Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/indie-web/?mbid=social10797854 <comment><USER2> Most people commenting in this thread are missing the point. This is about giving you the ability to put your personal data on a server that you control first, and then having the ability to push it to cloud services you don't control (like Facebook, Twitter, Google apps) easily and selectively through those services' APIs. That way, from your perspective, all the "clouds" revolve around your personal server and they are all interchangeable and disposable to you, because you have all the data on your box and can just choose to push it somewhere else instead. It means you can use all the cloud services, but are no longer dependent on any one of them for storing your own data.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are some interesting interviews with people working on re-decentralising the web at [http://redecentralize.org/](http://redecentralize.org/) \- and there are more lined up for the coming weeks. Definitely worth a watch if you have the time.

<comment><USER4> [https://unhosted.org/](https://unhosted.org/) is also interesting

<comment><USER3> Just in case you didn't see it before - github.com/rossjones/alternative- internet has a list of platforms,protocols and suchlike that are in this sort of area.

<comment><USER5> [https://github.com/rossjones/alternative- internet](https://github.com/rossjones/alternative-internet)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Namecoin does a better job of jailbreaking the internet away from government controlled TLDs. There's already plenty of open source twitter and fb clones but one that runs over Gnunet would be interesting.

The not-so pocket sized server is cool and all, but it's running on what is essentially a blackbox with tightly sealed patents. Might as well just write an Android server in a dalvik VM and host off your phone what's the difference if we are going the blackbox route.

<comment><USER7> > They cobbled it together using a Raspberry Pi, a portable hard drive, and > the Camlistore software built by Fitzpatrick and Slatkin.

Do tell, how could something be _less_ black-boxy than that?

<comment><USER6> Something with at least hardware documentation. Pi is a bunch of binary blobs so might as well just make Android webservers, at least it will be a pocket sized bunch of sealed patents

<comment><USER8> _Pi is a bunch of binary blobs_

Wow, you have pretty high standards!

High standards are good.

A running platform is also good.

Raspberry Pi has 2 binary blobs - the boot blob & the GPU blob. Personally, I'd prefer if they weren't needed.

But I think the availability of a cheap, widely deployed and capable computing platform is more important.

Yes, there are other choices that could be made for the hardware. People should be encouraged to explore those other options.

Nevertheless I think the decision to build something on RaspberryPi is a good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why are people so interested in recreating a 'more open X' (where X is something like dropbox, skype etc...)? When these people could actually be iterating on these ideas and creating something different. Is it because there is lots of money/publicity surrounding this new found interest in "openness" or do these people actually believe that this is the most important thing to be working on? I am just trying to imagine what kind of new openness we could create if we began thinking outside of the framework that current applications provide already.

This is not not to say that they're not doing enough, but it's just a question that's been bouncing around in my head lately.

<comment><USER10> Here's my take on why open standards matter (from March '12):

[http://www.onebigfluke.com/2012/03/diversity-powers- growth-w...](http://www.onebigfluke.com/2012/03/diversity-powers-growth-why- open.html)

\- Open standards are important because they promote competition and diversity.

\- The opportunities of today exist because someone in the past thought about the long term.

\- Open standards are an investment in our collective future.

<comment><USER9> I totally agree, this isn't necessarily about the projects listed in the article. It is more of a reaction against the over abundance of announcements like "it's like X but open!" without really providing any significant openness over google drive or whatever it's attempting to replace.

After checking out the projects mentioned in the article I would definitely say that they don't fall into this category.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Jailbreak the Internet? The first talk of the video link below goes in that direction giving some real ideas. Discussing GNUnet and Psyc2.

Rather technical.

"You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one." by Christian Grothoff, Carlo von Lynx, Jacob Appelbaum, and Richard Stallman.

[https://gnunet.org/internetistschuld](https://gnunet.org/internetistschuld)

</comment><comment><USER12> What does this have to do with the internet? This is more about what people do with it, than how the internet actually works...

Frankly .onion sites are a bit more impressive than someone cobbling together a NAS and some random software.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you hack on this stuff, try to attend IndieWebCamp next year (or in the UK in September):

[http://indiewebcamp.com/](http://indiewebcamp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm so glad we're going back to the days of hosting a blog on your ADSL connection. Yay, freedom for my dat...! Shit, connection went out again.

A little black box with a big hard drive and a web server on it? It's called a NAS, they've been around for a while. Can someone explain to me how such talented people can come up with such stupid ideas?

<comment><USER14> maybe not the perfect solution, but at least they are trying to do something about it, and not just being a meek lamb

also being a techstar has its drawbacks.. people always spect more from them.. but technology its all about iteration, community, cooking ideas and getting back to the sketchpad to try something better..

we SHOULD do something about it, and i take my hat off, to whoever its trying to do something.. techstar or not.. brilliant or not..

the web has a tendency to centralization and one that is creating big black- hole titans that swallows everyone in between..

economically this means the beginning of end of the middle class, and a greater abism between the super rich and the poor..

so kudos to everyone trying to do something about that, and not just using because its fine.. there are "traps and tricks" in all of those free services that we happilly use for free

storage is cheap.. processor is cheap.. computers(pc/phones/tables) are getting cheaper and faster so why are we using and depending of obscure clouds that much?

<comment><USER15> >computers(pc/phones/tables) are getting cheaper and faster so why are we using and depending of obscure clouds that much?]

Because the infrastructure to support high availability is expensive and most efficient at scale. Proper backup, disaster recovery, redundant HVAC, redundant power, waterless fire suppression, real access control (not the $15 Kwikset lock on your front door), server-class hardware which is built to last for years rather than fly off the Best Buy shelves and get abandoned as far as updates within months like most Android phones. All of these things are expensive and difficult and necessary to support the model of computing currently in place.

I'm excited about renaissance of protocols like BitTorrent which are tolerant of failures of individual nodes, but you can't just take current client-server computing, move the server to your shitty residential ADSL connection, and call it a day. "Trying to do something" in this manner is actively harmful because people are going to lose data.

We need entirely different (not necessarily new) protocols and paradigms to have a truly decentralized Internet, and they aren't exactly mature yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Bigger guys may make you dependent, but smaller guys are easier for bullies to push around. I for one am not sold yet on the idea that these larger companies enjoy sharing data with the US government, and so I still think they're looking for ways to not have to do that if they're not literally compelled to.

<comment><USER17> Small guys can run away when they need to though. Just keep it cheap and disposable and abandon-able, like a image of your system you can spool up on plug n play commodity servers / free hosts and let the bullies spend their resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> now theres a label for the type of working i am doing.. "indie web", despite im doing something completely different, but with the same basic intentions..

</comment><comment><USER5> Do any of you know what/where their IRC channel information is? I'm interested in checking it out.

<comment><USER10> I believe it's #indiewebcamp on freenode

[http://indiewebcamp.com/IRC](http://indiewebcamp.com/IRC)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sounds more like they're making their own subtle jail on top of existing infrastructure. I wouldn't expect much from Wired, post 1999, anyway.</comment>


PCLOB Report on the NSA Finds Not a Single Terrorist Thwarted by Program - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/independent-review-board-says-nsa-phone-data-program-is-illegal-and-should-end/2014/01/22/4cebd470-83dd-11e3-bbe5-6a2a3141e3a9_story.html <comment><USER2> Please do not editorialize the titles of stories you submit to HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER3> Was the headline changed? The following quote is from the report the article is about:

> _"We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United > States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in > the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,"_</comment></comment>


Could You Have Passed the 8th Grade in 1895? Take a Look - <AUTHOR> http://people.moreheadstate.edu/fs/w.willis/eighthgrade.html <comment><USER2> If I remember correctly I was tested on stuff that is just as hard or harder at the end of 8th grade. Maybe with less rote memorization and more thinking, more opportunity to demonstrate that I actually understood everything [0].

Consider also that they talked about all those things prior to the exam. Could you pass it right now? Maybe not. Could you pass it after a few weeks learning about the material? With flying colors.

It's interesting to read the questions but certainly not at all indicative of any developments in the educational system. You need statistics and creative social scientists to find out something about that.

[0] I personally don't like rote memorization. I recognize that rote memorization can sometimes be useful – I don't need a calculator for simple multiplications – but I would much rather just understand something and develop from that understanding a clear picture of which facts are important enough to memorize.

<comment><USER3> Right, but this is basic, practical stuff for everyday life (except for the stuff about bushels and rods). Even though you can learn it and then pass, the fact that you are past 8th grade and cannot means your education is deficient (mine as well).

Rote memorization is underrated. Yes, memorization alone is useless, but critical thinking without anything to think about is also useless.

<comment><USER4> Disagree completely. I could only answer one or maybe two of the grammar questions and yet I speak and write English just fine. Honestly, I don't even know what the "Principle Parts" of a verb refer to and I certainly can't list them. What bearing does that have on anything?

<comment><USER5> It's always nice to be able to take a machine apart, see how it works, and put it back together successfully. Language is a tool used every day by everyone, but fewer and fewer people know how it actually works. I wish schools still taught grammar properly. I hardly learned anything about how English (or language in general) worked until I took a foreign language course in high school.

<comment><USER6> Some aspects of grammar are important, but it's important to reflect on the purpose of its study: The ability to construct a sentence that's cogent, clear and understandable both in writing and while speaking.

Some things are simply not important to know as a native speaker but still manage to get taught in English classes. A couple of examples:

1\. The different between "that" and "which" (e.g. The curtains that/which cover the windows). Either way is perfectly clear and rigid adherence to a correct "rule" is just language fascism.

2\. Terminology for many things that are specific to grammar are also pretty useless. Words like 'participle', 'split-infinitive', and 'gerund' (I literally had to look that up to remember it) are basically useless. Specifically from the test are phrases which obviously have been taught within the class, but don't have any real meaning outside of the concept it's teaching: "Parts of Speech" and "Define Case".

Grammar is only important insomuch as you can write and speak intelligently and coherently. Construction beyond that belongs in a linguistics class specifically focused on the mechanics of language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here comes the flame war about how our educational system has declined in the past hundred years. In an attempt to head that off at the pass (Hey, if you're going to have a cliché argument I get to use a cliché) here is the problem with that. This is a test designed to review the material deemed important by one person in 1895 (If it is really from then). The class would have gone over what "epochs into which U.S. History is divided". This is the same thing with the stupid joke that I always heard when I was doing calculus and adults were around "When I was growing up, you didn't have to spell out your math homework". That is code for "I have no idea what's going on here" and let's be honest, that is fine.

I would bet that most people who read this could have answered almost all of these questions at some point in their life. We have to remember that the purpose of education is to teach you how to learn and how to adjust to your current situations. You learn what you need to get the job done and you relearn what you can't remember to complete the job.

EDIT: It's good to see that Snopes already did this. Thank you Snopes and thanks glhaynes for pointing us to it.

<comment><USER8> More importantly, many of the test questions are dependent on rote memorization of facts that are nearly useless in the accomplishment of successful life. How many bushels in a tare? What is a "principle part" of a verb? These things can be found on Google. I have all the skills tested by this test, but lack some of the knowledge. Since my brain is just a cache for knowledge, I can always fault it in if the need arises.

<comment><USER9> I think of it more as a look at how different life was in 1895. You couldn't Google anything. A farm owner probably _would_ benefit from being able to do those math problems in his head.

BTW, tare isn't a unit: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tare_weight>

<comment><USER10> I think you are right about how it reflects a different time.

I doubt many average farmers kids made it through to 8th Grade though. Anyone who was taking the 8th Grade exam was probably reasonably wealthy, looking to continue studying, and take on a profession of some kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_...](http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED119389&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED119389): "By 1918, all states had passed school attendance legislation, although until the 1930s, many were unsuccessful in enforcing their compulsory schooling laws."

Comparing compulsory education standards to non-compulsory education standards is unfair and unenlightening. The forces affecting the school are so different they can not be said to be the same thing except inasmuch as they share the word "schooling".

I say this as one who is carefully refraining from going any deeper because I have as rich an opinion on the topic as anyone else around here, one not friendly to current practices (to put my cards on the table), but this is a non-data-point, at least without a _lot_ more context, so much as to dwarf this little tidbit anyhow.

<comment><USER12> I'd like to hear your opinion.

<comment><USER11> Based on past experience, I am sure there will be some post in the near future which I will be unable to restrain myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.snopes.com/language/document/1895exam.asp>

<comment><USER14> Hmm, snopes doesn't seem to be saying that this is not, in fact, an exam from 1895, just that current educational standards haven't declined since then. So? Neither the HN headline nor the article make the claim that snopes refutes. Strawman.

This is interesting, just because it illustrates how the world has changed since 1895.

<comment><USER15> This kind of "I never _said_ that" semantic quibble raises one essential question: Have you stopped beating your elderly mother yet?

Things have implications beyond their explicit claims.

<comment><USER16> The two quibbles above seem nearly identical to me. It's interesting what role the assumptions of the audience play in their reaction to a statement.

I assumed that a snopes link would credit or discredit the claim (that this was a test from 1895.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?_

I like how the volume and weight of a bushel of wheat was common knowledge :)

<comment><USER18> Why weight? The problem only requires knowing how to convert a bushel to English measurements.

<comment><USER19> The next question on the test is:

 _3\. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think this can provide any insight into our current education system, it wouldn't make much sense to compare them...

However it is a rather fascinating look at life in the late 1800's, and what the common concerns were.

The section on linguistics; back then there was no large (non-print) media and the US English dialects were more splintered. Additionally English hadn't become quite the lingua franca it is today; (educated) people generally knew several languages in order to communicate with people. If you read books written around that time, it's rather common for the author to quote French or Latin without translation, with the implicit understanding that the reader knows them.

The math questions also provide some really neat insight into what were considered "common practical tasks"...in my schooling most of the word problems were phrased in terms of buying things at the supermarket or for more advanced topics building skyscrapers and bridges etc... Here however it's all about bushels of wheat etc.

Really neat.

</comment><comment><USER21> Could you have passed an 1869 MIT entrance exam?

<http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/exam/algebra.html>

I suspect so, maybe in the 7th or 8th grade.

<comment><USER22> Over the distance of time it is easier than the year 8 exam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've seen another variant on this test -

What it boils down to is that:

(1) rote memorization is not an indicator of intelligence or skill.

(2) specialty datapoints regarding farm life are no longer required

(3) English grammar teaching is in a sad state. (A known aspect of today's public schools)

For a fair comparison, one should review the 8th grade requirements in a variety of today's schools (I did so once in a cursory fashion). In my opinion, today's students have to take in at least as much information, some of it also specialized, and spit it out.

Arguably today's requirements are not as focused on exact knowledge as late 1800s requirements. I leave that to the philosopher of education to evaluate for better/worse.

What should also be considered is not just the test itself, but how tests were graded - was passing the top 90%? 60%? How lenient were teachers? An issue today is some teachers giving "free As". Did that exist in 1890?

What can also be considered is the difference between Kanas 8th grade and Boston 8th grade. Was there one? What about different schools?

There is not a simple analysis here. There must needs be a careful data-driven reflection examining the subtleties of the educational system before someone pushes out the generalization - "today's students are all worse and we are all stupid". I see many examples of smart people. Admittedly, they anecdotally seem to have "beat the system" most of the time, so, well - there's another facet to the analysis.

Note - I hear occasionally about Dewey & early 1900s educators setting up US education to optimize for factory workers and a compliant populace. Does anyone have any factual data/bibliographic sources asserting/refuting that?

</comment><comment><USER24> _Grammar (Time, one hour) 1\. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters. 2\. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications._

#1: Not "Parts of Speech" in #2.

<comment><USER25> Have capitalization rules changed over time? IIRC, German capitalizes most nouns, and German was very nearly chosen for America's national language. Further, reading a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence, one can see that Rights, Happiness, and other important words were capitalized.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Us_declaration_independenc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Us_declaration_independence.jpg)

<comment><USER24> We still do this in English; consider "Free software" versus "free software". The first means "libre", the second means "zero cost".

It's not an issue of importance but of making a generic word into one with specific meaning.

<comment><USER25> It seems to me that this still falls under the current rule of capitalizing proper nouns, though in this instance the nouns are made proper for exactly the reason you stated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This always makes me think of Isaac Asimov's classic essay, "Forget It!" in which he gets a hold of a hundred-year-old math textbook and writes about what's in there that isn't taught anymore. (A lot of stuff about computation using long-forgotten English units of measurement, for one.)

Anyone know if it's online? I have a print copy, but I can't find anything with a quick Googling.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'd be curious to see the answers for someone who got an average grade on this test.

It's not much of a test by modern standards - it's more a few quizzes strung together with somewhat generous time limits. Some things stick out:

1) Math section is farming-centric, as people have pointed out; it ends on making examples of paperwork. The first question is obscure terminology for something we cover in second grade or so. No algebra. Especially generous time limit for these questions, though you have to remember your bushels.

2) "fane, fain, feign" Those days had a different fashion in popular homophones. Also, interesting the focus on indicating pronunciation and breaking words down into syllables - I remember doing that well before 8th grade.

3) The geography section mentions the rest of the world, huzzah. ...Well, to test memorization of a few names. Otherwise, a better section than the others.

4) No questions about the _Civil War_ except to describe some famous battles and recognize the year it ended.

<comment><USER28> Regarding the arithmetic, the finance questions stick out to me: Arithmetic questions 4, 6, 8, and 10. Especially #8.

Regarding orthography, I find the mention of etymology, and the morphological question (#7), interesting, as these are pieces in a toolkit for understanding previously-unseen words.

The geography section is as much about meteorology as it is about placenames, which is awesome. This kind of scientific whole-world view is amusing contrasted with the Kansas Evolution Hearings.

<comment><USER27> As to the geography section, meteorology was covered in world geography when I was in eighth grade in Texas in the late 80s.

What isn't as impressive (and has been pointed out elsewhere) is that those are the _only_ science questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's hard for me to feel inadequate when looking at this test—regardless of whether it's real or not—because tests are typically dependent on your retention of what you are taught. If you're an 8th grader whose teacher doesn't explain what elementary sounds are, it would have no impact on whether or not you could pass the 8th grade.

<comment><USER30> More specifically, this is a test heavily based on facts. Nothing wrong with that. Knowing and retaining facts is important to life. Even if you have Google.

But the relevance of facts is based on context, and will change through time. Many of the facts tested for just aren't relevant in today's life. It's likely several of these weren't even relevant back in 1895 and were just added because 'they were always asked' or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _2\. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many > bushels of wheat will it hold?_

My, how far we've fallen.

</comment><comment><USER32> Ignoring the quality of the original question ("Could you have passed?"), an _equally good_ follow up would be:

Could someone from 1895 have passed an 8th grade test today?

</comment><comment><USER33> _6\. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent._

If this is a genuine question then I find it interesting that it was possible to answer back then. Now you'd have to know _which_ months as the length of each month affects the answer.

<comment><USER34> I had a 'mistake' in a question like that on an exam just a few weeks ago. You write 'I assume all months are 30 days' or 'I assume a full 30/31 day cycle' or whatever it is you assume at the top and you get full credit.

Additionally, I remember that most tests came with verbal instructions even as recently as when I was in primary school (well recent, 20 years ago). The teacher would dictate the questions which you'd write down on the paper; then afterward you had time to answer them. I think it's quite plausible that a similar system was used back then, especially considering the brevity of the questions. (I don't know how wide spread printing presses were back then, I know that many primary schools in Belgium in the 1980's still either didn't have them or only used them when it was 'necessary').

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ask them to type, send a text message, use a digital calculator, my microwave, the internet (email, www, torrents), driving fast cars, etc etc..

People had far less to know.

<comment><USER36> People had to know different things, but not necessarily a lesser quantity of information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Honestly speaking, could I pass this test if I sat down and took it right now? No.

However I do believe that, given a study guide (i.e my notes, and a test book) and a reasonable idea of what would be on the test, I could pass the test-- just as I passed many tests during my own educational era. Of course, a couple of days later most answers would be gone from my memory.

I've always been that way when it comes to learning, I don't retain details, I retain general idea's. For mathematics and sciences--problem solving, and for literature and history--that rules exists and many important events have occurred, all of which I can research and reference such material when the need arises. I'll admit, I'd like to able to recall names, and dates, and formulas at will--but frankly, as I obstinately claimed as a child, I've never actually needed such detailed information in real life. Generalizations, or time willing, a quick reference to related material are all you need.

</comment><comment><USER38> If I had attended school for 8 or 9 years prior to 1895, almost certainly. Many of these questions rely on knowing precise terminology no doubt used in that class or its textbook.

The time difference is the only thing that would hinder me. Heck, try asking a college student in 1895 a super easy question like how many states are in the United States in 2010.

</comment><comment><USER39> Had I _gone_ to 8th grade in 1895, I would be familiar with all of the anachronisms.

Also, some of the questions are clearly lists that, were this "real", would be taught by rote memorization. The sort of thing you would be able to chant back without thinking if you were in the classroom where the lists were repeated over and over for you to "learn".

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't know. I do know that I could write essays several pages in length, do math up through algebra/geometry, know both American and European history, and have some knowledge of the sciences, which this totally ignores.

</comment><comment><USER41> Could they have passed 8th grade in 1995? Doubtful: * Advances in Science * More (and more widely varied) history * Different economic and political regimes * Speaking a foreign language * Algebra II * Books (easily 90% drivel) which pass for great literature these days

Hard to compare when full information is not available. What is NIST standard for a bushel of wheat? What about rate of compounding at a bank (was that 10% apr or 10% per minute)?

This likely would be an easy test for most with today's level of education after a day of remedial education that covers the basics of this test.

</comment><comment><USER42> In 1895 I would have been too busy being an immigrant farmer with the rest of my family to go to school at all, so I'm pretty ambivalent about what my standardized testing fate might have been.

</comment><comment><USER43> As a homeschooling parent, I always find this kind of stuff interesting. For reference, people should check out the following link (under "Practice Tests for State Exams") for relatively current standards tests for various states, grade levels, and subjects:

<http://quizhub.com/quiz/quizhub.cfm>

</comment><comment><USER44> This is similar to the kind of tests we had in India when I was in the 4th-8th grade. We had world history instead of US history, and did not have Orthography, but those are the only differences that I can see. I might have aced it back then, but it would be hard to get about 50% if I did it today.

</comment><comment><USER45> What was with the focus on events that happened at specific dates? I understand the importance of knowing when events happened relative to each other, but memorizing dates seems a bit much. Perhaps the lack of easy access to reference materials made that kind of knowledge more important.

</comment><comment><USER46> The real miracle is that this teacher built a computer for her students to take an English test on in 1895!

</comment><comment><USER47> I could have passed the 8th grade in 1895 if I was born in 1882. But I wasn't.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is certainly more republics in Europe now than it used to be back then

</comment><comment><USER49> Kind of makes me feel real bad for those who can't pass High School today.

</comment><comment><USER50> What is a passing grade for this test? Doesn't seem to say.

</comment><comment><USER51> I know its fake but... Arithmetic 6 - Can't get the interest(at least any interesting one) without the capitalization period.

<comment><USER52> Is it fake? Snopes says a lot about it not really demonstrating a decline in education, but I didn't see them make a strong call on whether they were or weren't actual questions from 1895?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> i dont know how to answer a single one of these questions.

</comment><comment><USER54> Yes, there are many opinions on this thread, and this fact supports an observation:

The 'theory' or 'principals' of what 'education' should be are a MESS!

One of the posts mentioned Dewey: Yes he wrote:

John Dewey, 'Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education', The Free Press, New York, 1966.

although this is clearly not nearly the 'first printing'! Since my father was in education and had some influence from Dewey, I read that book. Dewey summarizes what 'education' actually is, and, really, is essentially forced to be, all other theories or principles aside, as just:

What the older generations pass down to the younger generations, with a lot of what was wrong and, hopefully, with some improvements.

So, here's an 'application': If have a broad 'public' education system where use essentially just a broad sample of the older generation to teach essentially everyone in the younger generation, then have to expect that what gets 'passed down' will have nearly all that was bad about society in the older generation and relatively little that is new and advantageous!

Here is a telling example: I was a college professor at Ohio State University. At one point I was asked to represent the faculty at a lunch for parents. Yes, many of the parents were quite skeptical of what was being taught or not taught. So, one question went:

"Why are you teaching my child calculus? I've never needed to know it."

I was a bit slow to see all the emotional, social, educational, and rational issues and, not wanting to say something wrong, said next to nothing. In a sense, it can be safer not to argue with 'the customer' or with a poorly informed and angry question. But here is what I might have said:

"We're trying to educate for the future, say, teach things that can be useful at some points over the next 50 years or so.

"Calculus is a pillar of Western Civilization: Although not everyone uses it, without it we would be in deep trouble in strength of materials, design of structures, electric power generation, distribution, and use, electronics and essentially everything involving electro-magnetic waves, engines of all kinds, airplanes, essentially everything in mechanical engineering, nearly all more advanced military technology, and in many subjects from more in math, all the physical and social sciences, statistics, finance, and more.

"We're not necessarily trying to teach what is already in very common usage but what is less well known and can give an advantage over the next 50 years. So, from its track record, calculus looks promising. That is, we believe that so few people know calculus well that more people could get an advantage from knowing it.

"For a specific example, before my graduate studies, I was in a new, rapidly growing company. At one point the Board of Directors wanted some projections of the revenue of the company. Many people could describe hopes, intentions, assumptions, dreams, etc., but there was a lack of anything with a more solid, objective, rational basis.

"While I didn't want to get involved, I thought for a while: What do we know? What do we want to know?

"Well we knew what our (daily) revenue was then. And, from our capacity planning, we knew what our planned, eventual daily revenue would be. So, for the projections the Board wanted, essentially we needed to 'interpolate' between these two revenue figures, that is, say how fast we would grow.

"So what could we observe about what was causing our growth? Well, broadly the growth was due to 'viral' effects, that is, happy customers talking to target customers not yet customers. So, each day in the future, the amount of this 'talking' by happy customers was proportional to the number of happy customers and, thus, to the revenue. And the number of potential customers hearing the talking and becoming customers was proportional to the number of potential customers.

"So, let t be time in days with the present day t = 0. Let y(t) be our revenue at time t. As in calculus, let y'(t) be the first derivative of y(t), that is, the rate of growth in y(t).

"Let b be the maximum daily revenue from our capacity planning.

"Then the rate of growth y'(t) is proportional to the current revenue y(t) and the capacity yet served b - y(t). So for some constant k, we must have

y'(t) = k y(t) ( b - y(t) )

"So, this is a non-linear ordinary differential equation initial value problem. With a little calculus, really just classic integration by parts, we can get a simple algebraic expression for the solution. This solution will have one constant c we so far do not know. But we have reduced the problem of projecting out to the future to selecting just one constant c. And we can estimate c from our growth over the past few months.

"So, on a Friday my SVP Planning and I selected a value for c and drew the graph of the growth. My SVP left on a business trip, and the Board meeting started the next morning.

"At noon I was in my office working and got a phone call to come to the Board meeting.

"The Board meeting was in disarray and no longer 'meeting'. Our two Board representatives from our main investor were unhappy and standing in a doorway to the hall with their bags packed.

"At about 8 AM the graph had been presented to the Board, and the two investor representatives asked how it had been calculated. For the next three hours or so, all the top management struggled to reproduce the graph and could not. The representatives then became angry, lost faith in and patience with the top management, made plane reservations back to Texas, returned to their rented rooms, packed their bags, and as a last chance returned to the offices for an answer.

"I arrived, reproduced a few points on the graph, and the investor representatives canceled their plane reservations, unpacked their bags, and stayed, and the company was saved. It is now a major company you know well and have used often; you value their work highly.

"This success was all because I knew calculus well and was about the only one there who did.

"So, we believe that in the next 50 years, calculus can be an advantage."

Yes, there is some question at how well even this answer would have been received!

Generally, then, in the real world of the broad population, it is difficult to know what to teach, how to teach it, or to get it learned!

Here's my take on the US 'way out': As we can tell, in K-12 and maybe more, the most important educational advantage is the family life of the student. So, in some families, education is understood and emphasized. So, education is really not just from the K-12 classrooms, not nearly!

Broadly, then, the secret to good education is to have parents who care do what they can at HOME. In extreme cases this solution can be just 'home schooling' and, at its best, can totally blow the doors off essentially anything from 'organized' education.

So, as in many things in the US, really good results are the responsibility of each individual, their family, their local community, etc. and much less well served by the county, state, or DC.

Topics with big advantages are essentially necessarily understood by at most only a tiny fraction of the population. Or, if a large fraction of the population understood, then much of the advantage would be gone. So, education with big advantages cannot be from the public school system! Sorry 'bout that!</comment>


Does water have memory? - <AUTHOR> http://www.life-enthusiast.com/index/products/Vibe_Water/Memory_Water?osCsid=f154708dbead9157a80b5a07ce81d7fd

<comment><USER2> No. Absolutely not. Makes for great sales copy though.

Here's some history and analysis on the topic: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory></comment>


Every $1 spent on food stamps resulted in $1.73 in GDP growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/Stimulus-Impact-2008.pdf

<comment><USER2> Another interesting observation from that Table 1 of the article: _every_ spending policy has a better impact than _every_ tax cut policy.

The theoretical explanation for this is very simple: in the current economic climate, tax reduction tend to be used simply to pay down debts - what Richard Koo calls a balance sheet recession.

Still, it's nice to have that so clear from a source that is quite unsuspicious of overly left/liberal leanings.

<comment><USER3> Paying down debts promotes long term growth though capital acquisition. Someone invested that money in a loan, they now have that money back plus a little interest, they are now going to look for someone else to loan that money to or do a direct investment.

<comment><USER4> That would be true if banks weren't reducing their ratios at the same time. Because their percentage of bad debts is going up, they have to reduce their lending to keep their bad debt to capital ratio at the same level. Even worse, their trying to improve their ratios because they now realize they had let them get out of hand during the boom.

<comment><USER3> The 'classic' great depression view of the monetary system is horribly outdated in large part because most people don't get their money by farming land, but the lending market has also shifted. Secularization, Car Loans and Credit Cards have greatly shifted the banks roles in the overall lending market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Warning: It's by Mark Zandi. Zandi is a hack and a mouthpiece for the ratings agencies.

For one example among many, see this link: <http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/09/zandi/>

More seriously, the link is just a summary of what Zandi's model predicted the recent stimulus would do. It's worth noting that:

1) Pretty much every other economist on the left and right disagree with him. On the right they think all his multipliers are too high, and even on the left they think the way he ranked them is bizarre. He reckons one of the best tax cuts is a lump sum refund - despite copious theoretical and empirical backing for the proposition that it's actually one of the worst (because it's most likely to trigger Ricardian Equivalency).

2) The actual results of the stimulus are starting to become clear, and they disagree with him too, both in terms of overall magnitude and, in particular, his completely batshit rankings. He thinks aid to state governments is one of the worst ways of spending cash, but infrastructure spending is quite good. In reality the aid to state governments was one of the most effective line items, while the infrastructure spending was a black hole in terms of job creation.

My advice is to go hunt up an actual respected economist (Romer or Barro are both great on this area) and read what they have to say. Zandi is neither respected nor, at the risk of being cruel, an economist.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't doubt that. The question becomes then, how much does that GDP growth increase federal revenues? If it doesn't increase it by $1 per $1.73 in GDP, it's still a net loss IMHO.

Also, the mere fact that food stamp recipients are prevalent and increasing signals a failure in our system.

Not saying we should get rid of food stamps, they're a necessary safety net, but that figure is misleading. How much should the government spend to increase GDP?

Is it valuable to have a high GDP and a high federal deficit? Or will that just end up in necessarily higher taxes down the road (so we don't end up like Greece) that will wipe out that GDP growth?

It's a sticky issue that can't be boiled down to a simple statement.

$1.73 in GDP growth != $1.73 in revenue to the government.

<comment><USER2> _The question becomes then, how much does that GDP growth increase federal revenues? If it doesn't increase it by $1 per $1.73 in GDP, it's still a net loss IMHO._

Why? Money is created by federal government and is therefore worthless to the federal government. It can just create more of it. It just makes no sense to look at the federal government (or any monetarily sovereign government for that matter) in terms of how much money they make.

On the other hand, if government revenues are increased by less than 1$, this means that someone, somewhere in the economy now has more net financial assets because of that.

Is that a bad thing? In some cases perhaps, but certainly not in general.

 _Is it valuable to have a high GDP and a high federal deficit? Or will that just end up in necessarily higher taxes down the road (so we don't end up like Greece) that will wipe out that GDP growth?_

History tells us that, for monetarily sovereign governments, their debt is not paid back. Therefore, the answer to your second question seems to be a very clear "No, it will not lead to higher taxes, but it will lead to better economic development right now, which likely also improves the growth path in the long run."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> GDP measures the output of workers. So this result states that by giving people money, you either enable them to work, or enable them to employ other people by spending that money. Presumably (I admit, TLDR) this conclusion comes from calculating the multiplied effect of what the food stamps are spent on.

But how can we know that the net effect is positive? How can we know that, for instance, giving people money doesn't prevent them from working, thereby decreasing GDP?

After all, there is no control group in economics, which is why (frustratingly) there are still totally opposite camps who keep claiming that current events prove them right.

<comment><USER2> _How can we know that, for instance, giving people money doesn't prevent them from working, thereby decreasing GDP?_

I'm not familiar with the methods used, but the article claims exactly that, doesn't it? By spending money on food stamps, GDP is increased.

Mind you, there might be types of spending with an even higher multiplier. And there might be types of spending that would be seen to be more beneficial for society even if their impact on GDP were smaller; for example: Why not just spend money to create jobs? Then spending on food stamps reduces automatically, as the number of eligible recipients decreases.

 _After all, there is no control group in economics, which is why (frustratingly) there are still totally opposite camps who keep claiming that current events prove them right._

This is indeed very unfortunate. Perhaps somebody clever enough with enough stamina could work on increasingly realistic simulations on the micro level and see which macro patterns emerge? Though of course then there would be an endless debate about how realistic the modeling of micro behavior is.

The current story told in mainstream textbooks (utility maximization etc.) certainly isn't very credible, given all the psychological insights from behavioral economics; and just the mere fact that marketing exists and how it operates tells you that the classical micro story is rather fishy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't government spending counted as part of GDP? (It's counted as consumption)

<comment> DifE-Q Yes it is. Herein lies part of the problem; the way GDP is calculated and what is meant by GDP. The whole GDP idea has little merit. Essentially the health of the economy is measured by how much money is spent. We should stop relying on GDP to measure economic health and measure wealth and lack of debt instead.

<comment><USER9> Anyone know why net household wealth isn't more commonly used as metric for, uh, wealth?

<comment><USER10> Wealth statistics are an actual metric that exists

For example, <http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/scf/scf_2007.htm>

<comment><USER9> That's not what I was asking. Net wealth doesn't have nearly the same status as GDP.

I sometimes wonder what policy would look like if the dominant economic priority was the increase total wealth, rather than economic activity.

<comment><USER10> For instance, if I have ten billion dollars in gold in my vault but choose to do nothing with it, then it has no impact on what we could call the economy but would still count as 'wealth'. If I have ten billion dollars in my vault that I never do anything with and the rest of the economy has a total of six cents, we would care how the six cents were being used, disproportionately to my trillion cents.

Or if everyone has 10 billion dollars in gold in their vaults in aggregate, if the price of gold rises, on paper their wealth would increase. But if everyone actually tried to expend their gold then the price of gold would decrease, but much more production would happen in the economy. If the price of tech stocks octuples then paper wealth increases but GDP does not necessarily change.

Or, if everyone just spent their money twice as quickly (e.g. the velocity of money increases). The economy would be able to do twice as much, but total 'wealth' need not necessarily change.

'wealth' is entangled with money and prices. The amount of production is affected by those things probably but not as directly.

<comment><USER9> Government economic policy is currently directed, in large part, toward making sure that there are regular increases in GDP. I get that.

I'm trying to figure out what government policy might look like if it was directed toward _increasing_ net household wealth. Just hoarding gold does little for the economy. But this is irrelevant. At issue is what it would look like, economically, to focus on increasing a nation's economic wealth (after inflation). It seems like it would be awfully difficult to increase after- inflation wealth without a fair amount of genuine value being created, no?

Could focusing on combined household wealth cause there to be more attention paid to median household wealth? And how might economic policy behave differently if increasing this was its focus?

Another reason to pay closer attention to wealth is that it doesn't suffer from the "broken window fallacy".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reinforces a truth that many fiscal conservatives are either ignorant of or choose to ignore. If the government spends a dollar, it does not disappear. It is paid to someone. They pay taxes on it. And then they spend it. And that person pays taxes on it. And so on and so forth. (excluding payments that go out to foreign entities)

Government spending isn't a drain. It is another piston in the financial engine. It also happens to be one of the most reliable and most pliable pistons in the engine.

You can think of the government as Herouku. Most of the time you're going to want to run as few instances as possible. When you make the front page of hackernews, you either need to jack up the instances or your site crashes.

We're drawing our lines in the wrong places. Some government spending is good. In some cases, massive government spending is good. A lot of the time the private markets do a better job. Sometimes they don't.

Paying food stamps is a great way to reduce crime and bolster the stability of your country. If you ignore the root causes you get long term issues. We need to fix the underlying problem and keep paying for food stamps. You can do both at the same time.

<comment><USER12> You are forgetting that tax dollars have to come from somewhere. the money has to be taken from one group of people or financed. Those activities are not costless. This is one of the reason why other studies find that reducing government spending stimulates growth (some of those studies are described here: [http://mercatus.org/publication/does-government-spending- aff...](http://mercatus.org/publication/does-government-spending-affect- economic-growth))

<comment><USER10> <http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Mercatus_Center>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Broken Window Fallacy

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

</comment><comment><USER14> Both sides have data that backs up their claims. The economy isn't something where you can pick out two indicators and claim that something is good ([http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870447150457444...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574440723298786310.html)).

Zandi may not have left/liberal leanings, but he certainly has government leanings.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've got an idea. Spend everything on food stamps. Than rinse & repeat.

</comment><comment><USER16> If that were true, obviously the government would merely need to 'print' a trillion each year in free food stamps to be distributed to the populace. All food costs could be Fed funded through magic dollars.

Magically it would generate a 'profit' of $730 billion per printed trillion per year for the general economy.

Except the stimulus programs, from the first that Bush fired off, to the Fed's QE programs, to the trillion dollar fraud Obama made shovel ready (har har) --- all have one thing in common: they've all failed to improve the US economy in any meaningful way.

Work force participation rate? hyper implosion. Government dependency? skyrocketing. Real wages? declining. Inflation? pain at the pump and grocery store. Trade deficit? Near all time record highs. Savings rate? miniscule. Household wealth? Less than 15 years ago. Standard of living? Hasn't moved in in 50 years. Debt? On the moon and rising faster by the day. Entitlements? $100 trillion unfunded disaster. Stock market? Hasn't moved in 15 years inflation adjusted.

and on and on

<comment><USER17> What? A fact-based intelligent comment is down voted? Sadly, it says a lot about effects of politically-correct brainwashing in our society.

On the other hand, a comment on top about the true voodoo economics is up and running well...

<comment><USER16> People mostly don't want the truth, and they certainly don't want to talk about consequences or necessary pain from decades of irresponsibility. Allow a natural recession instead of monetizing a fake recovery? Outrageous! Live within your means? Who would do such a thing when you can destroy the global reserve currency and buy some votes.

I think most people want to keep milking the collapsing system for as long as they can, for they're overly invested into that system's survival. Anything else literally scares them. It's why the politicians spout the same drivel year after year, right or left. They're just feuding over how to divide up the last crumbs.

The crumbs are running out.

<comment><USER18> @shingen, Your profile says nothing about you, yet I have this urge to know more. You have an email or something?

mine is username + gmail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is BS. We had to borrow that $1 and we will pay interest on it for years to come.

Our government is broke and wasting money left and right. The spending spree is not sustainable.

Take a good look at Greece. That is the future of America if we keep spending money this way.

<comment><USER20> _Take a good look at Greece. That is the future of America if we keep spending money this way._

Care to go a bit further into this conjecture?

<comment><USER21> I don't know if you can really extrapolate from Greece to the US, but it is relevant to note that by living on credit for so long, Greece wound up in a position where they couldn't raise more money. So their GDP grew for years on borrowed money, and now that they can't borrow any more, their GDP is shrinking dramatically. In other words, you can buy an artificial GDP increase today but you may have to sell it back at a discount tomorrow.

<comment><USER22> A problem Greece has that the US doesn't have is the Euro. If the US need more money, it prints more money. It causes inflation and that's sometimes a bad thing, but it patches a hole. Greece can't print more Euros. The US can devalue her currency for a long time to keep things running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This paper isn't worth the bits it's printed on.

Economist Mark Zandi (the author) missed predicting the biggest economic event not just of his career, but of three generations before him. Mostly, that was due to conflict of interest: Moody's was busy scooping up money to rate mortgage securities. What fraction of his oversight is due to just being a poor economist is unknown.

There are widows and orphans living poorer because of this clown. Don't waste your time.

</comment><comment><USER24> Calm down. First of all note that it is a short-term effect from a _temporary_ increase in food stamps. The article doesn't address the long term.

Secondly, why be surprised that giving money to those who badly need it would increase spending?

And thirdly that each spent dollar would ripple through the economy for a total value greater than a dollar? This is one of the earliest lessons in Economics 101.

What this shows is that food stamps are a relatively "frictionless" method of boosting spending. There's less overhead for food stamps than for other programs and, since the spending is unlikely to be misdirected (as in "bridge to nowhere" projects et al), you get lots of bang for your buck.</comment>


Getting rejected - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2010/09/12/getting-rejected/ <comment><USER2> _The reason this period was so useful was that it helped me develop a really thick skin._

Another reason is that a high volume of rejections is just another form of stepwise refinement. OP may not have realized it, but he probably got much better over time. It's a good idea to not personalize rejections. It's a better idea to use them as data in order to improve.

<comment><USER3> "It's a good idea to not personalize rejections. It's a better idea to use them as data in order to improve." \-- so true, but it's hard for some people not to take stuff personally. When they succeed in doing that, they'll become come successful, and better persons by the way.

<comment><USER4> i agree, it is hard for some people to not take it personally... i have struggled with this. my approach has been to focus on things i can control... and you can't control if people reject you.

<comment><USER3> Well true, if people are tight on finance or similar, they have mental pressure on them and almost always take things personally. They can't clean their head, refresh their thoughts and think strait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is partially right. The assumption that if dozens of VCs are rejecting you it's because "you aren't ambitious enough" is probably a great blog post title but poor advice for a startups execution ...

In reality it's because you don't check a checkbox, and the value for you is to: a) develop resilience to rejection (always great) and b) ascertain what you didn't articulate that meant that you didn't check the appropriate checkbox. Finding out how is quite hard, but insanely valuable. (eg: we once got rejected by an investor for reasons of our market being perceived as too small, after hearing this it was obvious there was confusion in our story, we iterated on our story a few times and that concern was removed)

The kind of rejection that'll make you give up is when users reject your product, I'm blown away this isn't discussed ever here.

</comment><comment><USER6> "If you're aren't getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren't ambitious enough."

Does that include getting downvotes on HN? ;)

<comment><USER7> It actually would be really helpful if you got honest feedback about why you were rejected... this has never happened in my experience; rather, you get some sugar-coated rejection like "we were all very impressed with your background and skills, but do not have a position that is a good match for you."

Of course if that were true, and your resume was not embellished, you would not have gotten past the first screening.

This is probably done for liability protection: any really honest reasons for why you were rejected could be used as fodder for a lawsuit.

<comment><USER8> "You were sufficiently promising to pass our screening but after meeting you we can definitely do better. Have a nice day." is not an easy thing to say even in absence of legal issues. I could tap-dance on your face as an employer without getting sued here, but that doesn't mean we sent applicants home with a list of their inadequacies.

Of course, if you believe social science research, the reason is probably "You failed in the first five seconds to connect with your interviewer, he rejected you then, and he eventually found a reason to hang his hat on."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been rejected from every job I've ever wanted, and had to settle for places that I ended up hating. I was just rejected this morning by Jane Street Capital, after spending hours on the programming problems they had sent me, trying to make them perfect. I had written and sent Python and Scheme solutions along with my OCaml solutions too. I enjoyed reading this short post, but I'm having trouble using this most recent rejection to my advantage. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. As much as I dream of working for myself on my own ideas, it's almost become a life goal to get into an awesome company, just because I've been rejected from them innumerable times.

Any advice? I'm young, 22, about to graduate in May. Should I just try to take risks while I'm young and work for myself, or keep trying until I finally get through an interview process for a place that I like? Part of me wants to keep trying until I finally get accepted somewhere, but another part of me thinks that it won't happen and I should just try to prove myself on my own.

<comment><USER10> > Any advice? I'm young, 22, about to graduate in May. Should I just try to > take risks while I'm young and work for myself, or keep trying until I > finally get through an interview process for a place that I like?

Contrary to most people here, I'd caution against "working for yourself". If you work for yourself, only a small portion of what you do will be programming. In addition, you won't learn about programming on a team (as opposed to coding by yourself). That said, if your goal is to run your own company, go for it; if your goal is just to write code in an environment you love, starting a company (itself rewarding and something I want to do at one point in my life) is neither the only, nor the best way of getting there.

Here's my suggestion: interview at a bunch of places, receive offers, "save the best for last" (don't interview for your dream job first). You may not get an offer for the perfect job, but you're also coming straight from college so the bar is considerably higher, in that you don't have a resume.

Technical interviewing is a very imperfect art, it's just ( _much_ ) better than the conventional approach of hiring warm bodies based on traditional metrics (the name of the school they went to, etc...). There often isn't a great correlation between one's interview score and one's performance on the job, so once you have people who've worked with you and who can vouch for you, along with examples of your work, you're much less likely to be passed over because you didn't do well enough on a single whiteboard coding exercise.

Out of the offers you do receive, pick the one where the people who've interviewed you seemed the smartest and most passionate: interested in same things as you are, willing to mentor you. Disregard everything else.

Once you're working, don't settle. Don't give up on your asoirations, code OCaml in your evenings, keep up with computer science, hack on open source projects. In a year, try the companies you'd want to work at again.

Also, consider what you've learned doing programming problems Jane Street: quite honestly, I am envious of having an excuse like that to solve interesting puzzles in a language I love. That should give you a boost interviewing at other places.

By the way, have you looked at: <http://cufp.org/jobs> ? There seem to be several OCaml offerings there.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for all the advice. I think it's a good idea to interview at a bunch of places to build up for a dream job. Although I'm on my third 6 month internship through school, the managers basically lied about what the jobs would entail to get me to accept (i.e. saying it's a software developer position and I'm stuck doing performance testing all the time), so there's not much I'm even proud to put on my resume. I've had to search far and wide for a reason to write some code, and that's what I always list on my resume.

Maybe one big problem with interviewing at a bunch of places is that I'm most proficient with Python and not Java. I learned to use it as my primary language because a very intelligent friend of mine was using it all the time, and he worked at Google. Although, the most technical interviews I've ever had were with Amazon where they let you use whatever language you want to come up with algorithms to answer their questions. It seems there aren't many companies that use Python.

Anyhow, I'll definitely apply around to a bunch of places even if I don't find them entirely appealing. They can't be much worse than what I've already endured through my internships, and I've learned to make the best of my time at my jobs by now anyway. I was thinking of doing the Y Combinator Common App today, so maybe I'll do that.

And you're right, it was loads of fun having an actual reason to solve some problems in OCaml. Actually, I'm not so passionate about the language, I just thought it was really cool that they were looking for sysadmins who also knew about functional programming. But I will check out that link anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wish I had realized this and kept trying instead of settling for four years as a corporate bank system architect.

<comment><USER7> Four years is not so long. You certainly at least learned what you DONT want to do for the the rest of your life. And four years experience with one employer looks better on a resume than four separate one-year jobs (unless you were a contractor) and also better than four years of unemployment.

<comment><USER11> Yup. I think I learnt a lot in these four years, sometimes I look back and wish I had focused on startups earlier but I realize I still had a long ways to go back then.

I finally quit this past May and joined a former co-worker on his new startup, so it all worked out in the end.

<comment><USER12> I have a similar story -- 5 years at a company where I ended up being bored and not caring about the work. But I learned a lot during those 5 years, and was able to take advantage of several opportunities that may not have otherwise been available to me.

And like you, I'm now at a startup, that I love (heh, most of the time), where I've been for the past 11 months. It's all about timing, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the best sales people I know once told me, "They either convince you they don't need your product or you convince them they can't live without it." I think about that every time I get rejected to make sure I never get convinced :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't that a line in the movie Boiler Room? <http://goo.gl/IM7r>

<comment><USER14> Boiler Room is one of my favs. Even though Glengarry Glen Ross was relatively boring, I like this line:

"It takes brass balls to sell real estate."

Then he turns around and he is holding brass balls. A-B-C is the best pitch ever in a movie, after greed is good of course.

If you want a great example of how to deal with rejection, come to Haight Ashbury and watch the homeless people ask for change. Sometimes if they have a good enough pitch, I'll give them a dollar. There was one guy giving "bad advice" and he told me to give him my credit card and to have unprotected sex with an intravenous drug user.

I gave him a dollar.

<comment><USER15> A favourite saying of a friend of mine: 'No balls, no babies.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds of something a friend once said to me. He said, "If you've never missed your flight, you're spending way too much time at the airport."

</comment><comment><USER17> I do this with girls!

And jokes aside...it works!

<comment><USER18> Norah Vincent's book _Self-Made Man_ discusses these issues. In it, Vincent spends a couple months dressing and acting like a man, and she goes around living life as a "man": i.e. she makes male friends, goes on dates, and so forth. The first time she approaches a group of women in an attempt to get to know them, Vincent is shocked by their indifference and what to her eyes looks anew like callousness. In this passage, her friend Curtis is in on the ruse and takes her out to meet women):

 _"Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the whole school. Rejection sucked.

"Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it."

That was my first lesson in male courtship ritual. You had to take your knocks and knock again. It was that or wait for some pitying act of God that would never come. This wasn't some magic island in a beer commercial where all the ladies would light up for me if only I drank the right brew.

"Try again, man," Curtis urged. "C'mon. Don't give up so easily." " _

She hadn't realized the sheer amount of rejection most men experience on a day-to-day basis in interacting with women. I suspect most women don't; I also suspect that most men don't understand how many implicit or explicit sexual offers many women get every day, and how that can become wearying too. In dealing with what I'd call the facts of dating life, Vincent says this:

 _"How do you handle all this fucking rejection?" I asked Curtis when we sat back down for a postmortem.

"Let me tell you a story," he said. "When I was in college, there was this guy Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean this guy had different women coming out of his room every weekend and most weeknights, and he wasn't particularly good looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing special. I couldn't figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him. 'How do you get so many girls to go out "with you?' He was a man of few words, kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: 'I get rejected ninety percent of the time. But it's that ten percent.'"_

And this isn't true only of dating life, but of startup life and many other fields (including my own: writing). I actually teach a chapter of Self-Made Man to my freshmen (I'm a grad student in English at the U of Arizona), and part of the reason I do it is for what she says about rejection (and about empathy).

Most of the comparisons between men and women in startups, ability, and so forth are, I think, complete bullshit. But I do wonder if men don't have an advantage in persistence because of early dating experiences, where if they're to have any success whatsoever they _must_ learn to accept and cope with rejection. This isn't because men are somehow born to be more persistent, but I think that, by the time they've been through at least a couple of relationships in which they have to be the ones who make the first move, they begin to get the idea that a) rejection is okay and b) they need a thick skin.

(See the Amazon link to Self-Made Man if you're curious: [http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Year- Disguised/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Year- Disguised/dp/0143038702?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957) . If you want the chapter I teach to my freshmen, from which the above quotes are drawn, send me an e-mail -- seligerj [at] gmail [....dot...] com)

<comment><USER19> This was an interesting comment, but I think it would be better to disclose the fact that your Amazon link contains a referral tag. Now I am not sure whether you posted some a big excerpt of the book because you genuinely thought it was interesting, or if you wanted to make more money.

<comment><USER20> Who cares? He'll make, what, a dollar?

<comment><USER21> Unless they changed it, a referral to Amazon will get the referrer some percentage of anything you buy during the next couple of days, regardless of the original link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great post!

I think this supports two of the most important qualities of a entrepreneur..resilience and persistence.

You gotta get back up when you get knocked down and you gotta keep going after you get up.

</comment><comment><USER23> Are there areas outside of applying for jobs, biz dev partnerhips, etc.. where this works?

Say you are a programmer, how any opportunities do you have to get rejected 100 times

<comment><USER24> Try asking women out.

<comment><USER13> lol, don't you get rejected every time you unsuccessfully try fixing a bug?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There is however an opportunity cost for being rejected a 100 times: the time spent applying could have been spent on starting a business or other activities.

<comment><USER26> Worse still, an opportunity is "spent" with each rejection.

<comment><USER27> This is only a problem if you believe that there is a limit to opportunities. There's always another opportunity around the corner that you haven't seen yet. And sometimes you have to fail at the obvious ones to see what the correct one is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Totally agree and love this post. Rejection is what separates the winners from the losers. Winners shake it off and losers internalize and quit.

</comment><comment> contol-m I can relate to this - even though I probably got more rejections than offers from job interviews, I learned a lot from them. However, I wish companies would give some interview feedback to candidates they rejected. Companies don't do this for the fear of getting sued.

</comment><comment><USER29> The skiing corollary: if you aren't wiping out at least once each run you aren't learning.

</comment><comment><USER30> Great post, seriously. I'm putting the headline somewhere where I'll see it daily.

Also, just FYI, there's a typo in the title:

"If _you're aren't_ getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren't ambitious enough."

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be good to mention as an aside that getting rejected isn't always good enough. Applying to college is a good example.

Just something to keep in mind.

<comment><USER32> Bro. You got into USC. You're doing quite well, at least better than me :)

<comment><USER31> And I also got rejected from a bunch of places. :D haven't talked to you in a while, I'll contact you soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I designed a game called Rejection Therapy back in 2009 to encourage myself to get out of my comfort zone more. It was amazingly effective and enlightening (for as long as I did it).

If anyone wants to try it, it's here: <http://rejectiontherapy.com>

It's not finished, it's very stripped down, but it works.

<comment><USER34> Stunningly elegant concept. I wish I'd thought of it. Trying it now.

<comment><USER33> Your comment made my day pm. Thank you.

<comment><USER34> No problem.

It works too, which is even better (though I failed to get a rejection yesterday). Once I've thoroughly tested it, I'm going to introduce it to my employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> ceeekk</comment>


Ask HN: What technologies you stopped using in 2018? - <AUTHOR> I stopped using JavaScript in favor of TypeScript (better suited for bigger teams) and Elixir (great language, but the job market is too small). It's a much better investment to learn the basics of Machine Learning/NLP or something only slightly related to tech like SEO than another programming language. <comment><USER2> Ever since I've found Vue I've stopped using all other web technologies (Angular, jQuery, etc). That framework is all that you will ever need for frontend imo especially with vuecli.

For backend I've stopped using frameworks altogether. I tried Laravel and Symfony for some time but in the end I ended up realizing that the headache caused by using them far outweigh their utility. This is the year I realized that a router is all I needed for my backend scripts to work.

Also tried many css frameworks too (bulma, pure, mg, etc) but ended up sticking with Bootstrap because I found it to be the most complete framework in terms of components, examples, documentation, and community.

<comment><USER3> Bootstrap is great and I will only use bootstrap. Vue is great too but market share is almost 0.1% here. React is leader.

<comment><USER2> You may be right about that though 0.1% is really surprising! Anyway, since we generally work on our own Saas sites market share isn't much of an issue.

The ease of use and the integrated webpack in vuecli has really cut our dev time.

<comment><USER3> That's great. I really like vue and wanna work in it but my company is using decades old technologies because our system has grown to the point where rebuilding everything is very expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Windows, I've been using it since the release of 3.0 (1990) and developing for it since the release of NT 4.0.

I realised this year that Microsoft don't really care about it anymore so why should I.

<comment><AUTHOR> So it was the end of a long road for you. Microsoft not caring about Windows will mean Apple bumping the prices and dropping the quality of their laptops even further. There is an obvious demand in the market for HQ laptops, but no player powerful enough to meet that demand.

<comment><USER4> I suspect Apple already charges what the market will bear, I doubt they think they are leaving money on the table.

There is good alternative hardware out there, my wife has a Lenovo T460 which I really like. I did try going down the Linux route but it is still lacking polish for a desktop operating system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Elm. Although it is functional and works fast, you have to write too many loc to implement simple things.

</comment><comment><USER6> Flash</comment>


Google Bus Protests: In Defense of Direct Action - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/praxis-journal/fb0f4babc9e4

<comment><USER2> The solution to this problem is somewhat clear: No private buses at public stops, and enforcement now of violations through ticketing and collection. The city council of SF can handle this if they wanted.</comment>