Opposition to Sidewalk Labs in Toronto - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47815344 <comment><USER2> The opposition to this is not just from the privacy perspective, there's also the issue of data ownership, and giving all this data away to Google for free. And once it's owned, both cities and citizens lose all control and oversight - you can't get yourself removed from the dataset, impose restrictions on how this personal data will be used, etc.

There are some good quotes in this older Reuters story ([https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-cities-privacy- fea...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-cities-privacy- feature/green-paradise-or-data-stealing-dystopia-toronto-smart-city-sparks- debate-idUSKBN1QS25E)):

> The proposal amounts to "permanent surveillance" and "massive data scraping" > under the guise of fighting climate change, he said. "They are conducting an > experiment in real time, in the real world: the privatization of our cities > on a large scale. They will have intellectual property rights over all of > this (data)."

> "We live in a system that values property rights," Orasch told the Thomson > Reuters Foundation. "In that system, data is a valuable asset for an > individual to have."

And the developer asking for investment money and a cut of property taxes, on top of gathering all this private data and owning it forever without oversight, is just icing on the cake. :)

<comment><USER3> This article has poor fact-checking. For example, the quote by the Queen's University professor is not accurate (or, charitably, outdated as of the time of publishing).

>The proposal amounts to "permanent surveillance" and "massive data scraping" under the guise of fighting climate change, he said.

>"They are conducting an experiment in real time, in the real world: the privatization of our cities on a large scale. They will have intellectual property rights over all of this (data)."

In October 2018 Sidewalk proposed a third party "Civic Data Trust" that would own and maintain the data. Its blog post on the subject reiterates _repeatedly_ that the data cannot and should not be owned by Sidewalk:

>No one has a right to own information collected from Quayside's physical environment — including Sidewalk Labs. Instead, this "urban data" should be under the control of an independent Civic Data Trust.

>No one should own urban data — it should be made freely and publicly available.

>We believe all data needs protection, but the extent to which urban data specifically may be collected in Quayside is what's new and different here. Existing laws on urban data do not address ownership. And urban data is only regulated when it contains personally identifiable information. Even then, these rules are often not followed in the public realm. We seek to build on them.

[https://www.sidewalklabs.com/blog/an-update-on-data- governan...](https://www.sidewalklabs.com/blog/an-update-on-data-governance- for-sidewalk-toronto/)

<comment><USER4> Presumably, if the Civic Data Trust proposal was more than a shell game, Sidewalk Lab's privacy chief wouldn't have said they were building a surveillance system in the resignation letter.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how a civic data trust is mutually exclusive with a surveillance state — it just provides common ownership and open access to the surveillance data. It seems Cavoukian's dispute centered on the lack of a requirement for third-party (non-Alphabet) data providers to anonymize data at the source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To me the most of the ways that I can think of a city being smart are not related to surveillance.

If there is some system that is supposed to benefit the public then its designs should be public and subject to public approval.

What would be reasonable would be something like open source designs and protocols and maybe an electronic bidding system for projects.

But it sounds like its one company embedding whatever spy-tech they want and controlling everything over a large area behind closed doors.

I actually am really looking forward to smart cities. But smart as in high tech and advanced, not smart as in monopolistic surveillance dystopia.

<comment><USER6> I think surveillance could be part of a smart city. But for that to be smart it would have to solve the inherent problems with surveillance. An actual smart city project would proudly announce what it did to solve these challenges.

I don't see anything on their website that does this, rather it talks about how developers can enjoy access to ubiquitous connectivity [0]. This is in stark contrast to other successful initiatives like Vision Zero that started with trying to define the fundamental problems.

[0] [https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/Sidewa...](https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/Sidewalk-Labs-Approach-to-Privacy.pdf) [1] [https://www.monash.edu/muarc/archive/our- publications/papers...](https://www.monash.edu/muarc/archive/our- publications/papers/visionzero)

<comment><USER7> > solve the inherent problems with surveillance

Which problems?

<comment><USER6> A simple search can summarize better than I can. There are many sources, including papers and books, for this.

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

<comment><USER7> Oh, I misunderstood. I thought there were problems to be solved _in_ surveillance, not _with_ surveillance. I didn't know that wasn't considered the main drive behind smart cities by everybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Aside from the privacy concerns, condos in this area are currently selling for $1000+/sqft. All renderings I have viewed from Google's proposal show some assortment of low rise buildings. You will need to be a multimillionaire to live in a low rise style building if the units are sold at market rates. That type of development doesn't represent the interest of the majority of the citizens (the avg salary in the city is ~45k USD). The city should only be approving 100+ story structures in the downtown core until there is enough supply to meet demand and bring RE prices down to reflect local salaries.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely. One of the reasons the real estate prices are so detached from local salaries is that there is a lot of suspected money laundering and Chinese speculators buying up properties and leaving them empty.

<comment><USER10> How is this Alphabet's fault?

<comment><USER11> It's not, but Google/A came in with great fanfare and seemed to get more leeway than other constructions do due to their name and their sci fi promises.

But it's important for people outside of Toronto to understand that this isn't what most people would call "downtown" either. It's in one of the least accessible parts of the city, that for that reason has historically only been used by industry. Transit is improving there, but it's not somewhere I'd want to live. So maybe low rise is all that can be sold there? I don't know but there are other high rises going up now in that area. How are their sales?

<comment><USER12> The lack of transit is bit of a misdirection. It's very easy to run bus routes once there is an residential population. Setting up transit in advance doesn't make much sense.

Also it's been primarily used by industry because it was zoned as industry, because industry needed access to the docs for shipping.

Look, It's a 15 minute bike ride to union station. You can walk to the financial district. People will buy whatever units they build there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Sidewalk Labs, a sister company to Google, had acquired disused land in > Toronto, Canada for this bold urban experiment

"Disused land" is a bit disingenuous. Toronto real estate prices are very high right now and this is waterfront property. It's former industrial land we're hoping to revitalize.

As far as I can tell, Google isn't doing us a favor here. They're just another developer trying to make a bunch of money off of our huge need for additional housing. They choose to make this money via surveillance and advertising, and increasing demand by promising some neat tech benefits.

But if they weren't here, that land would still be developed. Probably sooner. (And probably by a developer making money by cutting every corner in the build).

<comment><USER14> A study was done and they determined the main reason Nimbys are Nimbys is because they don't like the idea of developers making money by building things near them:

[https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/09/what-if-nimbys- hate-d...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/09/what-if-nimbys-hate- developers-more-than-housing/570169/)

<comment><USER13> That's really fascinating.

I'm not bothered by developers making money. They're a very important part of the housing system. But what does bother me is when you have buildings poorly constructed, made to be cheap to build but expensive to maintain. Most of the condos along the waterfront meet that criteria.

Even my own building, which on the whole is pretty well built, has to undergo a huge renovation to each unit because the developer used plastic piping instead of copper and it's failing. The developer saved a few bucks, and I'm paying for it years later.

I'm a YIMBY- so long as the developer isn't cutting corners.

<comment><USER15> PVC is extremely common for plumbing and should not, by it self, cause any issues. Copper pipes are very expensive and leak copper into the water, which can have some negative affects on health. The middle school I went to actually had to bring in bottled water because the copper quantity in the water was too high. Copper pipes are also much louder.

<comment><USER16> First of all PVC can't be used on the drinking side, only drain. Second of all, not all types of plastic used in plumbing have stood the test of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things; for the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order; this lukewarmness arising partly from the incredulity of mankind who does not truly believe in anything new until they actually have experience of it.

\-- Nicolo Machiavelli (1469 - 1527)

<comment><USER18> There is really very little of Machiavelli's one can accept or use in the contemporary world. \- Henry Kissinger

<comment><USER17> Well, that quote is really very little of Machiavelli. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could it be possible that Sidewalk could make money off this project and still advance city building significantly for the first time in forever? Would you rather see the the project go to another boring developer without vision? Another darb apartment park.

There is not even an actual complete proposal yet. And still, there is FUD coming in from all sides. I for one would like to see cities made for pedestrians with smart waste disposal and more interesting architecture than glass blocks.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think that Google should build company housing at their main facilities, give their people somewhere to live, and watch them 24/7 like lab rats.

You could accomplish an interesting experiment plus deal with the problem of giving new hires a place to live.

<comment><USER21> That works if the only places you visit are work and home.

<comment><USER22> Living in company housing means I can't visit anywhere else?

<comment><USER21> No, wanting to surveil someone 24/7 when you only have sensors at home and work means they can't visit anywhere else.

<comment><USER22> okay but how does it prevent them to visit anywhere else ?

<comment><USER21> That was my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I actually hope this project goes through, just because if it's google doing it everybody will be watching closely and there might actually be some privacy regulations that come out of it. The data they'll want to collect is valuable, and sooner or later somebody is going to try to collect it.

Kicking google out of the city doesn't change that, it just means somebody you're less likely to suspect and more likely to sell raw data to the highest bidder will come in in their place.

</comment><comment><USER6> It looks like every (mostly useless) waterfront, science city or business park I have ever been to. Is there something new here, or is it like with many things these days that people's perception have diverged from reality?

<comment><USER23> the most innovative thing i've seen talked about is an a hidden utility corridor running to all the buildings for trash pickup. Which can't actually be an original idea, can it?

<comment><USER24> In a sense isn't that what every alleyway in the world is?

<comment><USER23> only in the sense that ignores all the ways it's different to an alley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really wish there was a middle-way between 'let them do whatever they want' and 'let's protest and raise hysteria'.

Let's look at Downtown Toronto development over the past 10 years - condominiums built on every square inch of land that could be bought? In large part owned by people who don't plan to stay there long or even owned by a third party and rented out?

Ok, so that's what's been happening. What can Google possibly do, that is worse?

They're planning to try new things - go ahead and discuss the details you are not happy with. Just be aware of the alternative - cheap 30-40 story condominiums with 500 sq foot units, built to make a quick buck.

<comment><USER26> Collect privacy related data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Putting aside privacy for a moment, does anyone know what they're actually building? As far as I know they've sold the city on a bunch of vague "smart tech" promises without any concrete details.

I have no idea what Sidewalk Labs business plan is, but it seems like a traditional business executive (Dan Doctoroff) is trying to use Google's brand to get access to cities so he can build large developments without actually knowing anything about technology.

<comment><USER28> Because it has been a smokescreen and a chaotic mess, there is no trustworthy source of information of what the plan is or the agenda. For that reason alone it should be axed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting they were hoping to collect property taxes and other fees.

If Google wants to have a private company run utopian town to run experiments in, they should do like Disney did in Florida. Buy some swamp land, develop it, incorporate it privately, and have absolute control. This plan in Toronto seems to be corporate colonization of a public city, through stealth.

<comment><USER30> Except, of course, Google doesn't want that because much like 95% of their projects, they'll abandon it within 5 years anyways. Google wants the rewards, but not the risks, which with this project, they'll give the city to deal with after they lose interest in the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Canada is like this little brother always in America's big shadow. One thing we don't talk about as much is how we have this recurring fear that big American corporations think, "oh this won't fly in the U.S. but just use Canada. They're simple and slow and will tolerate it."

I guess put simply, the little brother is worried he'll get exploited. It's partly why the fight for NAFTA and tariffs got so bitter.

</comment><comment> collective-intl I'm truly saddened to see the reaction people are having to Sidewalk Labs' project. The current feeling in the air is to distrust and hate any project touched by a large tech company and be suspicious of any amount of data collected.

The environment today is such that both journalists and readers just want to pile on and make their points speaking out against privacy intrusions and the greed of big companies.

No one's bothered to understand the actual proposals of Sidewalk Labs and give them a fair chance.

For example, in contrast to what this article says, Sidewalk Labs would not own and profit from resident's data -- instead they are trying to be as careful as possible and leaving it to an independent organization ([https://www.sidewalklabs.com/blog/an-update-on-data- governan...](https://www.sidewalklabs.com/blog/an-update-on-data-governance- for-sidewalk-toronto/)).

Many cool ideas comprise Sidewalk Labs' vision, from the layout of a walkable community to convenient autonomous transport to pushing the leading edge of power conservation, waste management, and other eco-friendly tech.

In the age of dysfunctional cities like San Francisco, I had hope that a project bringing together a broad array of talented experts with real technical competence and letting them envision a model for cities of the future was a winning combination with huge potential for humanity.

Tragically, it has been doomed by the caprice of political fashion.

<comment><USER32> Google Fiber in Louisville is a great case study. Google thought there was a business wherein they could cheaply provide connectivity to users. Then there were problems, like exposed lines, and it became clear that fixing those problems would cost money. In that moment, they abruptly decided to bail, essentially leaving the city with the burden of fixing the mess Google created and leaving the early customers who committed to multi-year contracts only a few months to switch providers.

Politicians have to think longer term than what the current players in tech have demonstrated. This is 100% a self-created problem

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "a smart city built from the internet up "

I really don't understand the appeal of statement.

<comment><USER34> where every sidewalk garbage-bin will have its own instagram fan page!

<comment><USER35> And record who throws what out, and issue ads or fines accordingly! So much room for innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> More and more people will just move away from city once these tech are deployed on a bigger scale. Life is too short to be subjected to this type of bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER37> Needless to say, Sidewalk Labs has not angered "Toronto", it has angered activists who don't live in the neighborhood and never will but apparently have veto power over what goes on there.

<comment><USER38> I do live here, not an activist, and Sidewalk lab can take a long walk off my short pier. They have a lot of work to do to repair/rebuild their reputation.

<comment><USER37> You live on Sidewalk Labs' property?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> People are very superstitious, and quite hysterical. Google isn't building a city, they're building a neighbourhood in one small section of Toronto that most Torontonians never went to anyhow, and are under no obligation to go to after it has been rebuilt.

Postwar Urban development is fucking monotonous and largely the same everywhere. We should experiment and try different things. If you don't like it, fine. Get together with a few thousand like-minded people and build your own neighbourhood, the way you like it.

<comment><USER28> This is an extremely bad argument. All neighbourhoods, houses, even cottage docks are controlled through planning in Ontario.

Sensible people recognize that the city will continue to exist hundreds of years into the future. We do not let any crazy person build whatever comes into their minds because failures end up being a problem for neighbours and the government ultimately to fix, which means other taxpayers.

If we don't like it, we follow the law and complain to the planning committee. Like normal people. I don't really get your position.

<comment><USER12> That's not actually true. Docks are controlled because they may interfere with navigable waterways.

But you can build any house you want on unincorporated land (no municipality).

<comment><USER28> In Ontario all buildings must adhere to the Ontario Building Code. No exceptions.

This is Canada. There are no municipalities in the Constitution. There is no land that is not controlled by the government.

Docks are also regulated because of their ecological impact and safety.

I was kind of shocked by your comment so I googled to make sure. Here is an article saying the same things.

[https://cottagelife.com/realestate/inspections-in- unincorpor...](https://cottagelife.com/realestate/inspections-in- unincorporated-townships/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: color sorting algorithm? - <AUTHOR>

Imagine a pallete with N colors. You need to display them in some order that suits human eye best.
I seem to have problems with definition of what I want. Ideally, I'd like to see some gradients, e.g.: blue gradient from lightest to darkest, yellow gradient from lightest to darkest, etc.
The problem is that sorting by [H,S,V/L] or [H,V/L,S] doesn't seem to work for non-ideal palletes. The biggest problems are with shades of gray or something similar to shade of gray (when [R,G,B] components are almost equal) that appear in between gradients. Also, it should allow some deviation on hue (which would be invisible for human eye but surely visible for simple sorting algorithm), but my simple tries of generating a keys consisting of weighed sum of components failed.
What I also tried: building a matrix of RGB distance and then trying to sort colors keeping distance between two neighbours minimal; using combination of HSL and YUV components; sorting by [R,G,B], [H,S,L] keys and all the possible transpositions of keys.
What I haven't tried yet: hilbert curves, from what I see on pictures it won't help.
Suggestions, anyone? <comment><USER2> Have you considered that what you're trying to do is impossible? Without constraints on the colors being sorted, there is no single "obvious" mapping from a random collection of colours chosen from 3-space into 1-space.

If you do have constraints on the colors being chosen then you'll need to be explicit as to what they are, and then use them in a non-trivial manner.

</comment><comment><USER3> _You need to display them in some order that suits human eye best._

That sounds woefully ill-defined, if you ask me. My suggestion would be that you try to figure out better what it is you are looking for, and then start thinking about the algorithm to implement it.

 _I seem to have problems with definition of what I want._

Yep.

</comment><comment><USER4> You can try using ranges of frequencies in the light specter and ordering by wavelength.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't it similar to hue?

<comment><USER4> Technically yes, but you are trying to sort by HSV, or just by euclidean distance between RGB values, but RGB values doesn't correlate to frequencies. You could map RGB values to frequencies and order by frequency/wavelength instead of ordering by RGB values using distance.

<comment><USER5> I have the same problem I sorted colors by eucleudian distance , even distance CIELAB2000 in LCH format , it does not give the best result. How to convert the RGB to frequency/Wavelength ??</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC:  Ruby or Python - <AUTHOR>

In web development, I've pretty much been PHP only with some Perl tossed in here or there.  I'm looking to learn a new web language and framework and have decided that its either going to be Ruby or Python.  I'm not worried about the learning part.  If one language takes more time, then so be it.  I'm just looking for some advantages and disadvantages with either.<p>Outside of web development, I've also worked with C, C++, Objective-C and Java, so I'm not a hideous PHP programmer void of any elegance in coding and design, just a programmer who has mostly work with PHP! <comment><USER2> Asking this here is fairly pointless. When you ask this sort of question people tend to just go on subjective rants in favor of what they like, and flame people who disagree with their tastes.

The best thing you can do is put the time into reasearching the two until you are convinced for your own reasons to learn one, both, or neither.

Either way, both are good, important languages with quality frameworks and potential for job offers. So really you can't lose.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be fine hearing some subjective rants in favor...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I looked at both several years ago and picked Python because I thought the language and implementation was cleaner and better designed. The set of libraries was larger and the community was very responsive and helpful. Ruby has come along a lot since, but I still think the advantage is to Python which is still evolving without becoming a junk pile.

But as others have said, the two are close enough that you won't do badly by going with your own preference.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would use whatever seems to suit best for your task at hand.

Need to build a site quickly that is mostly information based such as a blog or some kind of editorial site. I'd choose python with django. The automatic admin section is great for this type of task.

Need to build something with a lot of popular features (twitter, mash ups, simple shopping carts, etc..) and don't have time to really learn every little detail. Ruby using Rails might be a good solution as there are thousands of demo and live applications out there to borrow from. Should reduce your development time.

If you are looking for a new hobby language. I would choose python as it doesn't have quite as large or fanatic following as ruby. It also has a lot of room for growth. There are many libraries and verticals in the python market which could use some help.

End of the day though. It's up to you and the problem you are solving.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have worked with Python and Ruby for nearly 10 years while being paid to code in Perl for a bit longer and honestly still to this day I wrestle with which language to build a new project. They are all wonderful and terrible.

The only insight I can offer you is that you can do everything you want to do in any of them. The points of consideration for which you learn then boils down to community, longevity (~market value of the skill/time) and personal interest in the specific tack each language takes. If you enjoy programming languages, there are different "interests" in Python, Perl and Ruby. Comparing the ways that Python and Ruby address Meta-programming, I think, will illuminate which for you is more interesting (which fits your brain better).

My other advice: Learn it all.

</comment><comment><USER6> Before investing time in learning a new language you may want to consider other "features" of a web framework that may help you choose. For example, give a try to web2py since it does not require installation (just unzip and starts). It includes sqlite and ssl enabled web server. You can do all development and maintenance via the web interface. In 5 minutes you should be able to write a simple app like:

        def hello(): return "Hello %s" % request.vars.name

Then you decide if it is worth your time to learn the language. Usually learning the APIs of a framework take more time than learning the language it is based on.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes!

(Or, since someone didn't like that response, look up all the previous instances of this discussion on this very site, and see if there's something they didn't cover. Otherwise, either language is just fine)

</comment><comment><USER8> I would say Python. why you may ask? For the following reasons: 1\. A wide collection of web frameworks from which you can choose from, e.g Django, webpy,turbogears, web2py, karrigel the list goes on. 2\. If you are so inclined, you can roll your own framework the help of WSGI. 3\. Python as a language is very simple and for an experience programmer, you can be up and running within a week. 4\. The python community is huge and helpful, with a lot of books and documentation. Just my 2 cents anyway.

<comment><USER9> All those things you said are true for Ruby, as well.

<comment><USER10> Although Python has been leaping down the slippery slope as well, I think calling Ruby's syntax _simple_ is a bit of a stretch. Ruby has many-- intentionally--more ways to do everything, and some of those more ways have small gotchas built in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The question is wrong. The correct question is not "ruby or python?", but "python or ruby?" :D Either one will do actually.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've found that I prefer Python over Ruby simply for the forced-indentation. It peeves me to no end when I work with others and they have horribly disorganized, unreadable code.

Granted, I like Python for other reasons as well, and I'm a Django fan to no end, but... yeah. Forced indentation for the win.

</comment><comment><USER13> Something that may be of interest, given your C background: Python and C mix really well. Not sure if that is relevant in web-centric development, but it _is_ when you want a more general-purpose language.</comment>


Groupon Authorizes $950 Million Series G - <AUTHOR> http://vcexperts.com/vce/news/buzz/archive_view.asp?id=996

<comment><USER3> A billion in VC? Or could that just be the high end of a range that they're preparing for? I'd never heard of a round done for that much so I went looking.

Only clear has ever taken on more VC than that _in total_ after combining all their rounds... but apparently much of that was from industry partners, and they had a lot of spectrum to buy in small chunks. The second highest company in terms of total raised comes in just below the size of this round alone, with $949.85M.

In googling to find that list I came across another fact... 1 Billion more or less matches the total amount of foreign VC expected to flow into all of India in 2011.

      Clearwire			$1,299.50
      Solyndra			$949.85
      Western Integrated Networks	$889.00
      MetroPCS Communications	$733.10
      Facebook			$677.70
      Reliant Pharmaceuticals	$574.15
      WildBlue Communications	$557.99
      Force10 Networks		$553.42
      Better Place			$550.00
      Grande Communications Netw.	$507.40

[http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/06/01/the- top-10-ri...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/06/01/the- top-10-richest-venture-backed-companies-of-all-time/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Two Anecdotes:

1) I'm hanging out with Family in Abbotsford, British Columbia, and wherever I go browsing, I'm getting Groupon Ads for interesting things to buy in Abbotsoford. I've been half tempted (for the first time in a long time) to click on these ads. There is 0% chance I would have considered going to these places without those ads. If I find something new and interesting, there is a very good chance that I (or my family) will return as repeat customers.

2) My mother, is trying to figure out how to attract new business into her Coffee Shop for a new line - just to let people know it exists, and is considering a groupon deal.

If, in fact, groupon has a sustainable profitable model in their existing markets, and the $950mm Series G is there to expand the same model into other markets, and, if they have no entrenched competition in those markets - <USER2> this move makes absolute sense.

Time will tell if all of these conditions hold true.

<comment><USER5> I have yet to buy a groupon, but I keep looking daily - I got some groupon gift cards.

There seems to be way too many ads for spas, salons and the like, which do not interest me, yet they seem to attract tons of buyers..

<comment><USER6> The expected lifetime value of a custom acquisition is so high for these services that Groupon makes sense even if the conversion rate is < 5%. And, since most salon owners can push the risk downward to their commissioned (paid by the job, really) staff, there's even less disincentive. Only the staffers still trying to build a book of business will accept Groupon customers, and those employees' opportunity losses are low because they end-up sitting around between clients anyway. So, the risk/reward trade-off of using Grupon in these industries is quite good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Of course we don't have all the variables here, but this doesn't seem like a very good move from an outside observer. If groupon is making hand over fist in cash, and has a healthy cash flow, part of me is wondering why they couldn't use that to steadily finance overseas expansion?

I understand VC's desire to get in on the ground floor of GroupOn's meteoritic growth, but giving them a billion dollars of cash right now doesn't seem like right play here.

Get big fast might of worked for a select few dot coms, but it certainly didn't work as a general rule.

<comment><USER8> I can give you an anecdote as an answer

Here in Israel, there are dozens of Groupon clones, which are extremely popular. But Groupon isn't here yet.

It's a land grab game, and in this business, growing fast matters.

<comment><USER7> Good point.

I guess the thing I would caution about is expanding fast vs. executing well. Hopefully they learn the lessons in the Yandex vs. Google and Amazon/Ebay vs. Tao Bao fights.

Facebook did execute on a very successful international strategy - but from my understanding they didn't need a billion dollars to do it. GroupOn's economics might be different - time will tell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The guy who owns the salon where I get my hair cut probably wouldn't do a Groupon deal because of adverse selection effects -- he would be worried about attracting a bunch of cheap people who wouldn't pay full price for his premium-ish services and, by virtue of buying into a Groupon, don't have loyalty to their stylists. However, he is willing to discount services to customers who are likely shopping for a new salon. A few years ago, he signed- up for a service which would send an elaborate snail mail invitation for a set of heavily discounted salon services to people who recently bought homes in certain high income zip codes around his business. He owns some pretty sophisticated salon management software which can track conversion rates (and therefore lifetime customer value). I think he wasn't getting enough conversions to justify the price (a few dollars/invite), but he'd be interested in other such services with the proper selection biases.

Could someone compete with Groupon by offering very selective discount offers? How much would it be worth for Grocery Store A to target those who shop primarily at Grocery Stores B? Could Visa use its credit card data to build-up such a list? Could it legally use that list to drive such marketing endeavors? Would consumers opt into having their purchasing data used in that way if it meant being offered amazing deals from time to time? How else could one offer up to businesses highly selective campaigns? The problem with Groupon is that it attracts customers who aren't especially valuable, and businesses have to hope to pick up the minority of those who represent profitable new business.

</comment><comment><USER9> Senior in liquidation preference to all other shares? They can _do_ that?

<comment><USER10> So does that kind of confirm that the founders are already cashed out?

<comment><USER11> Nope. From what I've heard it is standard practice for later rounds to dilute the investors from previous rounds.

<comment><USER10> Well, it looks like they cashed out.

[http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/30/groupon- insiders-345-millio...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/30/groupon- insiders-345-million/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Local advertising will be as big (if not bigger) than AdWords, ergo Groupon is the new Google. No wonder they turned them down.

<comment><USER13> Google isn't AdWords, Google is search (and now, the web). Search > Coupons. Google > Groupon

<comment><USER14> No, Google is an advertising company, pure and simple. Virtually all of their products are a means to aggregate an audience that they can sell to advertisers. Search is just another way that they do this.

Groupon could definitely end up being bigger than Google.

<comment><USER15> If there was ever a sign of a bubble, it's this comment.

Some local coupon startup thingy bigger than Google? u-huh.

People have been saying 'local is gonna be big' for years. I don't see why. Why do they think more money will be spent locally than people already spend other places?

<comment><USER14> Yeah, cause everyone knew Google was going to be worth 200 billion or whatever after they were 18 months in.

And the amount people spend on local commerce absolutely dwarfs all online spending, let alone online advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How defensible is Groupon's position? I buy wine online, and I'm happy to sign-up for multiple email wine offers. My Dad would sign-up for multiple Groupons if he observed any evidence of value from copycat competitors. People here have compared Groupon to Facebook, but I don't think the network effects are nearly as strong for Groupon. I don't doubt the first mover advantage, but I don't think it's as strong as some would claim. We should also note that Facebook was not the first social networking site out there.

Edit: With this last sentence, I made a poor attempt to imply that, even with incredibly strong network effects, Friendster and MySpace were displaced even after many thought they had attained critical mass.

<comment><USER16> The network effects aren't a defense. The main defensible advantage is the customer brand. That's what the money is for - making sure it beats competitors to scale in every city in every country in the world.

<comment><USER6> I get that Groupon wants to be a strong brand, and it is probably rational to grow big quickly before other competitors establish themselves. However, I don't see how its valuation is defensible given how relatively defenseless it is against competition. It enjoys much weaker network effects than Facebook, and consumers' cost of using multiple services is much lower than, say, using both Google and Bing for every search. Also, how will they maintain high margins when competitors will likely offer up their services to businesses for a fraction of the margin?

<comment><USER16> The reason the brand matters is that merchants will only use a competitor if it can drive a meaningful number of customers. As long as Groupon is synonymous with daily deals for both merchants and consumers, it will be difficult for any large scale competitor to emerge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is Bubblicious.

<comment><USER16> [Groupon employee speaking]

It might seem so based on publicly available numbers. The publicly available numbers are outdated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We integrated coupons into FaceCash just last week. I wonder how much our valuation just went up?</comment>


Apple Peel turns iPod into iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://news.techworld.com/mobile-wireless/3241323/apple-peel-turns-ipod-into-iphone/?cmpid=sbfacebookrplant <comment><USER2> you can talk and SMS... but what about 3G browsing?</comment>


RadioShack has filed for bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/5/7983221/radioshack-files-chapter-11-bankruptcy

<comment><USER2> I think we've all seen this coming for a while. But where does one go to find random electronic parts offline now? :(

<comment><USER3> I think the selections are mostly regional or smaller now. In northern & southern California, Fry's electronics.</comment></comment>


3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/CBel/20180213/308549/3D_engine_entirely_made_of_MS_Excel_formulae__Enjoy_this_Doomxls_file_.php <comment><USER3> This reminds me of the 3D roller coaster simulator in Excel[1]. The difference here is this was made for readability in mind and even works without macros.

[1] [http://www.excelunusual.com/coaster/](http://www.excelunusual.com/coaster/)

<comment><USER4> I love how the suggested video at the end is "Introduction to pivot table"

anyway, that's absolutely insane. The 3D engine seems to be laggy, on the video anyway, whereas this rollecoaster is pretty smooth !

<comment><USER5> Well, the roller coaster sim is wireframes only, which is always much easier to compute. You'll notice that the Doom clone has lighting and shaders, which, however primitive, add complexity to the render.

It's like the difference between text rendering versus decompressing JPEG images. Both can pile up enough data to exhibit lag, but you get more bang for your buck with the lighter data stream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excel w/o vba is the ultimate in functional programming.

<comment><USER7> You jest, but people really do underestimate Excel. Yes, it sucks - but there is a reason that despite all its flaws, _people keep trying to use it for things_. (And no, that reason is not "they're too stupid to learn how to code")

And I'm not sure the things that make Excel so crappy could really be fixed without sacrificing the things that make it such a flexible and useful tool. For instance, adding the ability to recurse or iterate sanely would remove the transparency of having every iteration of a computation clearly visualized cell-by-copy-pasted-cell.

<comment><USER8> For me it usually is "I would like to use some sensible tools, but corporate policy requires me to not do that (because they are not available) - so I have to (ab)use Excel/Office/VBA to get things done." It's not pretty, stable, efficient or really maintainable, but if you are forced to use a hammer..

ps. Excel does some things OK, like drawing pretty graphs on smallish datasets and visualize quick analysis with pivot tables. It just lacks a sensible scripting language and is generally very brittle once the data is getting nontrivial and more than one person is involved.

<comment><USER9> I've been solving this problem with PowerShell for the last year or so. It's usually available on locked-down corporate Windows boxes, and you can use the entire .NET Framework, as well as third-party .NET libraries, without admin rights. I'm using it with System.Data.SQLite to build a WPF application at the moment, which will hopefully replace a whole bunch of messy and hard-to- maintain Excel sheets and Access databases.

<comment><USER10> I love PowerShell for this reason. I had a 100 CSV files, and I needed the first two rows removed to put them into a signal viewing app, and it took only a few lines of PowerShell to do this on my corporate machine. I would normally do this in another PL, but strangely PowerShell's solution further pushed me to look into it for other uses on that machine. I wish there were a good book for this, since I actually prefer that than just Googling quick solutions when trying to actually learn something.

<comment><USER11> I work in a Microsoft shop, but I always have a bash shell running. It prevents me from really diving into PowerShell. I will end up running a quick sed '2,3d' on the csv files and move on with my life.

<comment><USER10> I have PowerShell on my local company machine, and without Admin priveleges I can't even sideload bash through a Git install. We're not a software company, so requesting Git is also out of the standard operational procedures as a user. IT knows my coding background (since 1978), but they can't change policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This feels like there's a joke, about Skyrim being ported to yet another platform, hidden in there. Context [0]

[0] [https://www.wired.com/2012/01/skyrim- calculator/](https://www.wired.com/2012/01/skyrim-calculator/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of a related project presented at SIGBOVIK demonstrating the Turing completeness of PowerPoint. It is also art.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't plugged the Roslyn .NET compiler into Excel as a first-class scripting environment yet. LinqPad in Excel would be miles better than VBA.

</comment><comment><USER15> Spreadsheets are pretty good for using when exploring the execution of an algorithm or computation graph. You can basically book keep every step of an execution.

Efficiencies or lack of it is visible in the spreadsheet in a very concrete way. How many used cells are there, how many "steps" or rows is required to finish a computation and how many times are cells addressed clearly relates to time and space complexity of an algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER16> Excel has been an interesting tool that has been abused by many different people for many different subject areas, from petro-engineers to asset management to budget forecasting to drug sales forecasting to activity planning and on and on and on.

With a judicious use of vba, many of the tasks above, especially those related to forecasting, planning and reporting can be automated down from hours to just seconds. I have seen inordinate amount of hours wasted by people using excel to do all sorts of tasks that were repetitive to the max. A thinking programmer can work with such people to change those tasks from being hugely manual to simply automatic.

Mind you, the vba that has been written by non-programmers is usually so bad that you don't want to even try to attempt to change or fix it. It is far better to just start from scratch.

It is a tool that can be used in quite novel ways, but it does have its gotchas that will cause interesting failures for businesses that rely on it. But when it is the only tool you have, then you use it any way you can.

<comment><USER17> What we have often seen in the business, is that Excel gives a flexibility and freedom that purpose-built tools often don't have. Want a extra field? Done. Field need to have a date larger then xx-xx-xxxx? Done. Even if the purpose- built tool has some kind of custom field system that accomodates these wishes, there always will be some feature the developers need to build. And that costs more turnaround time (and money) then doing it yourself.

<comment><USER16> That is certainly something that I have seen as well. The problem lies in validating the spreadsheets. Often, the amount of validation is minimal, whether that is the actual formulae used or the relationships that bare created or even the data that is used.

I have seen some outstanding examples of well written spreadsheets but these tend to be the minority case. Depending on the organisation and the priority it puts on validation, the spreadsheets can range in quality from vry poor to mediocre.

I have seen critical spreadsheets that were a disaster of coding.

Many times, the IT costs for getting the IT developers to do the work for you is so far above what it costs for you to do it yourself or even to get a developer in specifically to work for you, outside of any controls that your IT group would exert. Plenty of the work I have done in the last 20 years was based on the end-user employing me to do the work taht was not cost effective or even allowed for by the company IT teams.

<comment><USER18> Is validation a problem? You see the intermediate steps of calculation in the columns. It's way more clear then black-box unit testing. It's like some nice live debugging with print statements everywhere.

<comment><USER16> Validation is always a problem. In one early example, I came across, the core data on which the model did not match what was really there. The data was assumed to be correct and, of course, nobody actually did the checking. The previous year's data was used for the following year's calculations.

I knew the data for the spreadsheet was wrong only because I had been involved in looking at the actual data sources in weeks previously.

But there can also be formulae errors. They seem to produce the correct information, but they will have subtle errors that miss necessary edge cases or use set values when they shouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Ok, we're definitively in hell" \- C Bel, 2018. This is amazing, computation in Excel is becoming a solid meme.

I've got to ask (and I hope this isn't non-PC or some such), but is English the author's first language? Where's he from?

I wish that I had Excel so that I could try it out! :) More about the choice of random digits, sin x + cos x, would be nice to read.

<comment><USER20> I love Excel, and to show how it really is "better" notice nobody does these things in the FOSS spreadsheet wannabees...

<comment><USER21> I'm not going to argue that one spreadsheet solution is "better" than another as that is really a question of personal preference. However it should be noted that people do actually do these sorts of demos in other programs as well. And not just FOSS solutions but ive seen people do fanciful stuff in Google Docs too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I should open this in LibreOffice :-)

Actually, I've been wondering how to create a comprehensive spreadsheet that tests all of Excel's features. Kind of like an ACID3 for spreadsheets...

<comment><USER3> Yes it actually works quite well as long as you use the 1st, macro version.

If you have LibreOffice installed, it takes less time to actually try it, than to post a comment.

<comment><USER22> A bit snarky of you, given I didn't actually ask a question. Did you notice the bit where I mentioned an ACID3 style document?

I'm in the commit logs of LibreOffice, incidentally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Side note but what is the music with the video? I liked it

<comment><USER24> Dance Macabre [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does that also work in the online Excel app? That would be a neat abstaction layer for running crazy cool Excel apps/games in the browser. Lol

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone created a RESTful framework for excel yet? Maybe a package management tool as well?

<comment><USER27> I wrote this [0] little quick and dirty snippet to enable a Google Sheet as a JSON data source via GET requests. Unfortunately Google App Scripts only accept GET and POST requests [1] so it wouldn't be semantically RESTful, but adding update and delete features in the script are trivial if you send an action param along with your POST.

Using that data source snippet I wrote a 'static' CMS that pulls the JSON data from sheets in the workbook and then compiles and deploys a Jekyll site. I've been enthusiastically replacing WordPress sites with this wherever possible when clients only need data to change and don't require actual page editing (this system is perfect for restaurants - think menu changes). The "deploy" event is a little convoluted since I wanted to control what happens and when it happens, but it is all kicked off by submitting a Google Form which is attached to the Sheet.

The script as-is returns one object per row but converting it to key/value responses is also pretty easy. If Office365 has an equivalent to Google App Scripts that can publish a script as a web app, I'd love to hear about it.

[0] [https://gist.github.com/chrsstrm/3fb0ce6820acecf62c5490d220d...](https://gist.github.com/chrsstrm/3fb0ce6820acecf62c5490d220d4ec5f)

[1] [https://developers.google.com/apps- script/guides/web](https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/web)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Someone was reaaaallly really bored at work.

</comment><comment><USER29> God save us all! The finance people are becoming hackers (or whatever it is that finance people turn into once they go hackers)! Doomed.

<comment><USER30> _or whatever it is that finance people turn into once they go hackers_

Payroll analysts

<comment><USER31> Economists and data scientists.

/waves

<comment><USER30> ANECDOTE TIME! And actually a career related question:

I'm an absolute nerd for sports stats, and have a friend that moved out of the finance/BI world in the hospitality sector and landed herself an impressive gig at ESPN-of all things, as a stats editor.

It seems a relevant jaunt (because all I know of her profession is that she's an incredible mathematician) but the gap seems wide just from a perspective of domain knowledge; she openly states not caring at all for sports but the new job location puts her close to family.

My question is: is Data Science so applied that one can make that kind of jump domains easily? This gal is one of the smartest people I know but the more I look into what it is you folks do, the more I am simultaneously intimidated yet interested in the field.

<comment><USER31> Domain knowledge is always useful. But can also introduce biases in one's analysis.

For these types of professional roles you generally see specialized teams in three broad groups: data engineers, modelers/analysts, domain experts. Unicorns sometimes exist, but usually you see T-type experience with depth in one of the three.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wrong tool for duty. Arc might be more suitable.

</comment><comment><USER33> A bit off topic, but Excel has many dangerous features. Is there a spreadsheet that is safe to use ? I just know about gnumeric and LO's calc, but I don't know how goo they are (I rarely use spreadsheets, most of the time to draw simple curves)

<comment><USER34> Could you explain what the dangerous features are?

<comment><USER35> Dangerous is mostly the spaghetti business logic that results when excel spreadsheets get scaled up into _systems_.

"Dangerous" in lighter ways: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-gYb5GUs0dM)

Nostalgia requires this... [https://www.smore.com/clippy- js](https://www.smore.com/clippy-js)

<comment><USER35> To those that think spreadsheets can't be dangerous: [https://www.cnbc.com/id/100923538](https://www.cnbc.com/id/100923538)

From that link: "Spreadsheet errors are costing businesses billions of pounds, according to a financial modeling company, which is calling for the introduction of industry-wide standards to reduce the risk of mistakes.

F1F9 estimated that 88 percent of all spreadsheets have errors in them, while 50 percent of spreadsheets used by large companies have material defects. The company said the mistakes are not just costly in terms of time and money - <USER2> also lead to damaged reputations, lost jobs and disrupted careers."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


When Overnight News Came in the Back of Six-Wheeled 100MPH Citroën CXs - <AUTHOR> https://petrolicious.com/articles/vintage-friday-when-overnight-news-came-in-the-back-of-six-wheeled-100mph-citroen-cxs <comment><AUTHOR> Linked in the comments the other day from the post 'n-wheeled cars' \- I loved this post and the idea that pre-internet - news was distributed around europe at breakneck (illegal?) speeds to get it as swiftly as possible from the printers to other countries hundreds of miles away.</comment>


Meet the guy trying to turn emoji into a legitimate, usable language - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/04/30/meet-the-guy-trying-to-turn-emoji-into-a-legitimate-usable-language/

<comment><USER2> Egypt beat him to it; originally ran in the New Yorker: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDbYv9RWMAA-7rK.png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDbYv9RWMAA-7rK.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to me that writing using Emojis requires significantly more effort than writing it using just words. Besides the comical factor, I just do not see the advantage here. Correct me if I am wrong, but there would be certain phrases that you could not say in Emoji, it would struggle with slang and other made up words. I probably would not back this, but I cannot deny this is not cool and unique, I will be keeping my eyes on this to see if it goes anywhere.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One note of likely relevance to the HN crowd, if the Kickstarter[1] is successful, we're definitely planning to release an API + the raw data.

[1] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fred/the-emoji- translat...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fred/the-emoji-translation- project)

<comment><USER4> This would certainly make emojibot[0] a lot easier (and cheaper)! :)

[0] [https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/emojibot](https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/emojibot)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >There are literally no other image-based languages.

Written Chinese started as an image-based language.

<comment><USER6> If you go back far enough, what language didn't? All writing systems are derived from or borrowed from a script that in its ancient past was pictographic. Braille is the only exception I can think of.

Give emoji a few thousand years, maybe less, and it could become a proper language. I think it's already starting to evolve. The eggplant symbol has been repurposed to mean "penis". (So I've heard.)

But I think the main roadblock to the machine translator described in the article is that emoji are currently used as an adjunct to peoples' native language. Does a Japanese speaker use emoji the same way as a Russian speaker? Or German or Farsi? I suspect the answer is they don't. So trying to train an AI using texts from all these different speakers will be trying to build a Tower of Babel.

<comment><USER5> To write fish in chinese you write a pictogram. That pictogram is an image of a fish, except the image has evolved over the millennia to be unrecognisable.

The English word "fish" on the other hand, is not a pictogram, and its evolution has not been primarily visual. Instead it has undergone evolution in pronunciation, which has indirectly affected how the written word "looks".

<comment><USER6> No, to write the word for fish, you write the character pronounced "Yú" which happens to be 魚. Chinese speakers don't see that and think "that looks like a fish". They think "that sounds like Yú". Just as when you see the letter F you think of the sound, not that it looks like a hook: Phoenician 𐤅 - wāw. (Or if you know that the Latin root is piscis: 𐤐 - pē, that means mouth.) And before you point out that a Chinese speaker would describe 魚 as "the character for fish" remember that an English speaker when asked to spell a word might say "F as in fish."

Like I said, all written scripts if you go back far enough started with pictograms. But that was many millennia ago. Their evolved descendants are divided into alphabetic or syllabic scripts, both using the symbols to represent sounds but with a different granularity.

And really, Firefox spell-check, you're not going to recognize "millennia"? What's wrong with you?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing uProxy - a safer path to the Internet - Kilo-byte http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ6BuHL0EiQ

<comment><AUTHOR> how about instead of only using my friend's internet connection,give an use a gae app's, just like gaeproxy/goagent?

<comment><AUTHOR> ooops. i meant "give an option to use a gae app's, just like gaeproxy/goagent"</comment></comment>


Building an Accurate Statewide Dropout Early Warning System - <AUTHOR> http://jaredknowles.com/journal/2014/8/24/of-needles-and-haystacks-building-an-accurate-statewide-dropout-early-warning-system-in-wisconsin <comment><USER2> This system very much reminds me of a 'talking machines' episode, where a physics grad student asked a question concerning the definition of "machine learning" when most systems are hand crafted and the actual _learning_ is just statistics of the data put through the system.

Here we have a very specific system and they test over different instantiations of the approach, reporting one works better than the other. So what did we learn? For that matter, what did the machine learn? I'll have to read the paper more closely to really get the meat but, it's definitely an interesting problem.

On a side note I absolutely love seeing stuff on HN concerning ML being applied to stuff other than "big data"/"deep learning" startups. More links like these please!</comment>


Crash Bandicoot - Teaching an Old Dog New Bits - <AUTHOR> http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/27/crash-bandicoot-teaching-an-old-dog-new-bits-part-2/

<comment><USER2> This entire series of retrospective articles about the Naughty Dog team has been fascinating. Definitely worth the longish read.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was definitely true in the PS days. Nowadays it's more like this:

1\. License the Unreal engine

2\. Skin it with your content

3\. ???

4\. Profit!

And people wonder why games are so samey today.</comment>


SlideShare Outage Will Be Due To Global Warming - <AUTHOR> http://blog.slideshare.net/2010/12/07/slideshare-outage-will-be-due-to-global-warming/

<comment><USER2> The explanation for the server outage is 'maintenance.' The gibberish that follows is a string of un-funny non-sequiturs. YMMV.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree. The only explanation I can think of for that being posted is that the writer is sufficiently senior that no-one wants to lose their job by telling him it isn't funny, or worse, it just didn't occur to him to bounce it around the office beforehand for a humour benchmarking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No. I think this possibly the more useless explanation ever. _shrug_

<comment><USER5> Get some sense of humor.

<comment><USER4> What's that?

But, seriously, it wasn't even funny - just a little incomprehensible. Certainly unlikely to make sense to the vast majority of their users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I appreciate a short and concise explanation as I have heard enough 'stories' in my day job.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wait a second, at one point it says the interns are unpaid, and then it says they'll withhold their paychecks? If SlideShare can't even be consistent with their story about whether or not their interns are paid how am I supposed to trust them with my most awesome bullet-point laden PowerPoint slides??

<comment><USER8> > Wait a second, at one point it says the interns are unpaid, and then it says > they'll withhold their paychecks?

Why yes, haven't you ever heard people asking for their invitations to be refunded?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We hope the Apple tree farm will not infest the server room during this time nor an Android UFO landing. :) Great way to spin a planned server outage!

</comment><comment><USER10> This is what my travel blogging site looked like during our server migration a couple weeks back:

<http://www.blogabond.com/maintenance.html>

I like this sort of informal notice a lot more than the corporate boilerplate you tend to see most of the time.

</comment><comment><USER11> What's next? The Solar solstice has caused mass downtime; stay tuned. Eeek.

</comment><comment><USER12> Penguins are nasty. They bite!</comment>


Battle lines being drawn: A map of YIMBY-NIMBY skirmishes in Bay Area - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/06/26/battle-lines-being-drawn-a-map-of-yimby-nimby-skirmishes-in-bay-area/ <comment><USER3> Apparently every single browser on my iPhone is "too private" for the Mercury News.

<comment><USER4> Same. The DuckDuckGo app did the trick

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somehow I think the balance of power will tilt towards NIMBY. The wealthy just won't put up with it. Even Cher (reliably liberal) says it's not sustainable.

<comment><USER6> The "progressive" NIMBYs have a 9-2 majority on the Board of Supervisors. Hard for things to tilt even more toward them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spelling suggestion: YIYBY - <USER2>

<comment><USER8> Taking backyard literally, this is exactly the opposite of what is happening. NIMBYs are concerned far beyond their property line. If someone owns land, they shouldn't be blocked from increasing density by someone who doesn't own that land.

<comment><USER9> It's simply _true by definition_ that everyone who wants to alter zoning rules - no matter how - is telling other people what should be in their backyard. To suggest otherwise is intellectually dishonest. Your drive to change building rules _mostly affects other people_.

...but that's also how our system of government works, so just own it already.

What the OP is pointing out is the doublespeak nature of "YIMBY" as a rallying cry. Just be honest about what you want: unless you truly only care about what you can do with _your_ property, what you really want is for other people to stop fighting development in _their_ backyard, too.

Trying to frame this as a drive for personal choice misses the point of the debate: the other side doesn't care what you do in _your_ backyard, but they sure as hell don't want it affecting _theirs_.

(Nothing I'm saying here is advocating for a side in this argument. If you're downvoting me reflexively because you think I'm being "NIMBY", you're blinded by ideology.)

<comment><USER8> By changing zoning rules, I'm not forcing you to upgrade your single family home. I am enabling me to do so.

<comment><USER9> You're attempting to force everyone to live with the externalities of your decision.

It's fine to want density, but stop being dishonest about why other people might oppose what you want.

<comment><USER8> I do not think that is distinct to YIMBYs. I am forced to live with the externalities of high housing prices (3400 for a 900 sq.ft 2 bed room), lower freedom to utilize personal property (land), high homeless population, and cities you need a car to live in. Both ways will have externalities. I do not think I was dishonest about why anyone would oppose this.

I own property in another city and it is bat shit to me that you can not build freely on your land. The people filing lawsuits about their view or forcing environmental impact studies (when it doesn't matter) need to get smacked back to their property lines. If they don't like it, they can buy the land they want to control. If they don't have enough money for that, tough.

<comment><USER9> Once again: you're arguing against something that I'm not saying. In fact, you're making my point: the changes you want to make affect other people. _That's why they disagree with you._

The "YIMBY movement" starts with a terrible, condescending name that implicitly mocks the other side. It's as if the GOP changed it's name to the "anti-libtard party".

Why should the people with the money and power listen to you when you position yourselves only as opposition to a cartoon version of what they believe?

Also: every city in the world restricts what you can do with property you own. You can't build a radioactive waste site in your backyard, or a pork rendering plant in your garage. Get over it.

<comment><USER8> I don't want to build a pork farm, I want some higher density housing so that I pay less in rent. This isn't an extreme thing.

I am also a rich person and have heard some very dumb excuses as to why my colleagues' neighborhoods should stay zoned single family. From traffic to character. In the end, people are just preserving their home values at the expense of others and it is not a sustainable system. That motivation is misguided though, their million dollar plot of land is still going to be worth a million dollars with a duplex on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I have friends who have had to leave the Bay Area because of high rents, I also have (non tech, multi-generational local) friends who have the vast majority of their wealth tied up in their (or their parents) house here.

I don't love how some members of the YC community (often independently wealthy tech types) seem to suggest that this latter group need to sacrifice themselves by supporting policies that would effectively undermine the only thing that is allowing them to stay in the Bay Area.

I realize that the YIMBY crowd fervently believe that eventually, at some point, their policies will benefit both groups, but in the meanwhile the house prices here are stagnating and predicted to fall next 12 months which is already causing anxiety. Simply dismissing this group as NIMBYs who don't want to look at high rises so badly misses the point that I'm not surprised they are failing in their mission

<comment><USER11> >I also have (non tech, multi-generational local) friends who have the vast majority of their wealth tied up in their (or their parents) house here. ... I don't love how some members of the YC community (often independently wealthy tech types) seem to suggest that this latter group need to sacrifice themselves by supporting policies that would effectively undermine the only thing that is allowing them to stay in the Bay Area.

If they already own a house in the bay area, why would falling housing prices affect their ability to stay here?

<comment><USER10> Because few people own their house outright, and the equity in their house is their only form of financial cushion or retirement savings. In many cases, the kind of house price drop agitated for would bankrupt and evict them, with no way of buying into the market again despite the average lower prices.

<comment><USER11> Those scenarios seem few and far between. If it is a family home that has been owned for at least a decade in the bay area, then it has increased in value dramatically since it was bought, and no matter what kind of mortgage they have, they will have plenty of equity. If it was bought recently, then they probably don't have HELOCs or other instruments that would put them at risk, so the market value should be irrelevant to their financial situation.

I can't see how a market price decrease of a house that one owns, or has a mortgage on, could bankrupt someone or cause them to be evicted. The worst thing that could happen is for they homeowner to go "underwater", but even then, as long as they continue to pay their monthly mortgage payments, they get to keep their house.

<comment><USER10> Keeping in mind that these are not tech types with the associated salaries, you can't see how a market price decrease could bankrupt or evict someone? Mkay

<comment><USER11> No, I don't see it. But I'm open to the idea that I am missing something.

Maybe they have an ARM mortgage, and are planning to refinance just before the adjustable period begins, and are worried they won't be able to get new financing if the home value is significantly lower than the remaining principle? That would be easily solved by refinancing now into a fixed mortgage, but maybe they can't afford the increased monthly payment that would cause?

That's the only scenario I can think of, and it seems unlikely to affect many Bay Area homeowners, given the incredible rise in prices recently.

If you understand how a market price decrease would cause a homeowner to be evicted, please explain it.

<comment><USER10> I am actually in favor of building more housing. But I think that doing so will (on top of prices already being projected to fall) put further downward pressure on house prices.

To think that this is a rosy story for everyone with no losers is a fairy tale.

I believe that the already squeezed, non-tech, middle class of the Bay Area will suffer at the expense of new, younger tech workforce (and incidentally play into the hand of the actually wealthy tech leaders who are some of the biggest proponents). If you choose not believe that, then please provide a historical example of where deflationary pressure on house prices have been a boon for the existing working/middle class that own houses anywhere.

I realize that this is not a popular opinion among the HN crowd, which obviously skews young and tech, but it certainly is the opinion/anxiety that I hear expressed on the ground in the Bay Area among non-tech families. Are they delusional and should simply welcome lower house prices? Are their wealth and security something that must be sacrificed for the greater good? Maybe.

But I am very suspicious of some of the tech leader pushing this. It's obviously great for them if they can pay their employees less because rent is lower.

<comment><USER11> > I am actually in favor of building more housing. But I think that doing so > will (on top of prices already being projected to fall) put further downward > pressure on house prices.

> To think that this is a rosy story for everyone with no losers is a fairy > tale.

> I believe that the already squeezed, non-tech, middle class of the Bay Area > will suffer at the expense of new, younger tech workforce (and incidentally > play into the hand of the actually wealthy tech leaders who are some of the > biggest proponents). If you choose not believe that, then please provide a > historical example of where deflationary pressure on house prices have been > a boon for the existing working/middle class that own houses anywhere.

I never said that a decrease in housing prices would be good for non-tech homeowners. I just contested your claim that it would lead to them being evicted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Weekend project: Emojiplot, Emoji-based ideas for your next short story - <AUTHOR> http://www.emojiplot.com/ <comment><USER2> Seems you're out of quota.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the warning. I made a bad choice with the hosting.

It should be solved now.</comment></comment>


House Passes Amendment To Block Funds For Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationaljournal.com/house-passes-amendment-to-block-funds-for-net-neutrality-order-20110217

<comment><USER2> We are entering dark times for innovation.</comment>


Top 5 Nodejs books which you should read - <AUTHOR> https://codeforgeek.com/2017/08/top-5-node-js-books-read/ <comment><USER2> > "Getting Mean with Mongo Express Angular and Node"

Anyone recommending MongoDB usage in 2017 should think it twice. Mean indeed.</comment>


Ask HN: Share your profitable side project? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Divjoy is a tool for React devs that generates a custom codebase & UI. It's my main source of income now, in a large part thanks to being on the front of HN 6 months ago.

[https://divjoy.com](https://divjoy.com)

Show HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044)

</comment><comment><USER3> PSA to folks who answered this: if you have a profitable side project, double down and try making it into something more than a side-project.

If you've built something that is actually collecting revenue, you're already ahead of a huge number of folks out there, and you can likely build it into something that can at the very least make you live comfortably, if not much more.

</comment><comment><USER4> It depends on how you define "profit"... I have invested $10 for a domain, and if you exclude my development time, I'm making a profit on UnitPrice.org! [0] It's a website that analyzes specific categories of products on Amazon and calculates the best per-unit price. Lego, diapers, toilet paper, K-cups, etc. Obviously your own time is worth something, but it's fun, and despite barely getting any affiliate fees, it's enough to cover the domain name cost! I also use the website personally, so I've saved money on purchases too.

[0] [https://unitprice.org](https://unitprice.org)

</comment><comment><USER5> No longer a side project since I made the switch to work on it full time, but my stock option scanner SaaS [0] is profitable and my main source of income.

[0] [https://omnieq.com](https://omnieq.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> Trunk[0] syncs your stock levels/inventory in real-time between Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Faire, Shopify, Squarespace and Square

[0] [https://trunkinventory.com](https://trunkinventory.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> Makes about $30/mo in Brave Browser referrals [https://www.trump- news.today/](https://www.trump-news.today/)

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty positive you can increase this revenue by changing the link on top to your referral link...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Webase [1] is a no-code platform for building CRUD apps without writing early code. It has found a niche in being able to dynamically generate PDFs based off of forms combined with business documents for things like Real Estate contracts.

Website still needs to communicate the value more, but it is a fun project to keep improving.

[1] [https://www.webase.com](https://www.webase.com)

</comment><comment><USER10> ArcartaPay [https://arcartapay.com/](https://arcartapay.com/)

Started off as an email a link to get paid with Stripe for art dealers but now has a focus on the due diligence and was well-timed with some EU money laundering regulations.

Growing revenue 150% month on month and will likely have to become my main source of income soon.

</comment><comment><USER11> www.checkbot.io

It's a Chrome extension that crawls and tests websites for SEO, speed and security best practices.</comment>


You never did math in high school - <AUTHOR> http://j2kun.svbtle.com/you-never-did-math-in-high-school <comment><USER3> Yes I did. Also:

 _when a freshman college student tells me that he was always good at math, it translates to "I was very good at following obscure steps to manipulate mysterious symbols, without any real understanding of what they mean."_

The most common complaint I hear about undergraduate students is that they _aren 't able to blindly manipulate symbols_, and consequently get hopelessly confused when they have to deal with "unintuitive" concepts.

<comment><USER4> It's even worse than that. It's more like "I was very good at doing enough of the practice/homework problems to memorize all the possible combinations of problems that will end up on the test."

<comment><USER5> Exactly. You have to remember who the loudest complainers in a school are - not the nerds, not the losers, but the _keeners_. The kids who play the game of earning marks instead of learning to think.

That's who the current system panders to, because they're the ones who scream loudest when it doesn't. And they find it morally offensive if you ever ask them to solve a problem that isn't _extremely_ similar to an example they've already seen.

And they're the ones who think they're "good at math". That's who highschool caters to because that's what standardized testing caters to and that's what the noisiest parents and students want... and teachers that have higher ideals are swimming up-stream if they want to actually challenge the kids.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The OP comes across as very fond of deriding the US schooling system, but proposes nothing beyond an egotistical assurance that _he_ can teach math well even though no one else can.

Math education is _not_ homogenous. People are not homogenous. Everyone experiences math in different ways both in school and in everyday life. Some people will simply memorize the steps necessary to solve problems. Some will actually grasp the theory behind the problem solving. Some will experience very little of what is considered "classic" high school math. (At my school, those who are not tracked into calculus or statistics as Seniors take a course that deals with things like formal logic. It actually seems really interesting.) The OP's blanket assertions are simply wrong.

Moreover, math is a massive field. The OP's claim that calculus and algebra are not math but that "pattern recognition" is is just absurd.

<comment><USER7> Jeremy is a phd student at UIC right now and I'm pretty sure he taught a few classes there.

As someone who moved to the states at 13 I have to agree with him. Most teachers in America are forced to prep their students for exams instead of teaching them how to think critically. Instead of building an intuition, students are forced to memorize rules and equations so that they can finish their standardized exams in time. The problems done in class and for hw are of the same format as the exams, with the numbers used being the only difference. I've seen plenty of college students get offended when a professor puts a problem on an exam that requires some critical thinking.

I did my math degree at a school that had a special program for future math teachers and they were consistently the worst performing students in my classes. Abstract Algebra was a disaster for them, most couldn't put together even the simplest proofs. With exams approaching, they all begged the professor to tell them which proofs they were required to memorize. Somehow I got by with perfect scores by understanding the content while they had a tough time pulling off anything above 20%.

<comment><USER8> The problem isn't prepping for exams, the problem is that the exams cover only mechanical transformation.

Put real problem solving on the exam and this goes away. Of course, then teachers who can't problem solve (most of them) will be up in arms...

<comment><USER7> That's exactly what I was getting at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that you're getting at a great point, but another contributing factor may be that high school has a different scheduling structure.

      High School:
        Classes/Week   = 5
        Time/Class     = 45 min
        HW Frequency   = Every Day or Every few Days
        Exam Frequency = Every Week or Every Couple Weeks

      University:
        Classes/Week   = 2 or 3 + Discussion
        Time/Class     = 90 or 120 min
        HW Frequency   = Every Week or Every Couple Weeks
        Exam Frequency = Every Month or 3 per Semester

All I am trying to say is that difficulty of material is not always the problem. Sometimes the system can be the problem. It's clear that university expects you to spend more time doing independent study given there is more time between sessions, yet many new students aren't accustomed to spending their free time this way.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. For me, the worst part about college was how everything was spaced out. Once you got into the zone, you didn't have that much time before you had to go to another class or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> See Lockhart's Lament for an in-depth view of the same argument: [http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsL...](http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf)

<comment><USER12> He actually summarizes and links to Lockhart's Lament in the first six paragraphs.

More interesting is his link near the end, about how he teaches graph theory to college students: [http://jeremykun.com/2011/06/26/teaching-mathematics- graph-t...](http://jeremykun.com/2011/06/26/teaching-mathematics-graph- theory/)

<comment><USER11> Whoops, I read to the end but missed that link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I remember my dad giving me the following problem on a long distance car ride:

An A4 sheet of paper, when folded in half, becomes an A3 sheet of paper with the exact same ratio of long side to short side. Given this information, can you figure out the what the ratio is?

I must of spent 3 hours of that car ride doodling on a piece of paper trying to nut out that problem with no additional information or tools, ultimately unsuccessfully.

To this day, I think that was when the light switch went off for me about math as a creative problem solving endeavor and not just a rote series of calculations.

<comment><USER14> Interesting, I'd never thought about this before. In case you (or anyone else) are still wondering...

If an A3 sheet is X units by Y units (with X the long side) and A4 is 2Y units by X units then their ratios are X/Y and 2Y/X, respectively. If these are equal we have

2Y/X = X/Y

cross multiplying gives

2Y^2 = X^2

rearranging and taking a square root (X and Y are positive) gives

X/Y = sqrt(2).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have tough that education must be more integrated. Take for example, the Pythagoras theorem. Is a boring fact, with null use...

Wait!

If somebody tell me before that I can use it for get out of a jungle... I could have listen better.

The class could have started like this:

"You were traveling in plane, when suddenly, it crashed. Nobody else survived. You don't know where you are. It look like a jungle. Not civilization around, no cellphone, nothing. You will die in 1 week if not reach civilization. How can you escape?"

And if in history (at the same time that in maths) we talk about the man (Pythagoras), and about the compass. Then in social about the problems in traveling in the ancient cultures. Geography about maps. In artist class ( _" Art" class was more about technical diagrams for me, we never ever do oleo or similar stuff_), how draw maps and in spanish build histories about it. Then all the clases related to each other. Probably the math class must be the last of it, to make this build-up effective.

In short, all the classes connected around the _theme of the week_ or what are we doing at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER16> This just made me remember the whole class struglling with Riemann sums in Calc II, and Russian professor yelling "This is grade school calculus!" at us. Apparently Russians do Calculus in grade school.

<comment><USER17> Maybe not grade school, but calculus comes in tenth grade or so, if my memory is right. Quadratic equations are 8th grade, compared to 11th in North America.

It's actually telling of the quality of education, given that I did better in Math in college than in high school (in North America), and I still found it not anywhere rigorous enough.

<comment><USER18> There is no 'North America' when talking about education. There isn't even a 'United States'. The high school experience differs widely.

I went to public school in southeast Ohio. Quadratic equations (for me) were 8th grade. Calculus started midway through 10th, but didn't really get moving until 11th grade.

<comment><USER19> My US public high school did not offer calculus at all during my tenure. Resulted in very interesting conversations with university admissions departments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I remember reading a fun fact in an MIT faculty newsletter a few years ago: the amount of money that American students spend failing calculus — paying for the course and tutoring, then redoing it — is greater than the budget of Avatar (over $300 million).

Every year, our students spend the budget of a James Cameron film on failing to understand calculus...

</comment><comment><USER21> I taught a college pre-calc course for a short time. We had "show your work" exams, so I got to see how students solved problems. I think that many of them had been taught "test taking skills" in high school, including a method of finding answers to math problems by guess-and-try or process of elimination. Basically, their teachers had hacked the standardized testing process. (Probably including the AP exam).

Honestly, college math wasn't much better. Rather than confronting them with critical thought, we simply replaced the old hack with a new one:

1\. Recognize the "form" of the problem, corresponding to a section in the textbook.

2\. Plug the parameters of the problem into an equation solvable by the method of that section.

3\. Apply the method and write the answer.

When I realized this, I told my students about it.

There was a chapter on maxima and minima. But the only function they had learned was the quadratic, so all optimization problems boiled down to arranging things into a quadratic. The text had them graphing each quadratic. I decided it would be more interesting for the kids to see how we make our own formulas, so we derived one for the optimum of a quadratic function, and memorized it.

Now is this math or not? Well, I think there's a place in math that involves classifying the forms of expressions and equations, sort of like taxonomy in biology. But it shouldn't be the only thing.

</comment><comment><USER22> Any good books, or online resources, people can recommend on _actually_ doing maths for people from a non-maths background?

I mean this is an old refrain, and not one I disagree with, but it's missing the positive side of the argument.

<comment><USER23> BOOK OF PROOF: [http://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/index.html](http://www.people.vcu.edu/~rhammack/BookOfProof/index.html)

Foundations of Higher Mathematics: [http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Higher- Mathematics-Peter-F...](http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Higher-Mathematics- Peter-Fletcher/dp/053495166X)

How to Solve It: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Solve_It)

EDIT:

Mathematical Reasoning: Writing and Proof: [https://sites.google.com/site/mathematicalreasoning3ed/](https://sites.google.com/site/mathematicalreasoning3ed/)

<comment><USER24> I used Foundations as a text in college, but I think it may be out of print now. At more than $200 there may be more reasonable choices. Might be an option from Dover that covers similar material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to disagree with this.

For example, he attacks geometric proofs. Obviously, geometric proofs are useless and pointless, except that they represent a very simple and intuitive sandbox for learning proofs. Which is fantastic. How better would you teach kids to understand what math _means_ beyond arithmetic? You give them a bunch of simple rules that make obvious sense, and then show them how you can use those to prove non-obvious things.

Our curriculum has all but dropped geometric proofs and the kids are poorer for it.

I think our curriculum here in North America (I'm in Ontario, but I imagine Americans have very similar classes) is fine - the problem is that people are afraid to make the problems really hard and force the students to really stretch their skills beyond just "same as the example but change the numbers". That's what's missing, not some esoteric subject matter, just taking the existing tools in the existing toolbox and pushing the kids to build _higher_ instead of _more_.

<comment><USER25> It's the way geometry is taught, not the content, that is the problem. This is essentially the argument for all types of math; they aren't "math" because they're taught in a way that removes all the math and leaves... what exactly?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Jeremy has put together some of the best graph theory educational notes, and I refer to his website a lot when I'm trying to show teachers how to infuse something abstract and meaningful into their traditional mathematics education. I highly recommend checking out his work, he really exemplifies modern mathematical education.

</comment><comment><USER27> Well, I sure wish this article had more explaining of what we should actually teach, instead of "go read this other article". I was waiting for the point but it wasn't there.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nonsense. I did four years of math in high school, and it really was 'math'. It wasn't all research or 'critical thinking', but I didn't memorize "steps" either -- I have an awful 'rote' memory, at least without some oral hints.

And I did fine with math later on, in including my Ph.D. in applied math (stochastic optimal control) and peer reviewed publications in applied math -- with theorems and proofs.

The OP has a small point but takes it way, way too far.

</comment><comment><USER29> This may be true but personally I have found that the mathematics I was taught was good enough for most purposes.

People learn how to drive a car by doing it. They aren't encouraged to discover the laws of combustion or shown the magic of kinematics. They just learn how to press the petals.

<comment><USER30> Well yes, but understanding the math is the important part for most people unless they use it daily, while in driving a car it doesn't matter much as long as you can drive it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, I observed that the inverse seemed to be true in college (I was a computer science major). People (mostly math majors) who were _very good_ math students, meaning they breezed through the college calc courses, struggled when we met again in more CS-relevant classes like Discrete Mathematics and Algebraic Structures. It should be troubling to any educator to see people excel at Calc 2 integrations, yet struggle to accomplish much simpler (at least to me) tasks like proving that the product of two even integers is an even integer.

<comment><USER31> > struggle to accomplish much simpler (at least to me) tasks like proving that > the product of two even integers is an even integer.

I always see articles that claim I didn't do math in high school, and then people talk about things like this. I did this in high school. In the US. In 2001.

Literally, one of our test questions was: (a) prove the product of two even numbers is even (b) prove the product of two odd numbers is odd (c) prove the product of an odd and even number is even

And this wasn't regurgitating a proof we learned in class or had on homework, it was a question we had not seen before.

Blanket statements about what people see and don't see in high school are worthless.

<comment><USER4> I didn't make any blanket statements. I simply didn't encounter any proofs in high school math courses, other than "geometric proofs" which weren't formal proofs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I definitely felt like my grade school education did me a disservice in the math department. I liken it to learning grammar for 12 years without ever writing an essay.

This is why I think programming should be taught starting in elementary school. It gives you an application for the math you need to learn. I never cared about learning algebra, calculus, or trigonometry until I started programming. Now I wish I had paid attention and now I am going back and self educating on the subjects in order to empower my programming.

</comment><comment><USER33> Other's have pointed this out already, but there is a need for everyone to learn symbol manipulation, geometric representation, and 5 line arguments before mathematics mastered. Saying that this is not part of a complete mathematics education is saying that grammar and vocabulary are not part of an English education.

And yes, my school did mathematics in high school. We went through much of Euclid's Elements.

</comment><comment><USER34> My college experience was that teachers taught how to pass exams, as described in the article. But when asking the teacher _how_ the math worked, they were unable to _because they learned and were trained through the same system._ They didn't 'do' math or know math. They didn't possess the deeper understanding I was looking for someone to explain.

</comment><comment><USER35> The assumption that's explaining why high schools in America SUCK: "freshman calculus course".

In my school and country, we take calculus 1 & 2 in grade 11; that's two years before we go to college. In grade 12, we take differential equations.

<comment><USER36> Calculus is taught in high school. However, it is not mandatory/standard - <USER2> have to be on the college track, and it is skippable. (these are all general statements, different school districts make different choices).

For example, in my high school, in a fairly small rural school, we were taught calculus in senior year. I was bored, and did it sooner, but that was the general rule. We also had things like advanced placement biology, physics, and so on. Generally speaking, at the end of those courses you can take the optional AP tests, which allow you to skip the Physics I, Calc I&II, etc., that are the normal fare for freshmen.

I can't recall anyone who had diff eq taught in high school, though we really did end up using it anyway in advanced physics. To roughly sketch the limits of what we did, I remember needing Green's theorem, and having to prove things using elliptic integrals, but nothing much beyond that.

<comment><USER35> Interesting. When I came to college here in the US (CS, engineering department), I was rather shocked that most, if not all, engineering students came in with zero calculus or advanced physics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> He's spent _20 hours_ doing one-off lectures to high school math students, and he believes he's an expert teacher? He seems to have an interesting approach and can get the students intrigued, but giving an interesting hour-long presentation and teaching a high school class for a full year are very different things.

I'm not trying to be cynical or discouraging, but dial back the certainty in your genius methods a couple of notches until you've done more than just gotten kids interested for an hour.

</comment><comment><USER38> I love this article. I hated "Math" in school, loved in at university. Why don't they teach real Math at school?

</comment><comment><USER39> wish i'd known about this earlier. when i didn't get something i assumed i had to work harder. didn't realise i was supposed to blame the teacher. damn.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't like this kind of claim. Even calculation of 1+1 is math. To be constructive, instead of claiming what students learnt is not math (which actually is math), please articulate what you think needs to be added to high school math. However, please be aware that not everyone is expected to learn calculus after high school.

<comment><USER41> A lot of people separate "math" (the process of reasoning about structures or relations) from "arithmetic" (the process of calculating with numbers).

I think this is reasonable, as "math" is essentially just another name for "meta-arithmetic", and we draw similar boundaries between science and engineering, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wish I would have known this in high school and college. I was convinced I sucked at math because I did poorly on math tests. It wasn't until I started programming that I realized I _was_ good at math; I was just bad at the chickenshit busy work they made us do in high school algebra and geometry.</comment>


Top PC RPGs (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9453 <comment><USER2> The 2019 update to this article is at [https://rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=11193](https://rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=11193)

</comment><comment><USER3> A large catalogue of pc rpgs with comments. Many of these were after my rpg- playing heyday.

I appreciate the high praise for Ultima IV Quest of the Avatar. I had it for SNES and remember the fighting being much too easy but otherwise interesting for the virtue ethics that are the heart of the game.

At the beginning (IIRC) a fortune teller asks you to make choices which turn out not to be wrong or right but reflect preference of certain virtues over others. I believe this to reflect the case in reality.</comment>