builds where it wasn’t as repetitive. But mostly I stopped playing cuz of all the long drawn out PvTs :)

OP here. Thanks for making this connection! I hadn't heard of OFU before, but it sounds interesting. I'm actually working on another post about "optimizing around the optimal" and use multi-armed bandit as an example =). As Jeff Atwood mentions in his post on SOWH, writing about this has been a great way for me to think about the topic. If it turns out that smarter/more experienced people have already thought about/written about this subject at length, I'm not at all disappointed that I'm retracing their steps. In fact, it means that I independently found the right path!

I see this Coursera course on OFU: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/practical-rl/optimism-in-fa... and what looks like Auer's original UCRL paper http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3052-logarithmic-online-regret-b... Do you have a preferred source for learning about this? Thanks and Merry Christmas!

Congrats on the launch Bilal and team!

I don't have much background knowledge in mapping or self-driving, so I thought this was well-written in a way that anyone could understand! Re: breaking down the data framework into world geometry vs. semantic annotations— that makes sense, but how often would you need to update the annotations? Just running and biking around San Francisco, I feel like there's no shortage of construction that create changes to lanes/stop signs/lights and rules of traffic flow. How do you account for these, or would world geometry data be enough here?

I use an extension called ["News Feed Eradicator"](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...) because I rarely find that I get much, if any, value from the Facebook feed. As Ricky says, the links to external articles don't really match the context that I have when using Facebook. I use it almost exclusively for posts/messages within Groups and Messenger, both of which I feel like provide value more attuned to the original value prop, which is to stay in touch with friends and family.

I find a lot more value in vertical-specific feeds, e.g. I want to see my friends' training runs and races on Strava, reading inspiration on Goodreads, or travel and food adventures on Instagram. Instagram is a little bit more generic, but at least I generally have a better sense of what to expect when I open the feed than I would on Facebook.

I enjoyed learning about moais, but the Blue Zone quiz at the end of the article was a complete non-sequitir for me.

I like the simple litmus test that wizardforhire mentioned (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17544755). Another one I like is WaitButWhy's "Traffic Test":

"The Traffic Test is passed when I’m finishing up a hangout with someone and one of us is driving the other back home or back to their car, and I find myself rooting for traffic. That’s how much I’m enjoying the time with them."

(from https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html)

Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17512045, I'm trying to figure out what gets me most excited about what DIRT and TCRs could enable.

For me, it's actually not data easily verifiable as true or false, but more for "wisdom of the crowds" type of knowledge—things that you couldn't put up on a source like Wikipedia. These tend to be lists or recommendations that contain some subjectivity, but also tend to coalesce around a mostly-agreed upon set of answers from a trusted set of sources.

In the centralized world, we usually rely upon institutions like the Michelin Guide to develop a fair set of criteria, but we ultimately as end users trust that institution's "objectivity" and judge whether we think that list is valuable. Sometimes when I research, I informally end up creating lists of lists and combining them ad-hoc if I can't tell which of them is more trusted. These lists also tend to end up being static or only updated once or twice a year and can fall horribly out of date.

I think TCR incentives could potentially be really interesting as an alternative to these lists which rely on the institution's brand. For example, I think Quora Answer Wikis (like this one: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-independent-coffee-s...) and general consensus for recommendations in forums for questions like "Which cities should I visit in Thailand if I'm looking for nightlife and places to hike?" or "Which REST framework library should I use for a Django project?" It'd be amazing if DIRT could balance the incentives for community members to contribute to this type of data and keep them as living lists, with all changes and updates maintained through a community with the right checks and balances and incentives.

From the Medium post: >If the data is correct, it is freely shared. If the data is incorrect, anyone can challenge the data and earn tokens for identifying these inaccurate facts. Our protocol and platform makes it economically irrational for misinformation to persist in a data set.

I think the more interesting data would be data that's on a gray scale, e.g. using the above coffee shop in San Francisco example, obviously if John Doe tries to get his burger joint on the list as a growth hack even though they don't serve coffee, that should easily be verified as misinformation. But what if a coffee shop just closed for business, or moved to Mill Valley but thinks they should still be on the list, or just switched beans and raised the prices so that everyone agrees that it no longer deserves to be on the list?

Disclaimer: I know most of the team working on DIRT, and I don't know very much about TCRs.

Hey thisisit, happy to! Leo replied with more specifics in the sibling comment to this, so I'll try to talk about the high-level aspects very briefly, although I'm working on a post titled "PR from first principles" that will do a better job of explaining.

The "software-powered PR agency" is more a description of the appartus/mechanism rather than the goal, so perhaps it'd be more useful to start with our mission. We want to enable anyone with a great story to reach those who want to hear it. Rather than trying to build up the audience yourself, we believe that it is much more effective to connect sources of great stories with storytellers who 1) already have an audience, and 2) can do a better job of telling the story for that audience than you can.

This is the role that today's PR agencies occupy as middlemen. However, they come with prohibitive price tags that restrict access for most stories, and their principle means of making these connections is through individual relationships with both sources and journalists, much the same way it has been done for decades. We think it's time for a change.

The software-powered part comes into play because we ultimately want to create a marketplace that more efficiently facilitates these connections— using both public and proprietary data, we're starting to get a really good understanding of what stories specific storytellers are looking for, and we connect them to the best sources.

David, one of the founders at Upbeat here! Our media strategy lead Leo wrote up some advice about two of the most common stories to pitch. Obviously there are stories beyond announcing funding or launching out of an accelerator, but a lot of the advice here applies generally. If you have any specific questions, we'll be checking in here throughout the day to try to answer!

Congrats Chris, Lee, Ryan and the rest of the team on the launch!

Hey Amar,

Thanks for checking out our project! What alerts do you have set up in Google News Alerts?

Re: providing contact info— that's definitely one logical next step. We left it out of this hack week project. Journalists already get hundreds of pitches a day, so we're trying to experiment with something new and different in addition to the usual pitch cycles. We're thinking of letting journalists know that you're following them and reading their articles, and make it so they can follow your company as well to receive updates from you, or ask you for quotes/opinions on topics that you're an expert on. This already happens to an extent, but we can make all this much more efficient by only routing their relevant articles to you, and only showing your relevant quotes/updates.

Hey neerkumar,

Thanks for the kind words! We aren't focused on sales, but in case anyone here is, what do you mean? It'd find sales prospects based on how similar their companies are/what they tweet about?

Hey everyone,

After helping hundreds of companies with PR and having talked to thousands of founders, the most common thing we hear is: "I'm not sure how to get started with PR" or "I'll think about it in a few months when we're ready to launch." So for hack week, we brainstormed around this idea of "how to get started", and one of the projects we built is a super simple, low commitment and low effort way to get started with PR. Just tell us a little a bit about your company in 30 seconds, and voila, we try to find the most relevant journalists for what you're working on, and let you subscribe to a weekly digest to stay on top of news about your industry, competitors, etc.

Whether you're working at a company, starting a company, or just thinking about starting something, we hope this can help! It's still a very rough v0.1. Feedback, bug reports, etc are would be SUPER APPRECIATED! Thanks so much!

A few different things going into generate the list of 5 journalists that we think are relevant to your company, including a simple machine learned topic model. Happy to give more details if anyone's interested. Some of the results could definitely use some heavy tweaking— feedback is super appreciated!

> When asked by multiple lawmakers why Equifax set up this separate site, Smith said the company's main domain was not architected to process the enormous traffic the company knew would come its way after the announcement. In all, Smith said, the independent breach-response site has had 400 million consumer visits, which would have crumpled the main site.

Apparently they've never heard of subdomains, static pages, reverse proxies, and <insert many other solutions anyone on HN could come up with off the top of their heads>?