Recruit Is Japan's Top Contender for Global Internet Domination - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-17/recruit-is-japan-s-top-contender-for-global-internet-domination <comment><USER2> I recently signed up to recruit to make a dinner reservation in Japan.

They used a lot of dark patterns for their email marketing. Bombarding me with multiple different newsletters I didn't sign up for and I had to cancel every single one of them separately. And nearly a week delay after sign-off. One of the worst non-spam marketing I had to deal with in the last years.

<comment><USER3> This is common practice in Japan. We desperately need our own anti spam legislation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Recruit is one of the worst domestic companies in Japan. Their services suck, they are badly designed, they are not integrated, they have way too much workforce for the kind of business they are in, I could go on and on. If that's the best that Japan has to offer then the rest of the world is safe.

<comment><USER5> Man it's so depressing looking at what a giant Japan could be in the tech industry if they got their shit together politically, economically, and culturally to bring entrepreneurship and creative risk-taking back.

Their potential talent-to-output ratio has to be one of the worst in the world. Probably the worst if you look at their flashes on brilliance in the 1980s and early 1990s and what they could be today.

This problem goes well beyond their central financial mismanagement with stagflation.

<comment><USER6> Haha, it's true, man. I recently moved to Japan to live with family for a while. I interviewed at the top Japanese software companies in Japan, and even though I'm a senior engineer with 10 years' experience in FAANG in the USA, they felt like they were doing me a favor offering me 15 million JPY/year (150k USD at 100 yen per dollar, ~$130k USD at the time with the beefy US dollar). Tokyo is actually a little cheaper to live in than Seattle assuming you're OK with a tiny Tokyo apartment and a long Tokyo commute, but it isn't THAT much cheaper.

I tried to politely explain how and why people like me command the kind of salaries we do in the USA, but they just didn't get it. At 15M JPY I'd rather just work in the USA for a year, then take a year off in Japan, so that's what I ended up doing, haha.

All the local Japanese software giants are slowly being strangled to death on their home turf, and they're completely failing to compete internationally. It's a real shame, but oh well!

<comment><USER7> Sometimes I think the HN community is vastly out of touch with normal everyday humans, and comments like this validate it.

If you're making 7 million yen a year, you're making _really fucking good money_. If you're making 10 million, that company is really kissing your ass and you're essentially royalty. But 15 million is low?

Keep in mind that GDP per capita in Japan is only about 2/3 of America's, and also that the wealth divide is pretty much non-existent while America is basically two parallel societies: people who struggle to get by (or close to it) and the rich and carefree, and thinking 15 mil is low is just insanity. People would work 5 years at that job and retire to Okinawa with that cash.

>Tokyo is actually a little cheaper to live in than Seattle

That's an understatement. It's tremendously cheaper. You can get an apartment near your workplace, eat out 15 times a week, and still only spend half the money you'd spend on a decent in-city apartment in Seattle or SF.

>I tried to politely explain how and why people like me command the kind of salaries we do in the USA, but they just didn't get it.

Oh, no, they got it. They just wondered why someone thinks anyone gets paid that much. Not even most doctors are making that much. You basically requested CEO wages and thought they were crazy.

<comment><USER8> He isn't out of touch with reality. The economy works on supply and demand. He can make more money in country than another doing the same job, so he chose the country that paid him more. It's perfectly reasonable. It's not about it being a _good_ or _bad_ salary, it's just what the market will bear.

<comment><USER7> He can definitely get paid more in Seattle if he wants to. That's true. He will also have a cost of living that's pretty much double what it would be in Japan.

And true, it's an issue of supply and demand. He demanded too much and supply isn't there.

His problem is that he thinks they're strange for not just offering more money, not considering that, maybe, just maybe, a country with lower wages and smaller GDP simply can't pay people hundreds of thousands of dollars a year+bonus for jobs. When you think of it purely in the context of big number=good, then it's bad. When you consider Japan is a much cheaper country and there are other benefits (like not having to deal with ridiculously expensive American health care, good public transportation, etc), it's clearly by no means a bad deal. It's a deal probably nobody else in that company's history ever was or ever will be offered ever again.

<comment><USER8> > His problem is that he thinks they're strange for not just offering more > money

I don't think he thinks they're strange, he's just surprised. When you visit France and can buy high quality wine for half the cost that you get in the U.S., it's surprising. When you go to Singapore and see that housing can often be more expensive than luxury apartments in NYC, it's surprising. Similarly, when you go to Japan and see people doing the same thing you do, but making 30%+ less, it's surprising.

Maybe the cost of living and government provided social services make up for some of this difference, maybe they don't. But having some initial sticker shock in the price differential can be pretty natural.

If he has a problem, it's that he thinks a unit of work should be valued equally , i.e., if I do X, it should be universally valued at $Y. It's a nice thought, and I'd like to wish it was true, but it's not how our economy works. The value of X is not intrinsic, it's based on what someone is willing to pay for it.

Coal mining in the U.S. in the 1950s provided a solid middle class foundation, but the same job today does not. Beethoven is clearly a better musician than most pop music, but few today would shell out money to listen to his music, while they would for many popular artists.

Hopefully from this, he can realize how lucky he is to have access to a country which, for a variety of reasons, values this type of production more than other places in the world.

<comment><USER7> It's really not that programmers are more "valued" and everyone who isn't paying them enough money to buy a new house yearly isn't properly appreciating them. It's that one country can afford to pay more, and it's partly enabled by a massive wealth disparity.

Being surprised is strange. It's like being surprised that people get paid less in Poland and that companies won't pay as much for a programmer there. Nobody has the money to pay for $300000/year programmers in Poland. It's the same virtually everywhere except incredibly expensive corners of the world, like parts of America and Switzerland.

<comment><USER9> For the same reason that China is trouncing Taiwan in tech hiring, you need to beat your competitors. What's reasonable to give to someone else to make them do what you want depends on what your competitors do.

Framing it as "think of what another Japanese person would be making" is all wrong. We can say the exact same thing about Taiwan, and we surely wouldn't say the way for Taiwan to move forward is to tell candidates, "You just don't understand Taiwan. It has a very different way of life." Those candidates will understand Chinese money, the same way this person understood American money.

<comment><USER7> Taiwan is also an absolutely tiny economy compared to China. That money has to come from somewhere. In the case of many countries, it means paying most workers peanuts while paying someone else 10x as much.

Some on HN are okay with massive wealth disparity and think it's great for some international programmer to be valued far more than any local just because they worked at a company like Facebook. Some countries, like Taiwan and Japan, aren't on that train.

<comment><USER9> And that's why Taiwan is in a brain drain to China and the US. Chinese companies don't need to make the same excuses as Taiwanese companies when it comes to money.

<comment><USER7> How's it an excuse?

Hey, Afghanis and Sudanese people out there, want to fix your country? Just quit being poor. Pay money that you don't have. It's what the two largest, most powerful, wealthiest countries in the world do, so why can't you? No excuse not to pay them the same as a Silicon Valley startup getting funding that dwarfs your GDP.

Aside from throwing people out on the streets and cutting wages for the middle class in order to support some yuppie JavaScript coders from another country, it's not economically possible to just poof money into existence to pay ridiculous wages. I mean yeah, America does it and that works for some people here. Most people despise that.

<comment><USER6> You're looking at the economy and business in general completely wrong. You have a SERIOUS fundamental misunderstanding of how it works.

There isn't a fixed pool of X trillion dollars per year for all companies and government agencies to split up among workers.

If a company gives $300k to some guy in Silicon Valley, he'll turn around and give it to other people providing him with goods and services. They in turn spend the money on things they need.

<comment><USER7> That is the very definition of trickle down economics.

Spoilers: it's been thoroughly debunked. It factually does not work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Considering they completely lack internationalization/localization (at least on signup, on Hot Pepper and their Recruit account management page), it doesn't give me the impression Recruit has the right mindset to compete on a global scale.

While this is just a medium hard problem to fix technically, it's the mindset of most employees that would have to change. Good i18n/l10n requires some consideration of development (it's easy to create untranslatable text, when the technical structure of strings can't reflect foreign grammar), marketing/sales (you need different approaches for different markets) and management (giving time to do i18n right).

Currently Recruit shows the typical island mentality. Their consideration ends at the borders of Japan. Not a good place to start for global domination.

<comment><USER10> Recruit owns Indeed and Glassdoor, which are doing pretty well beyond Japan.

<comment><USER2> I imagine these are acquisitions that already did well before they got bought.

Glassdoor is also becoming increasingly known for letting companies "bribe" them to delete bad reviews.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The analogy with tencent and alibaba seems instructive, but not necessarily in a good way. They are both massive bloated platforms that do lots of different disconnected things not very well. e.g. the wechat messaging app contains subprograms for games, payment, flight bookings, etc you can't turn off. They only continue to exist because of network effects, and because they play nice with the Chinese government.

If Recruit works on the same model then they will have the same problem moving abroad that there is no one thing they are better at than an existing company

<comment><USER12> >They are both massive bloated platforms that do lots of different disconnected things not very well. e.g. the wechat messaging app contains subprograms for games, payment, flight bookings, etc you can't turn off

In an age where bringing users together and building ecosystems seems to count for more and more this isn't necessarily a downside. We're used to the startup and "move quick" mentality but conglomerates have been making somewhat of a comeback for a while now, and Google and Amazon aren't exactly 'non bloated' either, because I'm sure for many of their services there's some small company somewhere that does it better. (case in point, DeepL's translation is actually astonishingly good).

So maybe being a big scary monolith with government support is a good strategy to be a dominating internet company in this day and age and in the years to come.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my view, recruit is a sales company. They have very strong sales team covering SMBs. That allowed them to build gurunavi (similar to Yelp), airregi (similar to square), and so on. Couple of years ago they started focus more on hiring top engineering talent and I think it is absolutely right move, but frankly I don't think they can compete grobally as tech company in near future.

</comment><comment><USER14> I live and run a startup out of Japan and given the engineering talent here or lack thereof, I can almost guarantee that you won't see any Japanese tech startup going global anytime soon. If anything, they will copy another global innovative company and dominate the domestic market but with no real innovation (look no further than the very mediocre Rakuten).

Gone are the days where Sony, Nintendo and others had what it takes to craft a quality product that was compelling to global audiences.

Japan has lost its mojo and the sad thing is that the conservatives forces are so strong that this country won't attract any talent needed to change the bad bad status quo for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER2> I moved to Japan to do research for my CS master thesis at one of the top5 universities. While I knew English is not spoken by most Japanese, I was honestly surprised that nearly all the CS students in my lab lack the English skill for daily conversations, let alone have a technical discussion.

Considering how international and English dominated CS is and only Japans best students get a place at this university, that is a very bad basis to create top software engineering talent.

<comment><USER14> Indeed, Japan consistently ranks dead last in terms of English proficiency among OECD countries. Heck, it's even last among Asian economies including developing ones.

There's hardly any i18n for apps/services/portals implemented in Japan barring very few exceptions with minimum and rough execution. The few times I tried to hire Japanese engineering talent, I was shocked by the extreme lack of English aptitude for those out of CS curriculums and we are talking about top universities such as Tokyo University (Todai) and other prestigious institutes of technology. I can't help but think that Japan will sink deeper into mediocrity if they don't fix their language problem.

<comment><USER2> It already starts at school. Learning English with Katakana leads to such an incorrect pronunciation that they basically have to relearn talking in English, when they eventually meet foreigners. I have been to multiple school visits as part of the university program and it's a sad state. But in my experience they are trying to improve it, e.g. by bringing us foreign students to the schools and raising awareness.

<comment><USER15> For "Sukiyaki Western Django", I've read that Miike just had his Japanese actors memorize the classic western drawl. And that's what it sounds like, to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The #1 largest market for GitHub is the US. The second largest group of users is from Japan. I'm surprised there aren't more startups from Japan. The people are tech savvy and the economic malaise exceeding 20 years should be pushing people towards entrepreneurship and risk taking.

<comment><USER17> From what I know, Japanese companies are pretty resistant to using new software technology. (Someone, please correct me if I'm wrong).

<comment><USER4> Hey, Japanese companies still require fax for many things, so your statement is absolutely correct :-) Joking aside, yes this is true. Most companies run on Excel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While they may be held back by Japan's insular culture, that very weakness is also a moat.

</comment><comment><USER19> Their business idea seem original: put yourself between customers and services.

<comment><USER20> Just another rent seeker

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember Recruit developed one of Nintendo's first online platforms, Randnet [1]. After trying to pioneer in this space on each of their early consoles, only to see it fail to gain traction with their customers, Nintendo let online gameplay and networking take a back seat. Microsoft and Sony (and Sega) jumped on board that train with the very next generation of consoles and became leaders in online console gaming.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/64DD](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/64DD)

</comment><comment><USER22> They are also the holding company which owns Indeed.com

<comment><USER23> Yep. They are using Indeed talent and culture to help drive their expansion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> From what I know about the tech/talent there, it won't be happening any time soon

</comment><comment><USER24> So it's a wannabe WeChat, basically.

</comment><comment><USER25> I still find it very difficult to trust Bloomberg after "The Big Hack" was widely refuted without a retraction. Now whenever I read a Bloomberg puff peice like this, I'm wondering who's agenda they're serving. Who's got all the Recruit stock that wants to see it rise? How much of the article is twisted to paint this company in a positive light? They're not a trustworthy publication anymore.

<comment><USER26> Hey, folks thought Echelon was a joke in the 90's until Snowden showed that Echelon is child's play.

The Big Hack might be true or not, but it's not far fetched. There might be more at play here. Watch this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqQhWitJ1As&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER27> The issue is that Bloomberg couldn't provide any real evidence for their claims when pressed.

<comment><USER28> That's standard practice for media these days. One recalls the dozens of breathlessly reported then forgotten inside of a week "inside leaks" about "Russian collusion".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sift – a fast and powerful alternative to grep - <AUTHOR> https://sift-tool.org/ <comment><USER2> I've used sift for a while now and it's pretty awesome. Tons of options...the params code portion is huge. Performance is another winning factor. Sift is fast, even on big files.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks pretty sweet! The features listed in the 'use conditions' section look especially interesting. Gonna give it a try ...</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think international travel will look like from now on? - <AUTHOR> I'm especially curious about predictions for this year. Do you think we will see another globe-wide travel ban around October 2020? Why? <comment><USER2> It will be at reduced levels.

I live in upstate New York and was thinking of vacationing in Ohio this summer and decided against it because cases are surging in Ohio. This winter it was going to be Toronto or maybe Thunder Bay but I don't think the border is open to Canada.

</comment><comment><USER3> >For this year Probably dead. No vaccination OR herd immunity === No travel.

If we give it long enough (next year), herd immunity is realistic and we'll likely see travel increase. IMO folks have now learned that most things you can do via travel you can do in a video call, though, and we'll see about 80% of previous business travel. Not a fun time to be an airline.</comment>


According to virustotal.com, lists.debian.org are hosting attachment .DOC virus - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2016/q1/499 <comment><USER2> Not a linux virus anyway.</comment>


Neveragain.tech - <AUTHOR> http://neveragain.tech/ <comment><USER2> > We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, > and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming > administration's proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a > database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious > beliefs.

This list is impressively long, but what are these proposed data collection policies that are so ominous?

EDIT: obviously lots of data collection policies are ominous, but I'm trying to understand how the Trump administration is related to this (and how immigrants are especially affected).

<comment><USER3> Good question. The list of people who were targeted before were peoples who existed before any electronic computing existed. Beside, while this effort may retard some data collection, the data exists in distributed form in addition to voluntarily given by most mobile users --and it only addresses misuse of data in the US --which is a fraction of the world population.

India, China, Saudi, Russia already collect more information and do fewer nice things with the data and cover many more people --tho I suspect any effort there will die on the vine.

Beside, if you ignore ethnic data, ala France, then you don't have a good gauge on how people are doing beside a theoretical "average" person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah. Well I see FB and Google names there. You be the first to remove religious, political, and racial data you've collected. Thought so.

</comment><comment><USER5> I assume this is purely related to this administration as they note in the first paragraph and only if the intent is to do bad things with that data?

Because when I read the first bullet point, that's also the kinda data you'd gather if you were to even do something like positive outreach or assistance programs or something...

</comment><comment><USER6> Something bugs me about this, and it's hard to put my finger on. I'd say it feels roughly like an "isolated demand for rigor."

So the election of Trump woke some people up to a negative application of their surveillance systems and data in the context of the government targeting Muslims. But they are so unable to see the bigger picture that people unironically sign this pledge with Google next to their name?</comment>


Django 2.1 alpha 1 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2018/may/17/django-21-alpha-1/ <comment><AUTHOR> Release notes here: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/2.1/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/2.1/)

I'm looking forward to some of the admin improvements. View-only permissions, better template overriding, etc.

I might also use the improved FileResponse.</comment>


Show HN: Understand and improve your sleep health - <AUTHOR> https://www.jointherest.com <comment><USER2> Interesting. Improving sleep is something I can't recommend enough.

I don't see step #1 as "wear a sleep tracker". IMO that should be #1. I've been wearing sleep trackers since 2014 (first the MS Band, then Band 2, then Charge 2 and now Ionic after MS discontinued the band). So I have 5 years of data (approaching 2 thousand night's worth of data!), which makes analysis and recommendations and experiments far easier.

Maybe you do incorporate that later on in the flow, but I was surprised I didn't see it on page 1.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! So cool that you have that much data :) Would love to hear more about your thoughts if you're open to chatting - firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You guys should have some more content. It's not believable at the moment that it's anything more than the typical stuff I read about on the internet.

Think podcasts, long-form testimonials, what it's about, etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Thank you for sharing that. I'd love to hear more about what kind of content would be interesting if you're open to chatting - email@example.com.</comment></comment>


One Month Rails (YC S13) Teaches How To Build Your Startup While Learning To Code - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/05/yc-backed-one-month-rails-teaches-you-how-to-build-your-startup-while-you-learn-to-code/ <comment><USER3> There's going to be a lot more teaching-programming-as-a-product startups because the user base is proven, the economics are compelling, and the underlying story is that "Anyone who successfully figures out a scalable process to turn people into programmers wins the 21st century."

Incidentally, as long as I'm up:

[https://onemonthrails.com/try](https://onemonthrails.com/try)

A little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use for that button, unless you're running an S&M site. Try [Get A FREE 7-day Video Crash Course] rather than "Sign Up For..." and [Send Me My Videos].

(As always: do it in an A/B test if you don't believe me. This one is generally _cough_ fairly compelling.)

<comment><USER4> _A little birdy says that "Submit" is the worst possible copy you could use for that button_

Aren't you being too literal here? Vast majority of internet users have been trained to see "submit" for "okay I'm done filling out this form, next!".

<comment><USER3> We have competing hypotheses about an observable future fact. We should resolve them via the scientific method.

But if you don't have an email form doing thousands of impressions and want to just bet on this one, your bet would be a very bad bet to make.

<comment><USER4> While I won't disagree that there might be other labels that perform better than "Submit", calling "submit" as the _worst_ possible copy seems overtly sensational. We both know it isn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> @dxm, haha I actually want to try "don't submit". That one may backfire and actually work better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With these types of companies popping up, I'm left wondering how carpenters feel when someone watches a few episodes of HGTV and decides they can build their own house. There is so much more to programming and building a product than simply typing some magical symbols into an editor. Sure, it's a start, but once a product is built, deployed to production, and then has customers, it will need constant nurturing. Databases get slow, hardware fails, logs fill up diskspace, and yet that's only the tip of the iceberg in programming. Stating you can learn to code in one month is nothing more than the 'Teach Yourself $LANG in 24 Hours" from yesteryear. It minimizes the amount of skill and experience one needs to be a programmer and make $120,000 per year (which is still a lot of money).

OneMonthRails is a start, especially if you want to learn how to program, but I find it unethical to insinuate that one can land a $120k/yr job after 1 month of training.

For all my fellow Canadian compatriots, I read the marketing page of OneMonthRails and see visions of Tom Vu [1] trying to tell us about his guaranteed technique to becoming rich (later found out as the greater fool theory).

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi- fRExc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQNdi-fRExc)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory)

</comment><comment><USER6> Reinvention of the For Dummies series.

One of those dev bootcamps sales pitch was the average coder makes $83,000.

This one is pushing the ante to $120k.

Do you know why developers get paid on average $120,000 or more at some of the world's fastest growing companies?

It's because of various contributing factors. But for $49 you can buy the dream.

<comment><USER7> Speaking as one of the co-founders of Dev Bootcamp, they take a very different curricular and pedagogical approach than this course. The emphasis is 100% on fundamentals and Rails is used only as a means to that end. Curricularly, Rails isn't touched on until week 7 or so.

This seems like a fine thing for someone who just wants to learn to sling together an app and learn some of the "Rails incantations." If they're self- directed, maybe they'll dive deeper. DBC eschews that -- one of the first things they try to unteach students is that programming is about memorizing a bunch of magic spells.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm more and more disappointed in Startups that comes out of YC these days.

What's the different with peepcode, net tuts+, codeschool and co? What is the bigger picture here? Is this just a guy who was running a successful Skillshare course and decided to spin a company out of it and through his personality got into YC? Why even go through YC if he already had 5000+ student on skillshare?

Something I'm not seeing here?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure, but if I'd make a guess about why I got into YC it's because I was able to build something that tapped into a powerful need. It's definitely a good indicator that something is when whent there are so many resources out there and yet time and time again people who finished my class said it was the first time they had ever successfully learned how to code (after failing with other resources).

We're trying to take a more human approach to learning about technology. There are live chat and discussion sections as well as in-person study groups which is not something you'll find on peepcode and the rest. On top of that, you don't end up finishing any of those resources with a live product that can serve as the MVP for the company you're trying to build.

Just some thoughts, though I'd love to get your take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Being a developer that works with Rails daily, the first thing that jumped out at me was the code on the screen in the landing page image.

Rails hasn't used named_scope in a long time :)

I also found this bit to be just wrong

"I'm not even joking when I say this, but I think some of the resources out there make it intentionally hard for non-technical people to start learning. Maybe they want to keep this stuff a secret."

I don't believe for a second this exists. It's actually kind of offensive.

<comment><USER10> I agree. The number of resources available on the internet for beginning programmers is astounding. You can find tutorials and documentation for any language that you might want to learn. Professional-quality tools are available for free. There are numerous websites where professional programmers will provide comprehensive answers to your questions within a few hours, sometimes within minutes. The source code of major software packages, like the Linux kernel or the Firefox browser, is available free of charge to anyone who wants to study or modify it. Someone who wants to learn to program is limited only by their intelligence and motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I took the class a few months ago so I thought I would offer my unvarnished opinion of One Month Rails.

I've always loved technology but never had any coding skills whatsoever. To be honest, I didn't know where to begin. I would run a few searches and play around with a hello world tutorial and pretty much drop it from there.

Then I found this awesome speech by a guy named Mattan Griffel. He was speaking at an NYU event (pretty sure) and discussing how he learned to code in one month. I was blown away. It was like I was lost in the jungle blindfolded and someone handed me a map and a light. I finally had a way that all of this was accessible.

Griffel used a combination of a Lynda course, a Stanford course and Hartl's Rails tutorial to teach himself but in the meantime he had put together this course to learn Rails in a month.

Disclaimer: I didn't learn Rails in a month. I completed the course but I still can't build the next Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/Pinterest on my own if it didn't have the exact same features that Griffel's tutorial had.

Here's what it did do for me. For a person coming from a completely non- technical background, I had a roadmap. Terms, technologies, languages, databases are all things that are obvious to any CS/EE major but totally baffling to an outsider. Griffel's tutorial brought me into the coding world. Eventually, I was so blown away by what I learned that I wanted to do this as a profession which led me to the Flatiron School and I hope to pursue a new career as a web developer.

The One Month Rails course gave me the confidence to see that it really isn't all that difficult to learn this stuff. Time, dedication and perseverance are your friends. If you're completely new to programming, want to know the lay of the land, and have no idea what Ruby, Rails, Git, Heroku and jQuery is, this course is exactly what you need.

Mattan, thank you.

</comment><comment> TORIG-TG Took his class on Skillshare.

It was not a good first encounter with Ruby or Rails, but a decent class once you have some background experience.

The class moves too fast, and he needs to practice his presentation skills (he types something out in a video, and switches screens immediately). Also, the material was not entirely up to date with the gems.

That being said, I really enjoyed the class and would take more in a similar fashion.

<comment><USER12> I remember reading his quite useful blog post on learning rails quickly which included what was involved in creating a website and how to attain a simple understanding of web-specific database design, REST and front-end design.

It was pretty good. Two things sort of dismay me though when I see something like this:

1\. There are lots of free resources available online, like the above mentioned blogpost. We need to make a better case for open and free learning.

2\. All start-ups are forms and the display of the information entered into those forms according to nearly all of the start-ups I run into in NYC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points willbill, my responses:

1\. Learning has always been free! (Okay, almost always.) You can walk into any library and pick up a book on any subject. But most people don't do it because there are too many resources out there and they're not synthesized in a way that is catered towards a particular audience. People still pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to universities to learn topics that they could theoretically learn on their own. Why? Because text is really energy-intensive to consume. I don't feel like having a ton of low quality resources online is not the solution. That being said, I'm all about reducing the cost of learning and making it more accessible, which is why I hope that this class can provide a similar quality of education as $10-$18k intensive (like Hack Reactor or General Assembly) for people who can't afford that.

2\. 95% of products are forms and the display of that information - that's correct. That's why I don't think it's so hard for beginners to learn, and that's what makes Ruby on Rails particularly powerful. It's just tools for building forms, pulling data out of databases, and displaying that data in a pretty way.

<comment><USER13> They go to college because that's what society told them to do. They pay for that stupid diploma. I hope things change in the future? I still believe all Learning should be free. If your Learning is really worth $49.99; don't you think word of mouth would bring in the masses?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone heavily into the Ruby world (and particularly the news side of it) this has certainly seemed to come out of nowhere for me, though to be fair.. existing Rubyists are not really the target audience :-) How did it grow to reach 9000 students?

 _As it stands now, the YC-backed startup has over 9,000 paying student customers, with a month of tutorials costing $49.95._

I'm guessing earlier signups got preferential pricing, but there's still a potential for $100k+ per month revenues there.. that's pretty striking! :)

<comment><USER15> OMR was on TC "university", while this was the only one I tried I assume that had a lot to do with their numbers. I tried it because I saw it at the moment I decided to give rails a go and I got it for $20 because of a sale. That said, Mattan did make a good class for beginners and I've recommended at least one friend who was interested in mucking around with rails but was a rather novice programmer (even moreso than I am).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a business, this makes perfect sense to me. San Francisco is the city that taught the world you make more money selling pickaxes and denim than from digging for gold.

<comment><AUTHOR> I taught myself how to code on my own and realized that there are no good resources out there that provide a clear path for beginners. Yes, and the fact that I get to empower other people to build something they want to build is a bonus )

<comment><USER16> It may be true that many who buy pickaxes won't find gold, but if you don't buy a pickaxe or make your own (as you did), you definitely aren't going to find gold!

Besides, the canonical Ruby book is the "Pickaxe Book." What other metaphor fits?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Submit without an email address, and you get this error:

"The email parameter should include an email, euid, or leid key"

Wow, for something targeting those who aren't yet coders, that's a scary error message. (I've been dev'ing professionally since 1998, and I'm taken aback)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that must be a Mailchimp default. Agreed, it's not very good or clear.

<comment><USER17> Write a gateway in-between to process success and smooth out the error message the end user sees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I see this "guy with macbook air and coffee" picture on a few landing pages lately. For example here [http://www.timecamp.com/](http://www.timecamp.com/)

<comment><USER19> Its from [http://unsplash.com/](http://unsplash.com/). We also have him on our landing page - gonna have to change it if he shows up everywhere :).

<comment><USER18> yeah usplash is a popular/great resource, and that unfortunately makes it almost useless. Right now there is another HN post on the front page that is using an image from that same MacBook Air series (as a background image): [http://www.codingjohnson.com/an-awkward- conversation](http://www.codingjohnson.com/an-awkward-conversation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This company is a very smart scam. I'm an experienced ruby developer, and have been following them for a while. I checked out the course just out of curiosity when it was up on Skillshare. The way Mattan approaches the topic is interesting, and makes this company one of the most successful and not-scam -looking scams you will find. Here's how it works.

Rails is currently a buzzword for those just starting to try to learn how to code - very attractive. But in reality, Rails is not the best way to start learning code, it's a framework for experienced developers. Rails takes a ton of shortcuts and pushes a lot of things under the hood. This is very convenient if you understand the concepts that rails has abstracted, but very dangerous if you don't. Rails makes it easy to set up a basic rest MVC app for testing, but making a full blown custom web app requires a good understanding of many concepts, some of which are detailed below:

\- The principles of computer programming \- SQL and relational database design \- HTTP protocol, how it works \- MVC architecture, why and how it operates \- HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby - proficient at least \- The difference between client and server and how they interact \- Basic web security \- The command line and UNIX

I could go on with that list, but you get the idea. Building a real rails app is tough, and requires a large stack of knowledge that simply cannot be amassed within one month.

So how does Mattan handle this? He does away with the part where you actually learn any of these things. In One Month Rails, you are quickly introduced to concepts, then given code you can copy and paste in order to make it work.

For students, this is fantastic. They are attracted by the word "Rails" and the concept of becoming a programmer in one month (and allegedly making over $100k/year after that, as he claims). Everything works great, and it comes really easy. You skip the whole hard part where you actually need to understand things, and are just fed answers that always work. You look at him type the code, then you copy it exactly yourself. Developing an app suddenly became easy.

Fast forward to the end of the course. You have a working clone of twitter or pinterest or something, and life is good. You made this all yourself - you put in the code, ran the migrations, added the twitter bootstrap classes, etc. You are asked to review the course and of course you give Mattan a glowing review. It really worked - within a month you were able to build a full web app on your own!

By now, most of you will recognize where the scam is. You paid for the course, you finished it and you gave it a great review. But you also have _not learned anything at all_. And as soon as you actually need to go build an app or apply for a job, you'll quickly realize that you are out of luck. This is a successful and obviously profitable class, but at it's core, it's a scam. And to add to that, Mattan is at most a junior level developer himself.

This post is not here with the intent to be mean to Mattan or his company - <USER2> is a great guy, and the company has obviously been successful. I just wrote this here to tell the truth about what the company is doing and how it operates. I would love to see stats on how many people who have taken Mattan's class have gone on to actually having a career as a developer. I'm willing to bet it's 1% or less. But prove me wrong, please.

<comment><AUTHOR> These are all fair criticisms that I'm happy to respond to, but let's please be careful when throwing around the word "scam". A scam is something dishonest and I promise that I have good intentions.

We often forget that products can evolve. I'm not pretending that I've come up with the best version of what this product could eventually be. But I've validated the need for a product, released a version of it that has a modicum of value, and an overwhelming majority of the people who have completed the class are incredibly excited and thankful. I just got this email today (completely unsolicited):

"Subj: $100K in wasted programming costs. OMR liberated me!

Hi Mattan,

I followed your Rails course and created Shruffle.com. It's a simple way for businesses to do text marketing. Nothing too fancy, but I'm marketing it to local restaurants and barber shops around where I live, and have been getting good responses.

Just wanted to say a big THANK YOU for making a kick-ass course. I wasted so much time hiring wack ass programmers in the past who never understood what I wanted to do half the time. Over the course of 5-6 years I must have spent at least $100K in wasted programming costs for various projects that never went anywhere. Your course liberated me....now I can build anything that I dream of without spending a penny.

Most of the other courses were a big freaking waste of time. I was looking for something that showed me how to do basic things quickly (login/logout, validations, etc etc), and your course did just that. Next step is to incorporate Stripe for payments."

Now I'll admit that I'm not happy with what % of people finish the course (it's higher than average for an online class but still relatively low) and I'm not happy that I don't teach enough to give people the flexibility to build more than just a fairly simple CRUD app, but rest assured that as the creator of this product, I'm more critical than anyone else of its flaws.

The first version was 3 hours, I took a lot of feedback and completely redid the lessons to turn it into a much longer class. The course has been redone 3 time so far and I'm currently in the process of expanding it out into a much larger one that teaches people the various concepts of web applications within the contexts of different kinds of applications (an about me, a wordpress, a yelp, a pinterest) which will give people more of that understanding that we're both looking for.

Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, it hurts when someone takes a product you've spent a lot of time on and calls it a "scam".

<comment><USER9> What I don't know is whether or not the person in that email is equipped with what he or she needs to actually be able to figure out how to incorporate Stripe.

Are you at all confident that you have taught people how to research and understand what they are looking at?

I've known plenty of people who can follow patterns and regurgitate what they have seen, but have little to no ability to actually create. If what they want to do deviates just a little, they are toast.

<comment><USER21> People aren't stuck just copying.

At first, it might be copying. But having something workable that you can tweak can give you a good idea of how something works. After enough time tweaking, you can start building new things based on those best practices/examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> During a gold rush, sell pickaxes and shovels.

</comment><comment><USER23> I took this class on SkillShare with almost zero experience and loved it. I wish the lecture notes were formatted for printing. Keep up the good work Mattan.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hey Mattan,

Do I have to have a Mac for your course? A Windows Laptop won't do? I want to make sure I don't get caught with the wrong hardware.

I asked YC a couple of days back, and most said 'no', although the q was not specific to your program: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152605)

<comment><AUTHOR> A Windows laptop can work, but it will be a little tougher (the videos are recorded on a Mac so some of the commands are different). When you install Rails using RailsInstaller, use the Git Bash program that it comes with and most of the commands should be the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I did this course a few months back when it was on Skillshare and met Mattan at General Assembly in NYC - he's a sharp guy and very pleasant to talk to. The course is a great introduction for anyone new to programming to get from zero to app in a short period of time. It also allows people to determine if this is something they really want to dive into.

</comment><comment><USER26> Looking forward to trying this out! As an FYI, you're missing a period in one of your paragraphs for your email copy "...If you're not sure what to build? ...no worries, I have advice for that too" \- that last line should be "too.".

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call, will make a note and fix that shortly. It's people like you scubasteve that make me not look like a total asshat on the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> It would be far more honest to give a real starting salary rather than almost CTO ones.

</comment><comment><USER28> Hmm. I clicked on the intro video to play it. It started playing. I clicked on the dark background to dismiss it so I could continue viewing the site. The video still played in the background instead of pausing or stopping.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that's because it's just being hidden and not stopped. It's a bug I need to fix :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Congratulations Mattan! I'm looking forward for something like this but on growth hacking... since Googling about growth hacking yields so many great items you wrote on the subject, is there anything planned?

</comment><comment><USER30> I took this course and learned more while taking it than any other RoR course.

<comment><USER17> If you've taken multiple courses, then wouldn't your knowledge be cumulative? If you're an absolute beginner, any given course may be too fast or confusing, but after you've seen info on routes, models, generators a few times, the next bullet point tends to stick better

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely agree here. Different people learn concepts in different ways, and it's hard to know that teaching something a given way will stick. That's why we have to try to reach as many people as possible until we can build a personalized education system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is eerily similar to what happened with seo: people started to realize there was more money to be made teaching people _how_ to make lemonade than there was in actually _selling_ lemonade.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well, if this isn't validation for my latest idea, I don't know what is. I know it shouldn't, but finding out about competitors always seems to take the wind out of my sails.

</comment><comment><USER33> Here's a code for 10% off: [http://onemonthrails.com/signup?discount_code=rEEvPf](http://onemonthrails.com/signup?discount_code=rEEvPf)

</comment><comment><USER34> Hmm, it says:

        Which Programming Language should I choose?

on a site called One Month Rails. I wonder what language they'll suggest?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fair. But you'd be surprised how many people still ask me the question.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, I bet there are a few people who sign up for "One Month Rails" and then ask if they can use Python instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are actually :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Make money fast--earn thousands of dollars working from home in your spare time!

Truth is, in a world where everybody is special, nobody is.</comment>


Amazon Building Large Data Center in Oregon - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/11/07/amazon-building-large-data-center-in-oregon/

<comment><USER2> FYI, from the comments over there: "The Amazon data center was cancelled last week".</comment>


Treating Students as Gifted Yields Impressive Academic Results, Study Finds - <AUTHOR> http://today.duke.edu/2011/03/darity.html <comment><USER2> There is a good quote that is always passed around in education circles: "The soft bigotry of low expectations"

Educators that have low expectations for certain students will not challenge them and hold them accountable for their work and studies. The student will pick up on this fact. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I'm glad that they are beginning to quantify this piece of common wisdom. Perhaps this will break the bad habits and mindsets of some educators out there.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, you take one group and label them "gifted" and tell them how wonderful they are and how they all are and going to become doctors, engineers, lawyers, and accountants. Then you take the other group and tell them they're "sufficient" and "average".

No wonder the kids who are gifted are going to excel--they have confidence. The "average" kids have already had their dreams crushed. No more art/photography, jazz band, advanced chemistry or computer labs for you! Now all your electives are college readiness programs and that suck the fun out of learning.

I remember honors chemistry at my high school was allowed to do experiments, but regular chemistry wasn't. No wonder the kids in honors chemistry liked chemistry more and were excited to learn. I remember watching my chem teacher taking pure sodium and dropping it in water and watching it explode. The other class had to read out of a textbook.

<comment><USER4> _No wonder the kids who are gifted are going to excel--they have confidence. The "average" kids have already had their dreams crushed._

This hypothesis has been tested and refuted. When identical twins are separated at birth and adopted by different families, they often have wildly different environments. Some go to good schools, some to bad. Some go to families that nurture academic achievement, some to sports families. Nonetheless, the achievement level of one twin is predicted mostly by that of the other twin, not by the adoptive environment. The underlying cause appears to be general intelligence, as measured by IQ.

The effect holds even for highly intelligent people who are diverted from the university track. They simply direct their achievements in other directions.

<comment><USER5> As explained in other branches of this discussion thread, this hypothesis has also been tested and confirmed: kids of different countries are distributed on dramatically different bell curves, much further separated than kids of different ethnicities in the same country. Probably the twin studies you're describing didn't find much of an environmental effect because the environments they were looking at were actually very similar, in part because only extremely bad families have a major environmental effect.

<comment><USER4> Compare the study in question[1] with a list of the nations ranked by IQ[2]. The lists are in about the same order, because math accomplishment is driven by IQ, IQ is strongly influenced by genetics, and different countries tend to have different genetics.

 _much further separated than kids of different ethnicities in the same country_

No. African-Americans, for example, have an average IQ of 85, very much like an up-market African country. Go read _The Bell Curve_.

 _only extremely bad families have a major environmental effect_

The siblings in the adoptive families have nearly the full range of accomplishments of the general public. The possible explanations are (1) a sibling's accomplishments are mostly determined by internal causes, or (2) a sibling's accomplishments are substantially influenced by environment, and they experience a wide range of environments (even within the same family).

Other studies use twins raised together. The twins are more similar to each other than to their non-twin siblings, and the differences are explained mostly by IQ. This suggests that accomplishment comes mostly from internal causes.

 _the environments they were looking at were actually very similar_

In terms of opportunity, they are extremely similar by adulthood. In the U.S., annual income at age 30 depends mostly on IQ, regardless of race, ethnicity, and other factors.

[1] <http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations>

<comment><USER5> In fact, although IQ explains more academic achievement and income than any other measurable psychometric factor, it still doesn't explain very much of them. It explains only about 15-25% of variation in individual income and only about 25% of variation in individual academic achievement. Most of the rest is due to factors that are not measured.

By contrast, per capita income explains 46% of variation in average IQ among countries, and even more of the variation in academic performance. (Average academic performance explains over 50% of the variation in average IQ among countries.)

So, does high average income cause people to have high IQs and good academic performance, or the other way around? [http://sitemaker.umich.edu/salas.356/more_money__better_grad...](http://sitemaker.umich.edu/salas.356/more_money__better_grades) documents a study that found children's academic performance improves when their parents' income increases.

The TIMSS data you're citing show the opposite of what you claim them to. The variations in academic achievement between countries are much larger than variations in IQ between ethnicities.

TIMSS doesn't include a lot of African countries, but of those it does include, 8th-grade achievement in Ghana is 309, in Botswana is 364, in Egypt is 391, and in Tunisia is 420, compared to 508 in the US. The TIMSS scale is normalized so that one standard deviation is 100 points. If we estimated that the 508 score were a weighted average of 85% "white people" and 15% "black people" one standard deviation lower, then the "white people" would be at 523 and the "black people" would be at 423 --- closer to the "white US people" only one s.d. higher than to the Ghanaians 1.14 s.d.s lower. Even Botswana (perhaps the "upmarket" African country you're thinking of?) would be 0.59 s.d.s below the "black US people".

(The above breakdown is roughly correct. In the NAEP, the grade 8 mathematics average score for white students in 2009 was 293, the s.d. was 33, and the average for black students was 261, almost exactly one s.d. lower. <http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/> doesn't let me link the results, though.)

In general, the TIMSS rankings are much better explained by median income than by average intelligence. The Taiwan average is almost two s.d.s above the international average, which would be like an average IQ of 130, while the Qatar average is almost two s.d.s below, which would be like an average IQ of just over 70, "borderline mentally retarded". If you've ever traveled, it's obvious that Qatar isn't actually half populated with mentally retarded people and Taiwan isn't actually half populated with geniuses.

According to the book you linked, the measured average IQs are 105 for Taiwan and 78 for Qatar.

If you look at this map, you can see how little relationship there is between ethnic composition and national IQ: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_IQ_Lynn_Vanhanen_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:National_IQ_Lynn_Vanhanen_2006_IQ_and_Global_Inequality.png) There are enormous differences between Brazil and Congo, between Vietnam and China, between Singapore (which you can't even see) and Indonesia.

 _The Bell Curve_ has been amply debunked already, and in any case is decades out of date.

<comment><USER4> _By contrast, per capita income explains 46% of variation in average IQ among countries, ..._

Correlation is not causation. If race, nutrition, and parasite load (e.g., malaria) are causative factors of IQ (they are!), we would expect per capita income to be highly correlated with IQ. And indeed nutrition and parasites explain why equatorial Africa cranks out hideous poverty _and_ average IQs in the 50s.

 _The Taiwan average is almost two s.d.s above the international average, which would be like an average IQ of 130, ..._

Many Asians place a high priority on math practice, which readily increases ability. Islands of high math accomplishment have been created in the U.S. ghettos when a gifted teacher gives the students a culture transplant.

 _If you've ever traveled, it's obvious that Qatar isn't actually half populated with mentally retarded people ..._

Mental retardation is actually defined by deficient global neurological abilities: physical coordination, verbal fluency, procedural memory, emotional perception, emotional control, and so forth. In other words, what are called skills of daily living. These talents are partially independent of general intelligence. It is perfectly possible for someone to be friendly, well spoken, and a great cook without having much abstract reasoning ability.

 _... while the Qatar average is almost two s.d.s below, which would be like an average IQ of just over 70, "borderline mentally retarded"._

Those thresholds were designed for tracking white children into special education classes for developmental disabilities. In a homogenous group, IQ is highly correlated with mental retardation, because global brain damage necessarily reduces IQ. However the thresholds are much less meaningful across races. A white kid with an IQ of 70 will probably need special help to learn to tie their shoes, and will lack the curiosity to care. A black kid with an IQ of 70 is nearly normal except for abstract reasoning ability, and has trainable worker written all over them.

 _The Bell Curve has been amply debunked already, ..._

[citation needed]

Preferably a citation that lets hard data do the talking, looks at all the data, and understands the difference between correlation and causation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is not news.

This idea, in fact, has been around since the mid 1960's. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_Effect> Well done to Duke for replicating and publicising it though, as it never seemed to percolate into practice.

</comment><comment><USER7> Along side the findings reaffirmed in this study, I think it's prudent to mention the impact that language can have on a child's confidence. Specifically, the work done by Carol Dweck [1] and her colleagues have shown just how influential language can be in setting a fixed-mindset vs a growth- mindset in children.

In short, praise effort, not intelligence.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck>

<comment><USER8> _In short, praise effort, not intelligence._

Intelligence is vastly overrated and widely misunderstood.

By which I mean, it's not a fixed quantity that an individual has no control over; it is _not_ the same thing as natural aptitude. And responses like "Great job, even though you did poorly on that math test you studied really hard!" are not helpful if you actually want someone to get better. [Note: I'm not saying that "Bad Timmy, you clearly suck at math and I'm giving you an F!" is any better, though unfortunately belief in that false dichotomy is pretty common in the world of education]

When someone "intelligent" gets a bad grade on a math test despite having studied hard, they realize that something is wrong with the way they studied. Or that they have a deficiency in earlier material that they need to correct. Or that they need to sleep more before the test. Etc. They never accept that they didn't work hard enough (they did!), and they never accept that they're not smart enough (they are!) - they assume that they somehow worked _wrong_ , and they set about fixing that problem.

When someone "unintelligent" gets a bad grade on a test, they chalk it up to the fact that they're not very good at math, but hey, they tried hard, and that's what's important, right?

That's _not_ what's important. Learning to work hard is not a worthy goal on its own if you don't learn to work _better_ at the same time (or at least it's not the most worthy goal). This is as true in programming as it is anywhere.

Now, when it comes to child psychology and keeping a child engaged, maybe you're right and it's better to praise effort. But that should not come at the expense of praising intelligence; "intelligence" is the end product of many years of effort directed at the process of learning and thinking, not something that's doled out of a box at birth. Unfortunately it's something that we've never really learned to effectively teach, which is a shame.

[Edit: I'm also not claiming that there's no natural difference in smarts that _does_ come "for free" at birth, there is absolutely some sort of Bell curve happening there, and some people are destined to be at the high and low ends of it, for sure. But my point is that the way the people at the top handle failure is vastly different from the way people at the bottom handle it, in that they're never satisfied with mere effort.]

<comment><USER9> Hmm. Your point is valid, but does not contradict Dweck's version of "praise effort, not intelligence".

Dweck's main point is to avoid praising in such a way that it makes kids believe that they're naturally good at something. For example, don't say "You got 100% on that test? You're so good at math!" because that causes kids to believe that they're _intrinsically_ good at math, and that they don't need to continue working at it. The result is that these kids shy away from learning new math, because whenever they encounter math they don't "intrinsically" understand, it violates their "I'm good at math" worldview and makes them feel stupid.

Instead, she suggests praising good results with phrases like "See? You worked hard to solve the problem, and you did it!" - because this encourages the obvious desired behavior that kids see themselves as able to solve problems if they work at them. These kids relish challenges because challenges give them opportunities to validate their worldview - that they're good at figuring out how to solve problems - by solving them.

The aspect of "Learning to work hard is not a worthy goal on its own if you don't learn to work better at the same time" is clearly there, because it's the good results that are praised in both cases. It's just a question of _how_ you praise those good results: don't make the kid think that intelligence is intrinsic - but instead make them think that it can and must be worked at.

(And Dweck doesn't suggest praising poor results, as you suggest with your example "Great job, even though you did poorly on that math test you studied really hard!")

Hope this helps clear things up.

<comment><USER8> _(And Dweck doesn't suggest praising poor results, as you suggest with your example "Great job, even though you did poorly on that math test you studied really hard!")

Hope this helps clear things up._

That absolutely does, thank you.

I've always bristled at the idea that poor results should be excused and rewarded as long as effort is expended, which is, on second reading, definitely not what she claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a great book called Teaching As Leadership which devotes a full chapter to the effect of expectations on a student's performance.

My Kindle reader for Mac won't let me copy and paste, but the following extract from the book is so good that I will type it out:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>---

While the self-fulfilling prophecy of high expectations is well established by research, in our experience, the most compelling evidence of this idea's power comes from the many testimonials we receive from strong teachers. Crystal Brakke, for example, is a teacher who in her first year teaching eighth grade in Henderson, North Carolina, took her students from almost 70% failing the state literacy assessment to over 80 percent passing it. Ms Brakke shares how her high expectations helped change the academic trajectory of one particularly challenging student.

"The Wilson," the self-appointed nickname of a young man named Scott, was a living legend at Henderson Middle School. He was nearly sixteen years old and had already spent three years at the middle school. The crowds would part in the hallways for him. He ruled the school, and he knew it. He also knew that, probably quite realistically, he would be promoted to high school no matter what he did this school year - we just couldn't keep him in middle school another year. So my second-period class quickly became his personal playground...and I realised that if I didn't do something soon, the year would be lost for both him and the other twenty students I needed to teach...Scott wasn't ready for high school - he was reading at a fifth-grade level.

So I got together with the other teachers on my team, who were facing their own struggles with Scott, and we came up with a plan that was supported by both Scott's grandmother (his guardian) and his older brother, Richard, whom he idolised. We called him into a team meeting, and he sauntered in, ready for whatever we could give him - in-school suspension, after-school detention. He'd seen it all before. Instead, I told him that is schedule had changed: he would now be coming to my class first period and working with the cluster of "gifted and talented" students in that class. Honestly, you could see the color draining from his face. I explained that I realised what the problem was - that it wasn't him; it was me. I wasn't teaching him what he needed; wasn't teaching to his level and expecting from him what I knew he was capable of doing. That's when he just flat out called me "crazy".

But the next day, Scott came to my first-period class. He sat down, and didn't say a word for the next ninety minutes. That's when I knew we were on to something. I can tell you for certain that progress came slowly, very slowly. Some days I had to fight just for him to keep his head up, but then one day, he brought a pen and pencil to class. I almost cried, I was so executed. Another day, he raised his hand to answer a question. He had started participating, and that was the end of behaviour problems with "The Wilson".

By January, he was just another kid in my class and was sharing insights into "Romeo and Juliet" that made my jaw drop. My favourite memory from that year came when one of the seventh-grade teachers approached me after a staff meeting, asking, "What are you doing up there with Scott Wilson?". It turns out "The Wilson" had made a visit to the seventh-grade hallway to chat with some of his old teachers and let them know that we had finally figured it out: he's gifted.

<comment><USER8> _Crystal Brakke, for example, is a teacher who in her first year teaching eighth grade in Henderson, North Carolina, took her students from almost 70% failing the state literacy assessment to over 80 percent passing it._

A good teacher can certainly work wonders with students. But it's never as simple as making one change in a vacuum; when I read the anecdote that you've presented, it's pretty clear to me that we're dealing with a good teacher. Even if she's young, she's clearly attentive to the students, and she's smart enough to tailor her approach to best fit what she sees from them.

That's a pretty good sign that she's an exceptional teacher overall - it's a level of attention that you don't often see in schools (it's also one that fades with age, but that's another matter). I'm skeptical that the one technique she happens to credit this particular success to is a silver bullet that would help all students, especially those whose teachers are nowhere near as bright or caring.

Further, having spent some time in the trenches, I'd say a large part of this student's achievement gains are simply due to the fact that he was put in a room with better students, so he was uncomfortable and he fell in line with the way they behaved and acted in the class. That's easy to do for one student, but it's not a trick that scales.

Show me that a simple change in expectations can get an overpacked classroom of 35 disinterested, loud, and sometimes violent C-level students to step up their game and care about Romeo and Juliet (esp. when a sizable percentage of the class _can't read at all_ ), and I'll be impressed...

<comment><USER11> Change the environment, change the person. It can be done en masse, though it's not as east. The reason the KIPP schools work, even though they take children randomly from extremely substandard environments, is that they completely control most aspects of the students lives. The school itself enforces a discipline that spreads like a contagion through the children from the start. In addition, they keep the kids there from 7 AM till 5-6 PM, before they go home, and for the most part keeps them in summer as well. So you can recreate this effect, but you need complete control from the top down, at least at the start.

<comment><USER12> Do a Google search for: KIPP brainwashing

<comment><USER11> Very interesting! I had never read anything like that before. Truthfully though, it makes me like the KIPP program even more, as I am glad that tools of mass persuasion can finally be used for good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I initially did terribly in school. I often refused to do assignments or did them in a smart-alecky way, acted out violently, and became one of the principal's most frequent visitors.

In second grade, I entered the school's gifted program, and my academics improved greatly. Was it because of the quality of the instruction? No; it primarily consisted of hanging out with a few of the smarter kids in my year, playing computer games, and occasionally learning the names of Roman gods.

Of course, my problems did not disappear either; I still did not fit in with the kids who surrounded me over 90% of the time. It was not until I left my school district for a magnet program that my problems began to disappear and I began to develop ambition (and it still took some time to adjust).

I expect a lot of people will try to interpret these results to say that kids are smart because they went through a gifted program. For me, that's not what happened.3

</comment><comment><USER14> Highly implausible "study". In reality unintelligent kids in gifted classes do very poorly. This is not about hope, it's about convincing kids who would be perfectly happy as mechanics to go into debt quixotically pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering.

If true, every company could turn their employees into geniuses by telling them they were. No need for genes, slogans will do the trick.

In other words, more of the same neo-Lysenkoism that was behind "No Child Left Behind". Lysenko maintained that rye could become wheat if people just wanted it enough. In its pop manifestation today, Gladwell similarly maintains that ten thousand hours of training can turn anyone into an expert on anything.

HN readers nod at such articles and then ignore them in real life, hiring the super smart regardless of prior experience.

<comment><USER15> > If true, every company could turn their employees into geniuses by telling > them they were.

Only if they were hiring children.

<comment><USER14> It's always funny to see this kind of selective deference accorded to biology. Though there is no mention of an adult control group in this "study", I guess we are to extrapolate that one group (children) has neurological advantages over another (adults), even as we are enjoined from noting even the possibility of similar neurological differences between any other two groups (such as 20 year old programmers and 40 year old programmers...or geniuses and neurotypicals).

Hard to predict when and how a true egalitarian will allow for biological constraints on their ambitions.

<comment><USER15> I don't quite follow you... Do you doubt that there are significant neurological differences between children and adults that enable children to perform feats (involving neural plasticity and learning ability) that are out of reach of adults?

<comment><USER14> Of course there are. But I gather you doubt that there is significant variation in intelligence in the population at large, due to factors just as biological as those leading to the child/adult differential. That is the purpose of all this 10000 hours stuff: to deny that some people can't learn some things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've seen this result before. I think it's generally under-emphasized as it calls into question the justice* of setting aside resources for 'gifted' students if said resources also improve the outcomes for average students.

The rather sad, obvious truth here is that _everyone_ could benefit from better teaching - not just the kids with known issues at the top and the bottom.

Note "resources" != "money thrown at the problem". There are plenty of expensive interventions that don't work.

* this will probably provoke the usual hysterical stuff from the self-proclaimed HN geniuses that were terribly bored in school (unlike everyone else, who was, I suppose, riveted).

</comment><comment><USER17> Treating students as gifted requires extra resources. Which comes back to the basic notion of getting what you pay for.

On the other hand, this economics doesn't work that well in American public schools. They are crippled by teachers' unions which deny performance-based compensation, and funding is seriously skewed toward athletics (though I think in most schools that's funded more by the parents' direct contributions).

<comment><USER18> > funding is seriously skewed toward athletics (though I think in most schools > that's funded more by the parents' direct contributions).

(1) How are we measuring "seriously skewed"? Sure the football stadium may have just been remodelled, but how much did that cost relative to other things? (Note that a huge fraction of "school spending" doesn't make it to the school.)

(2) When someone pointed out that he (Babe Ruth) made more than the US president, Ruth replied "I know, but I had a better year than (President Herbert) Hoover."

My point is that the parents may be responding to better performance. I agree that education can be more valuable, but that doesn't imply that spending more is always a good idea. Good money after bad, ROI and all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe the definitions of "Gifted" and "Gifted Program" have changed a bit in the last 30 years, but this definitely would not have worked on the program I was in.

Back then, there was one gifted classroom per grade for the entire school district, and the kids in it were just plain smart. Little 9 year old me, fresh off being hands down the smartest second grader at Audubon Elementary School, was now just about the dumbest kid in class. I could hang with Math, but the reading and writing they were doing in that 3rd grade classroom put me squarely in the remedial group.

Having regular kids in that classroom would have been pure torture for them, and a drain on the rest of the class. Hell, _I_ was a drain on the class at times, and I'd just scored in the 99th percentile on my entrance exams.

I think it's still probably a good idea to split off kids based on ability. This article seems to be more about giving good teachers to everybody, which is certainly a good idea. It just doesn't have any relevance in a discussion about gifted education.

<comment><USER20> I think this study is being misunderstood here. Giftedness in most cases isn't something you either have or don't. Often it's a result of a better intellectually stimulating environment when growing up. Students of the same age that grew up in less stimulating environments will naturally be behind in a number of areas due to having less developed (or less extensive) neural structures in the areas of background knowledge, mental models, and other various mental procedures. In a lot of cases I believe these students can catch up, but placing them in even less stimulating environments will not accomplish this, and rather widen the gap.

Secondly and in addition, a major part of this study is about the effects various influences have on an individuals' intelligence theories and motivation -- effects of expectations, stereotypes, and also teacher behavior in class. Plenty of studies have shown how various external influences have a massive effect on a students' achievement due to the theory on intelligence they form from these influences.

So I agree giving good teachers to everybody is the solution, however there are definitely other environmental factors involved that complicate the issue. For one, breaking up students into gifted/non-gifted categories adds yet another stereotype that could potentially be harmful to both the non-gifted and gifted students.

I believe the solution would encompass having teachers that understand how these influences affect students, which will give them the capability to structure their classes and their instruction in such a way to dissipate any damage these influences can make, and instead turn them into catalysts for growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This study doesn't tell us anything we didn't know. Yes, when you give kids the best instructors and best resources, they do better.

The "success" in this study is that regular kids in a regular class end with 10% of kids testing for gifted, and regular kids in a "gifted" class show 15-20%. That simply is not that impressive or surprising.

The problem is that good instructors and resources are limited. And while those things would help anyone, you maximize their value by giving them to the kids on the gifted track. We, as a country, would be worse off if we didn't do this because we would be letting the truly talented go to waste in the name of "fairness."

<comment><USER22> <http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/>

<comment><USER23> There's nothing hindsight about this. We can make confident predictions: whatever this is, it will prove to be of very limited use or none at all. Why am I so confident? Because like with boosting IQ, researchers keep trying, and they keep failing. Their repeated failures tell us a lot about the probability the next study will succeed...

Education is _full_ of big gains promoted to anyone who will listen as the answer to this or that gap - like this one! - which turn out to be flukes (p=0.05 means you just need to keep trying...), statistical or data gaming (what does it really mean to have some specially treated kids reclassified into the gifted program? are the people choosing for the gifted program even blinded as to which kids they are expected to choose and vindicate this expensive program?) and Goodhart's law, regression to the mean or 'fade out' _, and outright fraud_ _.

_ like Head Start; there are benefits - and then they fade away: [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Head_Start_Pr...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Head_Start_Program#Mixed_studies_and_statements) or [http://edlibertywatch.org/2011/03/studies-on- effectiveness-o...](http://edlibertywatch.org/2011/03/studies-on- effectiveness-of-early-childhood-programs/) __Suppose this study had been conducted in this[http://www.ajc.com/news/investigation-into-aps- cheating-1001...](http://www.ajc.com/news/investigation-into-aps- cheating-1001375.html) recently exposed nest of crime?

<comment><USER22> You're addressing something different. I interpret the grandparent as "this study tells us what was intuitively obvious" which is hindsight bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The corollary is that just because you went through a gifted program and were a high-achiever doesn't mean you're necessarily smarter or better than anyone else. You just had more help along the way.

</comment><comment><USER25> Jesus.

 _Educating students works. Film at 11._

If schools had the resources to give everybody a tailored gifted program, then yeah, America might not suck. Unfortunately, we have other priorities.

</comment><comment><USER26> Being a _gifted student_ is no great feat in today's education system. This article is a perfect example of poor information. Just because you manage a 5-10% increase in the number of _gifted students_ (which is arbitrarily defined), does not mean you get any sort of increase in the quality of the top students.

Some students are simply smarter than others - and I don't think that's a point anyone can argue. Some debate on different types of learning, and specialized subjects, but from my experience, the gifted students do well in every subject (music/arts an exception). By having more _gifted students_ in a class, it is absolutely inevitable that more time will be spent teaching certain subjects, more clarification will be required, and material will probably need to be dumbed down at least a bit.

While this can create an increase in the pure number of students who reach a certain level, it is unfair to the actually gifted students who require an absolute top level of stimulation.

We've seen that economic communism doesn't work, and I'd bet an arm and a leg that intellectual communism doesn't work either.

<comment><USER27> I didn't downvote you, but I'm not certain you really understand the results presented. This operates just like labeling theory. If teachers stopped treating kids as dumb kids and boring them with idiotic busy work, then those kids wouldn't feel so bored and demotivated at school. There's a huge detrimental effect to any student's learning when they feel that the teacher has a low opinion of them. Why should they work their butts off to try to earn the respect of a teacher when the teacher has had their mind made up about the kid from day one? I've had friends who were labeled "slackers" try to work hard and reverse the label only to be accused of cheating when their test scores were no longer in line with the teacher's expectation of them.

Most teachers have no awareness of how the petty status games they play in their classrooms deeply impact the performance of their students. Many teachers also don't understand that if they can't communicate an enthusiasm for the subject, then they've failed as educators.

<comment><USER26> I understand the concept behind this, and I understand your argument as well. The reasoning, I think, is pretty simple.

Let me try to better explain what I'm trying to say, as a series of steps:

1\. Teachers start treating everyone as smart

2\. To treat everyone as gifted, more challenging material has to be introduced.

3\. As a result of increased motivation/whatever, the size of the _gifted student_ pool doubles. 80% of the class is still not at a gifted level.

4\. _No Child Left Behind_ , morality, failing students, angry parents come into play, and educators are forced to answer questions about the other 80%.

5\. Two problems are now in play: First, there is the failing 80%. Second, of the 20% of gifted students, 10% is smarter than the other 10%.

6\. Because there can be no tier separation of students (gifted/not gifted), material must be taught the same way, and the same material must be taught (otherwise, discrimination?)

7\. Educators have a decision to make: Teach dull material that suits the last 10% and 80%, or teach engaging material that suits the top 10%, but is difficult for the second 10%, and near impossible for the 80%.

8\. Choice A results in the top 10% of students losing out on an education, and Choice B results in 80% of the class failing.

9\. I hate to bring this up for a very liberal and optimistic audience but: the 20-80 rule is very prevalent in society. It's inevitable that the top 10% will probably account for a good 50% or so of the nation's GDP and innovation when they're older (no, I have no evidence, but it makes sense).

Are you beginning to see my point? I went on a first-date last night, and compared my high school experience (didn't learn a thing, wasn't told about SATs, people were stabbed, no AP/IB) with my date's high school (UTS in Toronto... 2 entrance exams to get in, contests and opportunities made available, etc). I'll tell you now, that I feel like I missed out on a lot of opportunity. By changing education to this model, you'll find more people who feel that way (maybe not as extreme).

PS. My education was _so_ bad, in fact, that by the time I took my SAT II subject tests, I know I needed 800s and I hadn't learned 70% of the material in Math II, Physics, or Chemistry. I bought books, and for the first time in high school, I actually studied.

<comment><AUTHOR> _1\. Teachers start treating everyone as smart

2\. To treat everyone as gifted, more challenging material has to be introduced._

Thank you for the detailed step-by-step reply to the comment above yours. Looking at your first two steps on the basis of international comparisons, I would say that the empirical observation of what happens in countries where step 1 and step 2 are followed is that learners IN GENERAL become smarter and reach higher levels than learners in the United States generally do. I am most familiar with the situation in Taiwan (where my nieces and nephews live, and where my wife grew up and I and my children lived for a time). The international comparative study TIMSS

<http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf>

shows that the entire bell curve for certain countries is shifted to the right, with "average" level of students in those countries being close to the gifted level in the United States, or, from another point of view, the "gifted" level of the United States being barely above the "average" level of those countries. (See Exhibit 1.1 on pages 34 and 35 of the linked document for a beautiful example of a statistical chart comparing score levels in different countries.)

The international comparisons show that learners rise to higher expectations. Examination of the poor (by international standards) performance of the top students in the United States

<http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/>

suggests there is plenty of headroom in the United States population that hasn't been explored by the typical United States curriculum. So it is commendable that the researchers mentioned in the submitted link are trying to test the limits of the United States population and see how much academic performance can increase here, as it has in other countries I know during my lifetime.

<comment><USER28> While I don't think that anyone would argue there is plenty of headroom, using international comparisons to make this case seems somewhat dubious for philosophical reasons. (Some people also strongly criticize the methodology of these international comparisons, but I don't know enough about this to say anything intelligent.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I used to call it The Naive Psychology - people are trying to isolate some barely observable phenomena and then prove that it is correct (very scientific approach) forgetting that an isolated phenomena is mere creation of the mind. ^_^

These "results" also depends of:

      Animated or depressive mood of teachers (private schools vs. ghetto schools).
      Conditions of classrooms (illumination, cleanness, colors of walls, furniture).
      The dress of the teachers.
      Male/female students ratio.
      Location of the school (suburbs vs. city).
      Noise level (traffic outside, etc).
      Weather (season) and time of day (morning/evening classes).

to name a few.

btw, It is much more important to emphasize the harmful effect of the parent's violence, childhood abuses and other negative feedback which is just a mirror image of observed phenomena known for centuries.

</comment><comment><USER30> All I know is that I was so deathly bored in school that I stopped showing up. It got so bad that they threatened to expel me despite my protestations that I was maintaining high grades without even showing up to class, and getting scholarships.

Would I have excelled in a "gifted" program? Probably, provided the material wasn't so trivial, dull, and repetitive. Would everyone benefit from a significantly increased difficulty? I'm not so sure.

Holding students to a high standard, and taking time to engage with them such that you earn their respect will of course raise student performance. However, applying the word "gifted" en masse simply dilutes the earlier meaning of the word.

</comment><comment><USER31> I observed something similar with dyslexia. A friend of mine is dyslexic. However he was only told that he was dyslexic a few months ago. Before he was told, he could read fine, and was quite good maths. Almost immediately after he was diagnosed, he started stumbling over words, and skipping sentences; he also dropped down to the 2nd last maths class from the 2 highest.

It's v. unscientific I know but it's an interesting observation all the same.

<comment><USER32> Just to offer a counter anecdote, a friend of mine had the opposite experience. She'd struggled all through school, until her dyslexia was diagnosed, and she could be taught compensation strategies. After that, she was much more successful.

<comment><USER31> Weird. Guess it's completely dependent on the person's personality then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How is this news? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect>

</comment><comment><USER34> There's a corollary too, which the University failed to study (but should've)...which is that if you treat people like infants and feed them fox news garbage 24/7, they act like idiots and society collapses. Go figure.</comment>


Nano-scale 'fingerprint' could boost security - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34780787 <comment><USER2> The original paper [http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16456](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep16456) is named _" Using Quantum Confinement to Uniquely Identify Devices"_

The main problem they are trying to solve is how to prevent reading out the chip level unique ids that are saved in IC. They solve this by using consistency in quantum level imperfections to generate chip level unique ids.

I am more interested about the claim presented in the BBC article: _" And the interesting thing is that you can't clone them. To clone them, you'd effectively have to measure [the fingerprints] atom-by-atom. You just can't do it."_

Would this work because of the measurement uncertainty principle? I.e. you will change the state of something when you measure it? Or do they think that it is _just too complicated_ to read out the key?

<comment><USER3> TL;DR: First steps to a new type of PUF.

What follows is my definitely-not-expert analysis. I'll try to answer your questions as best I can.

===== Before =====

Traditional PUFs are considered "unclonable" because they rely on uncontrollable manufacturing variation. It's not that it's impossible to create a function which gives the same output (so, they're not really unclonable), it's that the function implemented by each chip's PUF is different, and reverse engineering it requires very expensive and invasive physical inspection of minute characteristics of each part of each chip's PUF. So, cloning is very difficult and expensive, and all this work would only get you one chip's clone.

This is usually good enough, because PUFs are (AFAIK) generally used[1] primarily to make each known good chip uniquely identifiable. If the manufacturer has a set of known challenge-response pairs for all chips they've ever made, counterfeiting[2] becomes virtually impossible. The best you can do is clone some authentic chip. If you just make your own chip, the manufacturer's DB doesn't contain your challenge-response pairs and you'll be found out. If you clone a chip, then first you have to buy each chip you wish to clone (so why bother counterfeiting?), then do expensive, invasive reverse engineering, then program your clone, and the end result is a clone of a chip you already have, and which appears to be older than the chip really is, not newer.

===== Now =====

This work seems to be the first steps for a smaller, "more unclonable" PUF. Supposedly, their PUF is so dependent on nanoscale properties that the sort of invasive physical investigation you would typically do now almost certainly modifies the function implemented. I think it's not about relying on the uncertainty principle: if it were, then the output of the PUF would not be deterministic, which is _not_ what you want! Oh, and their PUF should be more compact than other PUFs (in terms of bits/μm2).

===== So what =====

I'm not really sure why this is in BBC News. PUFs are nothing new. The article touts the potential applications of PUFs, but doesn't explain how this construction is novel. I guess it's just a fluff piece to show their British readers that, "Hey, we're on the cutting edge of technology!"

[1] I suspect PUFs are also used to in Apple's newer iPhones as the "UID": input to a KDF for wrapping crypto keys, but this is pure speculation.

[2] The main kinds of counterfeits I hear people wanting to use PUFs to combat are a) unauthorized spins (the fab just makes more chips and sells them on the side), b) rebranded old chips (pop off a chip from some discarded electronics, sand the surface, print a new serial number, and present it as new), and c) actual counterfeit chips (entirely new designs purporting to implement the same functionality as some other chip).

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Few clarifications:

 _If you clone a chip, then first you have to buy each chip you wish to clone (so why bother counterfeiting?)_

Your maybe do not want to sell a lot of chips but only one chip to one specific buyer and also add some additional payload.

 _I think it 's not about relying on the uncertainty principle: if it were, then the output of the PUF would not be deterministic, which is not what you want!_

What I meant was that do they claim that their method works because you could not measure the quantum object without changing its state or they just say that it is just too complicated.</comment></comment></comment>


Truth about Why the Wayback Machine or Internet Archive Was Blocked in India - <AUTHOR> http://www.opindia.com/2017/08/truth-about-why-the-wayback-machine-or-internet-archive-was-blocked-in-india/ <comment><AUTHOR> Yesterday this news was on HN homepage. I just wanted to submit this clarification.

It seems like a weird decision by the courts to block websites randomly to prevent piracy of some movies.</comment>