Sit.

I like the simple approach.

And as a practical matter, just chillin' is safe. But still:

  [sitting] can get uncomfortable. But when you finish, 
  for some strange reason you feel better

Meditation requires some guidance appropriate to the person. Some people are attracted to meditation for the wrong reasons; encouraging them without proper direction can make things go badly for them.

Zen shinkanzen in particular is considered difficult for new students because it is object-less meditation (unlike e.g. Tibetan use of mandala, Christian prayer, or Vispassana body-awareness). Even Zen teachers often start with breath-counting and progress to other heuristics before approaching emptiness.

People are generally robust to thoughts and opinions, even somewhat negative ones, so it seems like the marketplace of ideas and apps is a fine place for that. But I would encourage people writing meditation apps at a minimum to take the same care that any health/diagnostic app would, amplified by the likelihood that someone emotionally unstable might embrace your offering a little too closely...

I don't get what you're saying.

Anyway, I think meditation is best when used for thinking, not for not-thinking.

I'm curious, best for what?

Personally, I don't need any practice to think - but not thinking, that's very challenging! And practicing has been very rewarding.

Best use of time ethically speaking. Goal is to develop ideas.

I don't know about you but I have way too many ideas. Some are good, most of them are terrible, and some of them are downright evil. It often takes a quiet mind to see which is which and not talk myself into indulging bad ideas.

For me it's not even that I have bad ideas that I find problematic about my thinking (though I do of course), sometimes they just hurt. Kinda like how you might walk around and stub your toe and now you're like, ouch, this is frustrating, and an unreasonably intense pain for such a minor and commonplace injury. In the same way, sometimes I'm minding my business and a painful thought pops into my head and it's like, no thank you, I don't really need that. (A stubbed toe is also a good estimate for how much they hurt.)

Sitting and just sort of existing for a little while without thinking (to the extent I'm able to refrain from thinking, which varies) keeps me grounded in the world beyond thought. If you forgot you had an entire body and thought you were just a foot, stubbing your toe would hurt a lot more.

If you forgot you had an entire body and thought you were just a foot, stubbing your toe would hurt a lot more.

Oh, man, that's a good one. Thank you for this insightful nugget to start my morning.

Sounds like hustle/grind/productivity/self-optimization.

Many have gone through that and found they need more balance, and practicing non-thought is a good way (the best? Dunno) of getting that.

It's good to think about things carefully for extended periods of time without distraction because it allows you to understand things you would not have understood otherwise.

May I ask what's unethical about sitting and doing nothing for a little while or meditating without a goal?

That is basically day dreaming, not really true meditation.

It's best to do both for different purposes. It's kind of like biking and weight lifting. You could count both as "exercise" but they serve different purposes and can work in conjunction.

Isn't the entire point of many types of meditation to not think? There's value in that, at least for some people.

Let's hear it. How are we going to hurt ourselves by waiting for a timer to tick for a minute or two without the safety blanket of scrolling Twitter?

To be fair, they did say:

[A]s a practical matter, just chillin' is safe.

I'm an autodidact so this chaffed at me too. But I have met people who've gone in a very strange direction by assembling a syncretic set of ideas plucked from different schools of thought, and ended up with something that was kinda nuts. And operating from this nutty set of principles sometimes lead them to make bad decisions, and made it very difficult to communicate with them.

I don't know think having guidance from a teacher is the only way to avoid that, but I think without feedback from others in some way it's really easy to start believing your own bullshit.

Let me try again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24185710 - Mindfulness and meditation can worsen depression and anxiety

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26485608 - Lost in Thought: Psychological Risks of Meditation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11752317 - For some, meditation has become more curse than cure

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14574205 - There’s a dark side to meditation that no one talks about

Cheers.

It's anecdotal of course but during a first body scan for a mindfulness course I got a panic attack. I stopped and on subsequent days did shorter meditation exercises before attempting another body scan (guided by audio, think it took like 35 mins), which was ok. It's not hard to imagine that if I would've tried to "push through" and hadn't stopped the body scan the first time as well as continued doing it on following days that this would have negatively affected my mental health.

Zen shinkanzen

You probably meant to say "shikantaza", I don't think "shinkanzen" is a word.

Shinkansen is the name of the famous Japanese high speed train model :) GP probably got the words mixed up in their mind, or it was autocorrect.

Perhaps Shinkanzen was an old Polish train between Krakow and Zakopane: 120 km in up to 8 hours.

I've been meditating for most of my life, and agree that objectless meditation can be frustrating/scary/emotionally challenging.

That's precisely why I say that although I use it for meditation, the goal of the app is just to sit down and do nothing for a minute or two. That's it.

FYI I consulted a qualified therapist (CBT, ACT) after building it and they didn't see any issues with my app or the article. She also practices and teaches meditation, so I got lucky I suppose!

Some people are attracted to meditation for the wrong reasons

Like what?

Not that anyone asked:

I've long given up on meditation timers. I go to a room without any digital technology except for a Casio F91W. I have gotten good at gauging how long I've been concentrating for and if I have aversion to continued sitting I just peek at the watch to know how long it's been.

This is a solved problem that costs $0 and I don't have to worry about receiving personalised ads because I'm into 'mindfulness'.

Yup. I count my breaths in batches of 12 (batch count on the in breath, breath count on the out breath). So like "1-1, 1-2, ..., 1-12, 2-1, 2-2" and it works out that the batch count is the number of minutes I've been meditating. So if I want to meditate for 10 minutes I do 10x 12-counts. No technology needed, can be done anywhere, anytime.

This is brilliant. For me it was about 8 counts per minute (and I could adjust on the fly). This is a good one to add to the arsenal of breathing techniques.

Re: the app. My personal experience has been after while if you need an app to do nothing …

I haven't heard about this before, did you learn it from someone? I usually just count breaths up to 10 and then restart and have a timer for 10 minutes - the timer usually ruins the mood. This is genius and I'm going to start doing this instead.

Counting makes it not so effective for me, but so do timers. I tend to just meditate however long feels right from 5-45 minutes.

No technology needed, can be done anywhere, anytime.

I call this doing nothing with... nothing. It aligns closer to the spirit of emptiness.

I suppose it costs one Casio F91W, but I get what you mean.

Good-quality incense burns pretty consistently -- when I sit, I sit the time it takes one stick to burn down. There's even incense-burners that will ring a little bell when the stick burns down, but I just stay aware of it.

Author here. I 100% agree, don't obsess about the tools, do whatever works for you. I use the app mainly for meditation and despite having decades of experience I tend to lose the track of time.

I get the impression that you haven't read the article/UI text in the app, so can't comment on the rest of your message I'm afraid.

But, to you some time: I don't charge for the app, I hate ads, I just want people to sit down and do nothing/stop doomscrolling. No need to meditate and no ideology involved.

For how long do you usually meditate?

I don't have to worry about receiving personalised ads because I'm into 'mindfulness'.

That's my reaction to all these mindfulness and mental health apps/services. The same tech bros that have created and profited off this crisis in the first place are now trying to sell a solution.

Interesting project. One thing I noticed: when I clicked the button, a fullscreen window got spawned, without any prompt asking me if I should enter fullscreen (Latest Firefox). On a sidenote: this could be used for browser-in-the-browser attacks[0] where someone could present a mock browser UI with a fake URL.

Other than that, it's a great project. Anything to just sit without distractions gives us an unfair advantage over the majority of the world's population who are addicted to phones.

[0] https://mrd0x.com/browser-in-the-browser-phishing-attack/

Browsers allow entering fullscreen as long as it's in response to user input, such as clicking a button. When entering fullscreen, browsers emit a prompt about exiting fullscreen, partly to make sure people know how to exit and partly to make sure entering fullscreen doesn't go unnoticed. So, it'd be hard to pull off such an attack.

So, it'd be hard to pull off such an attack.

That's what you'd think, but people rarely pay that much attention. The fullscreen prompt only shows up for a few seconds.

For example, recently a family member clicked on a fake YouTube link from an ad in Google's search results. Clicked the search bar and it immediately turned their whole screen into a "call apple support" popup.

They called me up because they thought it was a virus, but really it was just a fullscreen webpage, and being not very technologically inclined, they didn't even try Esc, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+Q, etc.

That's why I've installed adblock on every relative/friend's browser. Also disabled browser's notifications.

Then one day one of them blindly followed instructions to remove it so they can access an online newspaper. The only time they could actually follow instructions, it was actually malicious.

Then one day one of them blindly followed instructions to remove it so they can access an online newspaper.

Wow. That's a new level of evil. I've seen "disable your adblocker", but not "remove your adblocker".

This makes it even more justifiable that adblockers remove anti-adblock messages, beyond just removing annoyances. :)

So, it'd be hard to pull off such an attack.

How many people actually read prompts? People literally share 2FA codes with scammers over the phone even though the SMS itself tells them not to share it with anyone, including their own support workers.

This post turned out to be wildly off-topic to the actual topic, but it's relevant for this subthread of the conversation and I've written so many words already that so I might as well post it:

I believe that fullscreen notification got implemented exactly because of people not noticing their browser went into fullscreen mode.

I agree with some other poster, that it's unreasonable to assume that a majority of people would actually read the message. Luckily, though, that's not actually necessary. It's enough for them to notice that there was something fading away. Something unexpected happened.

Now it gets interesting: Regardless of people actively reading "Press [Esc]", as long as it was within their vision, their brain would still process it anyway.

This means that, in the state of confusion caused by the fading text, they'd be wondering "what just happened?" and their brain would execute the command "press [Esc]" regardless of the text being actively read or not.

The state of confusion causes the input to go right through, getting it executed, causing the user to press Escape.

That's a really fucking neat confusion technique!

PS: I'm not good at linking to topics so people gain better understanding, but I'll just read through some until I find good ones.

Milton Erickson's confusion technique. ( https://www.scribd.com/document/179357099/Milton-Erickson-TH... )

Quora's ChatGPT ( https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-simple-pattern-interrupt-con... ) has a few good lines to write about a confusion technique called "pattern interrupt".

This one here ( https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070912124017.h... ) is interesting. They either pretend, or are unaware of the fact, that they are using a confusion technique to program the client.

when I clicked the button, a fullscreen window got spawned, without any prompt asking me

This behavior is a pet peeve of mine. I almost never want anything to be fullscreen, and it's extremely irritating when applications or, especially, if a website makes the browser do it.

Trying to use technology to get people to spend some time meditating is fun :) I especially enjoyed the gong sound, the font selection, and the friendly wording in your app.

My WIP attempt at achieving something similar: https://ant.care/

There's a button "breathe for food" that'll trigger a similar effect as your website. The difference is that the user is given a digital reward ("food") which they use to feed their digital ant colony.

I'm now trying to add intelligent behaviors to the ant colony in an attempt to make them seem alive and compelling enough for users to repeatedly engage with the breathwork exercises.

Good luck with your project! :)

I’m curious what the ants are up to, do they do a great deal currently?

I’ve been running it for a short while and they’ve dug a little L shape with blue pheromones vertically, and purple horizontally - looks like they are putting food in the horizontal but one ant is stuck behind a food block. Poor Taquan.

Edit: the ‘view crater’ button also crashes the simulation, at least on an M2 Air using Chrome 120

So, ant.care is intentionally designed to be a slow moving experience, goal is to have it unfold over real-world months, but until I get sufficient environmental depth it's going to feel weird. I give the user the ability to control time in sandbox mode to provide a practical means of demoing.

The queen will give birth to worker ants every hour or so. Worker ants have a low chance of applying tunnel/nesting pheromones when they are surrounded by other ants. So, when your colony grows to a few worker ants then they'll start digging more tunnels and chambers to give themselves space. Food is taken from the surface and brought into the nest and has a higher probability of being dropped near other food which allows for food piles to form over time.

Ants go to sleep at night (not realistic, but I thought it was cute) and, if they're well fed, can regurgitate food to other hungry ants (like the queen, who can't move once giving birthing). They'll emote when these things occur.

And oops, yeah crater view shouldn't be live. I forgot I shipped an update live to debug iOS performance (works on iphones now without crashing!). The goal is to get a "top-down" view and to let ants leave the nest to forage for food, but have been struggling with architecture issues blocking me from it for a while.

This is a really cool idea, I will try out your app!

Hey thanks! It's still in its infancy and isn't something I use as part of my daily routine yet, but that's certainly the goal and direction I'm marching towards :) Hope you keep it in mind as it grows.

Ah, I'll say no more but they are up to something! Cool.

Hey Sean, I'm familiar with it, great work!

I think you should share it with https://mastodon.cloud/@futurebird@sauropods.win a.k.a. myrmepropagandist

:) Thanks. And sure, I can share it with them. Thanks for the suggestion!

Very useful and beautiful, thanks for sharing!

This also gave me the idea to use web tech to build the timer I always wanted, which is the reverse of this one: a bong when the timer expires, but also ticks every minute (or 5) while the timer is running.

Edit: you also have a very beautiful website... and extremely nice drawings!

I suffer from extreme time blindness and one apparent solution to this is to have a regular metronome like pulse - I would love an app for say a smart watch or something that did this with vibrations!

There is an iOS/watchOS metronome app literally called “Pulse” that provides haptic feedback. That might get you part of the way there

Managing time blindness has been a challenge, too.

I've discovered a helpful tool: the BlipBlip app on my Android device. This app allows for customizable settings such as selecting a ticking interval—in my case, a 15-minute reminder—and choosing from various ticking sounds, with my preference set to Casio.

Notably, it also enables the configuration of periods without ticking, particularly useful for nights or weekends.

The are plenty of other options but these are the ones I care about the most.

Hehe, I'm also working on a "metronome for my attention":

https://untested.sonnet.io/Things+to+support+my+own+well-bei...

hit me up via hello @ <website> or my newsletter on untested.sonnet.io and I'll message you when I have it.

That's an awesome list! And, yes, Pickel sounds like a tool I'd love to use. Can't wait to give it a try :)

There is also an amazing “together” mode: https://nothing-together.sonnet.io/

https://untested.sonnet.io/Sit.%2C+(together)

Thanks, I was wondering who _plomked_ with me just now. Then a bunch of people showed up.

(plomking still feels more personal to me than communicating via text for some reason)

I was also wondering why it feels more personal.

Plomking feels more like making a gesture, and I think we still lack that in the online world. Any reactions on social media usually have deeper and more loaded meaning than, say, a nod of acknowledgement, or even a wink.

I was wondering, could it be due to the value we mentally assign to our reactions when interacting online? “Liking” a post or message is never just about the “like”, it is also:

- forcing you to make a decison to “like” or not react (is this really worthy of my “like”?)

- broadcasting to everyone that you’ve liked something

- signaling the algorithms that there is some weight to the message

- keeping permanent record of your “like”

“Likes” and other reactions have so much weight and complexity behind them.. it kinda takes any intimacy and any human touch out of the equation.

This together mode is amazing. I want this combined with the sitting so I feel like I'm sitting with other people.

I also kind of want to personalize the sound my gong makes and to be able to share that with others who are sitting. If we could create a sound bath with all our little gongs it would be sooooo cooool!

why do we say “brutally” simple and not, say, “elegantly” simple?

We do say "elegantly simple". According to Google search result counts, "elegantly simple" is used about 15 times more often than "brutally simple".

You are right, but Google search is a terrible way to make the comparison. They are returning all websites that are vaguely related to the phase, not doing a word search.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=elegantly+simp... is much more accurate.

No, I'm doing a quoted phrase search, not a vague vector similarity search. Turning on verbatim mode doesn't change the results much (13 times more instead of 15).

My feeling has been that "brutally simple" evokes the meaning of Brutalist architecture, it is a phrase applied to something that is simple, honest, and functional.

Thanks for sharing. It's not immediately obvious from the site: does this offer anything more than a usual timer?

Yes, but you have to sit a little to find out...

Cool, thanks. I'll give it another shot, then.

Nope, it's just a dumb timer telling people to sit down and do nothing. More about that:

https://untested.sonnet.io/MISS+–+Make+It+Stupid%2C+Simple

Similarly, Ensō (enso.sonnet.io) is just a dumber <textarea>

I like it a lot. I was hoping it would be installable as a PWA.

^ this. This is pretty much the only thing I would add; when doing an "add to home screen" and going to full screen, it still shows the phone and browser borders, which aren't black. Adding a manifest.json, setting theme_color and background_color: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web... would help a lot on mobile with the immersion effect Sit is aiming for.

immersion effect Totally agree. At the moment, add to home screen creates a shortcut that opens up Safari (along with its other distracting tabs ;) would be great if Sit could be set up as a web app too!

I opened the webpage, settled myself down, and clicked "Start". A lovely bong resonated through my headphones, and I relaxed.

Immediately, one of the foster kitten sidled past me with a half-butchered gecko, still weakly struggling. I leapt up, grabbed a nearby broom, and gave chase. What followed was an episode of Tom & Jerry, but with more swearing. As I managed to part the cat from the gecko and punt the gecko outside, a calm bong brought me to my senses.

1/10, this did not make me sit.

So sorry to hear that! Perhaps this mrr will soothe your cat instead: https://mrr.sonnet.io

Ah! Well the kittens didn't get up to any nonsense while I scrolled, they just sat, cleaning the poop that they had kicked up the wall off their legs... so 10/10, great success! Thank you! Now I just need to scroll endlessly...

(Sardine is the kitten who led the Great Gecko Chase; Anchovy is the kitten who meditatively masterminded the Amazing Poop Fling. Really need to get these guys adopted out.)

Is this some sort of challenge on how far you can make it into the article before throwing up? I have not read something this pretentious and self absorbed, yet painfully lacking in self-awareness in a long long time.

It is beyond me how this fart huffing pseudo spiritualism becomes intertwined with engineering culture.

I mean, I respect the hustle, turning lifestyle advice and a general sense of being better than you into expensive billable consulting hours.

This type of comment is why we can’t have nice things. Don’t like a link? That’s fine, but no need to be mean about it.

I can't explain it but my brain can't handle that this is a website and not a mobile app.

That's a shame; quite a few apps should just be websites.

I came, I sat, I conquered. So simple, yet immediately effective. (Full disclosure: I'm a regular meditator, so it's pretty easy for me to slip into mindful awareness.)

Thank you for this!

Thanks, I use it to meditate myself (shi-ne).

I often set a minimal timer (e.g. 15 m) and then, either:

- use the 1-minute interval to get a rough idea of how much time has passed, or

- practice different breathing patterns (e.g. 3 breaths per minute)

In this, they are still trying to get the person to meditate. To sit with very little and wonder what they are doing wrong.

A few months ago I created Harbor (getharbor.app) which played some sounds with some haptics and tried to get people to focus on the sensation of the haptics.

I'm a meditator, but I know many people who aren't and trying to get them to just "sit" and do nothing is a challenge. Some people get stressed out about are they doing it "right".

These are the challenges to try to overcome with meditation, so I'm not quite sure why Sit is different to other timers.

These are the challenges to try to overcome with meditation, so I'm not quite sure why Sit is different to other timers.

You're looking at it as a product, which is understandable, but that's not the point. I communicate with people through my articles, drawings and code, and this is one of the ways of achieving that. It's like telling a friend that it's ok to slow down and do nothing for a moment but then scaling it up to 50-70k people. You can call it meditation or fucking around, I don't really care.

Thanks for sharing Harbor. Weirdly enough, I actually worked for a company specialised in using generative audio + biofeedback during therapy sessions (led by some prominent scientists in the field, mainly from Imperial College IIRC).

keep this ad-free and I will love you forever.

No worries, not gonna happen. I'm not much into psychological warfare these days.

Okay so

I was in a (unnamed cafe) browsing HN. I clicked on 'sit'. didn't expect the gong noise & my headphones weren't connected - got strange looks from a couple people.

I'm usually super hyperfixated with things but I immediately just snapped into a zone. the 'you can stop looking at the screen for now' prompt was super helpful.

so just I let my eyes just wander, it felt weird to do so, but slowly felt those knots in my brain fizzle out

I started with the window, watched some people past - the usual mindfulness - nothing too interesting. started listening to the traffic on a car-by-car level which seemed to bring everything into scope. I saw a baby pigeon pick at something across the street, a mother lean down to kiss their baby in a pram.

then my gaze sort of drifted back into the cafe, both visually and audibly

I heard the coffee machine whir, listened to the waiters giving each other ordered - which felt sort of intrusive but also kind of like a superpower.

THEN I caught this waitress' gaze, and I shit you not, she smiled at me.

maybe it's because I looked like a creep sitting in a cafe watching people with an open laptop in front of me but...

I learnt things from that 2 minutes of mental silence. thank you

edit: as I was writing this comment, the same waitress brought over my food and we had a chat!

side note: on my Mac there seemed to be some kind of UI glitch with the minutes dropdown menu - it was gigantic

Thanks for the comment. I've been feeling a bit down recently and I feel like I needed to read this.

this is cool as well as your other side projects :)

Thanks! there's also a group version of this app / little experiment I've been playing with. Working title "Space Kalimba".

https://nothing-together.sonnet.io

Sometimes * I communicate with random people via that site, without any words, just sending little "plomks" to each other.

* literally 30 seconds ago!

I love the font. Maybe particularly because it's kind of big, so you can see the details. It seems to be EB Garamond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB_Garamond

Oh yeah, EB Garamond is doing the heavy lifting for me, design-wise, no doubt about that:)

I use it on sonnet.io, consulting.sonnet.io and sit.sonnet.io I didn't use it on days.sonnet.io only because I felt weirdly obsessed with performance when I was coding it.

There's a blog post by the author explaining the context at https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/ . But really, just sit :-)

That page is more informative and probably the better link for HN, so I've switched to it above from https://sit.sonnet.io/. Thanks!

(I also bent the rules and let the title have a trailing period.)

UI only goes to 100 minutes. What if I want to have a really serious sit and think

ugh FINE, just pushed an update with 999 minutes (I'm too lazy to touch CSS during my holiday break). See you in 17 hours!

I was already sitting on my chair therefore I do not need this article and these crapy post titles which do not explain anything.

Do the same to make people work-out and we're golden.

The together version found here https://nothing-together.sonnet.io/ is neat as well, you can play simple sounds to another person or a bell gong to everyone

One thing i found a bit distracting is the very obvious looping point of the background music

If you are interested in a FOSS option for android check out Meditation Assistant:

https://code.rocket9labs.com/tslocum/meditationassistant

I really really love your sense of design. Feels very calming!

Like: the design, idea, sound, and the fact you spell colour with a u. 10/10

Don't like: "at the intersection of". 1/10

Overall: 4/10.

as long as I can get you to sit down on your ass for a moment and stop trying to be productive, I’m a happy man

I love this. You are my kind of a person. I'm also a big fan of meditation, mindfulness, and taking care. I hope you find success in this goal.

"Sit." as a name for the app just doesn't work for me. I laughed out loud when I found out it was an app for meditation, as I think of "Sit." as a put down. For people who don't know, It's a commonly used aggro comment put in match chat when you kill someone, typically in a high stakes duel.

However, that association puts me in the exact wrong headspace for meditation. Probably just me though.

    Looking for something
    else, but you got this haiku.
    Now, was it brutal?

if you have a problem with the phrase "brutally simple", why did you use it?

I’m glad we have the web for this. the app stores would never approve this, even as a free app

Cool, but there's an error there. "Just sit" is not a Zen koan, although it is a meditative technique used in Zen-Buddhism, particularly the Japanese Soto school of Zen. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza

Just sat and stared out the window for five minutes and it was delightful.

Ironically, however, I'll probably use this to _stand_ and stare out the window as a nice break from sitting all day.

Thanks for providing the sound to make this tool eyes-free. Cool little demo.

Every step you take is watched and assessed in terms of its monetisation potential, every interaction is meant to extract value from you.

Looks at uBlock Origin. Yep, requests to convertkit.com and sonnet-events.vercel.app are blocked.

I guess if you can't make something complicated or push the limits, you just call it "art" or "thought provoker" and spend lots of words talking about an egg timer.

Is what?

I love the art style, is it self made?