Why Do Americans Stink at Math? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/magazine/why-do-americans-stink-at-math.html <comment><USER2> I teach math. I am impressed that when you read these comments, very few of them show evidence of having read the article.

The article is about experience with actual students, with ones who have a real knack for the subject and would learn it despite what any teacher did, and with ones who waver. There proves to be a better way, which the article describes in various ways, including as "sense-making."

One of the problems here is that everybody has a pre-formed opinion and does not seem to want to risk having to modify it with the evidence of experience.

<comment><USER3> > _" One of the problems here is that everybody has a pre-formed opinion and > does not seem to want to risk having to modify it with the evidence of > experience."_

That's probably the most accurate description of HN comments I've seen. People see a headline related to something they already have pre-existing beliefs about, they read a few paragraphs just to make sure they're on point, and then they jump straight to the comments to argue in favor of what they already know to be true.

I'm willing to wager $10000 that a significant majority of HN commenters in any thread do not read the article in full, and even among those who do, a smaller minority actually post comments addressing the meat of what the article is saying.

<comment><USER4> _> I'm willing to wager $10000 that a significant majority of HN commenters in any thread do not read the article in full, and even among those who do, a smaller minority actually post comments addressing the meat of what the article is saying._

I'm curious... did you read the article in full? I'm not saying you're wrong but it would be funny if you didn't read it as well :)

One of the things I like about Scientific America is they have an Executive Summary at the start of the article. So while folks may not have the details they at least have the correct gist.

I skimmed the article. Do I have pre-formed opinions... I do. Would they have changed after reading the article in detail ... they might have if there was some hard evidence other than the obvious stat that the US is bad in math.

My question (I'm having my first child with in a month) is what do I do as a parent other than be patient:

 _" Training teachers in a new way of thinking will take time, and American parents will need to be patient. In Japan, the transition did not happen overnight. When Takahashi began teaching in the new style, parents initially complained about the young instructor experimenting on their children."_

My father forced my brother and I into Kumon. Kumon was hardly imaginative. Did it work? I think a little bit.

Education techniques particularly math has changed so many times that it is beginning to look like diet and exercises. We are all a little jaded so I can understand the plethora of pre-formed opinions.

<comment><USER2> > My question (I'm having my first child with in a month) is what do I do as a > parent other than be patient:

You could look into how your local public school system teaches. Taking to the people who teach there, for instance, is helpful. Expressing support for an NCTM-like approach, if you find you do support it, would also be great.

> Education techniques particularly math has changed so many times that it is > beginning to look like diet and exercises. We are all a little jaded so I > can understand the plethora of pre-formed opinions.

I understand and as a person who teaches math, and teaches teachers too, I feel the same impatience.

I want to know why we don't just go out and see, on actual students, what actually makes them better at understanding and being able to solve problems. Try different things and see what works. Review video tapes. Give before and after tests, and focus groups, and see what the people in the class learn the most from. Train teachers in the details of doing the job, as an engineer or doctor would be trained in details.

The thing is, that's what the folks described here are doing. Have they got the final answer? I doubt it, particularly as the impacts of tech is so little understood even now. But they are making progress, at least it seems that way to me. (If you are interested, _Building a Better Teacher_ is a source that would give you more of an understanding of what the discussion is. This article was part of the marketing people's plants for the book.)

<comment><USER5> This comment is related to your muse starting with "I want to know why..." I'm simply pondering and looking for feedback from someone who is actually a teaching professional unlike myself.

"There [my comment: Finland], as in Japan, teachers teach for 600 or fewer hours each school year, leaving them ample time to prepare, revise and learn. By contrast, American teachers spend nearly 1,100 hours with little feedback."

This line took my notice. I have to wonder if their school systems are such that teachers do not have to be in front of students 6 continuous hours daily as my daughter's teachers do. (My daughter is in elementary school.) By the time her teachers finish with students, attend after-school meetings and grade, I can see there being precious little mental energy left for professional development.

My friend Scott made a career change a decade ago. After being a software developer for 22 years, he switched to teaching tech in a middle school. His comment to me after his first year was that teaching is much more exhausting because you have to be "on" 5-6 hours daily. If you're "off", students pick up on it and reflect it. His opinion hasn't changed after a decade.

<comment><USER2> My only comment would be that I find what your friend Scott finds. I don't teach middle school, I teach in college, so my day is more mixed than his. But my training was as a high school teacher and my wife is a high school teacher, and I do find that her routine is exhausting.

I hear you about having little mental energy left. There are lots of intensely dedicated teachers but it is unreasonable to expect that they will be on 24-7. They get to have families, to have hobbies, etc., just like everybody else. Just like engineers, police officers, and any other highly trained professional.

(It is especially discouraging, for me, when someone writes a letter to the editor seeming to assert that teaching is something women do so they get summers off with their kids, kind of a hobby. Those make me cringe.)

<comment><USER5> IMO a culture developed in the US in the past few decades - I would be hard- pressed to pinpoint when but it's been within my professional life in IT - that we should minimize any activities in a work environment that do not have a direct tie to revenue. The result is that professional development is all but non-existent unless you do it on your own time.

The US is scrutinizing its education system right now. Unfortunately, we're looking for simple answers and pinning blame on teachers when the problems are more systemic. My neighbor is a visiting professor from Germany. His wife is a teacher in grades 5-8 in Germany. My wife and I had dinner with them a while back. They made the observation that blaming teachers took place in Germany about 10 years ago. When all was said and done the problems were more systemic, they were corrected, and the system is considerably better now in their opinion. Hopefully we'll follow suit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's an interesting question when you consider that in at least two university mathematics department rankings[1][2], the US holds 7 of the top 10 global spots. One could argue that for whatever reason, many of the professors, researchers and postdocs at those schools learned math in other countries, but, if these lists are to be believed, the US does have the richest mathematics knowledge in the world.

So two questions:

1) Why doesn't the preeminence of the US math knowledge appear to seep into the primary and secondary school education?

2) If the primary and secondary education in the ROW produces such a high level of capability relative to the US population, why aren't their universities better represented in the rankings?

[1] [http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global- universities/mat...](http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global- universities/mathematics)

[2] [http://www.topuniversities.com/university- rankings/universit...](http://www.topuniversities.com/university- rankings/university-subject-rankings/2015/mathematics)

<comment><USER7> "Why doesn't the preeminence of the US math knowledge appear to seep into the primary and secondary school education?"

Because preeminence of top tier institutions (which are kind of global centres anyhow) - has absolutely nothing to do with teaching math to the commons.

Here's a hint:

+++ Americans don't suck at Math +++

There's a very un-PC but very large elephant in the room that people won't discuss.

\+ European American and Asian American 'testing scores' are actually pretty good - and have been holding steady for a very long time. (Asians do a little better). Nothing has changed.

\+ Latino American and African Americans fare poorly, but having been getting better since we've been measuring by standards (i.e. 1950's-1970's).

Here's the trick:

\+ European Americans actually do better than Europeans - on average. \+ Asian Americans to better than Asians - on average. \+ Latino Americans do better than Central/South American Latinos \+ African Americans do better than Africans.

The key correlating factor here is 'ethnicity'. 'Ethnicity' is the broad, generalist predictor of educational outcomes. This definitely not 'race' and it's not even 'IQ' (those things are plausible but controversial) - it's a series of behaviours, social norms, examples, attitudes towards work, success, access to services, social networks, mentors, role models, etc. etc. etc..

Educational outcomes (and crime stats, income stats) break down along ethnic lines. In a manner of speaking - America can be thought of as 'four nations' \- White, Black, Asian and Latino. Obviously - it's very crude and generalist, and policy based on this would probably be racist - nevertheless - you pretty much have to look at the data given this.

In the end: American test score results have more to do with the _changing ethnic composition_ of the American population than they do anything else. Again: White people and Asians in America have performed consistently he same for decades. Teaching methods haven't changed much, students habits haven't changed much - so the outcome is naturally consistent.

More economic prosperity, access to services and different attitudes + deeper integration have meant Latino A. and African A.'s are doing a little bit better - but because there are so many more Americans of those groups - particularly Latino Americans - it changes the outcome of the 'average american test score'.

Analyzing educational results does not make sense until you break it down along ethnic lines. Once you do - it becomes crystal clear. It's the absolute #1 most important thing about the educational data that turns 'paradox' about educational investment (teaching has remained largely the same) and outcomes into 'perfect sense'.

Unfortunately, it's so sensitive few will want to talk about it - for fear that the general public equates educational outcomes to 'intelligence' and try to strongly correlate ethnicity + race to this, which would be fodder for racist/KKK types, which wouldn't really help the overall social situation in America.

Anyhow - America is actually doing pretty well overall.

<comment><USER8> > European Americans actually do better than Europeans - on average. + Asian > Americans to better than Asians - on average. + Latino Americans do better > than Central/South American Latinos + African Americans do better than > Africans.

I've always heard this explained as a sort of "selection bias". Since immigration to the US (particularly for university education) is often seen as desirable, the people who manage to pull it off tend to be above the mean. Do you feel that explanation rings false?

<comment><USER9> > I've always heard this explained as a sort of "selection bias". Since > immigration to the US (particularly for university education) is often seen > as desirable, the people who manage to pull it off tend to be above the > mean.

I think this is an explanation that could only be come up with by the descendants of those who have emigrated.

Thinking here in Scotland, the people who emigrated were not necessarily the most able or genetically superior somehow. Often, they were simply the most desperate. People who were cleared off their farms by landowners, people who had no other options available to them but to roll the dice and go abroad to Canada or Australia or the USA.

Most folk don't want to emigrate, certainly not in the 19th century. It is a last resort that you do if you are out of options. But perhaps the most capable and able have other options to take advantage of?

<comment><USER10> It's not clear that capability was that much of a factor. As the scion of Scots emigrants from the 19th Century, at least the 20h century version of my family was made up of bright capable people but hardly brilliant.

<comment><USER11> It's pretty awful to read how people regarded the Highland Clearances, like this from the _Scotsman_ :

 _" Collective emigration is, therefore, the removal of a diseased and damaged part of our population. It is a relief to the rest of the population to be rid of this part."_

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

<comment><USER10> DNA has made for the possibility of a much less nasty world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The key to math education is practice. Even drilling, maybe.

Other fields deal with concepts more or less mapped to the real world. Physics is about real world, more or less (right until you get to quants, then the level of abstraction rises dramatically). Same goes for biology, and even computer science in general. There, you can rely on words, which usually convey meaning.

In math, you can't rely on words. You'll never understand even relatively simple things like complex analysis or Fourier transform just by reading about it -- words are never enough to transfer the knowledge to you. You need to play with it, solve actual problems, understand in practice how various "moving parts" are related to each other, and then accept the naming convention (which is almost an afterthought, born as a mean of reference, not as a way to describe things). Therefore, relentless practice and solving abstract problems (a lot of them) is the only way to teach (or learn) mathematical concepts.

Some teachers want to make math more accessible with bringing it "down to earth", mapping mathematical concepts to more concrete problems. It is theoretically possible, and I was a supporter of this approach until very recently. However, math just doesn't work this way. Math is pure abstraction; linking the abstractions to earthly affairs too early shuts down mathematical thinking (creates biases that prevents applying mathematical insights to other fields that are different from the one learned).

Mathematical abstractions cannot be transferred by words and formulas alone; they need to be internalized by practice and drilling.

<comment><USER13> I disagree with this. I remember when I was in primary school and I was confused about how to multiply decimals. At that level I didn't even know what it would mean to multiply a decimal: how can you have 5, 0.2 times? I asked the teacher and instead of explaining the concept properly, i.e. 0.5 is half etc., I was just told to multiply the other way around, by adding up 0.2, 5 times - and do drills with that.

It's this kind of teaching that makes good robots and terrible mathematicians. (Thankfully I'm neither the former not the latter.)

<comment><USER14> That was a good way to teach you commutativity, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Without the right training, most teachers do not understand math well enough > to teach it the way Lampert does.

My high school math teacher majored in math and then got a certificate in teaching. She wasn't a teacher who was told to teach math among other classes. She knew all the advanced stuff (beyond what a high school curriculum required), she was excited about it, she could explain things in various ways, give analogies, was available after class to ask questions and so on. And that is post-collapse Soviet Union full of corruption, poverty and other crap like that. Surely if we can spend trillions of dollars on F-35 we can get us some good math teachers...?

In this country I see a large disconnect between words "Oh kids are so very very important, they are our future, they can't play outside too far because they will be abducted and we care so much for them" and deeds: I see large classrooms, not enough teachers, teacher are underpaid, not interested in math. Funding comes from local property taxes so rich neighborhood get more money, poor ones get less.

Another thing is I remember teachers were respected. Imagine how we react to someone saying "Oh they are doctor. And then everyone nods, right, they are very successful. Or lawyer, or works for Google and so on". Why isn't teaching like that? My mom tells me someone back home thought she was a teacher, because she at her age spoke some English. And she took it as a great complement. In this country you tell someone you thought they were a high- school teacher and they might get offended. Something is very wrong here...

As for making it more exciting -- initially I studies math by repetition and it worked pretty well for me. I think works because kids are amazing at memorizing stuff. Why not first take advantage of that? Starting them out with set theory sounds all cool on paper that is not how humans learn. Multiplication table, basic patterns, even operations are fine to memorize first. Later on it makes most sense to introduce proofs, word problems (I remember doing lots of word problems, our teachers were crazy for them) and so on.

<comment><USER16> I don't know of any country where teachers are considered as elites. The reason your mother took that as compliment is not because teacher is a high social class occupation, but because being good at english is considered a great skill in many countries. If you really had to compare, in most cases people would feel more flattered to be mistaken as a doctor (or an engineer who works at Google than as an elementary school teacher.

I know people will throw stones at me for this, but the reason teachers are not the top 1% of the society is because functionally their job is a commodity. (We're talking about elementary/middle/high school teachers, not professors here).

It is not hard to find someone who knows high school math, for example. I'm not discounting the fact that there are sometimes really outstanding teachers, but the thing is, it's hard to objectively measure their performance since their teaching talent is not directly related to how well their students do. On the other hand, the "teachers" at universities are well respected since their talent is not only limited to how well they teach but the quality of their own research--the value is much easier to quantify.

<comment><USER17> Afaik teachers are held in the same regard as doctors and lawyers in Scandinavia.

<comment><USER18> Nope, at least not in Norway or Sweden. Or possibly only in the sense that non of those professions are held in particularly high regard. And they certainly aren't paid like doctors of lawyers.

Sure if you ask people, they respect teachers in the abstract sense that they're people doing a very tough job for very little money, but it's hardly a career people aspire to, and certainly most teachers I know will admit it was their second or third choice that they kind of fell into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Math is hard work. I was bad at math. I went to college a couple years after I graduated high school where I made little effort to challenge myself. But after figuring things out, at 20 I decided I wanted to do computer science as I enjoyed some of the programming skills I picked up (C++ of all things!).

I was very unprepared for the math part of it and it was hard. I tested into a remedial math level and when I looked at the CS requirement I knew that wouldn't be a good way to start. So I bought a used math book and spent a few weeks studying hard so I could get into a decent math placement so I could be where I needed for CS. This was just the start.

I had a long road with a lot of frustration but I made it. I made it because I never worked so hard at something up to that point in my life. There were times I thought it was hopeless but I just continued to do rote math problems, over and over again. And slowly the concepts started to sink in more and more. But there was always the frustration of missing the little details and forgetting a concept or not having enough experience honing a certain skill. But if I kept at it, over and over again, I would learn it and it suddenly became easy.

I was "bad at math". It would have been so easy to quit and try something else. But I knew I wanted to not only pass my tests but really understand the calculus and differentials, etc I had to do. And it was the best thing I ever did for myself.

Not only does working so hard at something prove you can work hard and achieve something but it shapes the way you see the world.

Math is hard. Some of us just have to work harder. People should realize that failing is normal and if you keep at it you will eventually get it. For some people it takes longer than others. I could never create math. But with enough time I believe I could eventually truly learn anything because of this experience.

<comment><USER20> Congratulations!

I'm always disappointed when people say "some people just can't learn X".

It isn't that they cannot learn X, they just cannot learn it in the same time frame, and they shouldn't be expected to!

<comment><USER19> I mean that's really the problem. For some reason we think things will just make sense once we are taught the lesson and we try an exercise. But that's so often not the case. Accept you'll never be the genius who creates new things - maybe you will but put that aside. Focus on trying hard and committing yourself. It doesn't matter if it's math or cooking food, the more you try it and think of it and accept failure the better you'll be. Accept your limits as a creator but never accept that you can't understand a concept if you spend the time you personally need at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In 4th grade, I got a C in math. During my teacher student grade review meeting, my male teacher told me "it's okay, girls don't do as well at math as boys."

Yeah, so there's this as a reason. I definitely wasn't a good student until high school. I definitely had a bad teacher who gave me an excuse for _YEARS_ to accept bad results in math. My mother still bitches about that guy to this day. I suspect I have a slight learning disorder that affected my ability to process numbers. I mix 6/9s. 7/9s when transcribing numbers. Made homework difficult. Once I got to the point where letters started replacing numbers in homework, I went from a C student to an A student in math and was competing for the top grade in my math classes. Once I learned that I could do the work, I did the work and excelled.

I suspect that this type of bias affected more girls than just me, and these discouraged girls affected US scores.

</comment><comment><USER22> I found math class stultifying and boring until the focus switched from learning algorithms for computation to doing proofs of relations and concepts. Also I began to discover the actual applications for advanced math, instead of learning it for its own sake.

I wish in hindsight that instead of taking endless years of calculus there was a high school version of real analysis, and exercise problems rooted in real- life to motivate the learning.

<comment><USER23> I didn't really get into math until calculus, personally. There was this moment of realization that calc starts to describe the real world, opening up the ability to do all kinds of useful and interesting things. I ate up calc 1-3 and differential equations, even though I have no real use for them today. OTOH, my brain apparently just is not equipped to deal with proofs, either in mathematics or comp sci theory. They were always an enormous struggle for me.

<comment><USER24> Me too. I loved the story problems in calculus. I felt like I had learned a secret magic spell. Unfortunately I never get to use it in real life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One very interesting thought I read about:

Modern math classes tend to be very applied. I.e. the primary objective is to get the student to be able to solve real world problems with math. (A farmer sells 3 potatoes for a dollar. How much do 8 potatoes cost?). There seems to be some indication however, that abstract math is more accessible to some children, especially if they aren't supported by parents during their homework, etc. Because of this real-world to mathematical-world translation step. By exploring ways to make math more accessible, "friendly" and useful, teachers might actually make it harder for students to pick up math.

This is an interesting thought for me, because I tutored kids in math who were not doing good in school. I kind of ended up with a typical scheme to get them from "risk of failing the class" to Bs and occasionally As.

First I would introduce a a few techniques (equation solving in every case and the mathematical topic of their class - logarithms, binomial terms, etc. - also) and then give them very simple drill exercises. And a lot of them that we would solve together. I.e. simplifying exponentials $exp(3) * exp(5) = exp(8)$ etc. I always made sure that they were able to solve these drill exercises eventually, and they were all able to, because they picked up the scheme.

As a next step, I gave them the applied problems their teachers would ask them to solve, and made it into a translation problem. I.e. I explicitly told them that this was now just a translation. They could often identify with this because they self-identified often as language persons ("I like the literature class best", or "I like french class most"). I wouldn't ask them to solve the translation result right away. But they often just naturally did because it was not so different from the drill exercises.

Point is, I do not at all understand why I was needed for this. The teachers consistently failed their students in class, by not providing them with the very basic math skills and confidence that they needed to solve more complex problems.

<comment><USER26> > The teachers consistently failed their students in class, by not providing > them with the very basic math skills and confidence that they needed to > solve more complex problems.

Finding a good math teacher in America is difficult because the good math students rarely become teachers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One word: Football.

One of my friends graduated with an engineering degree from MIT. I once asked him if he could have traded that to be better at Football, would he? His response was that if there was even a remote chance he was good enough to play in the NFL he would have traded education for that chance.

Humans innately crave fame, and the lack of scarcity that is perceived to come with it. The USA has sadly, and unknowingly groomed that romanticism of fame, towards consumables (this might be the long term effects of Capitalism). Rather than grooming that romanticism of fame towards research/intelligence/creation (the renaissance).

Even local to the film industry, almost 100% of 10 year olds want to grow up to be Brad Pitt or Salma Hayek, not George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg[0]. Even fewer want to be the writer.

Even local to football, everyone knows the names of the player that caught that hail marry, got that big hit, recovered that fumble. Few know the names of the people who create those plays.

Only in recent years have the masses truly started to recognize creators/intelligence with the title famous (Gates, Jobs, Zuck). But again for the wrong reasons, i.e. for their money. Even artists Picasso, Beethoven (adored for generations) have only truly been appreciated by the aristocracy, i.e. the rich and "mathematically" acute.

Which way do you suspect the causal link lies? Are we first intelligent, therefore we appreciate the intelligent? Do we first appreciate the intelligent, therefore we become intelligent?

[0] I mean no disrespect to Brad Pitt or Salma Hayek, or actors in general. Good Actors need to be extremely intelligent, but this isn't why they are adored. I'd argue this part of them is even sadly shunned by the media and populace.

<comment><USER27> MIT has a pretty good football team.

[https://youtu.be/XnVcaHMsYqM](https://youtu.be/XnVcaHMsYqM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> If they would teach kids to _play_ with math (or any form of knowledge, for that matter), and not just run through 10,000 rote problems, maybe we'd rank better.

Especially word problems -- most of them felt like they were written for students wearing intellectual blinders... if you had any modicum of relevant knowledge outside of the lesson oftentimes word problems were impossible to solve

<comment><USER29> Could not agree with you more. Another thing I've noticed anecdotally is that many of the math teachers in the secondary system in North America do not have a broad understanding of math themselves. Math is given the most rote treatment of all the subjects, and I suppose this is understandable given the abstract nature of math.

But students are never told why they should care about abstractions in the first place, which is unfortunate. Many high schools simply refuse to speak the students' language.

I suspect this will change in this century. IMO, if a high school really wanted to be progressive, they would totally reform their math curriculum to include more exposure to applied math and computer sciences. Young folks should be using math to build their own Instagram or Minecraft clones that they can deploy to their devices that VERY DAY - using the concepts they've been introduced to in mathematics.

<comment><USER30> Not sure how math helps you deploy instagram clones. I mean set theory, logic, computable functions but that's a big stretch.

<comment><USER31> I would argue that every instagram filter is merely a linear algebra problem.

<comment><USER30> true.. nice example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks like the answer is buried at the end: "Finland, meanwhile, made the shift by carving out time for teachers to spend learning. There, as in Japan, teachers teach for 600 or fewer hours each school year, leaving them ample time to prepare, revise and learn. By contrast, American teachers spend nearly 1,100 hours with little feedback."

</comment><comment><USER33> Some of it is cultural: Americans don't want their kids to have too much homework, in many cases they don't want to help with homework or are unable to; they want a silver bullet. Some of it is lack of qualified teachers, and part of that is the way public schools are funded from the local tax base--do it cheaply as possible. Some of it is political pressure to dumb things down so that students can be graduated from HS before they reach the legal drinking age. Some of it is the rise of the education ``experts'' who always have some new…silver bullet (Feynman had a lot to say about such experts after reviewing math textbooks for California in the early '60s). The new math came about as an almost hysterical reaction to Sputnik, when, in fact, the U.S. had plenty of highly qualified scientists and engineers who just happened to get beaten to the punch by the URSS. But no, the math curriculum had to change into some kind of Bourbaki for tots, meanwhile in fact the Soviets were teaching math the old-fashioned way--nice cognitive dissonance there. There are a lot of factors, and I don't see any magical way of improving curricula, getting better teachers, requiring more homework, etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> The new SAT etc now puts more weighs on reading comprehension and make math less important, which further weakens the willingness to study math, so the Asians(who are traditionally better at math) will not dominate the SAT high scores. As a country this will only make math education much worse, it should be another way around, otherwise, you can not compete in the STEM field, which is crucial for future.

<comment><USER34> [http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global- universities/sea...](http://www.usnews.com/education/best-global- universities/search?subject=engineering&name=)

Chinese Tsinghua Univ beats MIT to take the top seat at USNews for engineering. I think this is the second time in a row.

As far as I know, Chinese universities took the best students without considerations of gender at all. They do have AA for races but it is minimal.

USA is moving towards to AA-for-school-and-workplace, I hope this will make more people happier with high self-esteem, in the meantime you lose your competitiveness quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Put 100 mathematicians, math educators, and policy makers into a room and ask them to come up with a good mathematics curriculum. They'll come out with 101 proposals. That's not a problem, really. Mathematics is not merely about mathematical substance, but also mathematical process (the two are intimately related), and not just process, but the process of discovering processes. Curricula, standards, directives, are all substance. Policy makers want to put their name on a thing, a substance and give it to everyone else and hope that process develops... somehow.

I think you have to contextualize mathematical in the broader problem with american public schools: they're awful, awful places for many students including me. I ended up studying higher mathematics in college and still study on my own for my own pleasure (and I get to apply some really high powered ideas to programming once in a while which grants a satisfaction that lingers). I think my math education could have been advanced 5 or even 10 years if public school weren't such a soul-crushing stultifying nightmare of procedure and compliance.

<comment><USER36> > (and I get to apply some really high powered ideas to programming once in a > while which grants a satisfaction that lingers)

Mind sharing what some of these ideas are?

<comment><USER35> Lately I've been experimenting with comonads to structure stateful code. The idea is that a comonad describes the interface for a state machine, and you can convert any comonad in Haskell into a monad transformer which acts as a restricted form of the state monad. The state monad describes expressions that can arbitrarily manipulate a state of some type. The monad you derive from a comonad does not have direct access to its state, the comonad describes all the allowed manipulations and queries.

This is all described and implemented here: [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/kan- extensions-5.0.1/doc...](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/kan- extensions-5.0.1/docs/Control-Monad-Co.html)

In particular, the type:

      data CoT w m a = CoT { runCoT :: forall r. w (a -> m r) -> m r }

Let's unpack this. The following type represents a state machine whose nodes are labeled with a continuation demanding an `a` and executing an effect:

      w (a -> m r)

The forall quantification in CoT means that it does not care what the result value is. It will take a state machine, manipulate it for a bit, produce an `a`, pick a continuation from the state machine and execute it.

That's a lot going on! I don't have time or space to explain how this is actually useful but here's a handy approximation:

\- `w` is an interface

\- `w s` is a model labeled with a value of `s` for each state it can occupy. These labels are a sort of view.

\- `CoT w m a` is a controller that can manipulate a model and compute in some effectful context.

High powered MVC. The upshot is that because we're leaning on Functors, Monads, and Comonads there are extremely well behaved and natural composition operations. For example, `fmap` allows us to change the view of a model by applying a pure function. The fact that `CoT` is a monad means that we can run controllers in serial, as well as combine our controller languages in sensible ways. The fact that `w` is a comonad means we can reason about the behavior of models equationally. This lets us transform, compose, and compare models with mathematical precision.

This is a project I only seldom work on in my spare time. I have already applied it to writing GUI's and game logic to good effect but I'm still exploring the design space regarding reactivity and temporal behavior. This has led me to reading the mathematical literature pertaining to products of comonads/sums of monads (they're dual).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Might it have something to do with this?

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority- of-u...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public- school-students-are-in- poverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html)

I'm no fan of the American education system, having suffered through it a full 12 years, but I have to believe it's not the primary cause here. Math is hard, and near impossible if you're stressed. I excelled at math, despite relatively boring math curricula. Why? Because I wasn't stressed as a kid, my family was stable and did not suffer from any serious physical and mental illness, and one parent always made enough money so that the other could stay at home throughout my entire childhood. I had an enormous advantage, and most all of the kids I knew through advanced math classes and math competitions had a similarly charmed existence.

<comment><USER38> This article debunks the Washington Post claim about a majority of kids in public school being in poverty.

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/no-...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/no- a-majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-not-in-poverty.html)

<comment><USER32> By failing at reading comprehension. There's a vast difference between public school students and school-aged children. In Chicago, only 10% of public school students are white[1], with a 45% white population[2] (for example.) Conflating the two things seems almost willfully deceptive.

edit:

[1] [http://www.cps.edu/About_CPS/At-a- glance/Pages/Stats_and_fac...](http://www.cps.edu/About_CPS/At-a- glance/Pages/Stats_and_facts.aspx)

[2] [http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/1714000](http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/1714000)

<comment><USER38> What's wilfully deceptive is pointing to one city and claiming it is relevant to national statistics. The WP Article assets a majority of public school students IN THE US are in poverty, that is objectively false. So the reading comprehension problem isn't with the article I cited.

<comment><USER37> The WP article isn't really central to my point -- that outside factors have more to do with poor math performance than anything happening inside the schools. I worked in a public school as a tutor for kids slightly behind their grade level (not with the kids who were really struggling) and I have plenty of anecdata from that experience. Kids with drug-addicted parents, kids with parents in prison, kids not having enough food at night, medicated kids, obese kids, a kid who had to move mid school year because his house was shot up in a driveby, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Since no one has brought up "Nix the Tricks" yet, here's the link to the ebook: [http://nixthetricks.com/](http://nixthetricks.com/)

Foreigners are likely unaware that these are the algorithms routinely taught to US students in math class. There are no formal proofs, no emphasis on making sense - the only purpose is to have something memorizeable to have students pass the next test (and possibly the No-Child-Left-Behind test at the end of the year). There is no generalization, no focus on understanding. When you tell an American kid at university level "this is why concept XY makes sense" they don't understand why you might say this, they are only interested in the algorithm and the solution (and passing the next test, of course).

Small wonder that anyone exposed to that curriculum sucks at math and on top of that us turned off the subject. It's like Feynman in Brasil!

</comment><comment><USER40> I taught my two kids long division in about ten 40-minute sessions spread over 5 days. I sat with each child as we learnt the procedure. To begin with I held the pencil and asked questions, then the child took over the writing and I monitored to fix mistakes until finally the task could be performed/practiced solo.

In this one-on-one practice approach misconceptions are eliminated quickly at the start. It could not easily be replicated in a large group. Instead the approach in the article seems to be about groups of people identifying each other's misconceptions. Either way the effectiveness lies in avoiding bad habit formation.

If you look at YouTube each method of arithmetic has variants and you can pick the one that looks best. e.g. I chose a method of multiplication with consistent placing for the carries which reduced error considerably over what I was taught at school.

</comment><comment><USER41> People keep saying Americans stink at math, americans don't understand science, americans are ignorant, etc.

And yet at the same time we have these sorts of track records:

[http://www.popsci.com/us-dominates-at-sending-stuff-to- mars](http://www.popsci.com/us-dominates-at-sending-stuff-to-mars)

It's not just Mars or the moon, or decades ago, the US also is where most operating systems and software and CPUS are conceived of and designed. As well as countless other things that people who are so ignorant would not reasonably be expected to be able to do.

<comment><USER42> I agree USA has an impressive track record for space exploration and is at the forefront of computing, but that seems like more of a reflection of our economy and top talent than overall math literacy. Ideally we would have the best of both worlds: good high school education, and a good economy, but for some reason the former lags behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Well, a lot of people came to America hoping they would need math less. Americans stink at it because they feel they don't need it and when they feel otherwise it will be too late. It's easy enough to encourage seduction too math as the article suggests, but the real challenge is somehow blocking out more and more distractions (other options) when you can't reduce them because freedom and democracy are national ideals. Math can be interesting but how do you keep it more interesting than video games when you don't have a culture willing to regulate them as harshly as South Korea or China? How do you keep people from following Howard Hughes and having fewer friends, staying mostly home, and watching an astonishing amount of recorded video? Howard Hughes was hardly someone who could do nothing with math, but there are a lot of pitfalls in America to which the schools are blinded or can't do anything about. How do the schools, with such little authority, reduce problem behavior AND help something more difficult and at least supposediy more healthful fill the void. This is the problem with the democratic subject that Plato described: in democracy so many behaviors must be acceptable / not disqualifying for power and respect that people cycle through a great diversity of them. This is far more a pressing issue than whether teachers already trying to teach math do it this way or this other way: if they still have to compete with more and more cell phones and games and other entertainments and Babel, they will get diminishing returns.

<comment><USER43> To put it more succinctly, when you have this American phenomena often labeled "ADHD", whatever you think is really happening there, education must be viewed in light of the whole attention economy of the child's life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am 39, American, white and I am taking a math class at my local college. I am the oldest person in the class by far. I get A's, so do a few others. Most get C's.

I do every homework problem. I do variations of the homework problems. I spend at least 6 hours outside of our class time (3 hours) doing the math.

When we have tests the Instructor gives us problems that are not like the homework where she can see if we can evaluate and apply the concepts to things we haven't yet seen.

</comment><comment><USER45> Americans who need to be good at math, are good at math. If you don't use it, you lose it.

Hell, I'm an EE, so I'm probably one of those who would be considered "good at math" (at least by layman opinion), yet I may do at most a couple of integrals a year. I'm mostly just doing basic algebra on an RPN calculator. Though I did ace all that EM theory, random proceses, etc in grad school; do I use the math behind it? Rarely.

</comment><comment><USER46> Can't read article, paywall or adblock or something.

Is it because our popular culture ridicules being good at math as nerdy?

Is it because almost every american can name at least one sports or pop singer who makes multiple millions but probably has never even heard of a mathematician let alone be able to name one.

The root cause is we don't value math as a society. Until we do, we won't spend the effort needed to figure out how to teach individuals better.

<comment><USER47> text dump: [http://ix.io/1AfP](http://ix.io/1AfP)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Japan times wrote a response to this article: [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/11/23/issues/teac...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2014/11/23/issues/teaching- quality-lesson-quantity-may-key-japans-top-math-marks/)

Not mentioned is the Japanese preschool system: [http://www.ernweb.com/educational-research- articles/mathemat...](http://www.ernweb.com/educational-research- articles/mathematics-teaching-in-japan/)

"Seventy percent of all children attend preschool for three years. Young children are gradually trained in important school-related behavior, practicing routines that will be used throughout elementary school."

"Two traits pervade the culture and are taught by both parents and teachers: effort and persistence."

</comment><comment><USER49> Here in America, we call people who excel at football "heroes", and people who excel at math "nerds".

</comment><comment><USER50> As far as I'm concerned, higher national IQ, more discipline in the classroom and possibly a longer school day is why America 'sucks' at Math compared to Japan. May be more of one and less of another, and let's not ignore the negative relationship between mean class IQ and the frequency of disruptions. This is only up to a point - potted plants have very low IQ but aren't disruptive, but like American students they also suck at maths. Anyway, I can say to nytimes, without reading the article that panflutes and sandals can only help America's children so much.

</comment><comment><USER51> American dont stink at Math, American stinks at training kids in general, you cant give too much home work, kids need time to play, and the Chinese kid in China is at school till 9 pm constantly doing and practice math. yeah, an avg American kid is not going to be as good as avg Chinese kid.

However, the top 3-5% of the American kid is going to be just as good if not equal to their Chinese counter parts.

In China, education made all kids above avg regardless if you are below or above intellectually. In America, an idiot is going to be an idiot, and a genius will take that step to be a genius.

</comment><comment><USER52> The funny thing is addition and multiplication are black box operations for most software people (non-ee) also. I wish some analog stuff was included on those books like nand to tetris: [https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-create-a- circuit-from-basic-c...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-create-a-circuit-from- basic-components-R-L-C-that-gives-me-an-adder-and-a-multiplier-of-two-analog- signals)

</comment><comment><USER53> _Everyone_ believes they are bad at maths, so they are. It applies just as much to the UK. My youngest believes this strongly, yet when we were quizzing, or helping with homework, she didn't seem to find it too hard, just believed it so. She certainly didn't get those beliefs from home!

Looking at my kids maths lessons, especially in late Junior, so much effort was spent to actually _hide_ the maths that I wonder they learnt anything!

<comment><USER54> I love math and I think I'm pretty good at it

<comment><USER53> OK, not everyone, but it seems to be the subject that people are most likely to claim to be terrible at. Schools don't help by sucking all the fun out of it.

Was always my favourite subject, but that was despite school rather than because of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> If you convert our scores to metric it's not so bad.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've latched onto this as my explanation for why English students are worse with math (English counts numbers weirdly, but Asian languages do math within their language to perform counting):

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for- math-14103...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for- math-1410304008)

</comment><comment><USER57> Because they don't spell it as Maths, obviously.

<comment><USER58> We spell it the same, we just abbreviate it differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I think it is related to our refusal to embrace the metric system, kids at a young age get thrown off by our archaic system of measurement.

<comment><USER60> I've wondered about that. The imperial system is positively awkward. What about other countries that also use the imperial system instead of metric? Are they also behind?

<comment><USER28> The UK uses their own screwy imperial units for some measures

<comment><USER61> Not really. You still go to the shops and buy things in litres and kilograms, and their entire construction industry is in metric. The only commercial product that isn't in metric, funnily enough, is beer and cider. I guess getting pissed people to change proved harder than everything else.

<comment><USER53> ...and milk is always pints. An _awful_ lot of products come in imperial sizes but metric labelling - 454g jars of jam etc.

Timber sometimes gets called 2x4 even though it's 50x100, but that seems less common now.

Oddly just about everyone still uses feet and inches for their height. I hear kilos more and more often for weight, I don't think I've ever heard cm for height in the UK.

<comment><USER61> > ...and milk is always pints.

Returned milk is (you know, in dem bottles). But milk you buy in the store is 1L, 2L, etc.

> Oddly just about everyone still uses feet and inches for their height.

True. Probably because of the recognition of the 6' centering measurement. People know that if you're 6', that's kind of the cut-off for what is referred to as 'tall enough'. Over that, you're generally 'tall'. Under that, and you're average height.

<comment><USER53> Not in any supermarket I've been in, 4 and 6 pints are the commonest. Maybe us northerners aren't trusted with metric milk yet!

Only time I see litres is some of the niche brands (like Cravendale and branded organic) in bigger supermarkets, or 500ml in corner shops and some garages. So they can charge more. Presumably people compare 2l price with 2.3l / 4 pint instead of £/l.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's an anecdote, but...

Guy I went thru undergrad with went to a high school where the 10th grade algebra class requires naming the principle to be applied for each step in a problem, as if it were a proof.

This is painful. But he'd learned algebra properly. I hadn't. His math grades were much better than mine for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER62> I hear Americans all the time _telling themselves_ that they are bad at math. These are my friends and family. I tell people that I'm into math. >50% of the time the first thing someone says is "I'm bad at math."

</comment><comment><USER63> In contrast to this, note that in International Mathematics Olympiads, pupils/students from the USA are quite good:

[http://www.imo-official.org/](http://www.imo-official.org/)

<comment><USER64> Oh sure. The _best_ education in the US is awesome, possibly the best anywhere. But the average is pretty sad, particularly compared to the rest of the first world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Math is the lingua franca of sciences. It should be taught like a language as well. In our elementary schools we don't have teachers dedicated to teaching math. Instead we have teachers who are afraid of math themselves.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm an American, and I don't "stink at math". I will compare my math SAT and GRE scores with any nation in the world. Similarly for my Ph.D. dissertation in applied math and my peer-reviewed, published papers in applied math. Opps, those paper were already reviewed as "new, correct, and significant" according to international standards.

Next, uh, I do have some opinions about the NYT, e.g., their track record on getting and publishing good, correct information. Hint: That opinion could not go much lower.

</comment><comment><USER67> Where's our Dr Seuss of math?

</comment><comment><USER68> Because you don't use math while watching TV and Reading FB newsfeed all day long.

<comment><USER35> Subscribe to the right fb feeds and you would

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Because there are a thousand other things you can do that are worthwhile and there is no anxiety to be perceived as "smart" in the way that math requires. Just party on and network and land yourself in a start up. You can pay someone else to do the math because the real money is in MAKING DECISIONS.</comment>


Hexagonal Langton's Ant 2 – Colors, Gliders and Highways - <AUTHOR> http://brtmr.de/index.html <comment><USER2> Love it! Here are some cool patterns:

      * RPB - Looks like a 3D printer printing a bowl of Cheerios
      * PRLL - Simplest Eastbound highway
      * BRSS & BLPP - Nearly space-filling hex spirals

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I have also discovered a pattern that is fully space-filling: BPBBP - will slowly fill the entire screen with a growing green hexagon, with a single yellow dot at the origin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great work! I build[1] a classic javascript interpreter for Langton's Ant a few years ago. Just updated it to include support for custom rules. Thanks for reminding me about Langton's Ant it is always cool to recall things one build in the past.

[1]: [http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/CJpjl](http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/CJpjl)

</comment><comment><USER4> My versions of the same fwiw:

\- [https://jcorbin.github.com/hexant](https://jcorbin.github.com/hexant) \-- the hexagonal one I'm working on now

\- [https://jcorbin.github.io/ants](https://jcorbin.github.io/ants) \-- the square grid one I made several years ago

<comment><USER4> e.g., here's a neat one: [http://jcorbin.github.io/hexant/#colors=light%28360%2C%20100...](http://jcorbin.github.io/hexant/#colors=light%28360%2C%20100%29&rule=ant%282L%2064F%202S%29&frameRate=65536&drawTrace)

<comment><AUTHOR> woa. that looks awesome ;) what am i looking at - whats the rule? and are you also coloring the spaces the ant has already been on, but that reverted to their original state?

<comment><USER4> It's not the most obvious UX but hit "/" to open the rules dialog, this rule set is "ant(2L 64F 2S)". Click through to the project page and check out the README for more info on the key binds: [https://github.com/jcorbin/hexant](https://github.com/jcorbin/hexant).

The coloring trick is a recent addition I call "redraw tracing"; essentially there are two color palettes: one for "cold cells" and "hot cells" (ones that haven't/have been visited "recently").

What makes it "redraw" tracing is that "recent" is simply defined as "since last full redraw". Full redraws are triggered when the ant hits an edge of the screen.

I plan to expand the tracing to support "last-N" tracing where "recent" would mean something more comprehensible like "in the last 1024 iterations" f.e.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> BSPSPSPSPSP - This program/configuration _appears_ to execute a random walk. Hard to be sure.

<comment><USER6> Well, it's deterministic, because the program is deterministic, but it certainly does look random.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So this is how the universe's only electron updates the state of every atom! Maybe.

</comment><comment><USER8> BRL - seems to have rotational symmetry, grows very slowly, not sure if it repeats. Would make a good loading spinner.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd love that as an animated android background.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your experience with nootropics? - <AUTHOR>

Do they actually work? What side effects have you experienced? Are the costs worth it? <comment><USER2> I didn't feel anything better.

I've taken different amounts of dosage of piracetam. From very small dosages to high. I frequently had headaches with high dosages which were fixed whenever I took choline with it.

It was for over 2 years so I've probably played as much as I could with it's dosage and the usage of choline with it, but I didn't feel any difference.

It's not like ritalin where it makes u go mad focused and stuff.</comment>


The 'Great Doubling' helps explain why jobs are so hard to find - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gettowork/detail?blogid=163&entry_id=59297&tsp=1 <comment><USER2> There is already a "Great Halving" underway, where people find personal satisfaction and prestige by working less than 40 hours a week. As an ex-pat, I meet a lot of people running 4HWW type lifestyle jobs (which usually turn out to about 20-30 hours a week, not 4). Corporate culture just hasn't caught up yet, and may not without drastic social changes.</comment>


Ask HN: How does FB advertise a niche game I'm playing to my friends? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently playing some niche game and I've talked about it with one of my friends recently (not on Facebook, but Discord). The game has a web site, which I will frequent with my machine. It requires registration, but I use a different email for it than my Facebook account. For the record, I also rarely use Facebook (~1/month type of situation).
My friend now showed me a picture of an ad on Facebook for the same game. This doesn't feel coincidental as the game is very niche and is fairly old/stable. How did Facebook do this? Can the game just go on Facebook and buy ads for people who are friends with the game's players? If so, how would Facebook know that I'm a player?  Browser fingerprinting despite adblock/socialblock? IP tracking?
This feels super creepy. I'm aware of some of the best practices for ensuring privacy on the internet, but the measures tend to become a trade off between privacy and convenience, which the latter tend to win. Are there some more basics things I can do to protect myself from this type of problems beyond just having Ublock Origin with social blocklists, logging out of Facebook/using Firefox container tabs, and potentially VPN? <comment><USER2> You open the game in a browser, go to facebook. Facebook registers the link you come from et voila.

</comment><comment><USER3> Facebook listening to you talk about the game.</comment>


Persuasive design: we tested the decoy effect on our pricing page - <AUTHOR> http://blog.usabilla.com/a-user-test-on-decoy-pricing-steer-decisions-and-increase-conversion/

<comment><USER2> This didn't test the decoy effect, it tested bad pricing on the low end and tested price sensitivity on the high end.

Conclusion: frugal users avoid bad prices, high end users are less price sensitive.

Would be interested to see an actual "decoy" test.</comment>


Charles 4 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xk72.com/post/148311808729/charles-4 <comment><USER2> Charles is pretty fantastic, I used it a little bit for debugging an Android app's server communication. The only thing that turned me off is that Charles isn't open source.

An open source alternative is James[1], which is pretty cool. Full disclosure though, I am a contributor :)

1: [https://github.com/james-proxy/james](https://github.com/james- proxy/james)

<comment><USER3> Why does it bother you that Charles isn't open source? The developers behind it want to get paid for their work, and they've put a lot of that in over the years. I've licensed it a few times myself, and consider it money well spent.

<comment><USER2> There's a large population that enjoy and participate in open source software. For me personally, I like that I can fix bugs that a business might ignore, or the ability to fork a dying open source project, rather than watching it die (e.g. Google reader).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unless you click on the download button there is nothing that mentions this is an HTTP proxy application.

[https://www.charlesproxy.com/](https://www.charlesproxy.com/)

<comment><USER5> The article is not written for those of us who don't know what Charles is, so it is being taken out of context when linked to from HN. The link title could have been been improved with a couple of words of context - but we followed the link anyway...

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I wasn't complaining. Was interested enough to poke around to find out more. Just offered the link for others who were curious too.

For what it's worth I think the project would benefit by giving a more prominent info link for the uninitiated in such postings. No reason to waste an opportunity to bring new people to the party.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was looking for an HTTP proxy and I recently found Stoplight [1]. I used to use MITM proxy & Fiddler before.

I definitely like Stoplight a lot more (especially their self-documenting feature for 3rd party APIs [2])

[1] - [https://stoplight.io/](https://stoplight.io/)

[2] - [https://vimeo.com/155438645](https://vimeo.com/155438645)

<comment><USER7> It's unfortunate that Fiddler Mono build is pretty old: [http://fiddler.wikidot.com/mono](http://fiddler.wikidot.com/mono)

<comment><USER8> Sort of a shame. Is it unstable or meaningfully out of feature parity with other fiddler branches? I used to use fiddler a lot, but have been using mitm and charles since moving to linux/pc development in the last few years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've used Charles for the last year but Charles 4 is consistently crashing for me, and local rewrites often fail (it says file doesn't exist?).

YMMV upgrading - I wish I had not.

</comment><comment><USER10> How does Charles handle gzip,deflate?

I use a short shell script for MITM.

It simply runs two socats and netsed in between them.

I create ca.pem and server2.pem with openssl, install ca.pem on my device and sign server2.pem with ca.pem.

I redirect traffic from device to my computer running the script.

Low complexity, works reliably, costs me nothing.

Downside is it only does one remote site at a time.

sslsplit works well too but it does not handle gzip,deflate.

<comment><USER11> I think the free version of Burp Suite will handle all of this for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Congratulations on the new release. I have been waiting a long while for this. :)

Love the improved GUI.

</comment><comment><USER13> Charles is nice, but I go with Burp [1]. It requires more work, but the extra goodies are worth it.

[1] - [https://portswigger.net](https://portswigger.net)

</comment><comment><USER14> The new Mac OS UI looks great! Thanks for your hard work!

</comment><comment><USER15> So, the title doesn't tell me what it is, I click on the link and it doesn't tell me what it is, its a lot of work to know what it is in a universe of applications.

<comment><USER16> That's because it's a blog article, the homepage does exactly what you want [https://www.charlesproxy.com/](https://www.charlesproxy.com/)

FWIW, Charles is sort of a legendary app in the web development community, it's something that can definitely be discussed without an introduction on HN.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your impression of YCNYC tonight (9/26)? - <AUTHOR>

Wondering what everyone's thoughts was of the event tonight, regarding Paul Graham's presentation on the unique aspects of any startup hub, and NYC's ascent into that category, the YC alumni startup presentations, networking, etc. <comment><USER2> I found the whole stage event engaging (every speaker held my attention). Took me a little while to decode the color stripes on everyone's name-tags (my own olive stripe seemed to represent something to do with databases), but at least it gave a starting point for networking conversations. I found it amusing that the startup speakers wanted to encourage people to start their own startups, but almost apologetically also wanted people to join their startups instead. I do wish that there had been an easier forum to speak to people who were looking for developers etc. to join their startups (even a simple sheet/board of paper stating who's looking, and what they're looking for would have been good).

</comment><comment><USER3> PG's presentation: characteristically focused, frank, funny, useful and well- articulated. NYC's ascent: This is not really an important question. NYC's scene is in good shape. YC alumni presentations: Just the right number, length of time and variety. Less banner waving and more frank advice would have been more useful. These guys don't need to promote themselves to us. Networking: About as great as you could get. Event production: very high. MP stayed out of the way, were there when we needed something. Good bathrooms and a coat check were very nice. Good A/C! Good Job, Renee!

</comment><comment><USER4> It was inspiring. I really didn't hear anything new. But it was great to finally see PG and some of the other partners.

I would recommend going to one of these if it your first time. However, if you have attended, you should be heads down creating something, inStead of just going to another start up event.

the only thing I didn't like, is people interviewing you and then walking away without telling you anything.

one guy told me "I am from Harvard". Lol</comment>


Should Investors in the Same Round of Financing Ever Get Different Prices? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2012/09/08/should-investors-in-the-same-round-of-financing-ever-get-different-prices/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BothSidesOfTheTable+%28Both+Sides+of+the+Table%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> Of course they should.

There're various financial instruments enabling this very well. Simple question and Dave is totally right while Fred still lives in the past and ignores the basics of dealmaking.

The first and those who were quick in decision making should pay less than those who join later the same round. To join a full party is always a safer bet than being the first guest, so simple.

Investor's reputation/brand/name and their network are other key drivers to the prices.

There's one exception: when VCs know each other very well and brought themselves into the round/deal then their good relationship (and potential other deals running besides) will usually prevent different prices.

<comment><USER3> i may be living in the past, but rounds/syndicates are held together by the glue of price and terms. when you don't have that, there is no round. just a bunch of investors, like you have in the public markets. you might want the private markets to behave like the public markets. but be careful what you wish for.

<comment><USER4> Can you elaborate on this, Fred? What's the benefit of having a round, over "a bunch of investors"?

<comment><USER5> Tradition, paperwork, the knowledge that you are a beautiful snowflake, and a big bragging press release?

<comment><USER6> Class. In more ways than one.

<comment><USER7> Huh? Investors are putting a price on your company based on your fundamentals. Just like all companies have differing fundamentals, so do investors. Is it not fair to put a price on their money based on their fundamentals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My opinion is that yes they should, because there is also non-monetary factor in what they bring in which is different (while all bucks are equal). This is not so pronounced with the VCs but try thinking about angels, i would accept way lower valuation on any product/company i will start from PG than from the wealthy guy next door who has no idea about what i will be doing.

<comment><USER3> you can put those investors on your advisory board and give them some options, explicitly recognizing them as valuable. this makes your round a lot less complicated and also allows you to be more concrete that you expect certain investors to give you value back

<comment><USER7> I imagine that the market will eventually devise instruments that uncomplicate a mixed price round.

When a lot of dumb money shows up in the startup/vc market at the beginning of next year, you'll probably see this happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Investor converting into the round at a discount is really an investor in the previous round, So both Dave and Fred are right The round should have one price for everyone to make it clean and simple But earlier investors converting should be thought of as earlier round participants

</comment><comment><USER10> Working at a start up where multiple investors came into the same round at different valuations; so yes, they should, it makes sense as different people bring different things to the table.

</comment><comment><USER11> A heavy duty well connected investor who is actively making connections and opening doors should get a better price than a bank whose involvement begins and ends with a term sheet.</comment>


Is Anyone Good Enough for an H-1B Visa? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/immigration-visa-h1b-trump-.html <comment><USER2> Come to Canada! There is a young and booming tech industry here and our immigration laws are very friendly to skilled workers.

I'm a Canadian who was on an H1B working in the valley for the past 6 years working at VP Eng. level for various technology startups. This year, I gave that up and returned home.

It was quite clear over the last year that the US is closing it's doors. They no longer want immigrants working/living in their country. Read the comments in the article. Look at the changes coming from the Trump administration. Even crossing the border you get a sense that you are not welcome.

<comment><USER3> Insanely hard to get a job there without Canadian education or experience. Way tougher for people from India and China, since Canadian recruiters have no idea of the quality of Universities in these places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Duplicate, see the original thread on this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769273](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15769273)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you learn a new language as fast as possible? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> > How can I learn Italian as fast as possible?

> How can I learn to play the guitar as fast as possible?

> How can I learn to submit jiu-jitsu black belts as fast as possible?

For some things in life shortcuts are simply not possible.

To get fluency you will have to: write a lot of code, read a lot of code, work on other people's code, have other people review your own code.

One thing that helps is already knowing a lot of other languages :). I usually duck-duck-go stuff like "$language for programmers" and "$language in 20 minutes" or "$language for people who know $similar_language" in order to find guides/howtos oriented a people who already know how to program. Because reading a Language guide that also teaches you what is an if statement or what is an exception is extremely boring to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Get a job where that language is the primary one. Coding it 8h+ a day gets you up to speed.

<comment><USER4> While this works, it usually creates a lot of bad habits.

<comment><USER5> Usually? Based on what evidence? Writing actual code as a member of a team is the best way to learn a new language and set of tools. What some may call "bad habits" are more accurately called _different_ habits. We can't, as a profession, even agree on indentation, so no habits are objectively good or bad.

<comment><USER4> Based on experience. I don't mean things like indentation. I mean things like on [http://thedailywtf.com/](http://thedailywtf.com/)

One company I joined put all their database types as strings because it was most flexible. A lot of architecture types are bad - they're slower, inflexible, harder to read, harder to test. It works, but changing the color of an icon then takes 4 hours, and may possibly crash one of the screens.

There's also a lot of spaghetti code, god classes, people who hack things together until they work, instead of spending an hour reading the manual to find what the proper use is. For example, I've seen someone who wants to get location permissions install a whole map plugin and hide the map in the background, instead of just writing the code that requests location permissions.

I've got years of experience, and these days I'm spending an hour/day watching beginner programmer tutorials to unlearn a lot of the bad habits of the past.

<comment><USER5> Based on experience (40 years programming) were just as likely to learn good habits and practices as bad ones. Of course daily WTF things happen and we all make fun of them, but there's no site like that to post when something goes right.

Programming is an ongoing learning process, and that means making mistakes and getting exposed to less than ideal solutions and habits along with the good ideas and practices. You can't get either from tutorials or working on personal projects, because feedback and mentoring play a big part in making forward progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depends on what I need to do. Learning enough to read some code takes less time than learning enough to fix bugs. Getting to sufficient competency to write code from scratch takes longer, and leading a team and making architecture decisions will take longer still.

I can usually read any C-family language without any study, because they are much more alike than different. I will need some reference material to fix bugs and make small changes. I may need a tutorial or a non-trivial code base to study to get to competency. Before I would lead a team or make expensive decisions I would want a couple of years experience with the language and ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER6> There aren't any shortcuts.. But when I was in college we studied abroad and I learned way faster having to communicate than I would have in the US. So my advice would be to visit another country that speaks the language for an extended period of time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Move there, no phone translate tools. You will learn because you have to.</comment>


If You're Passionate About Something, You Can Make a Living From It Online - <AUTHOR> http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/02/if-youre-passionate-about-something-you-can-make-a-living-from-it-online/ <comment><USER2> I'll jump in here, since I'm busy monetizing a niche community.

I run <http://www.obsidianportal.com>, and we're just turning 3 years old. I won't give stats on users, uniques, etc, since we keep that close to the vest. However, we do have over 10k RPG campaigns registered, and about 250k pages of content.

Most important, we're actually decently profitable, after 3 hard years. Still not ramen profitable, but it will provide a nice chunk of change this year. If our growth continues, I may be able to support myself full time in another 2-3 years, but I'm trying not to be too optimistic.

Before someone says, "You can make money off your passion" or "Do what you love and money will follow", I'd like to see their own personal evidence. I'm walking that road and I know how hard it is. Possible? Yes. But definitely not easy, and it takes waaay more than just passion. It takes late nights, hard work, thick skin, and a good bit of luck. Oh, and forget about "fail fast." If you do what you love, be prepared for a long, hard slog up the mountain to profitability. I love my community and my chosen subject matter, but it's still _work_ and it's still _hard_.

To the OP: Can you point to a community/passion that you've personally monetized _into a living_? Maybe it's too much to ask that someone be a personal expert on everything, but being in that boat myself, I get a little irritated when someone breaks out the "Do what you love" line without backing it up with personal experience. That's not to say that the OP hasn't done it, just that I didn't see any evidence in my cursory glance over the blog.

One last bit of advice: All our success is due to charging subscriptions. Forget ads. They suck. Besides being crazy variable, they also annoy your users. Find a way to charge money for something. No, you'll never get as big as Facebook or Twitter that way, but that doesn't matter. You'll never get as big as Facebook or Twitter anyway, so don't even try to walk that road.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Before someone says, "You can make money off your passion" or "Do what you love and money will follow", I'd like to see their own personal evidence. I'm walking that road and I know how hard it is. Possible? Yes. But definitely not easy, and it takes waaay more than just passion. It takes late nights, hard work, thick skin, and a good bit of luck. Oh, and forget about "fail fast." If you do what you love, be prepared for a long, hard slog up the mountain to profitability. I love my community and my chosen subject matter, but it's still work and it's still hard._

I apologize if my post was irritating to you, and you're right that I didn't elaborate on how difficult this can be, but my point wasn't that it's easy, just that it's almost certainly possible if you're willing to put in the work. And if you're passionate about it and you enjoy it overall, what do you have to lose? Your story is a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about.

And no, I'm not quite to the "making a living" point with the niches I'm monetizing (though I know others who are), though I think I will be in the next 12-18 months, assuming growth continues as it has been. I also don't put as much time and effort into them as I could/should, primarily because of my startup.

<comment><USER2> Congrats on your success, then. 18 months away from making a living is a great place to be. Assuming it's web based, do you have links to the sites/projects/whatever? I'm curious to see, and I always try to pick up ideas from others.

<comment><USER3> I'll send you a link when we're set to launch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Forums _in themselves_ don't make any money. Access to a big, active, interested market is worth an absolute fortune if you have the Direct Marketing expertise, but most forum owners don't. There's a reason why all successful print magazines have teams of advertising salespeople. Advertising is still a relationship business, especially when dealing with niches.

Do you know why you get an inflight magazine on a plane? Because it's hugely profitable for the airline. They are prepared to pay big chunks of money to writers, photographers, designers and printers just to be able to sell ads targeted at the niche of "people on planes". How lucrative do you imagine a super-targeted forum might be when monetised properly?

Direct Marketers treat mailing lists as a saleable commodity. A relatively cheap mailing list costs $50 per thousand names per mailing. A high quality list for a suitably lucrative niche list could sell for ten times that. Sponsorship of a regular newsletter with good readership could be worth even more if sold properly, likewise sponsored subforums.

That's the simple stuff, the things proper businesses do when they have a huge list of people who like to buy the same stuff. Today though, the sky is the bloody limit. I feel all tingly in my private area when I think of the Customer Development possibilities for someone who has a trust relationship and constant two-way communication with that many prospective customers.

A forum is a publishing business, potentially a highly lucrative one. It's not going to monetise itself. If you don't have the skills and aren't ready to learn them, you need to bring in people who do.

</comment><comment><USER5> forums don't make any money.

I know a guy who runs a very successful forum...#1 forum for a particular car niche...has 110K registered users, and about 50K uniques a month, and 1 million page views.

Know how much he makes? $2,500 a month. $500 from Adsense, $1000 from selling car parts, and $1000 from direct advertising sales.

$2,500 is not bad, until you throw in the cost of servers and bandwidth....after all is said and done, at the end of the month he clears about $600.

Sure $600 is nothing to sniff at, but he's been running the forum for 10 years now....so you would think at that level it'd be making a ton more money than that.

<comment><USER6> Servers and Bandwidth for a site doing 1 million page views a month should cost at most a couple hundred bucks, maybe $500 if you go overboard. If he is spending $1900 a month on servers that is ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> he has a lot of regulars. Gets something like 2,000-3,000 people on at the same time every night + it's an old site, so there are a ton of threads, I think something like 2 million at this point.

Infrastructure wise, I know that he has 4 web servers, 2 DB servers, and 1 image server...I'm not certain on specs, but I believe all of them are dual xeons.

But yeah it's pretty crazy, since it's a hobby, I'm sure he is getting things that he doesn't really need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I disagree with his assumption that these forums, let alone _every_ forum of similar size, earn enough to "make a living" from. Forums are notoriously hard to monetize, and traffic at those levels is likely to bring in at most a few hundred a month in advertising and affiliate revenue. That's not enough for a young single guy to live off, let alone a family.

<comment><USER8> It's true that forums are hard to monetize with Adsense and other affiliate ads, but they're definitely not impossible to monetize.

I started/ran silverfishlongboarding.com for a few years and the forums became very popular. Even so, it never made more than a couple hundred a month off Adsense.

Eventually we got rid of Adsense and started selling ads directly. Within a few months we were bringing in several thousand a month. It was much more time consuming, but it worked. I sold the site a couple years ago, but I keep in touch with the new owners and I know that at least one of them is making a living full time off it.

<comment><USER9> Wow, I used to surf the 'fish a good bit last year. Got hooked up with the Friday Night Rip at Prospect Park with the Earthwing and Bustin crews, bought a Kracked Skulls M1; my roommate bought an Original Apex. It's still a great site with a valuable community. Nice work!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like how HN readers take a blog post, tear it apart word by word and make really healthy discussion out of it.

I tried a forum thing 2-3 years back with help of few friends, but with ad sense couldn't even pay for hosting fees. Had to shut it down.

</comment><comment><USER11> _Now, I don't know how much money these sites are making...[but]...I'm convinced you could make a good living in these niches._

<comment><AUTHOR> How competent the owners of these sites might be in monetization is irrelevant, as my point is that the audiences in question are sufficiently engaged and passionate to be willing to pay for stuff, and thus it's _possible_ to make a good living from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> An audience != A business

<comment><USER13> It does in showbusiness.

<comment><USER14> You know, I'm watching a show about a wedding cake contest in Oklahoma right now. If Food network can make money on that, there's got to be a way to do it online.

I think we're just getting started in our ways of monetizing audiences online. Just look at the reality TV shows that make money on the most obscure topics these days.

<comment><USER15> I think that the advertisers pay more for Food network airtime because Food network has repeat patrons. It's a little different for a one-off show than for an entire network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My 2(-4) Cents (per click):* Most of these posts mention Adsense when they explain why they don't make a whole lot of money. Adsense is not very effective in many niches (for example, "funny stories" would only get you roughly 2-4 cents per click). Sure, you can't all start a forum about Mesothelioma Lawyers, but you can seek more intuitive, less hated methods of generating profit than Adsense.

*I'm so sorry for that intro, I just had to do it :)

</comment><comment><USER17> Upvoted because I hope it's true.

<comment><USER18> Hope is not a strategy.

<comment><USER17> Hope, by itself, is not a strategy.

<comment><USER16> Hope, by itself, encourages inaction.

<comment><USER19> Despair, by itself, encourages inaction

Hope is a fantastic motivator

<comment><USER16> I know this is a pointless tangent we're off on, but "hope" is a particular pet peeve of mine. Hope is not a motivator. In a lot of cases, when we hope something changes, we don't spend very much time trying to change it. For example, I could hope that "Mr. X" becomes mayor or I could go out and canvas the neighborhood, put out flyers, etc. Of course, with most action, you will also hope for a positive outcome, but hope alone is not a motivator, and hope ALONE, encourages inaction.

Despair is honestly more of a motivator than hope is. How many times have people been in a terrible situation and forced to work extra hard to create a better outcome. Yes, despair is not a positive feeling, but hope isn't all it's cracked up to be either. I'm not a pessimist, and there are times when hope is appropriate, e.g. when things are out of your control.

<comment><USER19> thanks for the explanation. Looks like we might have different meanings behind 'hope' here. I tend to think of it less in the way you describe here, and more like a vision of something I think is possible; hope is something that helps galvanise action.

eg, I hope to see my kids grow up with a reasonable level of immunity to brand-names, therefore, when we buy things we talk about things like what it's made of, how well will it suit our needs, how long do we expect it to last etc, and almost never mention what brand it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone propose any _automated techniques_ for discovering or sifting through potential niche communities, to figure out which can be monetized?</comment>


Ask HN: The GRE subject test - <AUTHOR>

I am planning to give the Computer Science GRE test,in March.
The reason I'm doing is is that I want to apply to  grad school (PhD) and my scores in university are not all that great (3.25 GPA).
Any advice? Thoughts?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I would definitely take it, and make sure that you do very well giving your relatively low GPA. You'll also want to do very well on the normal GRE too, since most schools look at that first and fore-most. The subject test is almost never required except for in the very elite schools, but a good score definitely will increase your chances anywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> What sort of a score on the normal GRE test would you say would be a very good score?

I understand the test is out of 1600 presently.</comment></comment>


Yahoo shuts down BOSS API (powering DuckDuckGo) - <AUTHOR> https://boss.yahoo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> While DDG uses a myriad of data sources, it's main search functionality is powered by Yahoo BOSS API. They should easily be able to switch over to BING API as Yahoo BOSS has delivered 100% Bing results anyway. However, the ads that DDG shows, and therefore their whole business model, are also powered by Yahoo BOSS API. So they will be able to continue their search engine but they won't make any money from it unless they cut a new deal for search ads.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's also interesting: Yahoo didn't really anounce this. I'm a Yahoo BOSS customer as well and I haven't been contacted by anyone. I only found out by randomly visiting their website.

<comment><USER2> They emailed everyone. I submitted this a while ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900233)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link, I haven't seen this. I just checked again, they didn't email me ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Actually it powers a lot of search engines. At Blekko we used it to fetch the "long tail" for searches where our index came up short, but we also tried that with Yandex's english index (they had invested in us and they had a similarly sized index).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll give Yandex a try :)</comment></comment>


How to crack a Microsoft interview - <AUTHOR> http://blog.interviewstreet.com/?p=649

<comment><USER2> This doesn't discuss much about passion for the product, which was always my first question and most important criteria.

Most of my interviews would revolve around telling the candidates, "Assume you're hired and you just started this morning. What would you do now?" The great hires already had tons of ideas and could demonstrate how they'd hit the ground running both with ideas and the execution to make it happen.

In general, approaching job interviews as something you need to crack or prepare for probably means you're looking for the wrong job. Really the job you want is the one you've already spent your whole life preparing for.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I continue working a Ruby gem for Visa API? - <AUTHOR> I've begun working on a ruby gem for visa.com api and have made around 10 commits. Then, after a few days, I realized that visa.com will probably introduce its own SDK for the major languages such as Java, Ruby, Python, JS. And they'll, including one in Ruby, of course be de-facto standard.<p>I wonder, should I continue working on my own ruby gem then? <comment><USER2> I think it depends on why your are working on it. Having your own removes a dependency on something that doesn't exist yet.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> for my portfolio. for the community. and maybe for myself.</comment></comment>


Samsung and Google pull Nexus Prime, Ice Cream Sandwich launch - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/samsung-and-google-pull-nexus-prime-ice-cream-sandwich-launch-1032490

<comment><USER2> AllThingsD has official word:

In an updated statement, the companies confirmed they were making the move out of respect for Jobs.

"We believe this is not the right time to announce a new product as the world expresses tribute to Steve Jobs's passing," the companies said.

[http://allthingsd.com/20111007/samsung-google-cancel- launch-...](http://allthingsd.com/20111007/samsung-google-cancel-launch-event- out-of-respect-for-steve-jobs-sources-say/)

<comment><USER3> Wasn't the announcement supposed to be on 10/11 that is almost a week away from Steve's death. Is it really that mournful at Google?

<comment><USER4> More likely it might conflict with Steve Job's funeral. I would imagine some high ranking Google officials are going to be there to pay their respects.

<comment><USER5> The funeral takes place today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      It's likely that the companies decided to postpone as a mark
      of respect to rival Steve Jobs, who passed away earlier this
      week.

ORLY? Am I being insensitive? Does anyone really think that's why they'd delay this announcement?

<comment><USER7> I'm a google employee. Internally, there has been much mourning and tribute to Steve. Our internal corporate portal contains a memorial on the front page. At a company-wide meeting, Larry again reflected on Steve.

And I doubt Google is the only company doing this. Look, competitive as companies in the valley are, we are all still human beings, with a sense of respect for others in our industry, and when one so who has burned so brightly, dies so young, we take notice. The amount of cynicism displayed here is just sad.

<comment><USER3> Can't blame Google if they are trying to be publicly mourful and trying to get mileage out of it. Tow birds in one stone: time to fix those last bugs and also get good press for the delay. Well played.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We can be cynical about everything or take them at face value. Its our choice. I'll go with face value this time.

</comment><comment><USER9> Where are the official announcements of this? I can't find links in any of these clone-posts, and I can't find announcements on Google or Samsung's websites.

<comment><USER10> It's apparently an email that's going to press outlets. This Is My Next/Verge is as reputable as any, and they've confirmed it: [http://thisismynext.com/2011/10/07/samsung-google- postpone-g...](http://thisismynext.com/2011/10/07/samsung-google-postpone- galaxy-nexus-launch/)

</comment></comment><comment> ac-slater Come on, Steve was using all kinds of legal shenanigans to try to keep Samsung Android products off the market. Why are they continuing to love their abuser?

<comment> ac-slater Seems to have struck a nerve. I thought all this patent litigation was considered bad around here.

<comment><USER10> You're off-topic and disrespectful.

There's a time and place to talk about Apple's legal practices. But this thread is about Samsung and Google (potentially) behaving much more respectfully toward a competitor than you are. Which is commendable.

<comment><USER11> I dunno why after a person's death everyone has to talk only of their good sides. It's a social convention but it's kinda dumb. He did a lot of good stuff, and also quite a bit of bad stuff. That's ok by me.

Google and Samsung did not comment by saying this is to pay respect to S.Jobs, because they wouldn't know what the reaction would be. Now that the reaction is positive, they might comment on it that way.

Otherwise, people would know and start saying "it's in fact because the news would be overshadowed by S.Jobs death, and it would also taint our product launch. It's an extraordinary event, Lets launch later".

There's nothing respectful in not launching a product, a week later. There has been many cool marks of respects instead, all over the worlda and the web, which mean a LOT more and make a LOT more sense than a product launch delay.

I know, unpopular opinions gotta be downvoted, and criticism bashed. Heh. That's pretty much against what S.Jobs believed in, ironically.

<comment><USER12> > I dunno why after a person's death everyone has to talk only of their good > sides. It's a social convention but it's kinda dumb.

If you had ill to say of the person, it would be polite and honest to say it when they were alive to defend themselves. The time after a person dies is a little soon as they have relatives and friends who need to work out their grief and not deal with a bunch of detractors.

I am sure Steve Jobs will be debated by historians and evaluated my the ever changing morals of the years to come.

<comment><USER11> By this argument, you're claiming that once dead, everything you've ever done is suddenly right. Well, again, that's kinda dumb. I agree with quite a few of the "bad things" Mr Jobs has done, but that doesn't make them "good things". It has nothing to do with honesty. Nothing. Nada. Zero.

Also, I don't need someone, like historians, to tell me how to think. Neither a global population's moral. I have my own though and my own morale. I know, again, that's not a common point of view. Much easier to go with the flow. And again, Mr Jobs would agree. If you want to honor his memory, maybe it's time to think different^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H on your own.

<comment><USER12> No, thats not what I said. I just think a brief bit to pause an consider and give people time to bury their dead should be the norm.

The historian comment was to show that the net effect of his life (or any other) will not truly be known until well after death. The morality part was my quick quip on what morals history's judgment will be based.

Its a free country, be rude and add all the pain to the world you want. I just tend to believe a little bit of thought and compassion for others would make it a nicer place.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Check out Screenify, a little application I wrote so I can browse reddit and Digg in screenshots. - <AUTHOR> http://screenify.com/

<comment><USER2> I have to say I don't see why you want to do that - "browse in screenshots".</comment>