The Trouble with Bright Kids - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/11/the_trouble_with_bright_kids.html?cm_sp=most_widget-_-default-_-The%20Trouble%20With%20Bright%20Kids <comment><USER2> The general idea here, "praise effort, not smartness", is pretty well backed by the research, I came across a similar study some years ago and they keep popping up. (Maybe it was the same one?) It's definitely made it into my mental catalog of parenting techniques should I ever have kids.

It also reflects my own personal experiences I think a lot of above-average- in-something people go through: at some point in their academic or professional lives, they hit a wall where their ability isn't enough and they don't have the mental discipline and other habits to put in the needed effort. Some things stop being fun and look suspiciously like _busywork_ even if it will help. (And sometimes it actually is unhelpful busywork.) I know some people eat up busywork, they just grind through it, personally I can't stand it and avoid it as long as I can. Nor have I found anyone suggesting a general solution to gaining a hard-worker attitude if you didn't develop one in your childhood, and it seems like a hard problem to solve since it's part of the wider motivation and procrastination problem.

Unfortunately the conclusion of the post is a bit too strong:

"No matter the ability — whether it's intelligence, creativity, self-control, charm, or athleticism — studies show them to be profoundly malleable. When it comes to mastering any skill, your experience, effort, and persistence matter a lot. So if you were a bright kid, it's time to toss out your (mistaken) belief about how ability works, embrace the fact that you can always improve, and reclaim the confidence to tackle any challenge that you lost so long ago."

Effort is insufficient, and great effort is not always necessary as those of us, who breezed through anything others struggled with, know. Ability is necessary though not sufficient. A 3-and-a-half foot tall person has no chance of being an NBA All Star, and I've witnessed not-very-smart students pour hours and hours into things like studying and still fail. Work smarter, not harder (though that requires you to be smart enough).

I remember Feynman reflecting on his art saying he didn't think it was very good, that he'd never in a hundred years rival a Renaissance master. Yet he still did it, probably because it was fun or interesting. Cultivating a spirit of playfulness and curiosity that produces effort in disguise seems more important to me than cultivating a spirit of effort for effort's sake.

<comment><USER3> Same story here. I was always the "bright kid" in school (and I got beat up quite often because of this : ) My environment (aunts, grand mothers, parents, teachers, friends, other pupils), always made sure that I knew this in some form or another. I was "smart" and excelled in all school classes, without effort.

One teacher once found personal gratification by grilling me for 1 hour in front of the class room: He set up an advanced math problem 4 years my senior and ridiculed me until I started to cry. "See, even you don't know everything". This happened when I was 11 years old. Yay for education professionals!

Now, as you said, there is always going to be a wall ahead. My parents have no college background so I was pretty much left alone after I finished high school. I enrolled with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Computer Science and bombed HARD. I was shy, I didn't know how to make friends, I failed at simnple administrative tasks required when growing up, couldn't support myself financially and on top of that the course material obviously wasn't going to be a walk in the park.

To this day I struggle with "boring" work and procrastination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could it be that the problem is not, the way we provide feedback to children, but that the expectations we place upon children has more to do with our own expectations than the child's innate ability?

Take a class of 30 children, they will have a wide range of intellectual abilities, ranging from borderline intellectually disabled to the highly gifted. Give them all the same task. Some will achieve well, and have no difficulty, one or two may not be able to complete the task without assistance. Take the same class the next day and have them perform the same task. Those who struggled will may perform better, those who completed the task the first time, will achieve the same result. Perform that same task for the next week or so, until the ones who struggled can perform the task. Now you will find that those children who initially had no problems with the task, have not even bothered to start it, and may well indeed be causing disruption in the class.

What I've described is what happens for most classes of children in most schools. The focus on ensuring all children reach some minimum performance in key areas has resulted in those children in the normal to high ability range are being shown that there is no value in being smart, as you are just going to have to do the same as everybody else anyway... so why bother?

The problem with Bright Kids is not that they never learn how to work hard on difficult tasks. It is that because they meet the minimum safety net requirements, they never are never even exposed to the difficult tasks, so is it any wonder that they grow to doubt the value of their abilities?

What I would love to see is every child in primary school be tested every year, for both potential and ability. This would allow Parents, Teachers and the students themselves to get an understanding of how hard the student is actually working. Are they really "smart" and bored out of their brains and therefore not meeting the academic requirements, or are they intellectually challenged, but through a lot of hard work, are achieving a reasonable standard?

Children do not all come from the same mould, why is it that we try to have them fit the same mould when it comes to education?

<comment><USER5> Anecdotes here and elsewhere (e.g. my own bright children) show they actually shy away from tasks they are not immediately good at! Because it contradicts what they've been told (Wow! you sure are smart!) they develop a 'sour grapes' attitude toward anything novel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Many commenters here mention that they were/are really bright but also undisciplined and miserable. This underlines something I've been thinking about a lot: that cognitive style accounts for a big chunk of life's success.

Think of the dumb-as-pigshit ladies' man or the happy-as-a-clam soccer mom who has life all figured out or the salesman who pulls in a ton of cash because he's really driven and doesn't give a fuck about rejection. Then think of the miserable yet brilliant nerd languishing in some dank cave of an apartment because he can't figure life out. Forever Alone...

Then again, if the bright people could learn to adopt better cognitive styles, then they would be unstoppable. Smart people should be winning at life, not dwelling in the shadows as a kind of misunderstood race who push society's technological progress along yet never reap the benefits in terms of happiness.

What are some cognitive styles you wish you had?

<comment><USER7> > Then think of the miserable yet brilliant nerd languishing in some dank cave > of an apartment because he can't figure life out. Forever Alone...

As one of those nerds in his early 30s living all alone by himself in a 5x5m studio, what's so wrong with "not figuring life out" and instead only caring about what interests you most? :)

Mind you, I used to have a social life until not long ago (when I was still happily married to my soon to be ex-wife), but at some point along the road I read Seneca's "De Brevitate Vitae " (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Brevitate_Vitae_%28Seneca%29>) and I realized that much of what I was doing at the time was really meaningless and not what I really wanted to spend my time on. And then my wife did me a ton of good and left me :), but it was for the best, cause as Seneca was saying you cannot buy back time wasted on meaningless pursuits (acquiring riches, high political honors etc.).

<comment><USER6> """As one of those nerds in his early 30s living all alone by himself in a 5x5m studio, what's so wrong with "not figuring life out" and instead only caring about what interests you most? :)"""

Dude, that totally counts as "figuring it out" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What this article neglects is the ability of 'bright kids' to excuse themselves for giving up. Precisely because they're so bright, they can convince themselves very effectively that what is required of them for completing a certain task is too mundane for their 'smartness' or it is not worth the time.

More often than not, this ends up with a lot of lost potential, which is why startups are such good options, because any work involving them, is definitely not boring,and it HAS to be worth the kids' time because _they_ set out to work on it, and it wasn't mandated by any external authority like parents or schools.

<comment><USER9> It's interesting because throughout history nearly all tasks have been mundane, and it's only recently that this has changed. But smart kids often feel entitled to not do the mundane stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> At my school, we have a bit of a "culture of genius" problem. Many, if not most, of my classmates grew up being one of the smartest people they knew. This lead to the widespread (and maybe not untrue) belief that we can do things that other people simply cannot. This leads to a lot of students setting themselves up to fail (epic procrastination, expecting to do well on finals after never going to a class or studying) and most students eventually fail hard at least once, but there are enough success stories to keep the "culture of genius" alive.

This article addresses what happens when the students fail. As the article states, many of us seem to blame failure on not being smart enough rather than just not working hard enough. Personally, I hope I've made away from the genius fallacy. Interning at a startup (as well as competing in athletics growing up) have made it pretty clear that success is more a function of effort and persistence than innate ability.

As bane offered some advice at the end of his post, I guess my mantra could be "Being smart makes things possible, actually working hard makes things happen".

<comment><USER11> Right. IQ is only a measure of capacity to learn, not what you've spent time filling your brain with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Like others who have posted here, I have s story similar to this. By the sounds of it, I wouldn't call myself as "gifted" as some who have posted here but, relative to the environment I was in, I was "gifted".

I grew up in three small towns. For the first 9 years, in a town of less than 1,000 where the 3rd and 4th grades (for example) were in the same class.

When I was 8 I was doing the same work as the 7th graders without any real trouble. It's all this small school could really do for me. This was actually mostly OK. Sure I was largely around (much) older kids but it really wasn't as isolating as some other experiences posted here.

Next was a slightly larger town (5-10,000) for 4 years. In the 4th grade my spelling tested at the 10th grade+ (I ran out of "test"). In the 5th grade I was doing algebra and trigonometry. By the 7th grade I was doing calculus. Honestly, maths was really the only thing that interested me. Until that is my family got a computer we couldn't really afford (a VIC 20), which turned out to be fairly limited (much less so than the C64 that came after it).

I can distinctly remember at age 10 reasoning out that God didn't exist (I was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic primary school with nuns and everything).

It's in this period where I think it became first apparent just how socially well-adjusted I wasn't. I think it's fair to say I didn't particularly know how to relate to others. Honestly, I'm not sure that still isn't true.

By 9 or so I could beat anyone I knew at Chess. Actually I think this was true at 7-8. Not that I knew anyone particularly good (not even remotely). Attempts to find a challenge from, say, chess AIs were pointless. They were pretty weak back then and tended to be defeated by going "off book".

Then came a move to a mining community of ~15-20,000, which I basically hated for the 5 years that constituted high school. The awkwardness and isolation from primary (elementary) school was compounded. It's always seemed to be that when it comes to social interactions and relationships, I somehow "missed out" on the instruction manual, or at least the training wheels, and the people around me were always speaking some language I just never understood.

I understood numbers and computers.

One of the problems was that I was _bored_. I found school so insanely easy. Nothing was really a challenge. I'd get told how smart I was. Only many years later did I fully appreciate just how much damage it does to be told you're smart. It demotivates you and isolates you.

I would fail assignments and classes because I didn't do them. Not because I couldn't do something but _something_ was never good enough. Or I'd fear the embarrassment and "humiliation" of not knowing something and having that pointed out to me.

I can remember having conversations with my parents where I'd bring home a 90% in a test and I'd get asked "what about the other 10%?" I don't think this was asked in a way to be mean. In a strange way, I think it was a weird way of showing pride because all you can "complain" about is a missing 10%. Whatever the case and in spite of well-meaning intentions, the message that was hammered in was that nothing ever seemed good enough.

My father was a fitter and turner in the British merchant navy. His father and grandfather were likewise tradesmen. My mother dropped out of high school (although her father was a school teacher and principal for much of his life).

Basically I don't think they knew what to do with me. Academic pursuits weren't something they were equipped to deal with. My two sisters were cut from the same cloth, neither being remotely academic and neither finishing high school.

I took notes in class but never looked at them again. Either I didn't need to (particularly for maths) or I didn't care to (eg human biology). I never really learned how to study. I can remember scoring 85% in multiple choice exams for subjects I knew nothing about just by figuring out the skills to pass such exams.

So after finally finishing high school I went to university.

It may sound strange but I don't think it ever occurred to me in high school that I might do computer programming for a living. It's not like thought about it and either wanted to or didn't. I never even pondered the question.

I ended up applying to do a science/engineering double degree because it looked hard. A bunch of other people in my class also ended up applying for engineering because they didn't know what to do either but, as I learned years later, I seemed (to them) to know what I was doing. I have to wonder what they would've become had I gone to school elsewhere.

Whereas high school was structured, university was not. Nobody checked your attendance. Painful shyness quickly caused me to avoid going to lectures altogether. I was completely unequipped for university.

I barely skated through first year and bombed out in second year (when you actually had to work). Some years later, work finally cured me of many of the aspects of painful shyness (eg standing up in front of people and giving presentations).

At one point my parents thought to send me to boarding school (in a 1 million+ city). I fought this and deeply regret it. It was an unknown. I wonder how much better I could've done if I'd been put in an environment where academic excellence wasn't a recipe for instantly being ostracized (as it was in my shitty state high school).

Likewise I wish I'd stuck with university long enough to find some guidance and mentoring. All in all it feels like I drifted through the system and eventually fell through the cracks.

At no point did I ever really find people like me either. Through primary and high school, the towns seemed too small for that. The university had a computer club but I found that lot, as a whole, to be a pretentious lot with whom I had precious little in common. It seemed like university just had a different cookie-cutter mold for the "in" group.

Largely I was left alone (something I realize I quite clearly contributed to). To me though that seemed to be an improvement from high school so I just went with it.

Now my sisters both have children and I see them both laud their children by telling them "you're so smart". I try to tell them how damaging this is and they shouldn't but they just don't get it. Old habits kick in.

I envy those people who grew up in households where at least one parent had gotten a college degree (a friend I later made had a PhD in lithography stuff, 3 members of his immediate family had PhDs and a great uncle or something won the Nobel Prize for Physics a number of years ago).

I really don't have a solution here other than to hammer in the point: _stop telling children they're smart_. I don't think I'm any kind of genius but it certainly did me absolutely no good at all.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for sharing this. I have a bright five year-old and, having read articles like this one, my partner and I try praise effort as much as we can.

Here's the problem. For nearly all of the tasks she's set in school, she doesn't need to expend much effort at all. We say, "nice work, you must have tried really hard!" and she replies, a little confused at us, "no".

It sounds like you found everything too easy as well. What kind of feedback would have worked for you?

<comment><USER14> I can't speak for your child of course, but I can give you a little story. My wife and I went to the same schools since kindergarden (not same class) to university, so the topics and difficulty were about the same. She always had fantastic grades (90%+) and she got the encouragement that parents usually do ("You're so smart!", "Ohhh yes, she is very smart, she had a 100% on X"). I on the other hand, was an above average but didn't care much so my grades were just a bit better than average (70-80%) but something my father said always stuck with me "I don't want/need you to be a genius, just work hard." That's about what I remember of my parents parenting technique: "Just work hard".

Now, I'm 29, and never excelled at school, dropped out of University after one year, travel across Europe working as a programmer in many interesting projects and can say I live a normal balanced life. I don't dwell much on problems, and accept that things change and I can change.

My wife on the other hand, she has very low self esteem mostly because she believes that what she does is what she is. She can't change it. If she forgets about something she says she is dumb. If she breaks a glass, she says she is clumsy, and has a very hard time believing these things can change. She is stuck at a miserable job because she is too afraid to move and fail at the new one (even though she had better offers). She can't really separate what she 'is' from what she can become. For her, mostly due to the way her parents praised as a child, she came to believe we are born a certain way and can't really change.

Long story to mostly tell you (though, I'm not a parent yet so I can't say I know what the hell I'm talking about) that as long as you can teach your kid that what we become is product of what we do, and not who we are born, she will probably be ok. Try to find thing you can point to hard work. She does her homework? Nice, then tell her next time she gets a good grade "Good thing you did all you homework, see how it payed up". She may still think it was easy, but she her subconscious will link hard work and results.

<comment><USER15> This reminds me very much of the Carol Dweck's theory on the Fixed and Growth Mindset[1].

I too, was raised on a Fixed Mindset; "You're not good at math/physics/chemistry? That's ok, I'm sure you have other skills.". This caused me some level of discomfort in trying new things (which are necessary for any sort of growth) because at some point I could just reach 'the end of the road' and the limit of 'talent'. This has often caused me to avoid new and challenging things altogether.

Since a year or so I've been trying to adapt the Growth Mindset by interrupting my thought process when I feel this discomfort and (often literally) say to myself that it is not the outcome that matters, but the chance to improve your skills and extend your abilities. Failure is not about you and it should just be a trigger to try harder; the road does not end. I still fall in the same traps I used to, but I've said Yes to more (challenging) things this year than any other year and I haven't 'failed' nearly as much as I thought I would, nor did the failures have the impact I feared them to have. Growth really is a marvelous (and endless) thing.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset_(book)>

<comment><USER14> Glad to see it is working for you! Just bought the book you mentioned for her. Maybe it will help her. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem with pop psychology is that it often is not _quite_ right. A half dozen decades ago, the "new idea" was that kids should not be beaten, but encouraged (spare the rod and spoil the child). In the last decade or two, we've learned that the _kind_ of praise you employ is important, and the advice now is to praise effort rather than innate ability.

Once you get into the real world, though, you learn that effort isn't as important as doing the right things well. School itself is teaching us the wrong thing, and this effort-praising business is compounding it. Trying _really_ hard at History when you don't like it isn't going to make your life much better in the long run, it's just going to be hours and hours that could have been spent furthering some other ability or otherwise enjoying childhood.

In a couple more decades, we'll have a shiny new experiment that shows that praising effort has ruined a couple generations, teaching them that life is nothing but hard work, soldiering through undesirable situations without considering importance or relevance. We'll learn that we need to teach children reflection, to foster creativity, and to encourage curiosity. Then we'll learn that those kids don't work hard enough, and the parenting industry will roll on...

Rural parents have had it right for generations. Making kids play outside, giving them real responsibilities (e.g., necessary farm chores), and teaching them a variety of skills outside the classroom is practically guaranteed to result in well-rounded, well-adjusted children. You don't need to read the latest parenting mumbo-jumbo to know how to raise a kid.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't know if it's a sign of some neurotic behavior, but I hate it when people use the word bright. And, for whatever reason, they use it a lot. I find it patronizing if not placating--especially when my work isn't appreciated by people that rationally couldn't possibly appreciate it on a deep level without me interpreting it for them (i.e. not their fault).

It always feels like a qualifier or platitude. "I know you're bright, but". Everybody says you should sell yourself, but as a child I always tried to NOT sell myself. I just wanted to get by with minimal effort, because those endevours (e.g. school) were meaningless to me beyond a score that may aid in perusing things I care about. I always felt like the bar was set low because kids in general don't try. There was zero advantage to distinguishing one's self other than higher expectations for the same, hollow A.

There's one particular example that always sticks with me. I remember taking Spanish from a charming, eccentric Argentinian woman. The work was simple, so I began to embellish the little side projects and essays. Why not? I had nothing else to do with the remaining 30 minutes of class. I turned in work; I got good grades. No misunderstanding.

But, eventually, I got bored and just did enough to satisfy an A. My heart just wasn't into embellishing Juan's illustrious adventure at the hospital. It didn't garner anything more. There wasn't an A++ or Super A.

During the next PTA meeting, my adorable Spanish teacher burst into tears. Why? Because I wasn't trying anymore. My heart just wasn't in it. Despite the fact 95% of the class gave no fucks whatsoever, my decline crushed her.

This fortified the notion, in my mind, that it's not worth being seen as bright or exceptional insofar it gains you nothing. It only means you are expected to do more for an A or the same baseline salary as that jerk-off you tutored Business Calculus to. If you can't sell it, don't do it. Yet, somehow, people always end up using that word -- bright. Again, I wonder if it's simply a nice way of saying idiosyncratic, since I try my hardest to not act "bright" in anyway. I simply try to not be dim-witted and do good work.

(I also find it somewhat worthless coming from most people, since I've known genius-level, 160-170IQ types. I'm nowhere near that realm of existence. And, yes, those people do live in a different world than us albeit sometimes not good).

</comment><comment><USER18> Bright kids put schools in a difficult position, to be sure. The biggest problem with them is they're still just kids. They may be high-IQ, but they've got kid-like focus, maturity, self-motivation, etc. It would be relatively easy to just take high-IQ children and let them tool around on their own, but that's not a good idea because they'll never learn study skills and organizational skills that are so necessary to succeed in the real world.

Gifted and talented programs are, of course, an option, but they cost money and even when they're available they're often too-little, too-late. Magnet high schools, for example, don't do much good when a kid has been figuring out who to avoid schoolwork to spare himself from the sheer boredom since kindergarten.

I think a good solution would be to develop specialized curricula for advanced students at the state or national level (segregated by area to account for students who are advanced in some areas but not others). Obviously it would be logistically impossible for teachers to teach and grade these different assignments, but gifted students tend to be able to self-teach, and grading should be purely based on effort anyway.

</comment><comment><USER11> Like many HNers, I was a pretty bright kid growing up. I scored embarrassingly well on most aptitude tests, and before entering middle school found myself the subject of repeated IQ, aptitude, learning style, personality style, thinking style, and psychological analysis by befuddled education specialists trying to figure out why I did so poorly in school.

Here's a sample of what I endured before entering 6th grade.

-6 IQ tests (the first when I was 4!)

-ITBS (I scored so high I had to take it twice, the second time isolated in a room with two observers since they thought I had cheated)

-MBTI - INTJ - I've taken this test at least a dozen times

-Keisey - I'm unfortunately a Mastermind

\- Holland - Strongly R-I-A

\- Various Thinking Style tests (abstract-to-concrete, abstract-sequential)

\- Hermann A-D

When I got to High School, I endured another battery of tests (3 more IQ tests), interviews and other ridiculous activities. I spent one day a week sequestered in a "gifted lab" where I was expected to produce works of art or something, but I found interminably contrived and boring.

Why did I do so bad in school despite these indicators of intelligence? I was miserable. From 1st grade on I was miserable. I hated school and everything about it. Arbitrary rules, boring wrote memorization, pep rallies, uninteresting subjects, teachers more inclined to deal with behavior issues in class than teach anything. I only bothered to attend instead of skip classes because the school had a decent liberal arts program (which was fun and had teachers that "understood" being miserable in school) and I helped start a poetry club with several other disaffected youths.

The truth is that I felt like, and in fact was, socially outcast by all of the special programs, tests, special classes, after school mentoring programs etc. I couldn't really enjoy talking with other kids my age in the normal classes and getting involved in "special" classes instantly cast you as an outcast.

After enduring all that I never bothered to take the PSATs, SATs, GREs. I didn't care. I was done being tested, probed and made to do what others wanted in the interest of nurturing my potential.

The truth is that, as a smart, self motivated kid, I kept myself plenty occupied by intellectual pursuits. Just outside of school. I built computers, wrote software, wrote music (often in math class), performed in community orchestras, drew in pencil, created alphabets, painted, studied a couple martial arts, read an extraordinary number of books, played piano for modern dance recitals, published poetry, got heavily involved in the demoscene. School was to be endured, not to succeed in.

When I turned 15 I started feeling hopelessly trapped in a system and a world I couldn't escape. Buoyed by my "successes" in various IQ/Aptitude tests, I thought the world just didn't "get" me. I started having suicidal thoughts. At 16 I found myself thinking seriously about killing myself. I spent more than one night at my sink with a kitchen knife at my wrist wondering if I should go ahead and make the cut or not. It was not a good place to be. I was saved by my music, and ability to experience _frisson_ (as weird as it sounds).

I did plenty of extracurricular I suppose, just none that would work on a university application.

Kids who succeeded in school were "losers" (I mistakenly thought), since they didn't have the inner light that led to self-creation (or so I thought). Regurgitation of endless facts and conforming to what the teachers wanted did not impress me.

Despite being extraordinarily bright, I was also hopelessly naive.

After graduating HS ( _just_ barely). I took a couple years off to find myself and to grow up a little. The rarefied environment I grew up in (along with some family issues) just gave me no chance to do that -- my IQ was high, but my EQ was low.

If I could do it all over again? I'd do the normal classes with the normal kids. I'd avoid all of the tests and other nonsense. I'd join the baseball team and the debate club. Get a perfect SAT score and get into a top school. Selling out? Maybe. But I think I'd have a been a lot less miserable and saved fighting the system for a later time.

Why did I do so poorly in school despite the tests? It was probably the tests. I was told I was so smart so many times that the effect mentioned in this article seems particularly germane. I didn't work hard, so I didn't do well, but I tested high, so I thought the system was broken, not me. I was _already_ smart, so I didn't need that fact positively reinforced, but I did need instances of hard work reinforced. I had no work ethic coming out of high school, I simply did things that interested me and dropped things that didn't.

I've thankfully grown out of many of these things, and the mantra I've used is simple, "If you're so smart, you should be able to figure out how to <insert problem>." If it's doing well in school, socializing well, working hard, etc. I try and overcome my problem with that simply phrase. It sounds silly, but it works and I wish I had known it growing up. I would have been a lot happier.

<comment><USER8> My god, this sounds so much like me! Although I'm not always miserable, only I'd always done well in school except for the last two years when everything just got very, very boring.

I graduate this year, and everything you've said in: > _At 16 I found myself thinking seriously about killing myself. I spent more than one night at my sink with a kitchen knife at my wrist wondering if I should go ahead and make the cut or not. It was not a good place to be. I was saved by my music, and ability to experience frisson (as weird as it sounds). I did plenty of extracurricular I suppose, just none that would work on a university application. Kids who succeeded in school were "losers" (I mistakenly thought), since they didn't have the inner light that led to self-creation (or so I thought). Regurgitation of endless facts and conforming to what the teachers wanted did not impress me. Despite being extraordinarily bright, I was also hopelessly naive._ Applies to me.

Could you please tell me how you got yourself out of this? I'm quite desperate here.

<comment><USER11> It sounds hopelessly stupid, but it saved me. I'm one of the few percentage of the population that can _frisson_ to certain works of music.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson>

When I was sitting there, knife to my wrist, the thought of all of the music that I would miss, that I wouldn't discover or be able to frisson to (I didn't know what it was called at the time and only learned what it was decades later, but I knew it was very real for me) was the one thing I couldn't accept.

I've never regretted that decision.

What I've found is that outside of academia, the real world problems are _so_ messy, and so complicated, that it takes all of my intelligence to work on those problems _and_ deal with other messy soft issues, like selling my ideas to higher ups, or balancing financials against employees, are so intellectually stimulating that it literally "gets better" if you have the drive and will to find a line of work where you get to work on interesting problems.

(I've always thought the wonderful "it gets better" ads do a disservice to other disaffected members of society by not talking specifically to us, even if the message it true for more than the community they target)

As a matter of fact, it doesn't just get better, it gets awesome. I've gotten a job I never get bored of, I got the girl, I get a pretty nice paycheck, live a nice life, travel as much as I want to wherever I feel like (see the world!), and always work to write a novel of my life that I'd find interesting.

Just remember, if you are as smart as they say you are, you can figure out how to solve your own problems. Not popular at school? That's a solvable problem. No girlfriend? Solvable. Bad grades? You can solve it. Your mind is your most powerful and flexible asset, you can use it to do anything you really put your mind to, even things that don't come naturally once you solve the problem of learning how to grind on boring stuff.

<comment><USER19> I had no idea frissoning was a unique thing. How repeatable is it for you? I've felt it countless times from music or moments in film or life in general when I experience something that is particularly profound or impressive on a visceral level. It's not a daily occurrence though. I've usually attributed it to the feeling of getting a surge of adrenaline. Interesting.

<comment><USER20> I can't repeat it much. I don't go chasing after it; I let it find me. It isn't something you can conjure up over and over. You feel like you are in contact with beauty itself, and then you are forever changed. The experience is fleeting, but I remain grateful for it when it happens.

In my case I found it in some music that I found at the exact right moment in my life and it served as a sort of pivot point to open myself up to life more. It's hard to know what caused what exactly; I don't believe it necessary to boil it down to something that would appease the cynics of the world. I instead see it as something of an omen: that I'd one day be able to participate in this thing called music.

It's a long road, but I thank you for reminding me of it.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like a mystical experience. Maybe something to look into?

<comment><USER21> If anything, I'd describe the experience (if what I experience is the same thing) as similar to, if not the same thing as, a small shot of endorphins dumped directly into the base of your neck.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I've experienced it.

Are you saying it's not commonly experienced?

<comment><USER21> I personally have no idea if it is common or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yes, praising students for their effort is a good way to encourage them to keep trying. But is this necessarily a good thing?

I see far too many students entering postsecondary education who shouldn't be there. No matter how hard they try, they just can't grasp the basic concepts. And when they inevitably fail, they fall back on what they were praised for as children -- "but I worked so hard!" -- as if they deserve to receive a degree on the basis of effort alone.

Sure, it's useful to remind smart kids that they need both brains and effort. But don't make the dumb kids think that effort alone is enough to get them where they want to go.

<comment><USER23> I'm not going to disagree with the meaning behind your post, but I am going to disagree with the wording.

Calling kids who shouldn't be in university dumb is incredibly harmful and reinforces the idea that you need some sort of Bachelor's degree to be successful, not-stupid, a real adult, etc. That attitude only encourages people who really should enter a trade get a random arts degree instead which causes them far more misery in the long run.

Besides, effort is not enough for smart people either -- for some careers, you'll need a variety of talents that even for a "smart" person may be difficult or slow to develop: people skills, aesthetic sense, artistic control, etc. Not to mention some people have an easy time with biology and have no trouble at all going through med school but find calculus hellish, and people who are the exact opposite. If anything, the whole "If you believe in yourself and work hard, you can go anywhere!"-attitude has a chance of backfiring with everyone.

<comment><USER22> _Calling kids who shouldn't be in university dumb is incredibly harmful..._

Only because you attach a value judgement to the word. I'm just calling a spade a spade; problems only arise when people think it's impossible for stupid people to be happy or successful (despite large volumes of evidence to the contrary).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A good professional life's about follow through. No one cares what you were smart enough to do, only what you've done.

I'm just learning that now at 26.

</comment><comment><USER25> [http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-New-Psychology-Success- ebook/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-New-Psychology-Success- ebook/dp/B000FCKPHG/) does a really good job exploring this.

</comment><comment><USER26> This article gives much more info on this topic. " Inverse Power of praise" <http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/27840/>

</comment><comment><USER27> I've read upwards of 140 comments, and have yet to stumble on some kind of _solution_ for those of us who fell into the "smart praise" category as children. Is there some way to flip the proverbial work-ethic switch in your mid-twenties (or later) or are we doomed to a life of self-doubt and avoiding anything remotely challenging that we're not already proficient in?

</comment><comment><USER28> I was always a Bright kid.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow... That hit close to home for me. I've always felt this way and I'm afraid to fail. I overachieve always to try overcompensate for the feeling that if I fail then I'm not smart enough.

I never overachieved in school, I think I was mostly bored but was always told I was "smart" and "bright." Jebus, that really hit a nerve.

</comment><comment><USER30> Where is the study showing intelligence to be profoundly malleable?

IQ is one of the more heritable traits, from what I've heard.

</comment><comment><USER31> Feeling a lot of kinship with many commenters in this thread. High grades without trying; honor/gifted classes from a young age (at the private school I went to, we had those starting in first grade. You were put into a class with a teacher and only 2-3 other students); breezed through tests without studying (thankfully this did not impact my work habits later on - as soon as I started working on challenging, real-world problems I became a workaholic); aloofness; extreme precociousness; a burning hatred of childhood (I wanted to be an adult to have something like freedom. I remember it feeling so unfair that large numbers of "undeserving", irresponsible, cruel people got to be adults and I was stuck a child. No one else I knew could relate); and of course, suicidal ideation. It's interesting to ponder what our lives would have been like had people like the ones in this thread known each other at the time.

Anyway, I thought I'd add my "why I hated school as a gifted child" list to this thread: This applies to public and private schools, both of which I've attended. This is an NYC-based, personal, anecdotal perspective, and doesn't feature any sort of statistical rigor.

* Co-student apathy, class disruptiveness, and disinterest. Seeing other students cheat, fall asleep, space out, not participate, and fail horribly can be a motivation killer.

* A predilection toward violence by many students/the constant threat of getting "jumped" (less of an issue at private, but not completely eliminated)

* Overcrowded classrooms

* Teaching to the lowest common denominator. No attempt at tailoring education to individuals or logical groups.

* At times, more time spent on attempting to restore order than teaching

* A habit of blaming "everyone involved" (i.e., anyone in the vicinity) instead of attempting to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of activities that were against regulations. A very "short-cutty" attitude towards determining any sort of blame. Nothing resembling due process and no requirements for sound evidence. "10 guilty men go free" had no meaning.

* Little to no coverage of the source theories or practical future applications of subjects. Much focus on facts, figures, and formulas without any attempt at relating it to the real world, past, present, or future. "Real world" examples tended to be laughably contrived. Attempting to glean information about sources/reasoning for the thing's existence often met with angry stares ("you're causing us to veer off the subject and confusing people!") or simply stopped cold ("it doesn't matter, just learn it").

* Poor facilities and equipment (not an issue at private)

* Alternately attempting to paint the currently taught education as a personal enrichment experience ("it's for your own good") or a necessity for future survival ("learn this or you'll sleep in the street"). Neither perspective was accompanied by anything resembling _why_ or _how_ it was beneficial.

* A jarring, cacophonous, impersonal, zoo-like atmosphere. Getting up early, waiting outside in the cold/heat, being stuffed into classrooms/buses/lunchrooms with people who had horrible hygiene; disgusting habits; were loud and obnoxious; were dramatic, crying, whining, moping children; were four feet tall and no life experience, yet filled with endless arrogance and bravado. Blaring bells going off when you're still half asleep. If you were precocious/mature, you tended to feel very uncomfortable and out of place. Arguments about this being like the "real world" are complete and utter nonsense; if I don't like a place of work or other institution, I go somewhere else that I like better.

* Absolutely horrible food (even at private school!)

* Far too much focus on testing rather than the ability to understand and apply knowledge (which goes right along with not attempting to teach how said knowledge could be usefully applied).

* Lack of depth. I've learned (and continue to learn) more about subjects researching them on my own than I ever learned about them in school. Perhaps that's a given considering how much time we can personally spend on subjects outside of school, it still seems like schools could do a lot better job of it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Another deceptive title designed to attract clicks.

The problem is with how we attribute achievement, how we praise kids, not the kids themselves. But the title as written attracts more attention. The reader thinks, "What could possibly be wrong with the bright kids?" Click.

I'd argue this finding implicitly speaks to the way we view and value intelligence and ability. Seems to me we refuse to acknowledge effort is as useful as some sort of innate ability. Our dominant fascination (judging by scholarly and mass media publications) seems not to be with hard work, and achievement despite the odds, but instead with those who are "gifted" and do not need to work as hard as everyone else to achieve the same results.

Surprise! The bright kids are not as motivated. That's the revolutionary finding presented in this fluff HBR blog "content".

We go to great lengths to try to find such "innate" above average ability, to label and preselect "the bright kids", instead of devoting our attention toward motivating and rewarding _effort_, which in my opinion might ultimately harness more human potential in the aggregate than focusing excessively on "the bright kids".

Especially when you consider that the attention we place on ability and the "bright" label we give them could possibly lower their overall performance, if you believe what's suggested by this study.

<comment><USER8> > _We go to great lengths to try to find such "innate" above average ability, > to label and preselect "the bright kids", instead of putting our efforts > into motivating and rewarding _effort_, which just might ultimately harness > more human potential in the aggregate than just focusing on "the bright > kids", in my opinion._

That's true for the most part, however motivating bright kids doesn't take away from resources so much so that rewarding effort becomes unfeasible. Bright kids require a lot of motivation because either:

1) They tend to doubt their abilities, and because they're bright spend most of their time figuring out whether they're actually bright as stated in the article.

2) They get bored with ordinary mundane work, and so break away from any formal system of learning and seek for an outlet, which may turn out to be very productive, or because they're so young, it may be counterproductive and result in them going back to point 1.

<comment><USER32> Very true. For how to "solve" those problems in education I have never had any decent ideas. No doubt many readers here have experienced them first hand.

I just see a lot of attention on "innate" ability, who has it, and why, and less attention placed on effort. I think effort is underrated. That is my biased opinion.

Would anyone disagree that if bright kids were forced to have to expend more effort, they might themselves benefit, as they _might_ be more likely to see some of their true potential? No guarantees of course.</comment></comment></comment>


Sonar enters the third dimension - <AUTHOR> http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2008/07/03/sonar-enters-the-third-dimension/ <comment><USER2> I saw the CEO speak about it at a conference recently, the stuff seemed fairly impressive. They definitely have a nice environmentalist streak running in them too, save the oceans through technology etc. Seemed like fairly commodity computers behind an array of sonar senders, but the real key was algorithms.</comment>


Distracer.io – Browser distributed ray tracing - <AUTHOR> http://distracer.io/ <comment><USER2> This is based on the Ray Tracer I worked on for a school project. Here's the technical report if you are interested :) [http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/javascript/javascript-ray- tracer....](http://blog.vjeux.com/2012/javascript/javascript-ray-tracer.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The underlying technology here is CrowdProcess ([https://crowdprocess.com/](https://crowdprocess.com/)). Their business model is to use CPU time of visitors of websites to make money, by selling access to that CPU power to people who want to run parallel jobs, like mine bitcoins.

I think they should consider the possibility of legal action against them, considering what happened to the guys doing this with a bitcoin miner: [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140205/17512926103/new- je...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140205/17512926103/new-jerseys- attorney-general-freaks-out-about-proof-of-concept-bitcoin-mining-app-issues- ridiculous-subpoena.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER4> This works fine when you're doing stills with simple scenes. When you've got GBs/TBs of external assets in the form of source geometry and texture data, all nodes need access to the same source data.

Once you start doing Monte Carlo path tracing and need decent sampling, you've also got to be careful that each node is generating the seeds for the random number generator correctly, otherwise you get patterns in the noise when you piece them back together.

For animated stuff, you're better off distributing the different frames across the nodes instead of splitting up each frame.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a huge waste of energy / calculation power, right?

I really, really understand the technical fancy behind this kind of parallel computing projects BUT have to imagine the wast of energy this would cause if really used for a real world calculation jobs compared with a dedicated server farm...

Or did the energy / calc-power realities change significantly lately?

<comment><USER6> What is the _energy / calc-power reality_?

Your own workstation and a dedicated server farm both waste power if they're under-utilized. So for server farms, we've consolidated with "clouds." Unfortunately your workstation still sits idle most of the time, so now this is just a really large cloud to schedule that capacity as well.

<comment><USER7> The power draw of my laptop under load versus typing this comment is almost 2:1. Under-utilized computers are not a waste of power, they're saving power. I'm especially not OK with unknowingly donating my battery capacity and limited cell data so CrowdProcess can sell it to someone while I read an article. This is just bad business for everyone involved (and the environment).

<comment><USER6> > Under-utilized computers are not a waste of power, they're saving power.

Does this mean we should fill homes and datacenters with a larger number of machines operating at fractional capacity in an effort to be more efficient than a smaller number fully utilized machines?

This citation, ceteris paribus, seems to disagree: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6128960/what-is-the- relat...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6128960/what-is-the-relation- between-cpu-utilization-and-energy-consumption)

> I'm especially not OK with unknowingly donating my battery capacity and > limited cell data so CrowdProcess can sell ...

That's fine, and I certainly agree, but it's _off-topic to my question and this thread_. I don't appreciate being summarily down-voted because every single comment is not in lock-step with berating the submitter on this point. There's a thread mentioning this, and I'm sure we all upvoted it.

Thanks.

<comment><USER7> Say you have a computational task you want to run.

You can run that on a single server for 1 minute, and use 5 watt-hours of power.

Or you can translate it to JavaScript and run it on 50 web browsers for a minute each, and use at least 50 watt-hours of power. That's what this would look like, since you lose so much to having to use JavaScript, not having a dedicated server-class CPU devoted to your task, and to overhead of transferring the data to/from the client. Heck, you'll waste a bunch of power just sending the code and data to clients that leave the page before sending back results, which means their slice of the work has to be run multiple times on multiple computers.

Same end result, 10+ times more electricity used, through a combination of having to do much more work, and doing it on much less efficient hardware. Money down the drain, pollution in the air. In reality the math is even worse than that for most tasks.

So, nobody's suggesting you fill homes with more PCs for some reason. The suggestion is to leave the PCs we already own alone, drawing a fraction of their maximum possible electric usage. If you're going to try to better utilize existing capacity, do it by buying spot instances on AWS for pennies per hour, because those machines will give you vastly more computation per watt. It would also be more power-efficient to add a brand new dedicated server to the data center for these tasks than to utilize visitor web browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For me on a rMBP the distributed render was twice as slow...

[http://f.cl.ly/items/3t2m1Z241x3E0X2o181L/Screen%20Shot%2020...](http://f.cl.ly/items/3t2m1Z241x3E0X2o181L/Screen%20Shot%202014-04-30%20at%202.30.54%20PM.png)

<comment><USER9> Idea is, probably, that the more distributed nodes the more in parallel they can do. Useful for lots of frames or large images. Neat idea to put it in a browser, but main trouble with making a production rendering is in implementation details and support for applications and shading networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If your internet connection is slow but your computer is modestly fast the CrowdProcess approach is demolished.

Internet capped at 100KB/s: [http://i.imgur.com/NhOiWCz.png](http://i.imgur.com/NhOiWCz.png)

</comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunatly it killed my browser (Chrome latest) on my macbook, but nice project!

</comment><comment><USER12> 25s on my machine vs 12s across 16 machines and a load of bandwidth flying round the internet. Not ethically worth it.

<comment><USER6> So a more than doubling of performance is unethical because the internet is being used for its intended purpose? Can you elaborate on this criticism? I'm assuming your threshold for "ethical" is perhaps 10x?

<comment><USER13> That's quite the condescending comment.

The 'ethical' part is likely referring to using visitors' browsers/CPUs to do your compute work without getting consent.

Parent post also mentioned the bandwidth usage is high so you're not only using the CPU but using up a visitor's bandwidth (many of whom have low monthly limits).</comment></comment></comment>


Inside of an atom snapped - <AUTHOR> http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/8721115/Inside-of-an-atom-snapped/ <comment><USER2> Am I the only one very surprised at the scale? Millimeters? I would expect much, much smaller... am I reading this wrong?

<comment><USER3> While in this case, the microscope is apparently producing a magnified image of a hydrogen atom's orbital structure, it is possible for an atom to have a macrscopic size, although it normally only happens in deep space. It turns out that the mean radius if an electron relative to the proton in a hydrogen atom scales with the square of the principle quantum number, n [1].

Since the energy scales with one over the square of n, high-n states all have energies close to zero. A very tenuously bound electron, with a very large n, can reach macroscopic size scales. While the ground state of hydrogen is the only truly stable state, in tenuous environments with low collision rates, atoms can get "stuck" in excited states that only have very rare radiative transitions available. These sorts of very excited atoms are called Rydberg atoms [2].

[1] [http://info.phys.unm.edu/~ideutsch/Classes/Phys531F11/Proble...](http://info.phys.unm.edu/~ideutsch/Classes/Phys531F11/ProblemSets/Phys531_PS01.pdf)

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

<comment><USER4> Theoretically, how wide could an atomic radius get in deep space?

Or does that mean that there is an infinitesimally small chance a electron could be found very far away from the nucleus because there is nothing else for it to interact with in empty deep space?

(The physics problem you linked to is ___far_ __beyond my understanding)

<comment><USER3> I'm honestly not sure how large atoms can be, since there are an arbitrarily large number of high-n states in the limit where the electron is tenuously bound to the proton. I know that states with n ~ 100 are commonly observed (see Figure 3 of [1]) in Galactic and extragalactic star forming regions. This is because ionizing radiation creates a population of relatively recently recombined atoms where the electron happened to arrive in a high-n state.

It's not that the electron has an infinitesimally small chance to be observed far away from the nucleus - it's quite likely actually if it lives in a high-n state - it's that collisions rates are so low that the system is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. Section III of these notes [2] describe the physics of Rydberg aroms and the radio recombination lines we observe from them quite nicely.

[1] [http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/549/2/979/pdf/52126.web....](http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/549/2/979/pdf/52126.web.pdf)

[2] [http://www.ucolick.org/~krumholz/courses/spring10_ast230/not...](http://www.ucolick.org/~krumholz/courses/spring10_ast230/notes9.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> More details about the imaging techniques given in the article submitted yesterday:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767401>

</comment><comment><USER6> So shouldn't the electron density be a sphere? It has this strange ring around outside...

<comment><USER7> The 2D projection of a spherical shell isn't a uniform disc – it does indeed look more or less like a ring. (Consider the rough analogy of a swinging pendulum – it spends most of its time near the edges of its swing.)

<comment><USER8> An orbital is not a spherical shell.

Edit: These are probably higher energy states. e.g., the 6s orbital: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HydrogenOrbitalsN6L0M0.png>

edit 2: Previous comment was still not correct. More plots of electron density for different energy states: <http://cronodon.com/Atomic/AtomTech4.html>

<comment><USER7> From the page you linked: "Notice that the electron is most likely to be found at one Bohr radius from the centre, in approximate agreement with the classical atomic model." That's approximately a spherical shell.

Why would these be such high-energy states?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Jupyter notebooks for quantum computing - <AUTHOR> https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/2017/quantum-computing-jupyter-notebooks-python/ <comment><USER2> It's IBM guys, so 90% chance it's just marketing/sales BS.

<comment><USER3> IBM = BS in your book? Why? You could always download this stuff and try it out and see that it actually exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ...and there is non-ML me thinking IBM were back in the hardware game with some mysterious laptop containing some beast of a GPU.

</comment><comment><USER5> Quantum Battleships? A quantum game? I had not heard about this in spite of multiple trips a little way down the quantum computing rabbit hole. I'm curious, has anyone here played this game? Is it actually played for fun? Does the quantum nature of the game's mechanics actually change the fun-ness of the game? Or any other known game?</comment>


Graphic: The Output Gap and why it doesn't feel like a recovery - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/the-output-gap/index.html

<comment><USER2> clearly, the output gap is facebook's fault.</comment>


Ask HN: Are cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology innovative? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 1\. Money [finance] is a technology just like Communication and transportation. 2\. Now, If you think about it, computers and computer networks came around only recently whereas these 3 have been around for thousands of years. 3\. Each of these domains will/are being re-imagined / reconstructed as if they came after the dawn of computers. 4\. A car invented after computers will be a computer itself on the network while processing with a capablity to drive itself. 5\. Communicating with any human being on the planet face to face will approach epic cheapness as these humans will have a computer in their pocket with a camera while being on a network that allows this. 6\. Now, Extend this to money/finance, The currency and the network through which the currency flows have been separate entities for more than a millennia, i.e. Banks and the Fiat currency or USD on a Master Card/Visa network. 7\. Evolution of the above would be a network that moves money/value while solving the double-spend problem and still not centralized i.e. Trust shifting from institutions/Govt to the Decentralized network that allows for this. 8\. Bitcoin is the protocol/Network/Currency that is the culmination of this evolution of money.

If you want to dig more: [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36448501](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/36448501)

</comment><comment><USER3> This depends heavily on how you define "innovative". The vast majority of use cases people claim to be building blockchain/crypto solutions for would be better served by a basic database and some regulation changes to lower financial transaction fees. However, I would say the underlying technologies are innovative and can be impactful in the future if applied to right problems by people who aren't just speculators wanting to get rich quick.</comment>


Show HN: Find the visual center of your images - <AUTHOR> http://javier.xyz/visual-center/ <comment><USER2> Very cool, would be interesting to have this combined with a visual center for face detection for the purpose of circular avatars.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty cool. The average color calc for the background is a nice touch.

Mind explaining what's happening in the background?</comment>


What Is DMCA - <AUTHOR> Can anyone let me know what is DMCA and when we can submit this? <comment><USER2> [https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act)</comment>


Insulin pump hacker says vendor Medtronic is ignoring security risk - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/25/insulin-pump-hacker-says-vendor-medtronic-is-ignoring-security-risk/

<comment><USER2> Medtronic is a local company in my town, and I know a LOT of people (including at least one other HN participant) who work there. It will be interesting to see what further follow-up there will be on this story. I wonder what form of authentication of signals to devices will be required by FDA regulation after this issue is explored in depth.

Note: one person I know in the medical device industry in this town points out that the whole medical device industry has a completely different orientation to bugs and hardware failures from most other industries. He used to work in civil passenger aviation avionics, where even one failure in millions of flights is unacceptable. The same point of view pervades the medical device industry--although sometimes more as an aspiration than as an actual accomplishment. Software writers for medical devices can expect full code reviews before a regulated device is approved by the FDA. Time to market is MUCH slower for a new medical device than for most new electronic products, because of all the regulated testing each new device must go through.</comment>


The long history of NSA and spying on US citizens - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/52361697693/a-tale-of-surveillance

<comment><USER2> This is a really excellent collection of facts and opinions that outlines just what we're up against as a "free" society.

I myself, for the past few months, have had this semi-conscious filter on what communications I send to people, and the fact that I have an internal process keeping check on my ideas and how/when they are expressed scares me. This just adds to the fear.

I had no idea the _extent_ of what kind of surveillance we were living under until reading this.

I think this is our next great battle as citizens of the United States. We've spent all of our free time giving up privacy and information to companies that are now funneling it to large spy networks. I believe it would behoove us to take a second look at our actions and how they act against us in the long run.

We are not truly free if we feel like there are eyes on us at all times.</comment>


Ask HN: Will you relocate to a place like Israel? - <AUTHOR>

We're a well funded biotech startup in the field of synthetic biology located in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Talent in Israel is abundant, however, there are two prominent American candidates we are really interested in hiring.
We haven't really made an approach yet, they both have families and relocation is a must, therefore we would like to know what we can do in our part to help them make the right choice :)
So my question is the following - What would make you relocate to a country like Israel?
In terms of benefits, vacation days, salary, housing, etc. <comment><USER2> Leave the political dimensions aside; any place is as risky.

Personally, I'd love a scenario where a startup helps me out in terms of travel costs, and maybe putting me up for a week while I find accommodation. Not very picky about vacation days much, but having a day or two off every month works, for now. The salary part's a little more complicated - it should take my current pay package into account, as well as extrapolate for currency differences, and consider the cost of living too. It's not a bomb, but it makes a huge difference knowing that you won't really go broke all of a sudden, in a foreign land.

In your case, though - relocation's not a great idea because it can get pretty tricky for both the candidates and you - if their families aren't adjusting to their new surroundings much, it'll affect the candidates, and thus, affect you in turn. I'd suggest exploring every option to make a remote-working scenario possible, and only using relocation as a last resort.

<comment><USER3> > putting me up for a week while I find accommodation

Depending on the market, a week in a foreign country is very short, especially with a family. I've known people moving US state to state who were put up a small number of months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If your company is located in (or near) Jaffa, you won't have any problem at all!

</comment><comment><USER5> The modern state of Israel was created so that it could be destroyed. It's part of a plan that was set in motion 130 years ago.

So the 'right choice' would be to not move there. You would be much better off relocating your company, yourself, and your families to somewhere safer.

Study history bruh.

<comment><USER6> "was created so that it could be destroyed"

[citation needed]

<comment><USER5> "The Second World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences between the Fascists and the political Zionists. This war must be brought about so that Nazism is destroyed and that the political Zionism be strong enough to institute a sovereign state of Israel in Palestine.

The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the "agentur" of the "Illuminati" between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other."

\--Albert Pike (Grand Commander of North American Freemasonry) August 15, 1871</comment></comment></comment>


Broken Performance Tools [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.brendangregg.com/Slides/QCon2015_Broken_Performance_Tools.pdf <comment><USER2> This is a nice summary of Linux performance monitoring tools.

What does he mean with his repeated question "Why isn't it 10x?"

<comment><USER3> If you benchmark a product and it does 13,000 req/sec (or whatever), then answer the question of why it isn't doing 130,000 req/sec. It's a way of encouraging you to debug it further.

<comment><USER2> Got it, thanks! For me the better question is often simply "Why is it X?" Knowing why the speed is X is often of much greater utility than simply knowing that X is the speed. I like to focus on determining the current single limiting factor before considering the harder question of what would be necessary to achieve 10x.

<comment><USER3> If you know the limiter, you know why it isn't 10x. It's CPU bound. It's disk bound and we're on a single disk. etc.

How do we actually make it 10x? is a follow on question, but as you say, not one that may be easy to answer!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: InstabotJS, an Instagram shitposting automation tool - <AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News,
I built a cli based Instagram automation tool for crossposting content from Reddit and submitting it as OC on Instagram. It works by parsing the Reddit API for fresh image content from target subreddits, and then it uses Puppeteer to simulate DOM traversal and post that content on Instagram from your user account. It also automates tasks such as following and refollowing users.
I built this out of a desire to practice using Puppeteer and conducting end to end tests. I'm really happy with the result of this project because it not only works as intended, but it also happens to be a very effective stress reliever to be able to post memes with the stroke of a cli command!
Check it out on NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/instabotjs
and on Github: https://github.com/fermidirak/instabotjs
Currently the project is licensed under WTFPL so feel free to go wild with it :)
Stack and important Technologies Used used: Node, Typescript, Puppeteer, CommanderJS, InquirerJS, Axios, Sharp
I hope somebody finds this project educational, or at the very least entertaining.
Cheers! -Dirak <comment><USER2> This looks really interesting!</comment>


Civic Tech Startup OpenGov Raises $25M, Adds Marc Andreessen to Board - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2015/10/15/civic-tech-startup-opengov-raises-25-million-adds-marc-andreessen-to-its-board/ <comment><USER2> (Nothing personal, Marc)

This is comical. Marc Andreesen is the least OpenGov-style person I can possibly think of. He is literally the definition of the American Oligarchy. When confronted with the Snowden revelations he said both that:

1\. Everyone knew that the government was doing this. 2\. That Snowden was a traitor.

Snowden's treason was only possible if the public _didn 't_ know what has been going on, so really this is code for "us guys with investments into company's that the INT organizations have contacted know what is really going on; we don't need a pesky whistle blower leaking it to the public".

OpenGov my ass.

"If you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor' there's a picture of Ed Snowden."

That is fucking Andreesen. He's not on our side. He's the enemy, in the same group as the banks that are corrupting our governments.

I get political realism / anarchy in international relations. I really do. I get how every telegraph ever sent is recorded in some American or British INT station.

But publicly shaming someone that validated that we essentially live in 1984 as a fucking traitor / criminal is despicable.

Some of us can't be bought. Some people don't care about money so much that they'll keep silent about assholes ruining our democracies.

Andreesen is just the one we have on record. Half of fucking wall street and Washington think like him.

And if you find this comment downvoted just remember that our intelligence agencies have tools to manipulate internet discussions:

[http://www.mintpressnews.com/new-snowden-docs-reveal- british...](http://www.mintpressnews.com/new-snowden-docs-reveal-british-spy- tactic-to-social-media/194034/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very happy for OpenGov, a note:

I interviewed with the team and learned about their projects. Speaking candidly, I was ecstatic and optimistic about a "civic" startup, that has potential to bring tech break throughs to neighborhoods and local governments; however their current projects didn't seem that exciting, they rubbed me off more as projects any appropriately marketed consulting shop could take.

<comment><USER4> Working with government is the ultimate schlep startup.

<comment><USER5> That hasn't been our experience at all.

1) You're working on something meaningful.

Look at what OpenGov is doing: making government financial data more transparent and accessible. Compare that with your average Yet-Another-Food- Delivery startup or "bringing the blockchain to an industry that doesn't need a blockchain."

2) The people you work for are unbelievably appreciative.

Every local government office we work with is so thankful for what we do. Basic features — scheduling an email reminder, scoping by geography, autocomplete — blows their minds. This goes back to (1), since you're helping them accomplish really meaningful objectives.

3) If you keep the hiring bar high, your team is incredible.

Passion is something you hear a lot about in the Valley, but how passionate can you really be about SnapChat. Maybe there are interesting challenges, but get a group together that wants to take on government and you're guaranteed to jump out of bed in the morning.

Precisely _because_ most people see working with governments to be a schlep, the ones who do self-select for passion.

<comment><USER6> may have been a reference to this essay

[http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great sign for the entire government technology space.

The potential for impact is massive. If we can save 1 hour per week for each of the 10.5 million local government employees, that unlocks 273,000 years of human potential every 12 months.

To rekindle love for public service, Seneca Systems is hiring in product design, front, and back end engineering.

Ruby, Elixir, React, Postgres, geospatial mapping.

[http://seneca.systems/careers](http://seneca.systems/careers)

<comment><USER7> If you've ever worked for or with a government entity, you'd find that saving time or money isn't a priority. In fact, departments try to spend as much as their budget as possible for fear they won't get as much next year.

<comment><USER5> We hear that assumption a lot, but it hasn't been the case in our experience (working with Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Baltimore, etc.).

At the local level, budgets matter. Even if you're going to spend your entire budget, spending less on tools frees up more budget to spend on other things. Things like community events, more staff, creating programs to engage or serve under-represented groups, commissioning cross-departmental studies.

Saving time absolutely matters. The common belief is that local government employees are lazy or incompetent. Again, we've never found that to be true. Many of them came into public service to serve their communities — no one gets into local government for fame or fortune — but were beaten down by the bureaucracy.

They are motivated to do good and better back office tools help them achieve their goals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was really hoping this project would be legislation voting and tracking for the people. I vaguely remember a project from 5 or so years ago that was called Open Gov based around legislation. Did OpenGov pivot? Maybe it was called something else.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, our non-profit project OpenGovernment.org, launched in Jan. 2011, is still available in open-source code for legislative tracking: [https://goo.gl/ThcG00](https://goo.gl/ThcG00). This includes the GovKit Ruby gem, which aggregates open government data with social context to make legislative info more accessible. We're always looking to re-boot OpenGovernment.org (OG for short) to focus on contacting state-level elected officials and discussing issues in the news on the open web - more about our goals of open data at every level of gov't: [http://opengovernment.org/pages/about.html](http://opengovernment.org/pages/about.html). And yes, as Derek said, check out Councilmatic for city-level transparency and engagement.</comment></comment>


Show HN: SubSync – Automatically download subtitles for your movies - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zerratar/SubSync <comment> dale-cooper How does this compare to subliminal ([https://github.com/Diaoul/subliminal](https://github.com/Diaoul/subliminal))?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no idea. I've honestly never heard of subliminal until just recently (yesterday) and I've never really tried it out.

But on first glance it seem like subliminal is more for developers in general as it provide apis to use it, it also have a bunch more providers than what SubSync currently have and most likely a much better way for guessing which subtitle is correct. It also seem to focus more on individual subtitles rather than trying to batch download them unlike SubSync. Although they do have support for downloading for a whole folder. How well that works I have no idea.

In the end, Subliminal have been in development for over 5 years and has been thoroughly tested. Whereas SubSync was a weekend project I made 2 weeks ago and never meant to compete with anything existing. I only knew I had a problem I needed to solve and wanted to share it with everyone :-)

TL;DR: I don't think SubSync offers anything unique over Subliminal at this moment. And if you're already used to using Subliminal you should keep doing so if that works good for you. :-)

<comment><USER2> I think the implication was more "why don't you incorporate subliminal support into SubSync, getting the best of both worlds?".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not sure about Plex and Kodi but Emby has a feature to automatically grab subtitles. It can search for the specific release (likely synchronised) or be more liberal with the added risk of getting a subtitle which doesn't sync. I think it uses Opensubtitles, and has no support for a different backend.

VLC uses Opensubtitles as well, but requires manual interaction. It can search for hash or name.

Both require an account (no API I think).

Subliminal you can run in a Docker environment (Emby as well, I suppose same with Plex and Kodi) to continuously grab subtitles for new releases.

Ideally, you want multiple providers for this. For example, Subscene and Addic7ed. AFAIK this isn't possible with any of the software I mentioned.

What I don't understand (actually, I think I do understand: it is because maintainers of subtitle platforms want to profit via ads) is why there's no incremental databases with subtitles (like we used to have with serials for software, forgot the name) so you can just select it offline. The amount of data is very little because its all text. With some compression and a database to search, it shouldn't cost a lot of resources. You can have a base, and then have incremental updates over that, with rebasing every once in a while. Kinda like HVSC (High Voltage Sid Collection).

</comment><comment><USER4> I used [https://subtitlesapp.com/](https://subtitlesapp.com/) for a while, but I think they started charging for it, so I stopped using any subtitles program.

Thanks for giving me an alternative :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you find this useful!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A tip if you want easy subs is to use Kodi. It has plug-ins for subtitle downloads so you just start playing the movie and go into a list of subs it found from subscene, opensubtitles or similar. Couldn't be easier.

<comment><USER6> Smplayer comes with this feature and it works very well too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice!

I will compile a list later of media players that has this feature and put it on SubSync github so it can help people out as much as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Be aware that this is a legal gray or even dark area, if your product becomes big you can expect to be hassled or sued by the media companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, which part of it? The fact it consumes from subscene.com without asking them or because downloading subtitles are illegal?

Reason why I'm asking is because I don't know, and obviously I don't feel like getting in trouble for a weekend hobby project.

<comment><USER7> In a way there is nothing illegal about offering links to another site. But subtitles are a derivative work of the original text so they are copyrighted and also you typically only need subtitles for movies obtained in a questionable way. So you immediately get involved in legally shady stuff.

The main problem is that if you get sued you stand to lose a lot of money, even if you eventually win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm using Media Player Classic with the k-lite codec pack, and there you can press D to download subs in specific languages

</comment><comment><USER9> Does this sync subs to the audio?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, not at the moment. It would be awesome If I could get that nailed. But that feels like it's a whole project of its own.

I'm exploring the idea though and doing some research on how this can be done. So it could be a feature for the future. :-)

<comment><USER10> Someone started such a project here: [https://machinelearnings.co/automatic- subtitle-synchronizati...](https://machinelearnings.co/automatic-subtitle- synchronization-e188a9275617) [https://github.com/AlbertoSabater/subtitle- synchronization](https://github.com/AlbertoSabater/subtitle-synchronization)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome findings! Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For mac you can use FlixTools which is pretty decent

</comment><comment><USER12> I use subdl on Linux, a simple command line tool.</comment>


Hundreds of bodies recovered in NYC not in Covid-19 counts even if symptomatic - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8208325/Bodies-recovered-NYC-homes-not-counted-COVID-death-toll.html <comment><USER2> Caution! it's the Daily Mail

<comment><USER3> If you want a more reliable source, there's an article in the NY Times this week about the same phenomenon.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/nyregion/new-york- coronav...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/nyregion/new-york-coronavirus- death-count.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And many other people died from an unrelated cause, but still count as a Corona death [https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/26/boys-death-no- longer-...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/26/boys-death-no-longer- counted-among-la-countys-virus-total/)</comment>