Glenn Reynolds: Higher education's bubble is about to burst - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Higher-education_s-bubble-is-about-to-burst-95639354.html

<comment><USER2> We've practically made "attending college" a universal expectation for every American high school graduate.

Realistic options such as trade schools, community colleges, military enlistment, and good old fashion "on the job training" need to be valid FIRST choices of most high school grads!

Not some fall back plan after dropping out of college with lingering debt and 2,3, and 4 lost earning years.

<comment><USER3> amen. I think if government would stop subsidizing college and stop brainwashing students on this all through high school, I think they'd be much more likely to make the choices that suit their circumstances. And private funding mechanisms wouldn't fund unrealistic choices nearly as often as public mechanisms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a YouTube channel for the Indian Institute of Technology. You can get a mostly complete engineering education up to the early graduate level by watching these videos and downloading problem/solution sets from MIT's OCW.

<http://www.youtube.com/user/nptelhrd>

Then there's github. Portfolios > resumes and everyone knows it.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out where we're headed.

<comment><USER5> I think this underestimates the value of having someone who will answer your questions.

<comment><USER4> 1\. Professors, TAs, and graders aren't judged on their ability to answer students' questions. They are judged on many other things: attending conferences, publishing research, writing their dissertation. They prioritize accordingly.

2\. The courses with the highest attrition rates are always the 100-level weed-out classes taught in 500-person lecture halls. At my school, a 40% drop rate in Intro CS was normal and 60% wasn't unheard-of. Were the drop-outs all too dumb to learn programming? Did some of them have trouble getting their questions answered? Nobody lost as much sleep over those questions as they did over their thesis defense. See #1.

3\. Most student questions are about BS that's irrelevant to learning. What's on the test? Do we have to read all of chapter 7? Why did you take ten points off on problem four? What font and spacing do you want me to use on the write- up?

I agree that formal education can change a student's world when it's done right. I don't think our current system rises to meet that standard very often. In part that's because it's easy to ignore real problems by thinking about the ideal. University education can be better than it is now, and competition from less formal learning can help it get there.

<comment><USER6> > _Were the drop-outs all too dumb to learn programming?_

Having tutored some of them - who all changed majors after the "flunk out" courses - the answer is a qualified _Yes_. I wouldn't call them stupid, but I would say that they just couldn't "get it". Just like some programmers cannot "get" pointers, many people just don't have what it takes to program.

Many people wanted to be a developer because it pays well. When they got into the introductory classes, they found that they didn't "get" it - and for the folks who dropped the class and changed majors - they _could not get it._ I'm not saying that programming is some magical career where rainbows flow out of unicorn's rear ends.

<comment><USER4> You're willing to question the ability of these students by saying "they couldn't get it."

You haven't examined the possibility that you couldn't teach it.

I don't want to question your intelligence here. I'm sincerely interested in your answer to the question: how do you know it's the one and not the other?

Here's some historical perspective. Before he became "The Great," Alexander's father Philip arranged for the young man to be tutored by Aristotle, who was already a world-famous academic. Philip was famous as well, for having his political enemies flayed or boiled alive. Imagine Aristotle saying to Philip, "Your son Alexander is a very bright young man. If he would only apply himself. B-"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since education can't be resold, there isn't going to be the sort of bursting bubble you see in markets for other goods.

Let's say what the article predicts comes to pass and the demand for degrees goes down. If degrees could be resold, then college graduates would start selling theirs. You might get a proverbial "bursting bubble" as more and more graduates started panicking and selling their degrees before they lost all their value.

But since graduates can't resell their degrees, we're more likely to see a gradual decline in their price.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, the first question I have after reading this article is "how do I short higher education"?

<comment><USER9> A college saving fund: "Pay us $x/month for the duration of your child's high school education, and we'll fund them throughout their college degree."

You just have to make x low enough that people will sign up, but high enough that you make money. Of course, if the bubble doesn't burst, you get it "in the shorts"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The social stigma associated with vocational and trade schools needs to end, and the university "experience" is BS. I imagine a big opportunity to fill the social needs of young people that don't go to college (even beyond selling them alcohol). Businesses that do a good job of matching people socially (maybe IM sports teams not associated with universities) would go a long way to dispelling the idea that you have to pay $50k/year for the intangible college experience.

<comment><USER11> but a big part of the point of college is to perpetuate the class system.

so, uh, yeah. Trade school is great, if you just want to make money. but your earning power has little to do with your 'class' I think; in many ways, getting a degree that doesn't qualify you for a job is conspicuous consumption.

What could be more conspicuous than spending a hundred grand on "self actualization" - the only outward effect basically being more interesting at parties?

<comment><USER12> The outward effect of a liberal arts education is being a more knowledgeable citizen, better able to think about the world around you. I'd say that goes a bit beyond conversations over cocktails.

<comment><USER11> > The outward effect of a liberal arts education is being a more knowledgeable > citizen, better able to think about the world around you.

be concrete. You are still speaking of internal changes; and I'm asking, "what does that mean?" - how does a person's behaviour improve after getting, say, an art history degree?

<comment><USER13> More knowledge means more neural connectivity, which means a greater level of creativity (as long as you also develop critical thought at the same pace.)

For art, you need creativity. People tell artists that "the best way to paint/write/draw/act/sculpt better is to go out and experience the world." Well, in the same way a degree in the sciences offers a good topical coverage of the _knowledge_ the world has to offer, a liberal arts degree offers a pretty good topical coverage of the _experiences_ the world has to offer, so you can decide what to dig into. They're useful from that perspective.

<comment><USER14> Great if you can afford it. Not useful for making money, usually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I actually think it isn't too overblown to hold up a college degree as something that, like homeownership, has been touted as the American dream and become a status item to be worshipped and sacrificed to. Our country's capitalistic nature seems to end up exploding every cultural norm that becomes too widely subscribed to. Have you seen how much weddings cost?

For one thing, I think there are a lot of bubble-like indicators out there. Just this week Forbes has a story on a charter school, Think College Now, which takes the universal attendance expectation to a new level. This is an elementary school, an _elementary school_ , filled with college-is-for- everyone cheerleading like signs asking "Am I making college-bound choices today?"

[http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0607/education-tcn- teamwor...](http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0607/education-tcn-teamwork- oakland-california-think-college.html)

Yes, it's gotten to a point where we've invented the college-prep public elementary school. I admit I'm partisan (I'm one of probably very few non- college-graduate Jeopardy! champions), yet isn't this substantial evidence that the attitude toward college education has become unglued from rationality?

</comment><comment><USER16> I did get an undergraduate degree. But when it came time to consider getting a graduate degree in business, I made the following comparison:

a) I could spend two years of my life, and over $100,000 to learn business, then graduate in debt, but without actual experience running a business.

b) I could start my own business, learn what I can from books in the public library, and other entrepreneurs; and within two years, have way more experience running a business than if I had gone to Business school. I would also spend less (though still quite a bit) of money.

I chose option b, starting with a year of wandering from cafe to cafe in SF, experimenting with various projects, and meeting other entrepreneurs. Three years later, my business is paying my bills, I've learned a ton, and I feel I have a very strong network.

Option b might not work for everyone, but I feel it was the right choice for me. I'm not sure I would have done the same thing with an undergraduate degree though.

</comment><comment><USER17> Matthew Crawford has some original thinking related to this topic, in his book "Shop Class as Soulcraft":

<http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/>

</comment><comment><USER18> Any interesting ways to "short" higher education tuitions?

<comment><USER19> Start buying up student loan debt and pooling them into Student Loan Backed Securities (SLBS). Tranche and rate them based on US News & World Report school rankings, sell these CDOs to wealthy institutional investors worldwide, then have your business partner short the shit out of them.

<comment><USER20> You mean SLABS?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset- backed_security#Student_l...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset- backed_security#Student_loans)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For more on this bubble, I recommend the Commonfund's HEPI site, which has a lot of information about the breakdown of cost increases in higher education (much is from general increases in health insurance costs, though the 2007 energy spike affected things significantly as well). The link is here: [http://www.commonfund.org/CommonfundInstitute/HEPI/Pages/def...](http://www.commonfund.org/CommonfundInstitute/HEPI/Pages/default.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm inclined to think this bubble will be limited to expensive private colleges that lack significant clout. State schools and community colleges will remain attractive options for students due to cost factors, and private universities with excellent reputations will continue to attract bright students. But any school that isn't affordable or famous will may see a decline in applications when this bubble bursts.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think that bubbles first came really strong to my attention in 2002, after the dot-com crash.

I watched the housing bubble welling up massively. Reading Doug Noland of prudenbear.com and other commentators, there was no great mystery about it unless you believed some patently false reasoning ("housing price always good up...").

The thing is that bubbles have a remarkable staying power. The housing bubble only _partially_ burst in 2008 and that was at least five years from the start. From health care, to education, to Chinese capital-spending, to housing-again, it seems like the many bubbles currently sustaining the peudo- recovery are all about to burst. But I'd add a "fudge-factor" of a couple year _still_. Plus, that brings us to 2012, a auspicious year for the end of the world.

<comment><USER11> I like to tell the story of how in 1998, when I got my first programming job, I decided not to buy a house because I thought prices were irrationally high, and that it was a bubble. I could have bought, too. Obviously, even if I rode it through the current crash, I'd be way in the black today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe I need to change my thought pattern, but alarmist headlines immediately pre-dispose me to be unreceptive to the idea the author is trying to convey...

</comment><comment><USER25> "Second, it may provide a credential that employers want, not because it represents actual skills, but because it's a weeding tool that doesn't produce civil-rights suits as, say, IQ tests might."

4 years out of a young person's life when a 2-hour test works better for predicting job performance is sort of awful, isn't it?.

<comment><USER26> To be fair IQ tests would probably be weighted less in relation to other things on the resume than a college degree is relative to other things on the resume.

But since a college degree is perceived as a more raw evaluation of skill/potential skill than an IQ test (which is more speculative as it only evaluates potential and evaluated in a short test), the degree is often given too much weight.

IQ test: speculative evaluation of potential but requires virtually no money/wealth to master. College degree: can/must be bought with (sufficient) money or (semi) inherited (in the case of legacy admissions). Both are bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really don't think anyone can predict when this bubble bursts. There are too many political and cultural factors involved. Also, as employment prospects decline and remain dismal throughout our second "lost decade", I tend to predict more shelter-seeking "students", debts be damned.

People used to think of financial insolvency and bankruptcy as a shameful failure. Not any more. There's a widespread sense that money isn't real and that repayment of debt is somewhat voluntary. This is why people were willing to buy houses at prices of 20-30 years' after-tax income during the bubble. Also, the fact that unexpected medical problems (and insurance malfeasance) can make virtually _anyone_ bankrupt eradicates the association of insolvency with personal failure; now it's something that can happen to anyone, like a lightning bolt from the sky.

The result is that, absent regulation, people will continue to take out loans for unaffordable education costs, default on their student debts (which are nondischargeable, but this doesn't prevent _default_ , only discharge in bankruptcy) and maybe have their wages garnished a bit. So we have debt bondage, but when the alternative is economic nonexistence (Wal-Mart job) this starts to look pretty good. At least the guy in the low-end office job, with 20% of his meager pay garnished, can sit down at work.

TL;DR version: in other words, as things are now, if college tuition cost $100,000 per year and loan companies were willing to offer it, people would still buy it, future insolvency be damned. If you take this offer, you have hope of an eventual regulatory change ("jubilee") that forgives or at least makes dischargeable student debt. If you don't, you face economic obliteration, unless you're visibly (at 18) in the top 0.01% of your age group in something (computer programming, acting, athletics).

</comment><comment><USER28> Even though many of you are anti-education there are still many fields and disciplines where one must go to University. Engineers, lawyers, Doctors, Managers, Accountants, Teachers, etc all need some form of higher education.

No employer in their right mind would hire anybody in any of those disciplines without the proper education, it simply does not happen. It used to happen in engineering, but those cases were very rare and now it doesn't anymore.

Then we move onto programing. Well, sure one could learn all of this stuff themselves. But, can a self taught programmer really say he knows all of the math to program physics modeling software? What about working on programs like autocad and pro engineering. What about MatLab and Mathematica.

Huge fields of projects, you are essentially negating yourself from, solely because you have no proven ability to do higher math and likely haven't put in the years of time it takes to become good at that math.</comment>


The Eye of the Needle - <AUTHOR> http://www.crashdev.com/2012/09/the-eye-of-needle.html

<comment><USER2> Survival of the fittest! It's applicable for everything.

Edit: Btw, I've heard follow on venture rounds (A, B, C etc.) get harder and harder on an exponential scale. If it is then why everyone is saying Series A crunch.

<comment><USER3> Possibly because it's quite possible to have a successful exit or profitable business with only a Series A (Google did it...), but hard to reach that milestone on seed/angel funding alone, unless you're bootstrapping entirely in which case you don't care about funding.

The reason follow-on rounds get harder is because there are exponentially fewer markets where it's rational for investors to put money in at that valuation. If you take a $5M Series A that values the company at $20M or so, then a $50M acquisition is still a win for everyone. If you take a $50M Series B that values the company at $300M, you _better_ be a billion-dollar business. If you take an $800M Series F, either you're the next Google or a bunch of investors are about to lose their shirts.

The Series A crunch gets publicity because it means that a bunch of founders are presumably either going to fail or will get talent-acquired for not-quite- FU-money. The Series B crunch just means that a lot of companies are getting acquired for FU money for the founders and a down payment on a house for the employees.</comment></comment>


Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 81 - <AUTHOR> https://webkit.org/blog/8834/release-notes-for-safari-technology-preview-81/ <comment><USER2> Disappointing... still no support for HTML5 date and time input types. Safari seems to be the last major hold out[0] keeping JavaScript-powered date pickers a (prudent) necessity.

[0]: [https://caniuse.com/#feat=input- datetime](https://caniuse.com/#feat=input-datetime)

<comment><USER3> Those JS pickers are going to be needed for a long time still, because native widgets are a nightmare to style consistently. Apparently nothing has been learned from the <select> styling minefield of the past.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that everyone should be able to edit the style of native elements. I prefer a consistent behavior, and the select itself works fine everywhere for example.

But i sadly agree, JS stuff is going to be needed for a long time.

<comment><USER3> There are good arguments for styling native elements and against them. I don't think this is specific to the web, cross-platform GUI toolkits have had this challenge forever.

The current datepickers on the desktop are "consistent in the same browser across many sites". There is no native solution for "consistent in the same site across browsers", which makes a lot of designers and PHBs upset, doesn't always fit the overall look of the site, and makes it harder for developers because each browser brings its own quirks with formatting, localization, validation, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _" Added the privacy preserving Ad Click Attribution API as an experimental feature"_

What is this?

<comment><AUTHOR> They're using multiple names to refer to this feature. It's also known as "Link Click Analytics" or <a ping>.

> The goal of link click analytics is to report to a web server that a > navigational link click happened and that the user is leaving the webpage. > Such auditing can be used for first-party web analytics as well as third- > party cross-site tracking. The latter is where ITP comes in.

[https://webkit.org/blog/8821/link-click-analytics-and- privac...](https://webkit.org/blog/8821/link-click-analytics-and-privacy/)

<comment><USER5> I think that's different. <a ping> has been in Safari for years now, that article was only written because WebKit recently removed the ability to disable it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was hoping to see support for U2F. I prefer to use Safari but really enjoy Chrome's support for Yubikey.

<comment><USER7> Totally agreed. FWIW they do have Webauthn in experimental features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone shed light on the "Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution" feature?

A quick glance at the changelog in Trac(!) and the commit on bugzilla(!) I just see changes to tests.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe it's the same as this feature: [https://webkit.org/blog/8821/link- click-analytics-and-privac...](https://webkit.org/blog/8821/link-click- analytics-and-privacy/)

<comment><USER7> got it, thanks for the link!

So, they seem to be saying if we don't support the ping element, adtech folks will use more malicious techniques?

I like that they are encouraging first-party analytics, and they are making small tweaks to respecting CSP, but something feels weird about this.

<comment><USER8> Content blockers (and their built in tracker prevention) both apply to ping elements, but there's no extra javascript or weird redirect tracking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just rewatched this talk on Monday from last year where Safari was called out for the rAF behavior that was fixed here. Cool to see this change.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOL7MC4Pl0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cCOL7MC4Pl0)

</comment><comment><USER10> The new request animation frame changes, are really exciting. Now RAF loops in safari are really synchronized

</comment><comment><USER11> Still no promised VP8 support.</comment>


Ask HN: IoT M2M data tariff recommendations? - <AUTHOR> Global/roaming support would be nice to have. <comment><USER2> Hologram.io</comment>


Show HN: I made a CLI to retrieve info from the IMDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zacoppotamus/TerminaIMdB

<comment><USER2> It's funny, this brings IMDB almost full-circle to its origins.

Back in the early 90s it was first this _huge_ text file distributed via usenet and ftp. I remember contributing a few points of a trivia about _T2: Judgement Day_ , one being the mirror of Arnold's "Get out." line to the trucker in _Terminator_ to Robert Patrick delivering the same to the helicopter pilot in _T2_.

Later on, after the volume of data was becoming unwieldy for a flat text file, it was converted to a MS-DOS based database system. You'd download a ton of archive files, unpack them, then run a binary that would allow you to query things like title, year, actor. One of the best features from those days (and maybe the very early web-based IMDB) was you could say, "show me actors that were common to these 2 movies" (or maybe it was "given these 2 actors, show me movies they both starred in" -- or maybe both).

I sorely miss those days of a community-driven IMDB. I was truly saddened when it "sold out" and became a more-or-less commercial portal.

<comment><USER3> You can still access the data files for private use, see <http://www.imdb.com/interfaces>.

Unfortunately, the data has a restrictive license. Though, I'm not sure if that entirely holds, as I believe there are limitations (at least in the United States) to having copyright on compilations of factual data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting, but you are not the pulling information from Imdb, according to the source code it is using omdbapi.com an independent site which used to be imdbapi.com until amazon issued them a C&D.

Keep in mind OmdbApi states that it uses all other resources except IMDB to compile its data, so you may not find some movies/information only found in IMDB.

Regardless, thank you open sourcing your work.

<comment><USER5> > omdbapi.com an independent site which used to be imdbapi.com until amazon > issued them a C&D.

How's omdbapi.com avoiding a C&D as well?

<comment><USER4> Omdbapi.com doesn't have the trademarked "imdb" word in their domain, they also seem to use wikipedia and freebase as their source.

Similar to how "Scroogle.org" stayed away from violating Google's trademark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice work. Just a couple of Python tips in case you wanted them.

\- Embrace PEP8 (<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/>). It'll help other developers work with your code.

\- argparse.ArgumentParser has a parse_args method, so you don't have to mess around with sys.argv

<comment><AUTHOR> Much appreciated, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hade made something similar in the form of a Chrome app/extension: you pasted lists of movie titles in a textarea and it retrieved basic information from IMDb about those titles.

What I had learned was that full text search on IMDb is of very poor quality and returns all sorts of crap; I ended up searching on Google to get the imdbId, and return to IMDb with that Id to get movie data.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's with the recent trend to use aliases instead of proper installation? (c.f. datafart, on the frontpage yesterday)

        mv terminalIMDB.py ~/bin/imdb
        chmod +x ~/bin/imdb

<comment><USER9> Would the benefit of doing it the author's way be that you can check out new versions from git without having to move the python script to /bin every or /usr/local/bin every time you get a new version.

<comment><USER8> I guess. But that could also be accomplished with a symlink, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice work. I see IMDB still don't have an API. I wrote a little movie comparison web app in the past and had to resort to screen scraping IMDB too. Rotten Tomatoes on the other hand seems to embrace developers a lot more and has an excellent API.

EDIT: Just realised you aren't actually screen scraping IMDB but using OMDB API (<http://www.omdbapi.com>) instead, I'll have to check that out.

<comment><USER11> IMDb do have an API, for eg. app.imdb.com, however this is meant for mobile applications and it can only be used if authorized in writing(!) by IMDb.

On CPAN there is WebService::IMDB module which uses this mobile API. Also there is IMBDB::File but (i believe) this works by web scraping IMDb website.

cpan links:

\- <https://metacpan.org/module/WebService::IMDB>

\- <https://metacpan.org/module/IMDB::Film>

<comment><USER10> Nice, thanks for the detailed post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wrote almost same script(<https://gist.github.com/1918439>) last year,here is the blog post(<http://mushfiq.com/2012/03/13/python-movie-data-crawler/>)

</comment><comment><USER13> I feel like I must mention the IMDBpy[1] project, its a mature framework/api to access IMDB via the web or to build a local database based on the flatfiles[2] imdb make available ;)

IMDB itself don't provide a (free) API and webscraping is explicitly forbidden in their TOS[3], so don't start building a service around that;)

[1] <http://imdbpy.sourceforge.net/> [2] <http://www.imdb.com/interfaces> [3] <http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions>

(edit: forgot a link)

</comment><comment><USER14> Had you previously noticed <https://github.com/bgr/imdb-cli> ? Can you tell us how yours differs from that and other IMDB CLI programs that have come before?

</comment><comment><USER15> Very cool! I wrote a similar Python script (<https://github.com/Pinkerton/Scripts/tree/master/Filmsy>) to find common actors between movies. It basically acts as a Python API wrapper for omdbapi.com.

I made it because I found a simple webapp at one point that did this, but forgot to bookmark it and never found it again.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very interesting. we've been using TMDB.org for our site filmquotra.com but are not tied to it. how do you distinguish yourself from tmdb?

<comment><USER17>
      > how do you distinguish yourself from tmdb

This is a command-line program for accessing movie information (via someone else's web API), not movie database system. Asking how he/she distinguishes his/herself from TheMovieDB, is... a little odd. It would be like asking XBMC how they distinguish themselves from IMDB.

<comment><USER16> thanks...i barely even understood your response to be honest...i'm not a programmer but trying to learn. love rentrak--i've been talking to someone there for a while now regarding a data feed.

<comment><USER17>
      > i barely even understood your response to be honest

\- IMDB & TMDB are collections of movie data.

\- XBMC (aka XBox Media Center) is a piece of software that plays videos and will grab information about those videos from IMDB or TMDB to display to the user (e.g. when you're watching a movie, it will show you a synopsis of the movie, boxart, etc grabbed from the web).

\- This post is just about a program that will allow you to say "I want information about a movie called _A Christmas Story_ " and it will fetch that information from the web, and display it. The only _real_ benefit of this, is being able to do the query/view the response from a text terminal, instead of just going to the website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks good. I made <http://www.deanclatworthy.com/imdb/> if anyone is interested too. Feel free to add it to your library.

<comment><USER18> Can you either charge for this or release it as OSS?

<comment><USER9> I doubt IMDB would be happy if I charged for it ;) I won't OS it for legal reasons (see what happened to imdbapi.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Pulling down URLs to images would be a really cool and useful addition. Good work though, looks great - will probably end up using this at some point.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll put that in the to-do list :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> IMDB app is the new hello world ;) There is mine: <https://github.com/caruccio/pymdb>

</comment><comment><USER21> I really did need something like this, but never thought of making of something!

Anyways looking forward to use this tool!</comment>


Inspirational video from Britain's got Talent - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=DelJrP3P7tA&feature=related

<comment><USER2> Awesome video. Also old, and also not really right for this forum.</comment>


Show HN: invoiceto.me (Make a free invoice PDF online) - <AUTHOR>

http://invoiceto.me/
My weekend project was this edit-in-place style invoice maker, with one button PDF generation and localStorage for everything. Aside from the PDF generator step, everything is jQuery powered and there is effectively no backend. This is (I suppose) an Alpha version, only really tested on webkit (iPad, Safari, & Chrome).
Feedback would be great: it's my first foray into web app development and I'm finding it hard to look at the page with fresh eyes—although I have my doubts about its usability in certain areas! All comments are welcome.
Part of me is tempted to attempt a platform for edit-in-place documents of this nature, I'd be interested to know if there is a similar approach taken elsewhere.
Many thanks, Stephen
(Note that this is a sort of follow up to my Ask HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2394319. I've taken on board the excellent advice there and have been doing lots of reading and experimenting. Want to get into the habit of shipping things ASAP though, so this is a small first step in that direction; it's also a tool that's handy for me.) <comment><USER2> I like it!

Here's a few suggestions you could think about.

\- Link the generation of invoices to existing apps/online services. No invoices work alone, probably you need to tap onto existing apps/services to help simplify users's adoption of your app.

\- Er.. why are you not making $$$ from it? Have a paid and a free options. One way I can think of the paid option is to allow users to save generated invoices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the input—interesting ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's very simple. I like it. Unfortunately, I don't have a use for it.

As for in-place editing, Neyric's javascript library has something along these lines.

<http://neyric.github.com/inputex/>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://invoiceto.me/> clickable

</comment><comment><USER5> looks good and very helpful.

one thing i would add is the ability to add a logo beside the "company name" as a lot of people want their logo on their invoices.

other than that, looks pretty good. GJ and nice domain!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is neat. How do you plan to make money on it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Possibilities include: \- Payable invoice URLS (include small charge) \- Branding/templates \- Edit in place beyond invoices

For now though, I'm concentrating on iron out the UI and then building a back end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are you using wkhtmltopdf for the generation?</comment>


The History of the iPhone on its 10th Anniversary [audio] - <AUTHOR> http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2017/01/the-history-of-the-iphone/ <comment><USER2> "Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, 'You are fucking up my company,' or, 'If we fail, it will be because of you.'"

If I had read this quote 2-3 years ago, before trying to found a startup, I would've thought that Jobs was a crazy asshole. While the latter point is still up for debate, I can now completely sympathize with how he felt in this moment.

<comment><USER3> Acting like that to your employees is a quick way to make them disappear. Apple was Apple, nothing was going to make them leave, no matter how much of an asshole Jobs was. I would listen to a CEO/Managers tirade once, before I started looking elsewhere. It's only a job.

<comment><USER4> Good. If someone (like Jobs) want to create the best product(s) out there, either you Be Better, or find somewhere where anything less than the best is good enough. Shape up or ship out.

<comment><USER5> Anyone of particularly high quality is capable of finding work elsewhere without much difficulty, so high-quality employees are actually _less_ likely to put up with crazy tirades.

<comment><USER6> Anyone of particularly high quality isn't going to be happy with 90% of the work available elsewhere. When you're at the top, you don't want to be managed by scrubs.

<comment><USER7> That's a bold claim. There are plenty of high performers who would rather be managed with dignity by a "scrub" than be berated by an genius asshole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, 'my god, we can build a phone with this'"

Does anybody know who this guy was?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bas Ording - [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,469,381.PN.&OS=PN/7,469,381&RS=PN/7,469,381)

<comment><USER9> On page 363 of his Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson tells the story of Jobs meeting a graphical designer in the lobby at Apple after a particularly poor interview:

"The process could be intimidating, but Jobs had an eye for talent. When they were looking for people to design the graphical interface for Apple's new operating system, Jobs got an email from a young man and invited him in. The applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well.

"Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen.

"When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. "I said, 'My God,' and hired him on the spot," Jobs recalled. The feature became a lovable part of Mac OS X, and the designer went on to design such things as inertial scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes the screen keep gliding for a moment after you've finished swiping)."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "So they asked, 'Why can't we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?' And you have to explain to them why you just can't."

Well, the iPhone 6 and especially the iPhone 7 do exactly this, so apparently you can indeed do exactly that. I wonder what has changed to make it possible.

<comment><USER10> They use the aluminum housing as part of the antenna now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool read.

"We put a sign on over the front door of the iPhone building that said FIGHT CLUB," Forstall testified. "Because the first rule of fight club is that you don't talk about fight club."

I found this bit wonderfully ironic given the anti-consumerist nature of the movie. Shades of Reagan playing 'Born in the USA' on the campaign trail.

<comment><USER12> On the other hand, the "Project Mayhem" members were shown to be consuming, avidly, an ultimately pointless product which they mistook for having a capability to fill the empty spaces in their lives where meaning could've gone. That the product in question happened to be a somewhat unusually violent repackaging of anti-consumerist ideology doesn't change the nature of its relationship with "Tyler Durden"'s followers.

<comment><USER11> That's an interesting argument!

What do you think Tyler's goal was in that movie? His fight club -> project mayhem plan seemed to go off the way he wanted it to. If you think he wanted to promote that free-your-mind, reset-the-score, you-are-not-your-possessions ideology, that desire seems to fit with the fact that he's the alter-ego of Norton's unfulfilled white collar weakling character. But you lay out pretty convincingly that Project Mayhem is more of a trick, trading one kind of prison for another. What would compel Norton's alter-ego to play such a trick?

<comment><USER12> In a word: nihilism. In another: narcissism. Project Mayhem is indeed a trick, but it's one "Jack" plays on himself.

Consider that blowing up the headquarters buildings of credit card companies does not suffice to achieve, or even approach, the goal of wiping out debt. Offsite backups are a thing. It doesn't even impair the operation of the business all that much, because disaster-recovery plans and hot failover sites are _also_ a thing. All told, Project Mayhem might have produced a period of as long as a whole weekend during which bank cards wouldn't work, and maybe not even that. But even if we're exceedingly charitable and assume they brought all the settlement systems down for a whole week, that doesn't materially affect debt held by credit customers, especially in light of the brief spending boom that'd almost certainly occur once people's cards started working again. So blowing up the HQ buildings is big, flashy, maybe a bit expensive for a variety of real estate insurance companies, and ultimately pointless.

And the way I read the character, Tyler Durden knows this is the case all along. The only person he really cares about selling on his line of bullshit is his own alter ego "Jack". Durden exists because "Jack" created him, and "Jack" created him because "Jack" wants convincing that he's not as meaningless, not as worthless, not as _pointless_ , as he feels himself to be. Because he feels himself that way, he can't muster the emotional resources to do this work for himself, so he creates Tyler Durden to do it for him, and Durden does it very well. Creating a fringe political movement that blows things up is incidental, and occurs not because Durden thinks that's a thing worth doing in its own right - it's an open question whether Durden can even be considered to have agency or consciousness independent of "Jack" \- but because it serves the purpose of convincing "Jack" that he _has_ a purpose.

This is a problem someone else might solve by volunteering at a retirement home or joining a church or starting a family - or all of the above, perhaps - but "Jack"'s too much of a nihilist to really believe in anything outside himself, and too much of a narcissist to really buy into anything that doesn't center on himself. We see the former in his internal monologue, which the film helpfully externalizes for us, and the latter in his behavior at the various support groups he parasitizes in the first act. So "Jack" eventually invents Tyler Durden, and Tyler Durden invents Project Mayhem, and this pays off for "Jack" twice over: first when he finds himself to have become the barycenter of a movement that has people ready to kill and die to advance its goals, and then second when he decides it can't be borne and sets about to destroy it, thus becoming able to conceive of himself as a virtuous man struggling against all the odds - and, in "killing" Durden at the climax, eventually succeeding in that struggle. The property damage, like the existence of Project Mayhem in the first place, is incidental; the only meaning it has in the context of "Jack"'s evolving self-experience, and thus in the context of the film, is an indication of the extent to which it's necessary for "Jack" to go in order to bridge the gap between how he perceives himself and how he needs to perceive himself in order to tolerate his own existence.

Of course, one's experience of oneself is rarely static, and Palahniuk and Fincher are too skilled in their respective crafts for it to be mere coincidence that _Fight Club_ ends when it does. It would perhaps be interesting to watch "Jack"'s tenuous grasp on life disintegrate completely, along with his circumstances, over the next several days following the climax of the film. But I doubt it would add all that much of appeal to the experience, or have a fingernail's chance of getting past the first test audience on which it was tried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It should be noted that the transcript makes for _great_ reading on its own, and seems to be word-for-word.

<comment><USER14> Yes, good reading... but mind-numbingly horrible as a podcast. The guy is just reading an essay out-loud!

Very few people can successfully podcast in a monologue format. The only person that comes to mind is Malcom Gladwell.

<comment><USER15> I agree. Monologue podcasts either work really well, or poorly. I'm a fan of Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A good hour of audio for my trainride back from Stockholm. It's amazing how emotional the iPhone unveil feels even without the video.

Thanks for sharing.</comment>


The Behavior Grid: Fifteen Ways Behavior Can Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.behaviorwizard.org/wp/behavior-grid/

<comment><USER2> Incredibly clear categorization of the types of behaviors. Diving deep into the basics of concepts like behavior change, language, game theory, and virtually any other concept really help us start to better understand what they really mean and aim to achieve, what affects them, what in our mind constitutes success and failure in affecting them, and other insights of the sort.</comment>


Steal real money in The Castle Doctrine video game - <AUTHOR> http://thecastledoctrine.net/stealRealMoneyContest.php

<comment><USER2> Looks like I may win $100 if I don't screw up in the next 2 hours.</comment>


Using "capabilities" to design safer, more expressive APIs in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://zsck.co/writing/capability-based-apis.html <comment><USER2> This was a really neat application of types!</comment>


Crypto Market Has Bottomed (According to Novogratz) - <AUTHOR> https://beincrypto.com/crypto-market-has-bottomed-according-to-novogratz/ <comment><USER2> From numbers alone?

I can see Bitcoin being stable as its used as a fiat hedge, but the top alt coin Ethereum, failed to solve the Blockchain log jam. It seems overall, apps should not run on blockchain.

These ERC20 platforms have to go to ~0 before we see the bottom.

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin isn't used as a Fiat hedge. It's used for laundering, buying drugs and other illegal activity. That's all that is keeping it alive

<comment><USER4> The professional criminals long ago switched to privacy focused coins like Monero and Zcash [0], both for movements and for ransomware/cryptojacking.

Fiat is still the largest market for money laundering [1], not Bitcoin. The amount of money described in that article is almost 50% of what Bitcoin's peak market cap was. I also think if Bitcoin was significantly better than existing methods for money laundering, we would see an increase in the proportion of identifiable illegal activity instead of a declining trend which implies the amount of money laundering (and other illegal activities) has at most remained constant [2]. That paper also reinforces the point made in [0] with regards to Monero/Zcash. It should also be noted that the paper found only ~25% of users and ~44% of transactions were involved, which while being large portions are not the majority portions. I would also hazard a guess that the majority of large scale illegal transactions would not be conducted on exchanges in amounts large enough to cause major slippage of price, which is a significant limiting factor in how quickly someone can launder their money (especially since while they don't want to significantly move the price themselves, other entities may not have such restrictions) as well as eliminating those transactions as major price movers.

Not saying no one uses Bitcoin for these things, just that it's highly unlikely those things are the primary factors in the price we see.

Personally, I think the price supports for Bitcoin are speculation, (possibly - I know one enthusiast personally who believes miners would buy up BTC whenever the price falls below break-even for mining) miners, and probably more than a few true believers.

I would also like to point out that Bitcoin, while the dominant factor in the crypto market, is not the ENTIRE cryptomarket. There are several projects that have actual unique use cases - Brave (BAT) and Enjin (ENJ) being two examples that are not explicitly targeting fiat substit, Ethereum, or Stellar. Believe it or not, there are actually people who would rather not have unelected third parties able to exercise control over their wealth and daily lives. Especially when some of those third parties engage in predatory practices and take risks that endanger the economy as a whole [3], and when those third parties are practically unavoidable.

[0] [https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/09/20/dhs-says-darknet- crimi...](https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/09/20/dhs-says-darknet-criminals- switching-bitcoin-monero/)

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/14/us-examining-danske-bank- ove...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/14/us-examining-danske-bank-over- possible-money-laundering-wsj-says.html)

[2] [https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/business-law- blog/blog/2018/02/sex-...](https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/business-law- blog/blog/2018/02/sex-drugs-and-bitcoin-how-much-illegal-activity-financed- through)

[3] [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bank-of-america- charge-...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bank-of-america-charge- checking-account_us_5a68a762e4b0dc592a0e91d6)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There have been buyers holding the $6000 level over the last couple of months, but there has not been much buying interest on the last few pops higher either. Calling a bottom at this point is way premature. It's at most a 50:50 chance at this point. If sellers come back in aggressively and drive the price through 6000, anyone who bought there is going to panic and that will drive the price a lot lower.

</comment><comment><USER6> Are Bitcoin a security? If so, would the SEC see this promotion as violating any rules?

I'm assuming Novogratz holds Bitcoin.

<comment><USER7> >Are Bitcoin a security?

not according to the SEC.

>"Cryptocurrencies: These are replacements for sovereign currencies, replace the dollar, the euro, the yen with bitcoin," Clayton said. "That type of currency is not a security."

>A token, or a digital asset used in a fundraising process known as an initial coin offering, or ICO, are securities by Clayton's definition.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/sec-chairman-clayton-says- ag...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/sec-chairman-clayton-says-agency-wont- change-definition-of-a-security.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> edit: disregard. I won't ever question the scientific validity of technical analysis again, and will add it to my ever-growing list of unacceptable opinions on HN.

<comment><USER9> Why the downvotes? The parent is correct: TA is junk science. In the case of bitcoin it does make for great schadenfreude though: [https://i.redd.it/8f87wq7snzl11.jpg](https://i.redd.it/8f87wq7snzl11.jpg)

<comment><USER10> Agreed. From the article: "Markets like to retrace to the breakout". Nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Crypto is by-and-large only good for illegal transactions; same as BitTorrent is only good for illegal downloads.

Anyone talking about other "applications" doesn't understand the way things currently work.

People with this _correct_ opinion might get censored by the Inquisition but we have only been right so far...

<comment><USER11> > same as BitTorrent is only good for illegal downloads.

[https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent- yo...](https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be- surprised/)

Number 3 will surprise you.</comment></comment>


Depressed children respond differently to rewards than other kids - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/8313.html <comment><USER2> "If they're persistently sad, irritable or less motivated, those are markers that may indicate depression, even in kids as young as 3 or 4, and we would recommend that parents get them evaluated."

Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying symptoms of depression, there's shit happening at home and the parents are neck-deep in denial about their role and pigs will fly before they get help for their kid.

<comment><USER3> > Speaking from personal experience, if a 3 or 4 year old is displaying > symptoms of depression, there's shit happening at home and the parents are > neck-deep in denial about their role and pigs will fly before they get help > for their kid.

Depression definitely can be caused by abuse. In fact if you're being abused you are probably also depressed.

Depression and other mental illnesses are also often caused by things that can't be externally influenced at all.

Casually linking poor parenting with mental illness enforces a stigma that discourages people from seeking treatment for themselves or for their children.

<comment><USER4> I didn't read GP as necessarily being about abuse, but even stuff like the parents arguing in front of the child.

<comment><USER5> I didn't read GPs post that way either, however I still agree with jetpks' point regarding depression. Mental illness is a medical condition so cannot be dismissed as a parenting problem. While _some_ instances of depression will be symptoms of a child's home life, others will be medical.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand how the parenting problem being the root cause of the mental illness dismisses the mental illness.

Imagine if the child is sick (eg in pneumonia) it wouldn't dismiss the illness if I explained how the child got sick because their parents left them outside freezing.

It's not dismissing, it's analyzing the root cause, to try and help the child. If something causes illness (mental and/or physical), we should take care of both the illness and the cause.

In the case of depression, finding a true unique cause is still open for debate/research, but it shoudn't prevent us from helping someone who's depressed.

<comment><USER5> Depression is a vague overly-general term so it differs from person to person. There isn't going to be a "true unique cause". In some instances it's just a result of chemical imbalances rather than emotional conditioning from the parents. Thus you cannot brush depression of as being environmental.

<comment><USER6> A _cause_ isn't necessarily environmental, it can be, and even if it is "a result of chemical imbalances", there's still a cause, and if we could find the causes for the multiple forms of mental illnesses wouldn't that be good?

<comment><USER7> What he is trying to get at, is that some mental illness are genetic, people are born with them, and due to people frequently insisting that they are always result of external factors, it leads to people that were born with genetic problems to not get treated as parents either are ashamed or feel insulted and refuse treatment.

(Disclaimer: this happened to me. I have confirmed ADHD and maybe aspergers too, but my parents were so offended when schools asked them to take me to a doctor that only now in my adulthood I am being treated properly)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can attest to this. Grew up with Bipolar II, and Christmas was always the worst due to the dissonance of the joy around you and your own bad feelings. Birthdays were worse, because then you couldn't escape the attention. I specifically requested to stop having birthday parties -rather to just have a small family dinner. I think my parents were just baffled, thought I was moody/cynical.

I really wish I was diagnosed earlier, but what can you do? It breaks my heart to think of any kid going through the same thing and it just being dismissed, but what are they supposed to do? If you're going to get a proper diagnosis you need a referral to see a psychiatrist. If you're a bit iffy and the doctor doesn't think a referral is in order you're likely to wind up with a number of wrong diagnoses. I don't think at that age I was even capable of explaining all my symptoms thoroughly enough for even a psychiatrist to figure out the whole picture.

This is why physical diagnoses _needs_ to step up to the plate. There needs to be a blood test, or something like it, rather than having to rely on baffled parents, or patients who might not even realize certain symptoms are even worth bringing up at all.

<comment><USER9> According to Wikipedia, Bipolar II is hard to diagnose. A lot of personality disorders also have an onset in late youth/early adulthood. IOW, you cannot diagnose those yet at a pre-teen age.

There's a big taboo concerning depression. It isn't regarded as a disease, in social life those who are negative tend to get avoided.

As for rewards like presents, I simply don't get the whole theatre behind it. It is just trading, often nowhere near original, and I too often don't know what on earth to buy for someone, ending up with cheesy things. You ask something, and you either get exactly what you want (no surprise), you get something you don't want and did not ask for (negative surprise) or you get something you did not ask for and do want (positive surprise). Now, how to make someone positively surprised if they already feel they got pretty much everything? If the only things they do want are rather expensive? If they don't need yet another cheap thing such as perfume while they already have their own expensive perfume brand which bottle is not even half empty? My point is that it can be extremely difficult to satisfy someone's needs. Not merely mine; the ones of all my peers. Now consider I was like this as a child as well (probably why I am like this now).

Perhaps therein lies the difference. The non depressed are happy to receive a gift, never mind that it is merely a custom whereas the depressed see through the custom. One could argue the latter is smarter, but is that true from a biological PoV?

<comment><USER8> I grew up with pretty left wing parents who were against consumerism. I liked the gifts and the principal of a fun pagan silly ritual where be re-express our love for one another. I never felt displeasure with being given a gift in my life. Guilt, maybe, that I couldn't show more pleasure in the situation, but kids are pretty good at hiding their emotions. Sometimes the act drops, and then observers just say you're having a bad day.

I find the idea that depressed people have a gift at seeing through fakery as troubling. It is a correlation and causation thing. If I was depressed everything seemed shit, even the stuff that wasn't fake, so of course it might look enlightened in certain situations. I think a lot of those studies are flawed pop-psychology type stuff that I wouldn't put much value in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hm, can someone help me figure out what this is saying more rigorously?

Specifically, is it saying Pr(Dislikes Rewards | Depressed) is high, or is it saying Pr(Depressed | Dislikes Rewards) is high, or both?

<comment><USER11> The article doesn't say anything about Pr(Dislikes Rewards), but rather claims to have measured P(Diminished Response to Rewards | Clinical Depression Diagnosis) > P(Diminished Response to Rewards | !Diagnosis).

It's an 84 person study, done using EEG (a very rough measure of electrical activity in the brain), claiming a result largely related neurotransmitter release (ie not the sort of thing EEGs are usually used to measure). You should take their claims with a huge helping of salt.

<comment><USER10> Yeah my focus wasn't on the wording, it was on the order of the two variables. Interesting, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait, so they had kids choose a door and there was a 50% chance they get a point or lose a point? And that's what constitutes scientific research these days?

Did they even account for the kids figuring out that whether they win or lose is completely random and there's no skill or pattern involved? You know, like "what's even the point of trying if it's all random anyway"? Maybe that's why some kids weren't thrilled to get a point, because there was literally no effort required to get it, pure chance.

I don't know what the "scientists" expected, but I don't know a single person who goes into euphoria after they win a coin flip. Geez, they might all be at risk of clinical depression!!!!!!!

<comment><USER13> Isn't it more likely that these scientists do actually know what they are doing, and aren't actually the incompetent bumbling fools you seem to think?

I'm baffled that there is always a response to any scientific research along the lines of "Well, these scientists didn't take <obvious confounding factor> into account! They need to compensate for <list of random attributes I just thought up>."

<comment><USER14> Quite aside from the fact that appeal to authority is not how science is _supposed_ to work, the current reproducibility crisis suggests that this sort of response need not be as baffling as you seem to find it.

To be clear, I doubt GP has accurately identified a confounder here; the comparison is between children diagnosed with depression and those not so diagnosed, performing the same task, so it's not as though differential response on the task is being used to identify depression. But the larger point that a result need not be taken on faith remains valid, as does the general advisability of knowing what you're talking about before you do so - which GP regrettably seems here to have overlooked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or "depressed" children simply aren't smitten by simple artificial gifts.

<comment><USER16> So what makes non-depressed kids more smitten? What's interesting is that there is a differentiation between the two, not which is the 'right' way to behave.

You can throw your own emotional spin on this phenomenon if you like, but the scientist's job was to investigate whether there is a phenomenon of this sort, and they did just that.

<comment><USER15> > So what makes non-depressed kids more smitten?

That they're receptive to BS tests and more easily manipulated ?

> What's interesting is that there is a differentiation between the two, not > which is the 'right' way to behave.

Interesting ? Of course there's a differentiation between the two, human brains don't operate the same.

But my point was with the common popular notion of claiming someone as depressed as something being notoriously bad with them and "not normal". What if the 'depressive realism' (as mentioned in this thread) is actually a feature that humans should develop to more rationally meet their choices in life? Now that's a question I find more interesting.

<comment><USER17> Eeyore > Pooh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. But isn't this almost the definition of depression?

<comment><USER19> I think a better take away is the reverse. If you are rewarding children in your class (or your kids) and one is not enthusiastic then you should take note there might be a problem (essentially the first sentence of the article).

<comment><USER20> I'd be very careful here. Perhaps the particular reward is not perceived by the child as a reward? I can think of any number of things that one party might perceive as a reward that would be, to me, uncomfortable or meh.

<comment><USER21> Interesting. Instead, kid enters the room, you tell them that they will be sitting there anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 hours, depending on how long the experiment should be. They get to choose a sequence of doors. At each step, the door can either contain +10 minutes or -10 minutes, representing the number of minutes which will be either added to or subtracted from their experiment duration, respectively.

My guess is that the depressed/bored children will now respond a little bit better to this experiment. It's just a guess -- but I think depressed/bored kids would tend to avoid spending time being bored in a little lab room.

<comment><USER22> Depression has little to do with boredom.

I think a depressed person would be more likely to ignore all your doors, or open a few without caring one way or the other. But I'm not a psychiatrist.

<comment><USER21> > Depression has little to do with boredom.

This is not as well understood as we think. I would suggest doing that experiment with both types of people, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Mrs. Berry was then left with the unpleasant realization that either her entire class was depressed, or scratch and sniff stickers were no longer cool.

</comment><comment><USER24> EEGs show brain differences between poor and rich kids [http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/12/02_corte...](http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/12/02_cortex.shtml)</comment>


Ask HN: Best non-academic algorithms book? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> This is a bit vague, but here are some suggestions

Algorithms to live by Brian Christian [https://www.amazon.ca/Algorithms-Live- Computer-Science-Decis...](https://www.amazon.ca/Algorithms-Live-Computer- Science-Decisions/dp/1627790365)

Bad Choices: How Algorithms Can Help You Think Smarter and Live Happier by Ali Almossawi [https://www.amazon.ca/Bad-Choices-Algorithms-Smarter- Happier...](https://www.amazon.ca/Bad-Choices-Algorithms-Smarter- Happier/dp/0735222126/ref=pd_sim_14_2/138-4400745-6525301?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=R4DGXJASMEFBWSB0ECP7)

</comment><comment><USER3> What would you like the book to cover? The daily driver algorithms and ten thousand pieces of trivia that working programmers keep in their minds, i.e. a non-academic book for working programmers? Breadth-first search, topological sort, the dozen different ways of implementing a hash map, stuff with strings, etc?

Or a work of popular science? Describing the few big algorithms that receive a disproportionate amount of attention? FFT, RSA, backpropagation, divide-and- conquer matrix multiplication, quicksort, simplex, and the like?

<comment><AUTHOR> A non-academic book for working programmers is spot on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Data Structures and Algorithms with JavaScript_ ([http://amzn.to/2vDDbHQ](http://amzn.to/2vDDbHQ)) is a really excellent book, even if you're not using JavaScript for anything (I wasn't when I first read it, and still found it immensely helpful).

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't read it but _Grokking Algorithms_ is well reviewed.

[https://www.manning.com/books/grokking- algorithms](https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-algorithms)</comment>


Seattle's 'microtransit' experiment drives people to light rail - <AUTHOR> https://crosscut.com/2019/08/seattles-microtransit-experiment-drives-people-light-rail-it-working <comment><USER2> I'm liking this idea, particularly as a low-cost, MVP version of Lyft/Uber that could solve some transit needs of people on really tight budgets.

A case in point: There's a big Safeway grocery store right by the Othello light rail station. If you live a mile or two east of that station, you've got poor grocery shopping choices in your immediate neighborhood, and you'd much rather have access to the Safeway.

But walking a mile with two or three bags of groceries is not going to be a pleasant experience, especially for older people or people in poor health. Getting this new van service at an affordable cost means you can get a lot better food and appreciably cheaper food into your life.

<comment><USER3> That use case though, it reads like it only goes _too_ transit not _away_ from transit. So you get a lift to the light rail, get your groceries and get back to the same light rail station and then, ... well it seems you are on you own for getting back to where you started?

<comment><USER4> It's definitely bidirectional. It would be farcical to take people one way to transit and then abandon them for the ride home. Why would you assume one way only? Seattle's not that dystopian.

<comment><USER5> >> It would be farcical to take people one way to transit and then abandon them for the ride home.

Like every day I have to work a night shift? All sorts of buses are eager to give me a lift when I want to go to work at 1500 (3pm). Where are they at 0230 when I want to get back home? One-way options are not unusual when it comes to realworld transit systems.

<comment><USER2> You're right that late night coverage right now is an issue. I think weekday service stops at 11 p.m., and it doesn't go past the early evening on weekends. But this is a start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ridership is up, but is traffic down?

It doesn't matter how many people are using this service. What matters is _which_ people are using it. Cities are realizing that most new transit schemes aren't getting people out of their cars. They are leeching people away from other forms of mass transit. Getting someone out of a bus and into a van is not a win.

What is needed is an actual competitor to the private car, something that can truly replace it. The buses in my area stop at 11pm, and the nearest passenger train is a hundred km away. Until that changes, if want to keep my job, I need to keep driving my car. Offering me a shuttle between my door and the bus stop means literally nothing if there is no bus to get.

<comment><USER6> Leeching people from busses into trains seems good, though?

<comment><USER5> That's an interesting question. The head of Ryanair used to talk about how air travel was sometimes lower carbon than the equivalent train journey (Ryanair flies to the smaller airports, and highspeed rail is far from zero carbon). There is certainly a tipping point where the train clearly wins, but there are also a great many areas where the slower and more direct bus service is probably best. This is doubly true in places like Vancouver that have been using electric buses for literally _decades_.

<comment><USER7> First of all, there is _no chance_ outside of some absurd contrived scenario for a jet to have lower co2 emissions than a train. When a CEO says something that transparently bullshit they are obviously lying in their interest you really shouldn't do their lying for them by parroting it.

Second, carbon dioxide (which I assume you were shorthanding as 'carbon') is not even half of the greenhouse-gas/radiative-forcing effect of air travel: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation#/media/File:Radiative_Forcing_in_Aviation_1992.png) So even if this CEO was technically right, he'd still be wrong in terms of what actually matters.

<comment><USER5> No. He did not say that the jet burned less fuel. He was commenting that a highspeed rail journey, with the necessary connecting car/bus/light rail legs on each end, can sometimes require more carbon than a more direct aircraft flight. There are breaking points where an all-economy flight can be the most energy-efficient option.

My home town (on an island) is a good example. I could take a direct flight to another city, or drive the 100's of KM by car+boat to the nearest passenger rail. And then I'd have to rent a car and drive several hundred more KM after stepping off the train. In such circumstances the direct aircraft connection is the lower-carbon option.

<comment><USER7> I see what you're doing even if you don't. This level of nitpickery and contrarian noise is the functional equivalent of denying reality. All you're doing is sewing doubt and throwing sand in the gears to make it harder for everyone else. You cannot continue to apply marginal optimization tactics to a solve for zero problem. It is simply a failure to understand and address reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can see how such services are helpful in sparsely populated areas.

I don't know Seattle personally, but in any larger city something like this begs the question: Why not improve the normal public transport service and also provide light-rail or busses to the areas that have "little east-west bus service" according to the article?

<comment><USER9> Seattle is improving the normal transport service, too. They are tearing up streets and putting in trains, they are eliminating parking(!) in favor of places to hang out. Seattle is becoming fantastically more car-hostile by the day. Seriously, the last time I visited one street had eliminated street parking in favor of a protected bike lane, potted plants and some chairs.

There are 27 distinct, voter-approved transit projects in progress:

[https://www.soundtransit.org/system- expansion](https://www.soundtransit.org/system-expansion)

<comment><USER10> Is that a bad thing, though? I mean, it is for people who like to drive, but I think the benefits to everyone else outweigh the preferences of car owners.

<comment><USER11> I read "fantastically car-hostile" as a pro car-hostility statement.

<comment><USER4> I had the opposite take. Usually when I read opinions colored by "car- hostile," it's from authors who advocate for car-maximized infrastructure.

<comment><USER9> I used to term car-hostile as a step beyond "pro-transit," because cities can be pro-transit while still not doing enough to actively reduce the number of people getting into cars.

Seattle is not just making riding transit more convenient. They are making driving more inconvenient.

<comment><USER12> As someone living in the suburbs near Seattle... You're half right. Mostly about the making driving (and parking) more inconvenient.

In programming terms they're ripping out a deprecated interface without having first provided a replacement to transition to. Yes there are park and ride facilities outside of the core city, but they're specced for local capacity. The gateway interface would be much more like replacing several warehouses near the tram line and freeway with GIANT, actively police monitored, parking garages. On the north end something similar probably needs to happen near the northgate mall, and if the extension up through the U doesn't go there it needs to.

THEN after the pre-requisite work is done, they should just ban all cars from the city outright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Via's cost per ride to the operator is about $10."

This doesn't sound sustainable. I wonder how much of this can be reduced.

<comment><USER14> Lot more expensive to build big parking garages that we all drive our cars to, to get on the bus. These feeder vans should cost way less per passenger than buses, if they can get a reasonable number of passengers.

<comment><USER15> > These feeder vans should cost way less per passenger than buses, if they can > get a reasonable number of passengers.

I'm curious why this would be the case - I'm under the impression the vast majority of the cost of operating a van/shuttle/bus is the cost of the driver.

<comment><USER14> You have a less skilled driver in the van. The one I often drive is just a 3 seat van. The driver is making $12 an hour I think they told me. It's a 6 month experiment.

<comment><USER16> I don't want to say less skilled, but you need less training which probably lowers costs.

However in terms of passengers, shorter trips means it's better to compare passengers per hour rather than the number in a bus at any one time. If they can average 8 passengers per hour the service would be making money on it's own and 4+ could probably be worthwhile as part of a larger network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I want is a minibus towing a little flatbed trailer. All it does is take people and their bikes from the bottom of the hill to the top.

For example, there's a place in San Francisco, West Portal to the top f the hill where Portola meets O'Shaughnessy, where you have about a mile to climb about 220 ft. Google maps bike route, shows elevation profile: [https://goo.gl/maps/zmcb8RkBtNGzUqFi7](https://goo.gl/maps/zmcb8RkBtNGzUqFi7) From there most of the rest of the city is downhill, including all of downtown and the Mission district.

If there was a bike-shuttle service for that uphill, and another from, say, Castro station to Diamond Heights, I think you would get a lot more people commuting by bicycle.

<comment><USER18> In Seattle I know many people who live on flat routes and don't bike. I don't think the hills are the main deterrent. Anecdotally, it sounds like fear factor (especially riding near cars) and sweat (even if office has a shower) are the big ones.

<comment><USER19> Yeah sure, but let me tell you biking from Ballard to Montlake on the Burke Gilman was awesome and easy. Now I live on Capitol Hill (Seattle) and don't bike cause the climb is a killer.

<comment><USER14> You can bike part way and put your bike on the front of a bus to go up a big hill. You can rent ebikes for pennies to go up the hill, you can get your own ebike for 500 bucks.

All of these things apply to me too :-) I live by a big freaking hill, 300' up and whenever I ride I have to take a shower. If I had a flatter hill I'd ride my bike the 4 miles to the p&r a lot. Instead I drive my stupid car.

<comment><USER20> Ebike rentals aren't pennies. My last ride was $4 for about a mile. I was surprised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The $3.2 million [...] so far, the service has exceeded Metro's daily > ridership goals and served up more than 70,000 total rides.

So far this has cost Seattle $46 dollars a ride.

Now, it looks like we're just 6 months in, so a simple projection would halve that number to $23 per ride after a year, potentially less if they scale up.

Why not just subsidize Lyft and Uber rides? For these short distances, it'd probably be less than $5.

<comment><USER22> >Why not just subsidize Lyft and Uber rides? For these short distances, it'd probably be less than $5.

They are already subsidized, by billions and billions of dollars of venture capital.

When you pay less than $5 to get from one side of your city to the other in the middle of rush hour, that's not covering the entire cost of the trip.

<comment><USER23> You could pay 2x the market rate and still be paying less than half of what they are now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's yet another last few mile transit option in testing too, called "Ride 2" [1], free with bus transfer. There's 2 zones in West Seattle, one on the east side. Free transfer if you bus ride. It's perfect for those places that have lots of buses at a central area but not enough feeders, not enough parking and ride space. King county is trying really hard to make it work on transit and they are doing a great job in my opinion.

1\. [https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/programs-p...](https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/programs- projects/innovation-technology/innovative-mobility/on- demand/ride2-eastgate.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER24> > "It would be a mistake for transit agencies and cities to rely on this kind > of last-mile connection to the exclusion of making better walking and biking > connections to transit hubs," he said. "Those are also very low-cost ways to > make it easier to connect to transit."

so a lot of people are taking the minibus because there are no way to safely physically get to an actual bus stop. if towns were planned around public transportation this would not be a problem. we have planned towns around automobiles for too long. this creates an artificial need for cars.

</comment><comment><USER22> All the talk about 'government waste' in this thread makes me think of my home town, where you still regularly see massive city buses driving around town without a single passenger riding in them.

Moving people on demand is definitely not cheap, but surely it is more cost effective that casting a net of mostly-empty buses around the city for half the day.

<comment><USER25> It's the coverage vs frequency (ridership) decision. [https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership- covera...](https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage- tradeoff.html)

This via service is for coverage not ridership that's why people are comparing the wrong thing.

Many American cities aka San Jose being the most recent example are retooling their bus routes for fewer but more frequent routes at the cost of cutting the coverage routes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> How does this compare / differ from those people ordering Uber/Lyft to do the exact same thing?

<comment><USER27> Much cheaper?

>Rides cost the same as taking the bus: $2.75 for adults, $1.50 for low-income riders with ORCA Lift cards.

Just looked up an Uber ride I took for less than a mile (.7 mile) - that had a cost of $6.45.

Oh top of that the cost is predicable - no surge pricing.

<comment><USER28> On top of that, it's actually basically free because it counts as a transfer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I recently moved from the Bay Area to Seattle. I was looking forward to the move because I love cycling and Seattle was rated #1 in bike infrastructure last year [1]. While the infrastructure is indeed somewhat better than the BA, I was shocked by the widespread hate for cyclists everywhere in Seattle and surrounding areas. Getting honked at is a regular occurrence here, and people will actually stick their head out of their cars to make sure you hear the insults they are shouting at you, while simultaneously giving you the finger. It gets worse: a couple weeks ago somebody hiding behind some trees threw a rock at me while riding on the Burke Gilman trail. Fortunately they missed me. The rock (fist-sized) shattered a few feet in front of me on the trail pavement. The hate is incessant and I definitely understand why people don't feel comfortable riding.

[1] [https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a23676188/best-bike- cities...](https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a23676188/best-bike-cities-2018/)

<comment><USER30> Regarding the cases where people in cars are yelling at you, are you riding slower than traffic in the car lane when this happens? Doing so defensively away from curb to avoid being door'ed but at the same time blocking cars from passing you?

Not agreeing with drivers, just guessing as this does attract a lot of driver rage.

<comment><USER30> Also fwiw, I rode daily all over Seattle for several years and had this happen to me exactly zero times. I've never met someone who, unprovoked, would yell at or menace a cyclist and have a hard time imagining someone who would except a rare crazy or 16yr old idiot trying to impress his friends. I have however talked to many people who are driven nuts by cyclists who obstruct traffic (in their opinion)

<comment><USER31> FWI(still)W, from talking to cyclists in my area (NYC and surroundings) whether somebody gets yelled at depends on a lot more than how they're riding. As an example, the women I know who ride bicycles (just as competently) get menaced a lot more than the men.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I like the idea but so far it seems like it's $40 per customer per journey.

<comment><USER33> >According to Metro, Via's cost per ride to the operator is about $10. Compared to Metro's systemwide cost per boarding of $4.92, that's expensive. But high ridership bus routes have a lower cost per boarding than low ridership routes, meaning Via's costs are not wildly out of line with costs associated with low-rider routes.

What am I missing there?

<comment><USER14> maybe they thought of 4 passengers? Building more roads costs a lot more when they are a billion dollars a mile in Seattle (i90, 30 years ago). Or the 520 bridge.

We need to do all the things to make traffic in Seattle better, light rail, buses, road improvements, last mile transit services. Would we really be better off if we dropped all this "wasteful" transit spending and had really worse traffic? Of course not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It would be cool if one side of the route didn't have to be to a light rail station. Or, if the trip wasn't limited to a two mile area. I think it would be cool if you could order a ride on an app, a vehicle comes to your exact location and then takes you to your exact destination. That would be a real innovation! Transportation that takes me to other transportation that then requires walking the last mile isn't exactly efficient. This service is Uber Pool that forces you to go to a train station instead of your exact destination? Why not just go to where you really want to go instead?

<comment><USER28> Uber Pool costs money, and is therefore reserved for people who have money to burn. Via Transit (the service referred to in OP) is $2.75, but counts as a transfer against the train, so it's effectively free if you were already planning on taking the train. Its goal is also to get people to use mass transit, which is can be a ton faster than driving/Uber Pool in Seattle too. I've used Via a lot and it turns a 22 minute walk to the train station into a 3 minute walk and 3 minute drive. Light rail from that point takes 18 minutes to go downtown, versus what would have been a 25-45 minute drive in Uber Pool. All for $2.75, versus $9-$15 on Uber Pool, or $20+ in UberX.

<comment><USER35> Except, since the article states that the average per ride cost on Via is $10, that total cost including the subsidy is more like $12.75, more if you include the rail subsidies. For commuters using the service every work day, that's >$2000 in subsidies per person. That's a pretty massive subsidy.

<comment><USER36> Your calculations disregard the fact that rides can be shared. These are vans, likely with room for 4-passengers. So, the average ride will have 2-passengers.

Secondly, I laud Seattle for finding ways to reduce congestion. It can take 45-minutes to go 4-miles by car from Beacon Hill to downtown. Particularly, they are trying to find a solution that is affordable to a large swath of the population, not just the tech-rich.

Finally, all public transit systems are designed to be subsidized, one way or another. To wit, every rider who pays $2.75 on a bus is getting a subsidy of $2.17 (each rider costs $4.92). At what point is the subsidy "too much"?

<comment><USER35> The definition of "ride" is ambiguous, but I'm relatively confident that the majority of hails are going to be single rider, and the subsidy is averaging at least $7/ride before they get to the transit station.

The article also has plenty of transit advocates stating the obvious- this cost more than even low ridership bus routes, so isn't a long term solution, and strong fixed route transit solutions are needed.

The subsidy here is large enough that if the investment is worthwhile, then it would also be worth investigating what would happen if we gave small, low cost electric vehicles (bicycles, scooters, or covered variants thereof) to households in the service areas.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>