Grade Inflation at American Colleges and Universities - <AUTHOR> http://www.gradeinflation.com/ <comment><USER4> One possible cause not mentioned in the article is that universities offer/require more filler courses. Last year, for example, I had to teach an intro to HTML course at a UC school. This is a required course for all non- engineering majors. To get an A, all you have to do is create a single html webpage using 10 different tags and 10 different css styles.[1] These courses are huge money makers for the university. I had 120 students in the lecture, and each student paid about $1000 to take that course. The course was a joke for 90% of the students, but they didn't care because they got their "easy A". In exchange, the university got a butt ton of cash.

[1] This grading system was set by the department so that there wouldn't be "easy" and "hard" quarters to take the course.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, Murray Sperber called it the "faculty-student non-aggression pact" \- "Professors don't ask much of their students and students don't ask much of their professors".

And a newer book called "Academically Adrift" found that students aren't learning much in college.

How do they get away with all this? One explanation is the signaling theory of education. A degree (and the prestige/selectivity/reputation of the school and program) is a proxy (signal) for IQ plus an indicator of persistence (toughing it out to make it through a degree program).

<comment><USER6> EconTalk has a great episode on this.

"ryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the value of a college education. Caplan argues that the extra amount that college graduates earn relative to high school graduates is misleading as a guide for attending college--it ignores the fact that a sizable number of students don't graduate and never earn that extra money. Caplan argues that the monetary benefits of a college education have a large signaling component rather than representing the value of the knowledge that's learned. Caplan closes by arguing that the subsidies to education should be reduced rather than increased."

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Teaching as a graduate student i'm seeing a pattern where my department is swamped with students and thus has a lot of grad students teaching (a lot of people here on student visas), then then evaluates all the teaching grad students based on student reviews.

A lot of those out-country students are scared of angering students, getting bad reviews and getting kicked out. End result, classes are getting easier and grades are inflating. Students are getting less prepared for later classes

I'm a US citizen and I have a reputation for being a hard grader because my position is a lot more stable (it is a lot easier to get funding for US citizens).

I teach mostly upper level classes and I am failing a lot of students with "good" grades.

<comment><USER8> Assistant professors are in a similar position -- student evals influence tenure decisions. It's a fundamental problem of poorly designed incentives.

<comment><USER7> No, the incentives are well designed, just not for the task we perceive as important.

We want to produce competent and educated students. Colleges and Universities want to maximize throughput and income. _In the short term_, student reviews do that job.

<comment><USER8> Right -- universities are "diluting their brand" in the long term by creating incentives that destroy the value of college education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My wife is getting her Master's in bioinformatics from a prestigious university. No joke on the day of the final exam her professor showed up to class 25 minutes late and said he only had one copy of the exam because the photo-copier wasn't working. Everyone got A's. And there is no accountability.

<comment><USER10> I would say that graduate programs tend to be a bit more binary, i.e. you're either passing a course or you aren't, and the professor knows exactly who those people are. And if you aren't passing, your prof. will also quietly suggest to you early on that you drop it and take it again a bit down the road. This was my experience in masters & phd level math courses, at least.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. In my graduate program you were either get a B or higher, or you were in the professor's office having a tough conversation about your future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In Singapore, all grades are normalized using the bell curve (normal distribution), where 50% gets the "pass" grade (C+).

This means, if everyone does well, even if your exam scores are near perfect, you could still end up with just a pass grade.

It sucks for students, but this way, grade inflation just cannot happen.

<comment><USER13> You need to be careful about this. When I was in high school the state government (NSW in Australia) removed the scaling from difficult subjects. This meant that doing a subject designed for morons (for example 2U Maths in Practice - we used to call Maths in Space) would be normalised to the same mean as higher level maths (4U). The smart thing to do if you had any mathamatical ability was to enrole in moron maths since you would of course be a star and get a very high mark. A few of my smart friends did this - <USER2> problem was by the time we graduated the universities had rebelled and introduced their own scaling and anyone who had done maths in space was scaled down to nothing. More by stubbornness than genius I chose to avoid this path and selected all hard subjects which turned out to be the smart thing to do in the end.

I guess the moral here is do what challenges you and don't worry about anyone else.

<comment><USER14> I had the exact opposite situation. I was encouraged to challenge myself and take the hard courses through high school, because it would look better on my transcript. I finished with a rather low GPA (around a C+), while simultaneously having a really high SAT score (770 verbal, 710 math).

Colleges here use both to determine scholarship eligibility, and it turns out I qualified for nothing. If I had taken the easier classes and raised my GPA to meet the threshold, I would have gotten a full ride based on my SAT.

The moral here is you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

<comment><USER13> The Australian system is very different in that we don't have the equivalent of the SAT with your entire university entrance mark determined by your final marks in your 10 best units of high school classes (there is a statewide final exam). Each subject was normalised to a mean of 60% with only 1% of marks over 90%. The universities then rescaled these marks so the mean for moron maths became something like 30% while 4U maths had a scaled mean of 80%. My unscaled mark was around 80% while my scaled mark ended up a little over 90%. My smart friends ended up with the oposite sort of mark.

<comment><USER14> Ultimately, you have to know your system and work it, while hoping the system doesn't change on you in the meantime. If your system hadn't changed dramatically, it sounds like your friends would have been the ones coming out ahead.

But I do suppose that the person who is 'cheating' the system is more likely to get screwed harder than someone doing the 'right' thing in the case of a major change. I expect that if things were changed in a way that hurt people doing what they were supposed to, there would be some transitional period, grandfathering, etc to protect them, whereas if a change hurts people who are gaming the system, it's more likely to just leave them hanging, since they shouldn't have been doing that anyway.

<comment><USER13> I agree, but as I found out by chance it is very hard to work a dynamic system prone to political change when you have to invest years into it. If your exposure is only short-term you are far less likely to get caught out by sudden changes.

The irony in all this is I ended enrolling in a science degree for which I only needed a very low mark to get into - I could have enrolled in any of my high school's subjects and it would not have mattered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The scale on the first plot is a bit disingenuous. Here's the same data replotted with a proper scale (i.e. ranging from 0 to 4 instead of 2.6 to 3.4).

[http://i.imgur.com/HxKss12.png](http://i.imgur.com/HxKss12.png)

<comment><USER16> Considering that a "grade" is an artificial quantity which doesn't represent the "mass" of anything real, the given scale is appropriate. The axes are also labelled very prominently, so I'm not sure what kind of false impression you think a reader would get from the first graph but not the second.

<comment><USER15> Grades are at least _supposed_ to reflect the quality of the students who pass the tests with some level of linearity. If the author doesn't believe this is the case, s-he shouldn't use them in the first place, especially not to discuss _grade inflation_.

The kind of false impression that at least I get when I look at this graph is that the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3 over the past 20 years when they were only multiplied by a factor 1.06. For anyone familiar with GPA, this is misleading.

<comment><USER16> >the grades were multiplied by a factor ~1.3

The point is that a grade is an ordinal quantity (somewhat). You don't get anything useful from multiplying grades by any "factor". Anyone in danger of thinking otherwise should not blame the graph. Fast food articles such as "Top 10 secrets of misleading graphs your profs don't want you to know" are probably more culpable in that regard.

<comment><USER15> > The point is that a grade is an ordinal quantity

In principle I agree, but grade inflation preserves the order so why should we care about grade inflation if grades are only about order? I think the plot and the rest of the article goes beyond that.

Also an histogram is a poor representation choice for ordinal data.

<comment><USER14> Grade inflation doesn't preserve order between the inflated and non-inflated grades, which I think is the point. An inflated low A might actually be lower than an original high B, but gets the shiny A that looks better on paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Like a lot of the pathologies in higher education, there's a lot of bleed from one problem/question and its answers (like grades) into others.

So first, what are grades even for? They give students and teachers feedback, they set goals and they enforce a certain amount of discipline, pacing, something to enforce practice. Basically, teaching tools.

If I try to think of something analogous, a periodic fitness test as part of a fitness program might be it.

Once grades exist, they pick up all sorts of other uses inside the system. Admissions of various sorts. Hiring. Proof. Measures of competence. Comparison. When this is the actual goal, the grading and testing looks different. GMAT is designed around this "secondary" use.

I think if you roll back the history of how high schools or universities picked up all the habits and structures they have now, grades weren't as central as they are now. Matriculation was the main marker and that's a binary.

Anyway….

I think this kind of focus on grades, grade inflation, deflation and such is more about the fact that most of us were at one time or another concerned with our grades. Any unfairness annoys us and when different generations, places or subjects "have it easy" we get annoyed.

I don't think it matters much though. The main reason for grades is the first part, the teaching tool. Hopefully that becomes the focus. Better grading where better is "helps the student more." That probably means tracking and giving feedback progress, reacting to deficits, controlling the pace and stuff like that.

I hope grading gets completely hijacked by the technology assisted pedagogy.

</comment><comment><USER18> What about grade deflation ? in the UK, where at least in social sciences ( Business Degree included) you are not graded against set standards but graded against your fellow students, with whom you are supposed to collaborate with as I understand it.

Even more, students are awarded between 0-70 max,although the documentation says it's 0 - 100. I've also discussed with several professors that they are encouraged to degrade the student, even if they find nothing wrong with the paper, because otherwise the results won't be consistent with past data.

Does anyone see any problem here ?

<comment><USER19> What if you infuse your papers with some minority and gender studies crap (even if it's not related)? Wouldn't it improve your grade?

<comment><USER20> Well, if you hadn't studied those topics in sufficient depth, the examiner would doubtless decrease your mark for writing crap. If they weren't relevant, your mark would be decreased for writing irrelevant things.

I suspect your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm sick of humanities- bashing. If people don't like culture, that's fine, but they don't have to go around oozing their contempt.

<comment><USER21> >If people don't like culture, that's fine

I thought the whole point of the modern humanities is that culture (or at least western culture) is evil and oppressive. In my experience the average humanities course is not concerned with "culture" in the "cultured" sense of the word, which I assume is the definition you were using. The university I attended recently dropped all the Greek, Latin and Classics courses, for instance, and fired (negotiated generous early retirement packages with) all the staff who had taught them.

<comment><USER20> I disagree that modern humanities have abandoned those topics. I know _plenty_ of people studying Greek, Latin, Classics, etc. Especially if you count people studying them as modules, rather than as the entire focus of their degree.

I get the impression you don't value things like anthropology, non-Western history and gender studies. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'd disagree here as well, though. I value and respect those disciplines, and I don't see their growth as a bad thing.

<comment><USER21> I suspect if you compared the relative number of people studying those topics now to fifty years ago, there'd be significantly fewer now studying classics etc.

I've nothing against anthropology, gender studies etc. as disciplines, just with how they're often taught, with a focus on promoting particular ideologies rather than detached critical thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is the result of a user pays education system. If I was dropping a 100K on a degree then I'd expect all HD's. And those that do spend as much money expect the same. So how do you differentiate yourself from all the others with the same degree and same grades? go get more schooling. thus grade inflation and degree inflation.

Down in Australia, its less of this and more "you should be thanking me for giving you 51% in physical and computational chemistry".

edit - long day == giving up on spelling

<comment><USER23> This argument is not very convincing, since grade inflation is also real in Germany, even though education is free here. I actually think it comes down to the fact that everyone feel that the middle class is in decline, which creates a more competitive environment and makes grades seem more important, so people work harder on that (which is not to say that others were lazy before - <USER3> maybe not optimising for good grades).

<comment><USER22> Well maybe I'm am just bad at physical chemistry then. It may also have some relation to weather a university is marking its students against each other or against criteria, if there is a bar to be passed, maybe the use of grades is irrelevant. Its should just be pass/fail, no other metric attached.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's true - the professor awarded everyone who turned up to class that day fifty percent, just for turning up! One student then started to question that decision - the professor said "aha - critical reasoning! Very good, extra marks for you!". Another then said they would write to the dean to complain, the professor said "excellent, I will award even more marks to you in anticipation of your written effort".

Seems like getting the grade got too easy...

<comment><USER25> Oh boy, that's a teacher that's given up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ah yes.... Purdue. Almost no grade inflation. When I was there, everyone saw this graph and it made them pissed because other schools had become 'easier' and Purdue had not. That was back before I realized no one gives a shit about GPA.

<comment><USER27> Don't employers filter candidate employees by their GPA, though?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's an underlying assumption of 'grades matter' that may no longer be true. I think this assumption has been becoming less relevant as more people look to see what you did rather than what marks you got. i.e. I believe more people are interested in evaluating your body of work these days. I think this is a good thing since it would allow students to be more rigorous in their learnings for two reasons: 1) students are seeking true knowledge and demonstration of mastery instead of an artificial comparisons and 2) they can be more risky as they learn since the consequences of arriving at a wrong conclusion are minimal.

</comment><comment><USER29> > It is commonly said that there is more grade inflation in the sciences than > in the humanities. This isn't exactly correct. What is true is that both the > humanities and the sciences have witnessed rising grades since the 1960s, > but it appears that the starting points for the rise were different.

I am confused by this statement, because the Y axis label on the accompanying chart says the exact opposite: that both the average GPA and the average change in GPA is higher for humanities than for natural sciences.

<comment><USER30> It's higher, but the line is flat... i.e. it started with a higher baseline but stayed stable. So the rise over time of sciences has been similar to humanities.

<comment><USER29> This still doesn't explain why the author is quasi-agreeing with the claim that the sciences has higher grade inflation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is it true that you cannot default on a collage loan in US? How is it legal? Isn't it the root cause of the problem.

(I'm not American, my knowledge is limited)

<comment><USER32> You can't discharge a student loan in bankruptcy. This makes sense. If you borrow money to purchase a car or a home the lender always has the option of repossessing the goods as a last resort.

You cannot legally repossess someone's human capital. So the current law is set to avoid the moral hazard of someone borrowing $100k in student loans and then declaring bankruptcy right after graduation.

<comment><USER33> But it promotes the moral hazard of the bank offering you a loan when they know that the human capital is likely to be worthless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> People tend to believe this isn't bad, as "other qualities" would be more important.

These qualities often are not creativity or diligence(hard to be quantified now), but family connections or social status.

Showing personal skills in an interview assumes you got one in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER35> I am sure, as 3minus1 mentioned, there are many instances of grade inflation but it seems to vary by major and school. The overall rise in GPA over the years though could be influenced by other things I wonder.

1\. jackpirate mentioned more filler courses

2\. The internet? If you had a bad professor and a poorly written textbook back in the day, you were kind of screwed outside of working with friends. Today the internet offers pieces of courses and HW examples from all over the world, and things like Coursera and MIT opencourse software are available.

3\. MORE AP and IB classes allow students to take college level courses but alot of kids at my college for example, in stead of carrying over the credits, chose to retake Calc I & II, even though they had ACED the AP exams, giving them a freshman year filler of courses that were relatively a breeze for them. I don't believe as many students took AP and IB classes back then. It seems to be the norm nowadays to use this AP/IB edge to actually help yourself ease into college courses be essentially retaking them. Besides, graduating early from a 4 year university is not encouraged, most kids at that level also want the full 4 year experience so their motivation to transfer the credits goes down.

If you think about it, this gives the private universities grades a double edge. you are more likely to be accepted into a competitive private university if you are smart enough to be acing college level courses in highschool, and once you get to the private university, you breeze through those courses by essentially retaking them.

Most students used a combination of all three of these things and obtained 3.8-4.0 Freshman year, allowing for more slack when the harder courses started to come in.

4\. Lets not forget aderall meds are handed out like candy these days to help kids work harder longer. Use of these drugs at top private universities is rampant. In many cases, parents seek out medication for their kids claiming ADHD when really what they are saying is "my kid is not working hard enough to meet up to my standards and because he must be as smart as I am that must be because he is distracted with video games, and therefore has ADHD". Many kids seek it out for themselves. Roughly 1/3rd of the kids I knew were taking aderall regularly (either with or without prescription) to pull all nighters on a regular basis to keep up in school.

one of many easily googled sources: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking- academic...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic- edge-teenagers-abuse-stimulants.html?_r=0)

5\. As for the difference between public and private schools, competitiveness and cheating (illegal use of adderall included) is contagious and I definitely think competition, cheating, use of drugs to work harder longer (as opposed to enjoyment and recreation), seems to exponentiate itself amongst more competitiveness students, which statistically, are more likely to end up at more competitive schools.

6\. Overall, more and more kids are going to college each year, but interestingly, the applicant pools for public universities does increase, the applicant pool for top private universities is exponential each year, allowing private schools to choose the cream of the crop, potentially creating more of a gap between the general caliber of students between private and public universities.

Anecdotal sure but to give you an idea, my friend who went to Johns Hopkins told me stories of kids ripping pages out of textbooks in the libraries so other students had no access, and I've heard this happens at top law schools as well. I witnessed in my private university even as a freshman. In many cases these are kids whose entire identities and their parents value of them depend on acing through ivy league schools, and failure (failure in these case being Bs)is not an option. I can't speak for the average public school, but I feel as if this mindset is less likely to be the norm here.

one of many sources to help support pt 5 & 6: [http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions- ma...](http://nypost.com/2013/08/25/tutor-reveals-ivy-admissions-madness-of- rich-penthouse-parents/)

7\. Someone else mentioned visa students who are TAs are pressured to give good grades for good reviews. With underclassmen on student visas, the competition seems to go up and they are in my experience more likely to engage in competitive behavior or cheating or aderall abuse because the stakes of failing out are also alot higher for them, but it seems to have the opposite effect if you are an undergrad versus be a grad grading TA trying to get good reviews from undergrads.

Anecdotal story, but proves that not all private schools use grade inflation liberally:

At my college, which is a private university ranked top 50, goes up and down each year by 20 or so in rankings, we are not top 5 but usually in top 25, grading is really tough and we were actually ranked top 3 toughest graders lumped in with MIT, except MIT exempts students from their entire freshman GPA (I've heard) to help with suicide and other such issues. Twice I was curved down because grades were so good we were suspected of cheating. The average GPA at my college was 2.7 when I graduated in 2012 and that is after 10% of students fail out. I wish I experienced more grade inflation at my school!

In the three cases of severe grade inflation during my undergrad career, the averages on the exams were 20/100 or 40/100, and they had to curve up 30-40 pts just get a third of the class to pass, and still that meant most kids got Bs or Cs. I'll never forget when we got 18/100 average for 64 kids in a class and we were all Engineering Majors. Different topic but I believe that results from hiring Professors who are better at research (brings in funding) than they are at teaching. Theres no reason statstically why the average of 64 students junior year of one of the hardest Engineering Majors at a top Engineering School should all be failing unless of course the Professor sucks at teaching.

So in this case, there was severe grade inflation, but that did not results in higher GPAs overall relative to other schools, it just helped A Professor not get in trouble for being responsible for causing the entire Electrical Engineering Department to fail and have to retake her course, which would have definitely put this Professor under review...

<comment><USER36> MIT doesn't really have "tough" grading per se, it has a lot of tough courses that are graded by mastery of the material. If you've chosen an appropriate major for yourself, you'll be getting mostly As and Bs. This eliminates dire competitive stresses that prompt sabotage in other schools, and encourages helping out each other. There's also a committee watching out for abuses by professors that would go so far as taking a class away from one if he thought there was cheating and decided to punitively grade as a result (although they're more focused on demanding too much, e.g. too lengthy finals, or otherwise too much required stuff at the end of term).

For freshman, it was graded pass-fail for the first year when I attended back in the '80s, now just for the first semester; that's more to ease the transition than anything else, and "hidden", unofficial grades are kept in case you need them for e.g. medical school applications. And the reported GPAs treat an A as 5.0.

Some figures for applications, as of some years ago, I think more people are applying now: 13,000 applications, but MIT has a high bar in terms of being able to do the general requirements of a semester of math past the AP Calculus BC sequence, one term each of mechanics and E&M calculus based physics, and other stuff like chemistry and a lab. So no legacy admits per se, instead the admissions office identified 3,000 applicants who they thought could "do the work", then constructed a class of ~1,100.

<comment><USER35> Interesting. It is silly that articles come out with tough grading rankings, based on what? I was just stating an article to further prove the point that not all schools are just a breeze and hand out As, and the higher grades are more likely attributed to having higher performing students, the trends of which become more obvious as competition for college acceptance goes up every year.

I think for my school people did choose the right majors but the Professors were hired based on their ability to bring in research/grant money and had no interest/some even acted disgusted at having to bother to teach a class, therefore alot of the class, despite being high performers in general, found that alot of classes, almost 100% consistent with the Professors mainly focused on research as opposed to teaching, caused lower grades overall. We have a very low endowment and overall much less money than MIT, so the pressure/incentive to hire Professors based on their ability to bring money in the school always trumps their ability to teach or produce a stimulating curriculum in general.

I would say this results in higher curves due to lower test performance in classes, that do not actually result in curving everyone up to an A, and thus is perceived by the outside world as "tough grading" but I think the students are of high caliber, but really it is a result of poor teaching. If the 64 students who have made it through the first two years of a college with high grades, all go into one class, and suddenly the average is 18/100 on an exam, and the 4.0 student makes a 55/100 and also gets an F without a curve, then we could say, maybe this is an issue with the a construct of incentivizing Professors to actually bother teaching and not so much that the students werent cut out for the major.

To add more stats, according to 2013, there were 16,000 undergraduate applicants to my school with an incoming freshman class of 1,204 so similar.

But on the more general point, I don't think the main driver for the disparity between high grades in private schools is due to a scandal or grade inflation, as most of my points support, in general higher performing students get into higher performing schools and those more competitive schools are good, especially with a large applicant pool, at deciding who is capable of doing well there, though I would say MIT is much better at this than my school was.

<comment><USER36> Hmmm; while MIT doesn't have a truly huge endowment (its management of all that sort of thing was downright criminal until the '90s, details on request, and it then managed to benefit from the following financial bubbles), it can get away with hiring those sorts of research professors. With exceptions that prove the rule, like SF author Joe Haldeman, all professors are tenured or tenure track, they only get tenure by being #1 or #2 in their field ( _very_ occasionally #3, and this is strongly enforced in multiple ways), and that of course means they're able to support themselves with grant money (plus one day a week to otherwise earn money). _And_ they must be _adequate_ teachers, and I came across/knew of very few who weren't serious and sincere about education, although of course their ability varied.

And this is enforced a whole bunch of ways post-tenure, e.g. I witnessed a case where a professor a lot of us have heard about was sat down by the head of his department (who I worked for at the time) and forced to read all the student evaluations of a course he'd just taught, which were all strongly negative except for another exception that proved the rule (we'd read them prior to the confrontation), and was then told he'd never teach that course again, he'd screwed up so badly.

Anyway, yeah, I can see all your points, which reinforce what I've been reading and occasionally witnessing starting in the '70s. One might more broadly correlate it with caviler way colleges and universities let students take on massive debt with all too often little chance of repaying it in a reasonable amount of time, the massive bloat of administrators, and how the latter are wresting more control from the faculty ... too many of these institutions just aren't all that serious about undergraduate education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Or a reason GPA has gone is because it's also become more competitive as acceptance rates have gone down. Who knows.

<comment><USER38> They have not. Acceptance rates are increases. The school makes more money by having more students.

<comment><USER35> While this may be true for public universities, private maintain their prestige by student faculty ratios and keeping their incoming classes between 1000-1300 students. You will see most private universities have kept their class size constant in the passed decade while public ones have increased, further supporting the graph shown in this article attesting to the disparity in grades between public and private schools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm not an American. I think it's funny when I see people writing about a "C student" being a loser/slacker, a B student either being good or an underachiever, and a _straight A_ student as the point where you finally have your shit together and are doing well.

<comment><USER40> Winner takes all.

The same exists in the UK. Because if you don't get an A, you won't get into the high end universities, you won't get a high paying job, and that's you done. Life of serfdom.

Exceptions to the rule exist but our society is based on small amounts of winners compared to many losers.

<comment><USER39> I was talking about grade inflation, not winner takes all. So getting straight As over there might be the equivalent of getting straight Bs over here. And this doesn't say anything about which place is harder to study or to get respectable results; obviously people's expectations rise with the inflation. But there _is_ a downside to inflation though, namely that it is easier to get straight As, which means that you can't differentiate the academically gifted from the academically brilliant. Not unless you bring in other metrics, but I guess having other metrics is healthy according to some opinions.

Life is probably less _winner takes all_ over here, but I don't think it has anything to do with grade inflation or lack thereof in high school or college.

For that matter; where you are accepted into higher education over here tends to be determined by a _score_ which is your average grade plus some points for age (maybe for "life experience"?), and other things. Which ends up meaning that if you don't have near perfect grades out of "high school", you won't get into medical school (I guess this is the hardest one to get into). It is my impression that since the US has more privatization, you can at least find some university/college if you have money or connections even if you don't have stellar grades.

<comment><USER36> Med schools are a particular problem because the pipeline that starts with them is constricted by the number of residents the society/government is willing and able to support ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_\(medicine\)) ). So as long as it's an attractive field (getting much less so in the US) there will be significantly more med school applicants than slots.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


My old account, with 2150 karma, is useless. So I made a new one. - <AUTHOR>

Flagging submissions had been disabled. So had downvoting comments.<p>After 710 days, I'm starting over. <comment><USER2> 1109 days, 13159 karma. I don't have flagging anymore but I don't miss it too much.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does PG disable upvoting for submissions, too?</comment>


Technology Is at the Center (Peter Thiel interview) - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/news/show/125469.html?NotTheHomesteadingArticle

<comment><USER2> Most recently, he can be found investing $500,000 in a practical-anarchist startup with the grandson of Milton Friedman. Details can be found in this fascinating, but blandly-headlined submission:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177505>

Audacious? Yes. Awesome? Yes.</comment>


"After Content Marketing" -- on the future of this racket... - <AUTHOR> http://www.newfangled.com/the_future_of_content_marketing <comment><USER2> A great overview of a subject cloaked in FUD - and a clear eyed and cynical view of the motivations and intentions of all our walled garden social sites.

Plenty of food for thought here

Edit: it treats content as some amorphous entertainment. Content that _teaches_ will have more value because it gives you extra capability. So I would go for the teaching style more than any text with the right keywords.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Wasn't necessarily trying to drum up controversy, but I do think that the industry at large needs a little bit of a clearing of the air as far as this subject is concerned...

<comment><USER2> Have not listened to the podcast but I like trend extrapolation as a device for thinking around subjects - it's my own catnip.

I am not sure I fully followed the last argument - it seemed that Seth Godin et al have pulled up the ladder behind them on books and are now going to do it on conferences.?

If I expand your music analogy, then it seems the age of superstars is over - too many channels too much diversity for everyone to want to buy the next Beatles record. But the same must come to pass for celebrity content-makers?

I watch people presenting at PyCon, some have influenced me to write new projects, change my testing, but none got rich off it.

We shall need our own personal filters - but instead of automating that wont we choose editors who recommend our choices - conferences being a very good proxy for just that?

Sorry it's a bit late here - rambling a bit</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best resources to teach a 6-year old to program - <AUTHOR> We just gave our son a Raspberry Pi as a birthday present and he is starting to get a grasp on how to use the UI, at least enjoying Minecraft and some other Python games. As he is going to first grade next school year, I was thinking on spending a couple of hours with him a week to teach him the fundamentals of programming (emphasis on the fun) so he can start learning to use the keyboard, create some simple game or some other fun software.
Any ideas are more than welcomed.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Have super low expectations. I did the same thing with my daughter when she was 6. Got her going on some really basic programming and typing programs. She picked up the UI manipulation well and has gotten decent at typing but hasn't grokked logic flows yet.

Just recently she got a Lego Mindstorms ev3 and the lightbulb just went on when she was using the PC program to program her robot.

So really, just have patience, introduce things to front load but he won't catch on until he's intrinsically motivated at the right time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I have low expectations, but my main early goals is for him to get used to keyboard and mouse, and maybe understand how things are working.

Thanks for your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My experience is that the efforts an average 6-year old should put to learn programming at that level are very high and at ~9 years old not so high. So except he is very interested/capable I would wait until he grows. I don't think you gain too much starting earlier, in a way I call it parenting anxiety. This is why you don't start teaching them calculus, they are not ready except if they show signals of precocity or giftedness.

Having said that I would start with ScratchJr ([https://www.scratchjr.org/](https://www.scratchjr.org/)) on a tablet and Alice ([https://www.alice.org/](https://www.alice.org/)) on the desktop. Alice will require your assistance for scripting but he would be able to select and position the 3D characters.

</comment><comment><USER4> The opencomputers mod for MineCraft can be a lot of fun.

I also tend to do a lot with my kids by just opening the chrome dev tools and play away with JavaScript and mucking up some random web page.

<comment><AUTHOR> He is getting the gist of Minecraft, we have a PS4 with the game, but he likes the mouse interaction more.

Thanks for your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I helped my wife do some lesson plans on computing covering algorithms and collections. It was starting from practical then working out a methodology using games. It worked really well at all levels my wife has used it. I keep meaning to write this up - but never get the time. Although now my son is 5 i might try it with him on a wet afternoon

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a great one: [https://scratch.mit.edu](https://scratch.mit.edu)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I saw this one. Is there any book that you might know and recommend?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Give him an issue of Byte magazine and tell him to copy all 30 pages of machine language to the computer using the keyboard. Better yet, tel him that at the end of all the typing, there will be a game to play!

Yay!

<comment><AUTHOR> II used to play with my Sinclair and get the code from some Sci-fi books that had games in it.</comment></comment>


Reddit user reverse engineers TikTok and the security implications are terrible - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/fxgi06/not_new_news_but_tbh_if_you_have_tiktiok_just_get/ <comment><AUTHOR> I saw this linked to from [https://www.boredpanda.com/tik-tok-reverse- engineered-data-i...](https://www.boredpanda.com/tik-tok-reverse-engineered- data-information- collecting/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic)

It's going around because of a new story about TikTok intercepting iOS clipboards. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23634138)</comment>


The Snow Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://snow.meta.io/

<comment><USER2> _Only runs on x86-64 architectures and operating systems._

 _Only runs on POSIX-compliant operating systems._

 _Snow currently requires the experimental GCC version 4.4_

Snow also could have benefited from being prototyped in Awk and Sed first. How can you be influenced by "Smalltalk, Python, Ruby and JavaScript", and still end up writing your compiler in C++?

Good luck to the author, if this is a first attempt (but compiler writing != language design.)

</comment><comment><USER3> What exactly is interesting about this language? The two strongest qualities I see (easy binding with dlopen and parallelization) are unimplemented, and already exist in similar languages.

</comment><comment><USER4> First of all I should say that it's unfortunate that this is spreading while it's still very much in alpha. But hey, they _did_ put the website there and this _is_ the internett. I also feel that I should clarify some parts since it's not completely up to date:

It's prototype-based at core, but will have a class system built upon the prototype-infrastructure.

The C++ version supports 32bit now, but more interesting, they're rewritig it in pure C. See the mailing list for more details (snow-dev at Google Groups).

And just to make it crystal clear: This isn't a release. They just wanted to create a site to give _some_ information on the project, and some guys decided to post this to Reddit/HN. It's still far away from 0.1.

</comment><comment><USER5> No Snow Crash joke yet? I'm disappointed.

And besides, I'm not sure what this is good for.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't buy into a language that uses colon for assignment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought it was kinda interesting. Do any other languages do this?

<comment><USER7> Maxima does:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_%28software%29>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Snow _could_ be great. Its delivery as a completely unfinished project, though, gives it an air of non-seriousness.

Compare, for instance, with the first public release of Clojure, which was very usable for everyday programming, and came along with detailed explanations on the rational and motivations behind the creation of the new language.

</comment><comment><USER9> You instantiate an object and then poke methods into it? Ever heard of umm, classes?

<comment><USER10> Prototype-based OOP is an alternative to class-based OOP. See the Self, Javascript and IO languages for examples.

I'm not making any claims as to which is "better", just pointing out that it's a valid way of doing things.</comment></comment>


Get hired by your neighbors for odd jobs - <AUTHOR>

Https://www.snapwee.com <comment><USER2> Don't put your URL in the text box. You might want to delete and resubmit.</comment>


Probably the best way to understand hardware is to write a emulator - <AUTHOR> https://www.taniarascia.com/writing-an-emulator-in-javascript-chip8/ <comment><USER2> Is there a reason this was killed, rather than just retitled?

It looks like an interesting post to me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted yesterday on a group that the best way to understand CPU is to write a virtual machine(kind JVM), a mate said that him wants to write a pet project, a emulator for CHIP 8, I think that this is a better way to understand a simplified architecture of computers</comment>


FlingOS: An educational operating system - <AUTHOR> http://www.flingos.co.uk/ <comment><USER4> An operating system written in C#! Interesting - [http://www.flingos.co.uk/docs/reference/Why- CSharp/](http://www.flingos.co.uk/docs/reference/Why-CSharp/)

<comment><USER5> It reminds me of the one Microsoft made, but we can actually play around with it :)

And this one probably isn't multi-threading everywhere.

EDIT: surprisingly easy to setup in a VM

EDIT 2: I suck at this apparently already made it freeze..

<comment><USER6> Microsoft's research OS was called Singularity [1] and the C# compiler (that compiled to native code) Bartok [2].

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/singularity/](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/singularity/) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartok_(compiler)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartok_\(compiler\))

<comment> michel-slm Singularity was later extended by the joint MS-MSR project Midori, which sadly was discontinued last year. Apparently some features are being incorporated into C#.

Joe Duffy is blogging about his experience: [http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about- midori/](http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Educational operating system" makes me think of an OS that's designed for delivering educational content, not one that's an example operating system for learning bare-metal coding.

I wonder if "model" might be a better word to use.

<comment><USER8> This is an interesting issue - how people interpet the name seems to come out 50/50 between "OS for learning OS dev" and "OS for educational content". In my experience, people's backgrounds are the biggest factor affecting which they think of.

We're reluctant to go with "model" OS or similar because we're not actually implementing anything like an ideal OS - we don't use optimised algorithms for example. The idea being that you can learn/teach the OS concept using a simple implementation (and readable code) and then students/developers can optimise as an exercise/extension/for a real OS. So it's not a "model" OS but is an "example" OS to use to teach the key concepts.

Unfortunately, "example" OS leads people to think our OS is practical as a basis for a real OS, which it isn't and we don't want to give the impression we're trying to rival Linux/Windows/OSX/etc. No name seems to give a universally correct and good first impression!

<comment> michel-slm As someone who has taken an advanced OS class that involves implementing portions of such an educational / teaching OS, I also perceive "educational" to mean "for learning OS dev".

The other side of the spectrum for me is "research" and "proof of concept" OSes though - like House (written in Haskell) or Singularity and Midori.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like these kinds of projects, but have thus far been unlucky with mono projects on linux.. I might try it out anyways.

<comment><USER8> Compile our compiler against XBuild and apparently it works (according to one Reddit user). Unlikely to work with MonoDevelops default/old compiler.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The author was looking for money to help the project a month ago:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments/3upyvq/would_you_sup...](https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/comments/3upyvq/would_you_support_a_flingos_kickstarter/)

<comment><USER10> Even though Ed has a really cool project I am guessing since he does not have a business model it must be hard for him to work on it :(

Unless he figures out how to convince people who are :

1| C# Developers

2| Interested in OS development

To give him money for his work its going to be a tough sell - sadly.

<comment><USER8> You've very much hit the nail on the head. However, though it's hard, it's not impossible - we've got some magic (read as: not suitable for a public forum) in the business pipeline that should keep this project alive. If all goes well, we'll have a lot to shout about in a couple of months time. Until then, we're still welcoming sponsorship or donations! If nothing else, the project remains open source for anyone to contribute to. Cheers, Ed

<comment><USER11> I really hope you are successful ! I have been stalking your work for a while :D

Have you tried talking to local schools ? They seem really good target audience - with a lot of money actually.

I am also interested OS dev but I had nightmarish experience with C# while working at BRL.

I too am from UoB ( Eng Maths ) - graduated recently.

Its funny how much CS people are always browsing HN lol

<comment><USER8> Thanks! Good to hear. We haven't yet but we're planning to in late 2016. We are hoping to produce an OS dev kit for A-Level / first-year univeristy students which we can sell at low cost.

Awesome that you're from UoB! Shame you weren't here last term when I ran the lectures/workshops. Are you still living in Bristol?

I have to say, I only come on here occasionally and signed up today to be able to reply to things about FlingOS - new user syndrome is limiting my number of comments though!

<comment><USER11> That sounds wonderful ! - A dev kit would be really cool - something like the arduino that students can get their hands dirty with.

I am working for a startup who are involved in the education space, but it's focused on the chinese market, somehow our sale's team figured out how to make chinese consumer pay us money to write code lol.

I moved to London.

yeah - hacker news is weird. Do not let the comments hear or on reddit affect you - you could cure cancer and still be shrugged off.

When I was in Uni I didn't take an modules on OS stuff - too complicated, too much time - and there aren't many things I do with it once it's done ? So if you can convince people of the application - something that will capture the imagination. Something they could do with FlingOS - make a robot, IoT, put on their car/bike ?

I mean I am having a difficult time thinking of writing a custom OS to solve some problem I am having.

I really like your youtube videos ! You should invest in a better microphone - it actually helps !

<comment><USER8> Yep but we're looking at the creator CI20 or CI40 boards as our compiler supports MIPS.

I tend to only listen to the positive stuff from Reddit and the like but that said, we've not had any notable amount of negative feedback online thus far which is rather remarkable!

Yeah cool projects are one aspect but we're also pushing the "if you understand low level, your high level and Web apps will be better and certainly much more secure"!

Thanks for the feedback about the videos. I have a pro microphone - Blue Yeti. The issue is actually the recording environment (my thin walled, noisy neighbours flat in Bristol) which means quality is lost in editing the noise out. I'm trying to organise I better recording environment for future videos.

Is there a link to the startup you're involved in? Or is it all in a language a I sadly don't speak? Haha.

<comment><USER11> Reduce the gain on your Blue Yeti - it's actually one of the disadvantages of the Yeti microphones - they capture a lot of the background noise.

For noise - try the starving artist method - record it under a thick duvet. The physics behind it is the same as those fancy expensive sound proof rooms. It actually works ! Many artists with no money use this method.

It does look ridiculous and when you present your audio to a bunch of people you do not want to reveal that you recorded it under a duvet wearing your underwear.

I am guessing you are living in a student house lol - I was lucky to live with working people who valued silence - Find a time - usually 10pm - 12 pm that is not too late and when things are quite to do your recording. If you can schedule it like that you should be fine.

I agree, understanding C helps me everyday - even though I used to complain about it in first year.

Its all in Javascript, so its something that you have experience with.

Have you thought about creating your board for the chinese market ? - <USER2> chinese for example lot of demand for educational content there ( Lots of demand for everything actually )

<comment><USER8> Haha it's always at the lowest! My flat really is that noisy. And the video I'm (slowly) uploading now is even worse because I don't have my mic so it's laptop recorded - wanted to post something to "ride the New Year wave" so to speak!

I have sound proof foam etc, it just doesn't help. Many things researched and tried (with much laughter from my flat mates on the occasion they saw me doing odd things) to no avail. A lot of it was recorded when heavy building work was going on just outside my window (basically all of the summer I was working the building works were going on but University buildings were even worse). If you'd heard the original audio, I think you'd be impressed by how clean I actually managed to get it in then end.

Targeting the Chinese is an interesting idea. The problem would be finding someone to translate the content (and documentation in the code) - <USER3> really requires a native Chinese speaker (what about both variants of the language?) and they need the technical language - a very rare person indeed in the UK, I expect!

<comment><USER11> Not rare at all.

There are a lot of chinese students walking around MVB. You just need to walk up to them and start talking !

What would be difficult is finding a chinese person who shares the same amount of passion in your project.

MVB is the optimal place for finding that person !

Tell me about it - Uni halls are super noisy. Don't you have a friend who lives in a quiet place ?

<comment><USER8> Yes MVB has lots of international students (as social secretary of BEEES I do talk to them regularly! ;) ), but the ones who actually have all the technical language (good enough to translate the docs accurately) are (at a guess) busy third or fourth years. None the less, I'll ask around when I'm back in Bristol (and post exam season).

It was just after first year so sadly not. Most of my friends moved out of Bristol for the summer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> After the Oberon derived OSes from ETHZ there is hardly any university pursuing OS research in memory safe languages, so congratulations on the work achieved so far.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great! Keep it up.

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for the share! This is really valuable for the project and has given us great feedback and positive messages.</comment>


Why Bitcoin is so volatile - <AUTHOR> http://greyenlightenment.com/why-bitcoin-is-so-volatile/ <comment><USER2> It is in fact not the case that there is a single exchange on which IBM trades (it is listed on the NYSE, CsE, and at various places abroad). Liquidity factually does exist in different amounts at different places; this is a major reason why HFT works.

Bitcoin is volatile because it has a small float, terrible market infrastructure [1], a relatively unsophisticated set of traders, a Wild West of market manipulation [2], and no fundamentals to get in the way of wild gyrations.

[1] The biggest Bitcoin exchange presently is functionally incapable of transacting in dollars.

[2] As one of many things that could be said here, the biggest Bitcoin exchange earns commissions in Bitcoin and then "dollarizes" then by selling the Bitcoins on their own exchange, to their customers.

<comment><USER3> What you say is mostly correct but the undertone "wild west", "unsophisticated", "manipulation", etc fails to address the point because that is true of most hedge funds as well.

<comment><USER3> While the downvotes serve to show disagreement the lack of arguments also shows where the downvotes come from.

<comment><USER3> :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While the described effect might not be the most important reason why bitcoin is changing its value so rapidly, the effect was visible during the past week after bitcoin past the 10k USD mark.

</comment><comment><USER5> How do you calculate how much price will drop if X $ of Bitcoin will be sold? What's formula?

<comment><USER6> You check the order book of the exchange, in this case gdax

<comment><USER5> But how you calculate how much % change on price based on order book? Can you give me an example?

<comment><USER6> Basically you simulate the sale based on the order book. Let's say the order book contains the following bids ordered by price:

        Person A wants to buy 10 coins for 100 dollar
        Person B wants to buy 4 coins for 97 dollar
        Person C wants to buy 3 coins for 96 dollar
        etc

Now someone wants to sell 12 coins, he will sell 10 coins to person A and 2 coins to person B. The order book will now look like this:

        Person B wants to buy 2 coins for 97 dollar
        Person C wants to buy 3 coins for 96 dollar
        etc

Before dumping the 12 coins you could sell a coin for 100 dollar, after dumping you can sell a coin for 97 dollar. You could say the price has dropped 3%. Obviously this is a very naive calculation, but it should give you the basic idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> perhaps, the uprise of derivatives like LedgerX, Deribit as well as the recent CME decision will increase market efficiency and help us better to understand the underlying bitcoin market

</comment><comment><USER8> Bitcoin has a somewhat arbitrary denomination. What is the ratio of information transfer in 1 bitcoin versus a half of a coin? The answer is ....close to 1. How about 1 Satoshi? Well, gas fee needs to be a fraction of the payment, so 1 Satoshi is close to 0 utility. How accurate does gas payment need to be? Well, for starters, gas payment seems to be a fixed fee of the payload, not a ratio of the amount sent. Lets analyze this.

Higher fiat pinnings allow for higher remittance transfers using less coins, but ultimately the same network resources (mining.) How do most regular people buy coin, do they bargain? No, they just buy $500 or however many dollars IN BTC and take whatever ratio is given to them. This is because stock does not come in fractional amounts...but BTC does. Meaning there is a stabilizing force in the form of common people "settling" for a small piece at their desired fiat amount.

In summary, until Bitcoin hits amounts close to 10^5, the Satoshi as the smallest sendable amount, 10^8 coins, continues to provide close to the same amount of utility, whether you are sending 1000 satoshis, or 10 bitcoins.</comment>


Colbert turns his funny gun on Snowden in RSA keynote - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57619771-83/colbert-turns-his-funny-gun-on-snowden-in-rsa-keynote/

<comment><USER3> We still have a long way to go on educating the public. The 3 branches of government have conspired in secret to enable programs the violate the rule of law and create the conditions for a police state.

-The FISA court does not have the authority under statue or the Constitution to rule on the Constitutionality of NSA programs. The FISA court only has the authority to approve specific warrants.

\- The Senators and Representatives who objected to the secret reinterpretation of Patriot Act for domestic surveillance have been unwilling to risk their positions on the committee to reveal this to the public as they have a moral duty to do.

\- The NSA specifically lost the legislative battle to embedded backdoors, weaknesses and key escrow in commercial encryption battles. They lost and they went ahead and did it anyway. Clearly subverting democratic intent.

</comment><comment><USER4> While I don't disagree that the NSA's directive is international information gathering, and that should be the limit of its scope, I think Colbert's wrong to think that's something that can exist without ever going far beyond its scope. By natural consequence of having an extremely well funded organization with zero oversight, if we don't have whistleblowers, they're going to take advantage of the situation.

Which brings me to the counterpoint which is that Snowden shouldn't spend the rest of his life in jail, which is what would invariably happen would be go to trial in the US. I think it's of little matter that he revealed how we spy on other countries. I think the point of that was to show that that's how we're being spied _on_ by the 5 Eyes, who will freely share their spying information.

<comment><USER5> >an extremely well funded organization with zero oversight

This is a false statement since the NSA does have oversight.

>Snowden shouldn't spend the rest of his life in jail, which is what would invariably happen would be go to trial in the US.

This, too, is a false statement and conjecture.

<comment><USER6> Snowden states he was able to look up information on any citizen, including the President, without any explicit approval or subsequent investigation. What evidence do you have to refute that?

<comment><USER7> That's not the way logic works. Affirmative assertions need to be demonstrated by the person making the claim. It's not encumbent on anyone to disprove Snowden's claims; it's his responsibility to show that they are true.

<comment><USER6> The weird thing is the NSA has never refuted the very specific allegation of Booz's access and the lack of supervision ([http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward- snowden-...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa- whistleblower-surveillance)), merely just repeated that 'oversight exists'. Since we're all discussing a massive series of leaked documents, how do you logically think otherwise?

Let's see what the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has to say:

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/23/4651448/nsa-report- reveals...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/23/4651448/nsa-report-reveals-some- agents-abused-spying-power)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just watched the 30 minute video trying to hear his opinion without being wrapped in blogspam, and I think this article is a bit sensational.

The only reference I heard made to Snowden was in the very last question where an audience member asks Colbert how to keep people from being afraid of the government. In his reply, Colbert asked if what Snowden did was illegal, and when the audience said yes, he essentially said one of the bravest (and most morally admirable) things Snowden could do after breaking an unjust law is to face trial and accept the resulting consequences. His position came across to me as a combination of civil disobedience and traditional stand-and-face-the- music thinking. He didn't at all come across as vitriolic of Snowden or deeply offended by Snowden's actions.

Here's the video:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP9qqdE4O1I&t=1610](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP9qqdE4O1I&t=1610)

<comment><USER9> There were other references to Snowden in the video you linked. Two others I noticed in the first 15 minutes:

(1) Colbert mentions it bothers him that Snowden _claimed_ he leaked in order to let us know how then NSA was spying on _us_ , but then a lot of the information revealed turned out to be about how we were spying on _others_. Leaking that sort of info would only be justified if one is specifically opposed to us spying on _other_ countries - and Colbert thinks the case for that position hasn't really been made.

(2) Somebody asked what Colbert sees as the likely _endgame_ for Snowden. Answer: Colbert guesses the guy will probably come home in the end, but it's likely to take ten years before public opinion shifts his way enough to allow that. As an example of an analogous situation, Colbert brings up the Americans who fled the draft and were eventually pardoned by Ford and Carter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Why, if Snowden was concerned with letting us know how we are spied on, why did he let us know how we spy on other countries? I think we should spy on other countries._

The last sentence is where he is - only in my opinion of course - <USER2> wrong; no country should spy on other countries without _very_ good reasons. And wanting to know what is going on behind closed doors of foreign governments or companies misses my definition of very good reasons by orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER11> I think k we should spy on other countries and share his view of Snowden. I'm really glad Snow den leaked what he did, I just wish he didn't leak all of it. It does raise many questions on motivation. if he's disgusted with spy work in general he should just say so and be honest with the world. I could then have more respect for him doing what he did (and I do respect the conversation he's started.)

<comment><USER10> Can you give good reasons why the United States should spy on other countries? Or let's make it concrete, I am from Germany, why should the United States spy on Germany?

<comment><USER11> We can only gain by spying on you. We have a military base with defense systems in your country. Your political decisions therefore will have an impact on the effectiveness of our military system to defend our country.

<comment><USER10> By robbing strangers in dark backstreets I can only gain, too. Because a country can gain something is not a good reason at all. And how do German decisions affect the United States' ability to defend themselves? We are thousands of kilometers away. We could maybe decided that we no longer want US military bases on German ground - quite unlikely if you ask me - but even if so, how does that impact the ability of the United States to protect their borders?

<comment><USER7> By robbing strangers in the dark you can lose your life! I don't think you understand the argument here. I sincerely think you are confusing strongly the way you think the world should work with what decision-makers can do under the limits of bounded rationality. Because something is to be gained is almost the only justification for everything that happens.

If you want to figure out a world where people aren't self-interested and risk-averse, maybe a church would be a better place for you to have that discussion.

<comment><USER10> If people are purely selfish, then everything is lost anyway - selfishness is not able to sustain a human society. And while people have to be selfish to some degree to sustain their lives, I see no reasons why they can not act altruistically after they secured basic human needs like food and shelter.

And I agree that most if not all decisions are based or should be based on the expected gain, but the question is then of course how you define or measure that gain. There may actually be a real gain for a country if you spy on other countries, but I argue that this is the wrong standard for gain in that situation, a selfish definition of gain. I would strongly prefer to consider the gain or loss for the whole world when evaluating decisions like whether or not to spy on other countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Colbert's funny as hell and as likeable as they come. But despite his reputation, he's not exactly an "outside the box" thinker.

He's a deeply religious catholic, is patriotic and apparently believes in the rule of law.

<comment><USER13> I think our problems come when we start looking for any more than entertainment in our entertainers.

He attributes the "greatest threat to security" to not voting and not watching political money. I would politely disagree. Our "greatest threat to security" is that our people take their opinions from the mouths of celebrities and politicians, and not through careful consideration of the facts.

<comment><USER14> Nowadays, the most reliable way to see (at least more of) the facts on television is by watching comedy shows. "Real" television news programs are in the business of advertising to their viewers, not informing them.

How can you blame our people for taking their opinion from celebrities, entertainers, and politicians when they are more informative than the avenues that are supposed to inform us?

<comment><USER15> Can you support this? So you don't think comedy shows have any advertising agenda simply because their main purpose is to entertain? I would suggest that they have an additional tool at their disposal (humor) to help put a spin on matters.

<comment><USER14> My theory is that most of the comedy shows (The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, etc.) make jokes out of showing the opposite end of extreme viewpoints or stories that show up on news. You might be laughing at the absurdity, but you're more informed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16>
      But when it comes to doing the right thing for your
      country, as Snowden has stated was his reason for leaking
      the NSA documents, Colbert said that you must face the
      consequences of the law.

Saddam Hussein faced the consequences of law too, but we all knew the outcome before the trial even started.

If I was Snowden I wouldn't be in a hurry to return to the United States and spend twenty years in prison.

<comment><USER17> Ironically, none of the officials that caused the last Iraq war have even been charged or investigated despite failing to produce any evidence of WMDs or massive support for Al-Qaeda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Stating that "the American People" voted for the Patriot Act repeatedly is ignoring the massive disenfranchisement of Democratic voters in states with Republican-controlled legislatures, and the gerrymandering that leads to a lock on US House seats[1]. The goal of the Republican Party is to win government by hook or by crook, and lately it's been the latter.

Without this gerrymandering, it's debatable how things might have gone otherwise. Colbert might not have so much faith in the system if he played the Redistricting Game [2].

[1] [http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders- part-1...](http://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders- part-1-busting-the-both-sides-do-it-myth/)

[2] [http://www.redistrictinggame.org](http://www.redistrictinggame.org)

<comment><USER19> Gerrymandering works both ways; you can't bring up the disenfranchised Democratic voters in Republican districts without recognizing the disenfranchised Republican voters in Democratic districts, or third party voters in every district. You could have simply stated that the goal of established political parties is to win government by hook or by crook, with preference to the latter since it requires less effort.

<comment><USER20> I think the argument mrartzloff is trying to make hinges on the fact that the House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans even though republicans lost the popular vote nation wide. i.e. 1.4 million more people voted for a Democratic representative than a Republican one and yet, Republicans had 33 more seats than Democrats.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Represen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections,_2012)

There are at least 2 possible reasons for this. One which is argued above is that it is because of gerrymandering districts. The second is that in Democratic districts votes were more lopsided where in districts where Republicans won, they won by smaller margins. In either case, more than 50% of Americans voted for a Democrat to be their representative in the house of representatives and yet Democrats do not hold the majority of seats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There is a video of this on youtube: /watch?v=bP9qqdE4O1I

</comment><comment><USER22> This is Colbert's 'truthiness' showing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Disgusting. For those that thought Comedy Central brought you alternative news (which I actually did during the Bush years) in the form of The Colbert Report and The Daily Show should now know if not already that they're both just talking heads paid for by the mainstream media apparatus.</comment>


What's your favorite free game that runs on Linux, and teaches you something? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> To learn auto racing or acrobatic flying, there's the esports for engineers package of classic PC simulation games: [https://github.com/bencaddigan/esports-for- engineers](https://github.com/bencaddigan/esports-for-engineers)

</comment><comment><USER2> I was recently learning to play go using gnugo[1].

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/](https://www.gnu.org/software/gnugo/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The book "Deep Learning and the game of Go" from Manning walks you through the process of building an AlphaGo clone using python and standard machine learning libraries.

[https://github.com/maxpumperla/deep_learning_and_the_game_of...](https://github.com/maxpumperla/deep_learning_and_the_game_of_go)

Play a demo Go bot developed in the book here: [https://www.badukai.com/demos/static/play_predict_19.html](https://www.badukai.com/demos/static/play_predict_19.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> to learn contract bridge, I find the bcalc single/double dummy solver bcalc useful: [http://bcalc.w8.pl/index.php?lang=en&topic=download](http://bcalc.w8.pl/index.php?lang=en&topic=download)

also good is the freeware bride program Wbridge5, which has won several world computer bridge championships. It is a Windows program, but runs fine on linux with the wine emulation layer. (I've run it on fedora 30, debian 10 and ubuntu 19.10)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> to learn chess, there's scid and the stockfish engine included in distros such as debian and ubuntu.

There's also the lc0 engine, which is the open source version of the mighty Deep Mind AlphaZero chess engine - linux installation instructions for lc0 are here: [https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER3> Also shoutout to lichess.org which is by far the best platform to play chess on and is completely free.

<comment><USER4> Free as in speech[0] and beer too!

[0] - [https://github.com/lichess-org](https://github.com/lichess-org)</comment></comment></comment>


Outsource your homeowork to India  - <AUTHOR> http://management.silicon.com/careers/0,39024671,39250909,00.htm <comment><USER2> This is awesome. Since I don't have a CS degree, this will put me on equal terms with people that have worthless ones. We'll be judged on experience and knowledge instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> People have been asking homework questions (often verbatim) on forums and newsgroups for ages. The fact that people are now _paying_ for that same advice just seems like CS students have hit a new low. Really, I expect better from cheaters.

<comment><USER4> Especially since a lot of the contractors seem to be turning around and seeking advice from usenet! One old professor of mine told us that he had seen one of his own final essay questions appear on a real time programming group, posted from India.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sad and disappointing.

But: if they can successfully outsource their dissertation for £100, maybe the system is broken, too?

<comment><USER6> Seriously.

The material should be interesting enough to make students want to do it. And if you are outsourcing your thesis, why are you even working towards a PhD?

<comment><USER7> £</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would one go about writing his own database? - <AUTHOR>

I was thinking that writing a DB would be a good project to start getting comfortable with a language I've been learning. However I have no idea about design, strategies or best practices for creating a DB. <comment><USER2> What kind of database? An embedded key/value database like TokyoCabinet? An embedded SQL database like SQLite? An in memory data-structure database like Redis? A server SQL database like MySQL? A distributed key/value database like Cassandra? A json document database like CouchDB? I could go on...

In general, if you want to learn a new language, pick a project of limited scope (weeks) that you have done in the past in some other language.

A database is a bad choice. Even the simplest database worth being called a database requires months of effort.

<comment><AUTHOR> To be precise, I want to code a key/value store exclusively oriented at geolocated queries by key. It doesn't look like a very complex project or am I underestimating it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I noticed you want to do geolocation. Let's put that aside for now, just looking at key/value.

1\. You need to store all your data in "pages". These are fixed-length blocks (that can be chained together).

2\. Use a classical "dictionary" data structure to store your index (most use B-Tree), but you place that structure on-disk instead of in-memory. Your index basically points a key to the index of the first page that contains the value.

3\. You may need to store other types of data in the file, such as the free page list.

As for geo-location, B-Tree fits nicely here.

1\. Intelligently lay out your B-Tree so that nearby nodes are typically within the same node-family-system. Include information about the distance spanned by descendants in the tree (you probably want to use Manhatten distance).

2\. When trying to do "near" queries, first locate the node you are interested in and then start traversing up the parents until you find the ancestor that encompasses the distance you are looking for.

3\. Grab all the descendants of that ancestor and re-check them against the distance.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is one of those questions where if you ask it the answer is 'you shouldn't'.

If you want to get comfortable with a language that you are learning my advice would be to pick a simple real-world problem and to try to solve that rather than to tackle a major project like this. That will only cause frustration in the long run.

<comment><USER5> in the short run too. even setting up the project sounds like a bitch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you meant database engine, then you should contribute to open source database projects like PostgreSQL or MariaDB. This assumes that you're comfortable with populating and maintaining databases.

Start with downloading the source code for say MariaDB, reading internals documentation on project Wiki, compiling it on your machine.

[https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Developer_FAQ#How_do_I_get_...](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Developer_FAQ#How_do_I_get_involved_in_PostgreSQL_development.3F)

[https://mariadb.com/kb/en/contributing- code/](https://mariadb.com/kb/en/contributing-code/)

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think if you really wanted to get comfortable with something that could have you make a performant, database quickly, you might want to start with something like C...

Now, C is a shotgun that you will invariably use to shoot yourself in the foot with, but I think it's absolutely straightforward and powerful manual memory management, as well as raw speed, would make it worth learning.

Like, you could for example just focus on building a database of a given size, in memory -- you could even do it all in RAM, if you wanted.

You could have the database specialize in holding one kind of data structure (for example, how about tries? they're pretty rare, despite how useful they are)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the constructive feedback. In fact, I wanted to focus just in latitude-longitude pairs to perform geolocated queries, this is my single goal. I'm trying to get rid of MongoDB for my backend and this is one of the last barriers...

<comment><USER7> So you were trying to get rid of mongodb as a backend, and you ended up at writing your own? Well I'm not sure how set you are on that, but maybe you should look into some other databases, what did you dislike about mongo?

And yeah, with such a specific goal, you could very well make a very nice niche DB that optimizes for the kind of data you're trying to search! Especially with map data becoming more and more important, I think it's actually a pretty awesome idea.

However, I would say that you should go in with the intent to make a kickass latitude-longitude database, rather than just having it be a piece of something you're trying to push to production (you have better things to worry about with something that's going to production -- don't make the db one of them)

You never know, you might find that the database is the more important project!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I, for one, think you should do it. But you've got to realize, up front, this will be thrown away, will only work for 1 use case, will be slow, etc. Don't build anything general, or anything reusable. Write in Go. Put everything in one big textfile. Start with O(slow) code. Use a simple 'schema', like tsv/csv/json. It will work.

Production-ready, simple, written by you: pick 2. The 'correct' thing to do is choose the first two. Have at it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, to start getting comfortable with a language, a DB won't be my choice. You should really start with something easier.

</comment><comment><USER10> One feature at a time, the same as any other program.

Start with something very simple - maybe a single table with a hardcoded schema, or a simple string key/value store (a la memcached). Find a use case for which this is an improvement over what you had before. Add features as and when you need them.

</comment><comment><USER11> if you have a different angle on querying your data that the current solutions don't solve then you should definitely give it a shot.

You should try to limit what you build though. Can you utilize leveldb, Riak, Cassandra, Redis or even Postgres Foreign Data Wrapper.

Your data will probably need to be queried with other user data so consider that as well.

I would start with figuring out how to query the data you need that different from the current measures and prove to yourself that it beats out the existing strategies. If it does then expand by storing and loading the data to disk.

then work on connecting to it through multiple clients, look into using msgpack, thrift, message pack.

Have fun.

</comment><comment><USER12> The language you have been learning had best be C or Assembly. Almost anything else and your database will always be the weakest link in performance.

<comment><USER4> I really don't see how you could suggest to learn assembly in this context. I'm not aware of any production database for commodity hardware written in assembler. (in the embedded world there are a few but that's specialty stuff).

<comment><USER12> I don't think commodity hardware was specified as a project goal.

If you run any of the big EMC, or NetAPP, or Exadata systems those are built with many of the core components written in Assembly.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My company's new virtual assistant SaaS product - <AUTHOR> http://beatrixapp.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Accompanying blog post here: [http://yongfook.com/startup-confessions-i-m-in- love-with-my-...](http://yongfook.com/startup-confessions-i-m-in-love-with-my- assistant.html)

This isn't a faux-MVP, the product is live and being tested out now :) Would love any feedback about the idea and if you have an uncontrollable desire to be one of the beta testers shoot me a mail with "HN" in the subject to email@example.com! cheers

</comment><comment><USER2> I love this idea. Have emailed you.</comment>


It took almost two weeks of 14 hour days to program this game - <AUTHOR> http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/529101

<comment><USER2> Nice game.

Do you know about <http:///www.flashgamelicense.com/> ? If not it's a place where you put flash games to auction and the big portals pay to get their branding put into your game before it's distributed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I may just do that. Thank you!

<comment><USER2> It's worth checking out .... you make good games (played hats the other week at reddit too) and if the big portals like them they'll pay thousands, and in some cases for some lucky guys 5 digit amounts, just to have their branding in your game. It's also a great community for testing, getting feedback and improving your games and how you make them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if you did everything yourself during those two weeks but if you did can we get a more detailed breakdown:

1\. Time spent on graphics

2\. Time spent on level design/creation

3\. Time spent play testing

4\. Time spent programming

5\. Time spent on sound and music

<comment><AUTHOR> I worked with an artist on the game. He also did most level design.

How do you gauge things like this? I mean, does coding the interpreter or items in the game count as level creation? What about prototype levels? We each made at least 5 testing levels to see how they worked and started that about 5 days ago.

Play testing with other people only occurred sporadically for the last few days of development. Getting feedback from sites like Hacker News is a kind of play testing. I'm still tweaking.

Programming is the big one of course. Unfortunately I can't really say how long I spent on it as it intermingles with things like level design and graphics. The levels themselves have a lot of custom code - I wasn't about to make a real level editor for such a short game. And, this being flixel, I wasn't using the Flash IDE to create this. It's mostly code, so I guess almost all the time not drawing, level editing, or making sounds was spent coding.

I got a buddy to make the music, but I made the sounds as they were needed using a synth :) I might have spent 2 hours tops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you discuss your approach to game design and development? Do you use well- known game libraries for a lot of the game mechanics or do you roll your own?

How did you go about populating the game world? Did you create your own game editor?

Great game!

<comment><AUTHOR> I used Flixel. I had to add a lot to get most of the game mechanics in a reasonable way. Flixel provides the basic platforming phyiscs, but I had to add things like variable jumps, dialog screens, pickups, enemies, inventory, etc.

The world is actually a collection of text files in a format Flixel uses to make the basic physics. Each level has three files: background, widgets, and enemies. I modified the file parser so I could spawn enemies, doors, and triggers easily.

We used a free level editor to make the text files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice work.

A few comments:

I found that some NPC characters placed themselves in front of things I wanted to use (doors, computers etc.). Perhaps they should either have a minimum distance, or just be mobile so that they don't stay around for long.

A full screen map would be nice, with the areas that you have visited marked in gray. It would make the navigation a bit easier.

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of cave story in space.

<comment><USER7> Your game has been saved, Huzzah!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I enjoyed it for about 5 minutes. I'm pretty impressed with what you can accomplish in 14x14.

First think about what small feature you can add to the game to make it even more addictive. Can you take advantage of social gaming (comparing scores, multiplayer)? The model you have could skyrocket with the right small touches.

I'd wish you luck, but you don't need it :D. Game on!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

We'll be adding achievements for sure. And hopefully more levels soon. Some sort of currency/experience would be nice, but not sure how to implement it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The game is fun, but I can't get over <Up> not being jump. Any reason you used <x> instead?

<comment><AUTHOR> We thought the controls would be familiar to those that played cave story, and also if we used UP to jump, how would you aim up?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, yeah, I know. I could just never get the hang of that control style. I suck at Mega-Man, I suck at Contra, and I suck at your game... But that's me, not the games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No alternate kb layout support...

<comment><USER11> Yep, I'm using a kinesis... instant hand cramp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome game, I keep coming back to it. Heads up on a typo, though: all the health machines say "You health has been restored", should be "Your health...". Other than that, it's pretty amazing.

</comment><comment><USER13> really digging the animation/feel of the game. Also, I died =), hit continue, and the music stopped.

Best of luck man, looking forward to seeing your other games.

</comment><comment><USER14> Minor suggestion: put the intro to narro the scrapdealer on the load page and lose the keyboard instructions page altogether.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, how would I tell the player the controls then...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Did you contract out the voice acting? The wizard performance during the player setup screens is pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER16> I lost interest around the fourth room, and those blob guys were really annoying because of how far they jump. They always getcha.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I've since updated the green guys to "giggle" before jumping at you. It should give you more time to kill them. The changes should be up in an hour or so (I've had too many views for instant-updates).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It took two weeks to program an ancient IIS error page? I could have done that with cut and paste in just a few minutes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have control over newgrounds, but is it still an error?

<comment><USER18> No, it worked just fine for me. Well done on the game, BTW.</comment></comment></comment>