Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing – Tech Talk - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogcreek.com/eight-fallacies-of-distributed-computing-tech-talk/

<comment><USER2> The Eight Fallacies were the impetus for the development of Jini and JavaSpaces. I wrote about this many moons ago here: [http://www.softwarematters.org/jini- intro.html](http://www.softwarematters.org/jini-intro.html)

Jini is one of those technologies that should have taken off but somehow didn't. At the time, the Jini proponents attributed the failure to the fact that J2EE sold more hardware. That might have been a factor, but I suspect the fact that Jini was just too much outside the mainstream was a bigger issue. Not unlike Lisp, really.

<comment><USER3> I would imagine being tied to Java at least by name (JavaSpace, Jini) is an impetus to push others away from it.

That is why a "Soup of REST-ful services" is becoming the lowest common denominator for distributed architectures (I think the buzzword I am supposed to use is "micro-services"). Because it is not tied to a language or platform.

Speaking of Sun's distributed systems, anyone remember JXTA? Looked really fun on paper, peer-to-peer overlay networks, send messages to anyone anywhere, works just "like pipes". Anyone ever used that? I learned about it school at one point during a project.

<comment><USER2> REST is great for decoupling but as generally implemented it adds too much latency for some types of distributed computing. It also makes distributed transactions difficult to manage.

Jimi addressed a lot of those problems in a technically interesting way. The protocol itself is language agnostic, but the implementation took advantage of Java's mobile code capabilities.

<comment><USER3> > It also makes distributed transactions difficult to manage.

Wonder if the typical REST-ful answer would be to make yet another service on top that manages distributed transactions and talks to a variety of other services. Sort of like APIs wrapping another APIs which wrap other APIs...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Also on a funny note, but related:

[http://ferd.ca/beating-the-cap-theorem- checklist.html](http://ferd.ca/beating-the-cap-theorem-checklist.html)</comment>


Show HN: Golongpoll – Go HTTP longpolling library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jcuga/golongpoll <comment><USER2> _> Why does everyone run to websockets even when they only need server-to- client pushing? Probably because it's difficult to get longpolling right._

Definitely not. Longpolling adds a huge amount of overhead when messages are sent relatively frequently. For each longpoll request, the client needs to send all the headers and cookies every time. Each response includes all headers and connection setup. A websocket connection has zero overhead after the initial http upgrade. If you have websocket available, you should always prefer websocket to long polling. In most cases where websocket would be blocked by infrastructure, long polling would be forced to retry extremely quickly because of forced timeout.

<comment><USER3> WebSockets are superior from a technical perspective, no arguing that. But, long-polling makes for more straightforward APIs, which could be valuable if you're more concerned about developer UX than the number of bytes on the wire.

For example, long-polling can actually be RESTful, so it fits in well with conventional API practices. It's also naturally resilient to network issues since each re-poll heals the stream. Users are very unlikely to lose data due to forgetting about some corner case.

<comment><USER2> Websockets can be RESTful too. I've seen the following:

      GET /orders - fetch all orders
      GET /orders Upgrade: websocket - streaming view of all new orders

The problem with this type of RESTful integration though is the connection limit imposed by browsers. Of course, long poll has the identical problem. You can't long poll more than a couple endpoints.

<comment><USER3> True, you can use URI paths with WebSockets which at least makes the streams resource-oriented. CBIX does it: [https://www.cbix.ca/api- websocket](https://www.cbix.ca/api-websocket)

I think calling this _RESTful_ is a bit of a stretch though, at least in any conventional sense of what that means to people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Long polling is a hack. Anyone who has had to scale it across more than a single CPU core on a single machine will know this.

TCP and WebSockets are stateful, HTTP is stateless. So long polling is essentially:

Stateful -> Stateless -> Sateful

You start in a good place, then you add complexity to make it stateless and then you add even more complexity to roll back the statelessness and then you end up where you started... Except it's 90% slower and you now have to use an armada of sticky load balancers to prevent the system from falling apart...

<comment><USER5> Maybe in "fat" language runtimes this is a problem (Ruby, Java, Python etc).

In Go, requests are a single goroutine, dirt cheap (no problem with a single CPU). To me, this type of work is where Go excels.

I used SSE (not quite long polling but I think it has the same implications as far as this discussion goes) back in Go 1.3 days (so GOMAXPROCS=1) to write metrics to 100<n<1000 clients and the process barely registered CPU or memory usage. No lock problems either (copying metric values over channels).

As far as complexity .. well, sure, if you fuck up the design or use the wrong tool for the job you'll have problems.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I needed some simple push notifications, I could't find any decent library or example for longpolling in go (or most other languages), so I decided to make one :)

A lot of the examples out there in blog posts are too simplistic. They don't handle buffering old events and most of them simply give an event to the first request and then discard it. That's not real pub-sub.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure my blog post with a long polling tutorial was one of those. Glad to see someone improve on the idea and turn it into a lib!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great to see this. I am a big fan of long-polling. Too many people only think of it as some hack underlying libraries like Socket.io or SockJS, but this is because they've not seen how clean a long-polling API can actually be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. I originally started out using SSE but I ended up settling on longpolling because of wider browser support and the fact that there are issues with SSE even on newer browsers and polyfills. The knee-jerk reaction nowadays is to use websockets for everything, but sometimes simple is better.

<comment><USER7> I've been using SSE with Go for personal projects, so just one browser, could you expand on the issues you mentioned? I'm curious if it is indeed as bad as you say.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't work in IE, last I checked.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


University labour strife underscores cost of tenured academics - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/university-labour-strife-underscores-job-security-plight-of-contract-faculty/article23276935/

<comment><USER2> This reads like a press release written by York University administrators, or pretty much college administrators everywhere. Some facts that offer a useful corrective:

1\. Rising college costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last 2 decades [0]

2\. Salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]

3\. Most institutions actually employ _fewer_ full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts who get paid a pittance [2]

So...college is massively more expensive than it's ever been, but full-time professor salaries have not risen significantly and there are actually fewer of them overall. So where has the money gone?

In the US, I don't know that there is a complete answer on that, but there are definitely some suspects:

* offsets to deal with slashed state funding (although federal funding has risen significantly in the same time period)

* university endowments

* university administrators [3]

* building sprees and tons of shiny new facilities

[0] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college- tu...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tuition-in- the-u-s-again-rises-faster-than-inflation)

[1] [http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.as...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.asp)

[2] [http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.as...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.asp)

[3] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-14/bureaucrat...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-14/bureaucrats- paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the useful information, but do you have a source for the university endowments claim? Are their schools where tuition funds go towards expanding the endowment? At my alma mater it was the other way around (endowment made billions a year and paid some of that out to operate the school) and I thought it was similar at most schools with sizable endowments.

<comment><USER4> > at most schools with sizable endowments.

Well there's your problem, most schools don't _have_ sizable endowments. Endowments for rich schools have performed fairly well over the last couple decades, not so much for those with smaller endowments. So if you use tuition and fee money on things that might have previously been funded through endowments while you attempt to build (or re-build), it's really the same thing.

<comment><USER5> The tuition and fees are being used for things that _have traditionally been funded by endowments_ rather than for things that _have been previously funded by endowments_. Schools with small endowments are expanding via fees in areas where other schools have used endowments to expand in the past.

For example, Ben Hill Griffin gave money to the University of Florida [endowed school] to expand their football stadium. Down the road in Orlando, University of Central Florida used student fees to build an on-campus football stadium. It did not have one previously -- nor a football team to fill it until relatively recently (the DI team was also built largely based on student fees).

All that construction requires fundraising and together generate lots of administrative positions, and that's where rising fees and tuition go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I very often want to call BS on the research at universities, there is absolutely no link between having new insight and being a good explainer. I would gladly create teaching places without any research like there exist research labs that do absolutely no teaching. And then judge the teachers exclusively in their ability to get the students to improve their skills. No grants proposal, no publish or perish, no negotiation over authorship order, no peer review game, only how to explain stuff, how students learn, what's the best way to convey a concept.

<comment><USER7> If you see teaching as a kind of persuasion, a prof with no ability to persuade will not be bringing in the grant money, and no grant money means no work, no work means no publish, and publish or perish means you get no grad students, no possible administrator or chair post, no cool presentations leading to awards, no job offers from a better (higher paid) school... its just not looking good.

Another way to look at it is you get lots of prestige by leading the field, and you lead the field by teaching people at conference presentations. Admittedly the people being taught are fellow academics not freshmen, but still...

Finally you could survive in a tenured job with no motivation to be leaders, but given the overproduction of PHDs ranges from merely 10x to as much as 1000x as many as necessary in some liberal arts, the odds of a slacker being hired when only the top 1% can get a tenure track prof job are extremely low, so there is that selection bias against slackers indicating very few profs will be slackers.

<comment><USER8> I'm surprised that you seem to think that "slacker"/"non-slacker" is an intrinsic immutable property of a person rather than a situational response to incentives. I think most critics of tenure would argue that granting life long job security can and does cause "non-slackers" to adopt "slacker" behavior since they no longer have to compete for their job. The fact that someone worked hard to get tenure does not imply that they will continue to be productive when they have no competition.

<comment><USER9> It should also be noted that tenure does not guarantee funding. A tenured faculty member who adopts "slacker" behavior will likely see their lab/group eviscerated, more "service" obligations heaped on them, and their job progressively becoming less fun.

Additionally, "tenured"/"non-tenured" is not a single binary switch in terms of prestige. Even with tenure there's things to be striving for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note that all cited universities are located in Southern Ontario (Toronto and Hamilton). Tuition has gone up in Canada, but not as high as it has in the States, not by a long run, and it has stayed quite low in Quebec, at least for residents ($2750/year).

I know that at the University of Montreal adjuncts have been unionized for a long time, and they have a bit of job security; there are no multi-year contracts for a given course, but they get priority on courses they've already taught.

One issue is that adjuncts used to be mainly professionals who'd teach one course per semester on the side. That was fairly common at my engineering school back in the early 2000s. Since it was secondary income, they did not see much point to unionize or fight for job security.

But now you have a lot of people who end up trying to make a primary living through adjunct teaching, and that old model or part-time teaching doesn't really work for them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Two things should be noted:

1\. The research funding system in Canada is very different. In the U.S., a number of research-focused faculty can be expected to be bringing money _into_ the university, especially those outside the humanities.

2\. For some reason, "make a teaching-focused tenure track" never gets brought up, which makes me skeptical that this is merely those pesky tenured professors and their research gumming up the works.

<comment><USER11> _1\. The research funding system in Canada is very different. In the U.S., a number of research-focused faculty can be expected to be bringing money into the university, especially those outside the humanities._

Isn't this the case in Canada too?

<comment><USER12> It's true in the sense that at least some of the faculty members will be bringing in a lot of money into the department. In my department, I know that there's a few professors who either from large funding grants or contracts bring in the majority of research funds. The university (and consequently the faculty and department) gets a percentage of that funding for its own budget. The rest of the faculty in the department combined don't bring in nearly as much money as those few with large research grants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this divide is only going to get worse with the adoption of edex and the like. First tier universities will continue to attract faculty and students, meanwhile second and third tier institutions will see a deterioration in their fortunes as students migrate to online education. It's not there yet by the stage is getting set. Any reprieve for adjunct faculty will likely be short lived.

So strong institutions will be on stronger and the weaker ones will lose out. Not sure what that means for the balance of hard sciences vs humanities, by my guess is that the less bankable humanities will lose out in money and influence.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's the latest sunshine list data for York University:

[http://surlyhamiltonian.blogspot.ca/2014/04/york- university-...](http://surlyhamiltonian.blogspot.ca/2014/04/york- university-2013-sunshine-list.html)

Shoukri is at C$478K

</comment><comment><USER15> More on adjuncts:

[http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the- late...](http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the- latest/2014/2/6/adjuncts-fight-foralivingwage.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know how bad this is in fields other than the humanities ?</comment>


Founder with an accent? Free offer from SayAfter.me - <AUTHOR> http://www.sayafter.me/hacker-news <comment><USER2> Coming this fall to the Mountain View Community Playhouse, a classic musical updated for today's Valley:

 _My Fair Founder_

Can master symbolicist Henry Higgins (played by Paul Graham in his first musical-theater role) win a bet by coaching ambitious but crude-speaking Eliza Doolittle to be the toast of Sand Hill Road in three short months?

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll sing along to tunes such as:

 _The Gain in this Domain stays Mainly with the Brain_

...and...

 _I 've Grown Accustomed to Her Viral Growth Pace_

<comment><USER3> My girlfriend works in Broadway. I wish she knew enough about the recent foreign accents thing to find this as funny as I do. Well done.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! To help those who know the recent kerfluffle moreso than _My Fair Lady_ :

"Why Can't The English Learn To Speak"

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg)

<comment><USER4> LOL, he says "your language is the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible"... I wonder if it was meant to be funny , out of ignorance or arrogance...

As I've posted before, there is this sort of inherent imperialist bias people have with someone who does not have a good command or English. A hundred years ago, it may have been an indication of class (and to some degree still is today). But to look down and be utterly dismissive of someone because they have an accent is just plain dumb.

In PGs defense, just because someone is dumb doesn't mean people will cease to engage in such behavior. And given that the entrepreneur is the one on the selling side, it may behoove him/her to brush up on whichever accent is appealing to those to be sold.

I personally have several accents in English and I subconsciously switch from one to another depending on whom I'm speaking with. If necessary I change languages all together. Reality is, I am better able to connect with the other person this way.

<comment><USER5> The original play was by George Bernard Shaw. Any commentary on the absurdities and arrogance of the British class system is deliberate. Though by "the Bible" he's equally referring to the King James translation, which was regarded as a major literary influence, on par with Shakespeare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I watched your intro video and have 2 points to comment on

* "Can I have a spaghetti" isn't the right way to say it. Drop the "a"

* Have a native english speaker read it out, not a computer generated voice (if that isn't already the plan)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah the video does not have correct grammar in some sentences.

Actual human speech is on the roadmap but not until I fix the main issue, which is finding a repeatable marketing/sales cycle. Open to suggestions though!

<comment><USER7> Good job for the work. But seriously, I don't think you even have a MVP yet. If the purpose of this site is to correct people's accent, having a generate voice(huge electronic accent) is not acceptable at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, robotic accents is not helpful (but hilarious though).

This app is mainly aimed at fixing the incorrect pronunciation of words, rather than the accent. If I ever get to add real human voices, then it will be even better.

<comment><USER6> You might be able to use mechanical turk to get some cheap proper readings of text ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I couldn't find your pricing anywhere... I'm a native English speaker, so this product isn't relevant to me, but I wouldn't want be comfortable recommending it to anyone without knowing how much it'd cost after those first 3 months. Really critical to have in an easy-to-find place on the website IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, you have to be logged in to see the subscription page at: [http://www.sayafter.me/subscriptions/subscribe](http://www.sayafter.me/subscriptions/subscribe).

I will change it to be available for anonymous visitors. Thanks!

<comment><USER9> Why not just say the price here?

<comment><USER10> consider it a "dark pattern" to trick users [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301378)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You might add something on the landing page saying what exactly you do. I read through everything and it doesn't specify how it'll improve English; is it just drills? A therapist to coach people? Pronunciation checking software?

<comment><AUTHOR> Noted, I tried to use "simple language", so it wouldn't scare off non- technical people. I think I got it way too simple. Thanks.

<comment><USER12> If you simplify an explanation, it still needs to do the explaining, even if it's in the form of a high-level overview. I don't even see mention of the dialect you're teaching. Especially since you're targeting people in the STEM industry (people who tend to value knowledge and precision), I'd recommend having a more specific description available for those who want, even if it's not the first message that greets the viewer.

Since we're on the subject of what your software does, and since as a native English speaker, I don't want to [ab]use your free trial just to study its workings, could you please provide that explanation here? :) Do you teach the basics of English phonology or do you just provide [auto-generated] text for users to mimic. Do you provide Rosetta Stone-like pronunciation feedback? If you don't provide basic instruction in English phonology, I highly recommend you consider adding it. Being well versed in articulatory phonetics, I taught myself Chinese phonology (Standard Mandarin) from Wikipedia. Despite not having very good Chinese, I've passed for a native speaker in short telephone conversations on multiple occasions. Even if it takes weeks to give the student the phonetic background that I had (I don't know if it would), you'll then be able to give them near-native pronunciation almost instantly, and then they'll only need to iron out the kinks with your mimic drills before sounding like a native. I don't know if this is the approach used by most accent coaches, but it's highly effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the detailed information.

The only feedback the user gets is a score for the current phrase, and highlighting of the words that he has mispronounced.

For example: If the phrase was "Where is the closest hospital?" but you said "Where is the closest clinic?", the application would highlight correct words in green and incorrect ones (hospital in this case) in orange/red depending on the word distance of "clinic" to "hospital")

When I say "word distance" I mean Levenshtein Distance: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance)

I never thought about giving basic information about English phonology, but you make a very valid point. I will look into this further, and please let me know about any detailed resources about this subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Repetition makes the master". I'd suggest you tweak the UX so I need to repeat each word / phrase a couple of times before passing to the next level.

Speaking of which... you could gamify this in like 200 different ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a very good idea, I will add this option to the current exercise flow. Thanks!

<comment><USER14> It would be really useful to replay what user said, or even better, replay incorrectly pronounced word and then correct pronunciation. Right now there is no good way for user to correct mistakes, even if it's clear that there is a mistake.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

Unfortunately currently neither webkit-speech-input nor Web Speech API supports recording of the user voice input.

I will look for alternative solutions though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A note about prices. I'm in need for such a service and thank you to provide it.

But $30/month is more that what I would give. For that price, I would expect to have a human teacher to review my progression from time to time and provide advices.

At $20/month, I would use the service for something like three or four month, until I decide I'm ready enough.

At $10/month, I would probably consider a permanent subscription.

<comment><USER16> > But $30/month is more that what I would give. For that price, I would expect > to have a human teacher to review my progression from time to time and > provide advices.

That's less than half what it'd cost to hire a language tutor for a single hour.

<comment><USER15> That's why I don't speak of having time with a dedicated teacher, but simply having him/her review a few items (for example, those failed again and again) and provide a short advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is 'British' English?

No such thing exists really, at least not in the spoken word form.

You'll also find that regional accents are considered more favourable/likeable than 'the Queens English' so the premise of this may not be 100% correct...

(Brummie is not included in the favourable dialects because it's not considered nice by anyone in the UK except those in that area.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Simple really:

British: [http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&q=Have%20...](http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&q=Have%20a%20wonderful%20day.&tl=en- gb)

American: [http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&q=Have%20...](http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&q=Have%20a%20wonderful%20day.&tl=en- us)

I know they don't sound ideal, but this is the only distinction I can make via the resources I have.

<comment><USER17> I don't know anyone who sounds like the 'British' version I also doubt that that dialect would be preferred.

It would fall under the 'Queens English' or 'received pronunciation', which, in some studies, is considered less intelligent than Yorkshire dialect - [http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/apr/04/6](http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/apr/04/6)

<comment><USER18> The "Have a wonderful" part is not uncommon but the "day" with long drawling "a" sounds super-strange to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm a native American English speaker who is also into startups (and has lived in a lot of places, communicating with non-native speakers in English, as well as my really horrible Kurdish, Pashto, Dari, French, Arabic, etc. phrases...). Observations:

1) You should fully Americanize all the spellings. It is American English people want.

2) This would be far too boring for me to stick with if it is things like "I went to the cinema yesterday". A coherent story, or even better, a domain- specific lesson, would be a much more engaging way to teach a language. I was able to learn when it was "talk to my driver about the security situation and drive plan", but never cared enough for casual conversation. I am usually happy to talk to people who speak horrible English about things I care about, which presumably for the hn audience is tech, startups, etc., but not about sports (cricket!?). If you could do a vertical-specific sayafter.me it would be awesome.

<comment><USER20> Not all people want American English thank you very much. Every time I'm forced to type 'color' a small part of me dies.

<comment><USER21> Wot wot pip pip cheerio get the torch line's engaged eat some crisps there's a good chap.

<comment><USER22> That's not a mature response. I've look at your other comments and you look like you've made some worthwhile contribution but this comment is not what I visit HN daily for.

I agree with te_chris, it is not only arrogant but incorrect to make that assumption. I don't actually mind using 'color', but you live in a small world if you think that only a certain accent is relevant.

<comment><USER21> Ah well, everybody has their off days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Carnegie Speech is another good product in this area, that as the name suggests came out of Carnegie Mellon a number of years ago (I have no affiliation with the company).

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow I didn't know about this product. It looks really advanced, would be good opportunity to see the other players in the market.

I think one advantage I have over this product is, SayAfter.me stores ever growing stats of word/phrase pronunciation attempts from all users.

Later on it can build custom exercises depending on the background of a particular user.

I will be able to say "You are Spanish, other Spanish users had the most trouble with these words. So here is an exercise that contains problematic English words for native Spanish speakers".

<comment><USER24> Are you using google speech api? Site looks great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, voice records are generated via Google speech API. Voice recognition is webkit speech input, only supported in Google Chrome. The application itself uses AngularJS.

This thing wouldn't have been possible without Google really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there any evidence this actually works? You're motivating your product by saying it helps you keep your job if you have a thick accent. Does your product work? How does it compare to competitors? Adding this information would improve credibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well the only evidence I have personally seen is the improvement of my wife's pronunciation.

She doesn't mispronounce the words she practised anymore.

Also I got positive feedback from the early beta users (other students & English learners) so I assumed it was useful in its initial state.

But yes, I will add additional information with benefits and comparison with other products.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I couldn't sign up because the email field is limited to 30 characters. Emails can be up to 256 characters long, sometimes longer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the report, will fix it ASAP. Apparently this issue is affecting other Django users as well:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2610088/can-djangos- auth-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2610088/can-djangos-auth-user- username-be-varchar75-how-could-that-be-done)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looks interesting. Just a heads up that the video on the home page doesn't want to load for me. I'm getting a javascript error about the youtube frame trying to access the sayafter.me frame.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the report, I will look into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great timing. Haven't tried out the product but on top of this a faster way to improve could be to just engage in conversations daily with a lot of native english speakers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea, unfortunately not everyone has access to native speakers in their social circles.

Another nice hack for practising speech is calling free phone support of various companies/products and tell them about your problem with their product/service. I learnt this from an Italian guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I would love something like this that can help me learn other accents of my own language (English), or other languages (French, perhaps), and evaluate my performance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Adding other languages and American English is on the roadmap, never thought about other accents of English though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> You can add youtube videos or some short clips from movies and ask your user repeat after protagonist. Everyone likes to repeat catchy phrases from movies)))

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! I was also thinking of adding song lyrics, starting with Queen maybe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Cool idea! Down the line, it might be in everyone's best interest to have an American English option as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We live in London, so British English was the way to go. If I ever get to work on this full time, not only I will add American English, but also Spanish, German, French ASAP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nice timing :)

Will definitely check this one out.

</comment><comment><USER33> Good marketing, perfect timing!

</comment><comment><USER34> I'll give it a try to remove/lessen my German accent.. :-)

Btw: Yes, my email address ends in .de - your registration form seems to think I mistyped and suggests that I change that to .net. Intentional, even for valid TLDs?

<comment><AUTHOR> I just use the mailcheck plugin with default settings ([https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck](https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck))

If this keeps happening often maybe I should use my own domain list.

Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER15> > if this keeps happening often maybe I should use my own domain list.

You probably should do it as soon as possible :

> The included default top level domains are com, net, org, info, edu, gov, > co.uk, and mil.

Which means ... it excludes all regional non english TLDs. Pretty much a problem for a service that targets non english native speakers. :)

By the way, I am an english non native speaker that writes a lot of english through the internet but never ever _speak_ english. This service is just perfect for me, thank you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright I just deployed a hotfix that includes TLDs for: com, net, org, de, fr, in, ru, it, tr.

I will also be adding lots of new content soon, so if you are interested in a particular theme for words/phrases ("flowers", "dog breeds", "Flirting 101" etc) just let me know. I will give them higher priority.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for that.

I have no special theme right in mind, I usually speak english only when I travel, so it's mainly general purpose language. This could be as well asking for menu in restaurant, discussing tech with other developers or debating politics with foreign friends.

On the other hand, the idea of isolating words that are especially often wrongly pronounced for a given native language you mentioned in an other comment sounds really awesome : I'm less interested in getting a specific word right than getting right specific sounds used in a lot of words (but I guess this does not help you to select your first words, sorry about that).

<comment><AUTHOR> > I'm less interested in getting a specific word right than getting right > specific sounds used in a lot of words

Actually this is the long term goal. If I ever have the chance to work on SayAfter.me full time, I will map phonetic sounds to words, and find out which nationalities have trouble with which sounds.

More info here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_number#Letters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_number#Letters)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It sounds just like some google-translate generated speech. Do you REALLY think somebody will pay for this service? It's ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER36> @znt, just have to say this is a brilliant idea!

</comment><comment><USER37> On the nain page of speakafter.me: is 'practise' the right spelling ? ("Not only will you practise").

<comment><USER38> It is, in fact: [http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammartips/grammar-tip- prac...](http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammartips/grammar-tip-practise- practice.asp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Great, my accent is already turning british!

</comment><comment><USER40> Please: do this for Spanish! I live in Spain, and have a helluva time being understood when I speak Spanish.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely on the roadmap. If you pass me your email, I can notify you when Spanish version goes live.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is the website broken? When I click on See Video, nothing happens.

</comment><comment><USER42> nice relevant post. congrats</comment>


Hands Down, One of The Most Engaging Talks About Content Marketing Online  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.9slides.com/2014/01/08/content-marketing-in-simple-english-by-marcus-sheridan/ Some call it a revolutionary technique to grow your business, but Marcus Sheridan a.k.a. the Sales Lion says is just common sense! This now web marketing guru shares "the secret sauce" of his success in simple English. <comment><USER2> What is funny is most of the time the competition isn't competition at all. Are FB and twitter really in competition? No, not so much at all. They are useful for totally different things.

Heck, most of us are too small for our competition to mean much to our business. We are the ones that are causing the most wins/losses in our business, but it's easier to pretend that the competition is what we should worry about.

Be awesome to the people who pay you. Treat them well. Don't worry about people who aren't paying you.</comment>


Ask HN: I versus We - <AUTHOR>

When writing a post, newsletter, or really anything for your site, startup, or freelance job where you're the only author/worker/employee, is it best to use I or We?  I struggle with whether to use I or we in blog posts when I'm the only writer on the site.  On other sites I write for, I use we always, but on my own where there's no other person for the we, it seems odd.
Thoughts, Opinions?  What do you usually do? <comment><USER2> If it seems odd, don't do it. If you're the only person, I think it's fine just to use 'I'.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_plural> ;)

'In a frequently-repeated story, United States Navy Admiral Hyman G. Rickover told a subordinate who used the royal we: "Three groups are permitted that usage: pregnant women, royalty, and schizophrenics. Which one are you?"'

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ... that looks like the link I needed :)

And the quote that (possibly) comes from Mark Twain is great, too: "Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'"

Perhaps it's the _editors_ part where bloggers get the idea to use _we_ on everything...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In addition to the comments already made about sounding personal, pregnant women, royalty, and the schizophrenic, sometimes I use "we" to mean "us both - you, the reader, and me, the author." With that in mind, some places where "we" would otherwise sound wrong suddenly become normal/sensible/reasonable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, very good point. _We've_ all experienced situations where this would be true ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Use "I" when you want to convey something personal; use "we" when you want to convey unity, mutual empathy or some other connection with your team and audience. If it's a close call, a good rule of thumb is to think hard and be honest -- are you referring to yourself or to your team?

Examples:

1) I'd say "I deeply apologize" rather than "we deeply apologize" when I want to be clear about owning responsibility for a corporate failure without hiding behind our corporate outfit.

2) I'd say "We're excited to launch..." to convey a team's hard work, dedication and excitement.

3) I'd say "We all hate having to do foo. That's why we created bar!" to show mutual empathy with our audience and convey that we are trying to solve a problem that "we" all have.

These tips mostly come from a public speaking class that I took, but they've served me very well for writing copy.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another school of thought on this is if you're trying to look bigger than you are, which alot of startups do, "we" might be more appropriate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, and that's exactly why I've had some tell me to use _we_ in articles and other copywriting. But it just doesn't really feel appropriate always ... if you're just one guy writing a blog, seems like you should make it sound that way. I do see the value in projecting the bigger image, but sometimes it seems like down-to-earthness can go a long ways too...

<comment><USER6> "Bigger images" go both ways - you can find yourself held to standards and prey to expectations that you don't want.

I've seen this a lot in hobby industries - guys working out of a tiny rented space in a office park find themselves wondering why their customers think they're a big company with a lot of money. This is inevitably due to their trying to look "professional", which tends to be a mingling of actual professionalism and aping the promotional styles of larger companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you use 'we', better have a good answer when someone asks who else works with you or you'll seem douchy. I don't see anything wrong in using 'we' if you have coworkers, even if they're remote or work occasionally on demand. If you're completely on your own, use 'I'.

However, I've heard anectodes about one-man/woman businesses where a person fakes there's more people in the office. Seems dumb but sometimes it's needed and they had success with it, I don't think it suits your case though :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I try to use "I" whenever possible. It makes the message more personal and invites comments and replies. "We" is best when talking about collective decisions.

</comment><comment><USER9> It depends a lot on the perception you're trying to create. I can't find it now, but there was an article a while back that spoke to the benefits of having a dedicated identity for your billing department. In short, it helps to separate the you that negotiates contracts and produces from the you that asks for the money. Of course, if you were doing something like this, you would want to make sure you used the plural.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was reading a post from SmartBear the other day that touches upon this: [http://blog.asmartbear.com/how-to-get-customers-who-love- you...](http://blog.asmartbear.com/how-to-get-customers-who-love-you-even- when-you-screw-up.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> I use "we" when I refer to my target audience and me or when I am speaking for my group. "We" is always plural. I sense a dishonesty when it is used to create groups of people that do not exist, to imply numbers when there is only one.

</comment><comment><USER12> This may well be a habit inherited from my start in a very small organisation where I was in charge of anything electronic, regardless of how much it looked like a computer, but....

I find when I'm describing a project I've done to anyone outside the organisation (and quite often inside, too), I almost always use We automatically. I may have done it but I did it on behalf (and frequently under the direction) of the organisation - it is an achievement and an asset for the organisation and should be credited as such.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it depends on the attribution. If I see I, but no personal name, it seems weird. If there's a name, and we is used, it should be clear who the other people are.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's all about emphasis.

Every sentence in my copy has a reason to be there, and the I/We thing isn't it. As it's important to not detract from the real message, I try and use what I think the reader might expect. This stops the reader from putting too much importance into my word selection on a point that I didn't intend to emphasize.

So I use both, depending on the context (although I'm sloppy unless I'm writing copy).

</comment><comment><USER15> One often thinks of the word "I" when one stumbles upon Martha Stewart on television. The rate at which she uses the word is remarkable. One can't help but believe its uses is intentional or at least consistent with her marketing strategy. Has anyone else noticed this? Or, are we being overly sensitive as we quickly change the channel, resolving to use the word less often than Martha?

</comment><comment><USER16> This article makes an attempt at illustrating that more often thant not, using the first-person-singular can also be an indicator of respect and boundary- maintenance to others:

<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2533>

</comment><comment><USER17> Keep in mind that if you decide to hire people later on, you may have to go through your site/app and change every instance of "I" to "we". :)

</comment><comment><USER18> My writing teachers never let us use "I" in high school, because it is considered poor form by most grammar purists.

<comment><USER19> What an odd thing for them to say. "I" is one of the most common words in the English language. I very much doubt even _grammar purists_ would recommend against it. What's next? "'The' is considered harmful"?

<comment><USER9> I think the gp was in reference to writing academically, in which case it is often inappropriate to use 'I' as you should be writing in more absolute terms. I never did like that, though, as it makes your writing sound structurally dismissive of alternative viewpoints.

<comment><USER20> It also leads to passive voice, which is sometimes appropriate ("Then three cubic centimeters of goat bile were added to the solution"; ideally, anyone should be able to perform this experiment, and the experimenter is out of the picture entirely), but in general, I agree with you.

The mental trick is to append "I think" to the beginning of every sentence and hope that that works.

Also: using the "I" opens up the argumentum ad hominem, which can focus criticism into uncomfortable territory ("Goat bile shouldn't have been added until after the solution was brought to a boil!", versus "You shouldn't have added goat bile until...." One of those is a bit more likely to be taken personally (albeit by someone with thin skin, perhaps as a result of too much exposure to goat bile)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Neither.

Find a way to restructure the sentence to use "you".

It's about your audience, not yourself.

<comment><USER22> My brother when he was in college had a writing instructor that said if a student used "you" in a paper then they better buy her flowers.

<comment><USER23> Well that is because collage papers are supposed to be written in third person to remove biasing the user by framing them in the situation. You are also not supposed to use, I, we, or us. You should never refer to the reader, author or researcher as an entity in of personal reference. In academic papers you are providing information not framing a story to build character development. It can seem kind of steril but it is done for a reason. That said, in the real world, you generally want to bias the hell out of the reader. Patio11 made a suggestion on a article once in which he suggested flipping all the we's of the article to you. I went back and reworked some marketing material I had to reflect that suggestion and was amazed at how compelling the once boring text became. The reason was simple it framed the reader in the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >What do you usually do?

One struggles to decide.</comment>


One-quarter of the world's pigs died in a year due to swine fever in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/opinion/china-swine-fever.html <comment><USER2> Funny to see this finally making mainstream news and the front page of HN. I worked as a research analyst at a long/short equities fund and one of the biggest bets we placed was based on ASF. The sell side was completely complacent about this, but we were tracking the disease closely and the math was undeniable - this was going to be a major, major disruption in global protein markets.

Bullets of the thesis were:

\- African Swine Fever in China is putting half the global supply of hogs at risk.

\- It will take years for China to get a handle on the disease.

\- This will cause prices of pork in China to rise. China will have to import pork to fill the hole in order to avoid a political crisis.

\- As a result, global proteins will enter a multi-year up-cycle. All proteins (beef, chicken, pork) will benefit.

This structural thesis could be played many, many ways.

<comment><USER3> Any examples of how a retail investor would play this?

<comment><USER4> Buy an index fund.

Do you think you can compete with that big investment outfit that has people working on this stuff full time?

<comment><USER5> Sure I can compete. I don't have so much money under my control that my act of buying/selling changes the market. Thus I can afford to make trades that are worth a lot of money on my scale, but not worth it for the big guys because compared to the total amount they must work with means they don't have the time.

Note I said can. Reading the 10k and 8q and other such forms to find those opportunities is boring. I get paid very well to write software instead and just let an index fund grow my money. I can't live off my investments yet, but when they grow enough I'll be able to [substitute any of a number of hobbies I might get interested in], and it won't be a full time job moving money around.

<comment><USER4> "not worth it for the big guys"

Sounds like a legit strategy, but it also sounds like part of it is actively _not competing_ with them.

<comment><USER6> If that's how you define it, then it was never the question to begin with. Someone just asked how to move on this info, which, we now all agree, is possible. Nobody said anything about competing until it was brought up as a glib dismissal of the original question. Which, we now agree, wasn't warranted.

<comment><USER4> From the OP "Buy TSN, SAFM, HRL... _but it 's probably too late_ at this point. We were placing bets on this 18 months ago."

Emphasis mine.

<comment><USER6> I'm confused. Are you saying placing small bets that aren't worth it for big management firms is a "legit strategy" to perform better on the scale of a retail investor, or not? I'm getting mixed messages.

<comment><USER4> There are two conversations here:

* Pigs and how to make a buck because of all the ones dying in China. I'm not seeing any good suggestions about how to profit from that for small investors.

* bluGill's suggestion that they can compete with big actors by not competing with them, by looking at deals that are too small for the big fish to be interested in.

The latter seemed an 'in general' strategy and not related to the specific situation with the pork and broader meat industries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Meat ag is incredibly dangerous and pollution-causing.

1\. Pandemic evolution by cramming zillions of animals in unsanitary conditions, with humans interspersed attempting to clear out rivers of poop and pee.

2\. Antibiotic resistance by overusing antibiotics to promote growth while compelling accelerated evolution of microbes that can't be treated with as many classes of antibiotics.

3\. Inefficient allocation of input and supporting resources: diesel fuel, water, fertilizer, phosphorous and crops.

4\. Pollution of air, water and soil... pig farms especially necessitate lakes of shit that are sprayed into the air, polluting large areas of air, waiter and land. Agriculture runoff as well.

5\. Climate change. Net CO2 output of meat ag is nearly that of Portland cement (clinker) production.

....

99\. Animal cruelty... which doesn't persuade many people because self- interested cognitive dissonance overcomes most people's limits of self-control and rational thought. (Upton Sinclair-like effect.)

<comment><USER8> This is exactly the point I tried to make below when people kept claiming that E. coli was a plant problem and not a plant problem. But as you mentioned, it's far more convenient to talk about the dreaded potato blight and ignore the fact that animal agriculture is the biggest contributor to species extinction (through clearing of land for growing of crops to feed back to animals).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Two other relevant HN discussions in the past week:

 _Chinese criminal gangs spreading African swine fever to force farmers to sell pigs_ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891495)

 _China flight systems jammed by pig farm's African swine fever defences_ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968)

</comment><comment><USER10> This isn't just China, it is the whole region.

I've lived in Vietnam for 4 years now and have traveled extensively by motorbike over the entire country. On all of the roads, there is various livestock roaming freely. Goats, pigs, dogs, cats, chickens, buffalo, etc... they are either just on the street or in pens in peoples literal shacks by the side of the road.

When driving from south to north (towards China), at some point, you stop seeing pigs entirely. There are checkpoints every few km where you are required to drive through either a wet hole in the ground or over a wet burlap sack. At some places, they spray your tires. There are signs in the villages telling people to be careful.

Needless to say, for this reason and others, I've stopped eating meat in Vietnam unless I know it is imported from an expat owned restaurant. Even then, I've dialed back my meat consumption quite a bit. Eating street food has entirely lost its appeal.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. You have no insights in where the meat comes from and how long it was cooled before preparation etc.

Fortunately, here in Vietnam the vegetarian options are plenty and also really good.

<comment><USER10> Hey Till, nice to see you here on hn! =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One-quarter doesn't sound like much to me as a sheep farmer. Our herds double- to-triple every year, and then get cut way back again as we turn the lambs into meat. Pigs have even more offspring: 5-6 piglets per litter, 1.5 litters per year, and can have their first litter at 8 months. "One-quarter of the pigs" should be replacable in less than a year, a minor temporary supply shortage for the meat market.

EDIT: I don't disupte any of the facts of the article, and my use of the world "minor" is from the presumption that people might infer that this is a long- term problem, rather than an acute and quickly rectifiable one which seems "minor" in comparison to a long-term one.

<comment><USER13> Problems being that the disease is still going and not under control.

Also whole herds are being culled, producers would have to buy not just breed and some are switching to other livestock.

<comment><USER12> I don't dispute any of that. I only wanted to head off a possible misconception that the headline might have lead people to believe that losing "one quarter" was going to be hard to recover from. It's definitely bad, but also easy and quick to recover from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised neither the article nor the comments on here discuss the problem of genetic diversity. Practically all domesticated farm animals today are bred in a highly controlled manner, and are selected for yield.

Here in France where I live, almost all chickens, pigs, cows etc are pure-bred belonging to races (cows especially are registered in race registries). Take for example our local cow race, the Charolais. These cows are famous for the quality of their meat, but at the same time notorious for demanding constant veterinary care and needing help in calving.

There's no doubt that all those diseases that break out every few years would have much less chance of developping into global plagues if domestic animals were more genetically diverse, but this would require rethinking our priorities, and also perhaps our relationship with those animals that nourish us.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow. I guess that's why China has a Strategic Pork Reserve[1]. I thought the Pork Reserve was funny the first time i heard about it, but it's not so much now.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/id/100795405](https://www.cnbc.com/id/100795405)

<comment><USER16> Not as funny as Canada's strategic maple syrup reserve which at some point was actually stolen...

<comment><USER17> Oh. My. God. This is true: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Hei...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Canadian_Maple_Syrup_Heist).

I'm going to write a movie out of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I read things like this and wonder what will move the tipping point to plant- derived sources of essential amino acids (thus protein) adequately to stop farming animals.

<comment><USER13> Poorly managed plant diseases are just as prevalent and often even harder to control and eradicate.

Animal agriculture won't stop.

This disease process eliminates bad management and corrupt inefficient government.

<comment><USER18> Are plant diseases less communicable to humans (and animals in general) ?

<comment><USER13> I don't know if this is a good faith question or not. But of course the concern isn't people getting diseases from plants.

Crop yields go down and in some cases the resulting grain becomes poisonous to people or animals which can in some cases cause disease (fungal most often).

<comment><USER18> good point, as i didn't word it correctly at all: how tricky is it to control diseases _among_ plant cultivars?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [http://archive.md/ItaXn](http://archive.md/ItaXn)

</comment><comment><USER20> I find this so interesting. Oftentimes we talk about wars, and treaties, politicians and warlords as though most of the fate of the world depended upon them. Yet this single outbreak of a disease will probably do just as much or more damage to China than the trade war.

Now sure there are things that can be done and leaders are leaders precisely because they are halp to organize and deal with problems at a large scale like this, but there is so much that is still out of our control as humans.

It is humbling to think how vunerable we still are to mother nature despite all of our progrsss. Maybe that is something we should keep in mind more, how fragile and dependent we still are as people, nations and humanity.

<comment><USER21> This really only affects people who are obsessed with pig meat, which is a non-essential luxury.

<comment><USER22> Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A nice conclusion for the year of the pig :/

</comment><comment><USER24> a week or two ago my Safeway was selling pork shoulders for $0.99/lb. Tuesday I went back and they had whole cooked hams for $0.99/lb. I have been wondering why pork has been so cheap and to see that there is such a global shortage seems counterintuitive. Perhaps domestic farmers have increased production with China importing more pork, leaving a domestic supply surplus?

<comment><USER16> Scary to think what conditions those animals had to live in that selling 1lb for 1$ is even remotely profitable.

<comment><USER25> Pork shoulder should be the cheapest part of the pig. It doesn't mean the pig wasn't profitable. The shoulder doesn't require much processing by the grocer especially if it's bone-in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Meat prices are considerably higher around here in Brazil. My local butcher says that it's due to Chinese importation.

</comment><comment><USER27> Hopefully, it will lead to better plant-based diet adoption.

</comment><comment><USER28> Clickbaitish title, most pigs are slaughtered before reaching one year of age.

<comment><USER29> That's a very uncharitable way of interpreting the headline. From the article body: "the epidemic there alone has killed nearly one-quarter of all the world's pigs".

<comment><USER30> What he's saying is that 100% of those pigs that died due to the epidemic would also have died within a year anyway. The title is crafted in such a way that you picture a whole, static population of pigs and a quarter is removed from this whole. Like we start 2020 with 75% of the individuals of 2019. As if the mortality rate shot from something normal up to 25%. When it actually was 100% all along.

Without the epidemic title could have been "All of the worlds pigs died in a year due to humans killing them to eat their body parts".

Not saying the epidemic is a good thing, but at the end of the day it doesn't make a whole lot of difference from an individual pig's perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The NY Times mis-used "swine fever" in the sub title.

It should be African Swine Fever, which is not swine fever, which is really Classical Swine Fever.

And these are not to be confused with swine flu (aka H1N1).

</comment><comment><USER32> Criminals were using drones to make the fever spread faster, see:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21891968)

<comment><USER33> That story is pretty hard to believe. It might be true, but it reads like so much scaremongering and blame deflection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This makes me wonder, who's factory pig-farms are more hellish? China's or USA's?

You might think that China's notorious inhumanity gives their factory farms a leg-up. But there might be hellishness-ceiling that Chinese and USAian factory farms both meet.

</comment><comment><USER35> Well, as someone built very similarly to a pig, that is distressing news.

This is why I don't save 100% of my money for retirement. It's good to live while being alive.

<comment><USER36> what?

<comment><USER37> GP probably refers to their body shape, and references people who save every dime they can while working and then not living long enough to actually have enjoyed life or retirement.

<comment><USER38> I'd assume gp was referring to the fact that humans and pigs are genetically very similar and not that gp is out of shape or something.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"I made 3 CEOs rich – So why am I broke?" - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2016/05/03/i-made-three-ceos-rich-so-why-am-i-broke/#6408bd8b2ec7 <comment><USER3> And this, boys and girls, is why you should never join a second start-up. Join one early, see how it works & learn as much as you can. Do not expect $$$ - you will not make any. Then decide if you want to start your own, or want comfortable well-paid employment at GOOG/AAPL/FB/etc

Do not expect to make money from a start-up unless you started it. If you did not start it, you are the disposable labour. Sorry.

<comment><USER4> If people took your advice Silicon Valley would be toast.

<comment><USER3> Silicon valley is built on naive dreamers who time and time again expect to make money as startup employees against all rules of logic and contrary to historical data.

<comment><USER5> Why don't people understand, you don't get rich without risking capital.

Yes, your time is capital. But not when you've already traded it for salary.

Brokers risk their time to try to sell speculative deals. This is why they make a chunk of the deal. No guarantee.

Lawyers get paid by the hour for their time. This is why they can earn a nice living but won't get wildly rich unless they take speculative cases on contingency.

<comment><USER3> What did the founder risk? OtherPeoples'Money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just want to say I found this extension today:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forbes-splash- scre...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forbes-splash-screen- bypa/gjiddhnfkgbnnhbghaacfofkopmgleij)

It disables that annoying splash screen that asks you to turn off ad blocker.

You're welcome.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a concept called "being the master of your own destiny". It requires that one views themselves through a lens of a business owner even while having a W2 job. Someone that believes a CEO when the latter says "I will take care of you" has not developed that ability. It's like believing a customer that walks into your shop and says "I will bring the money tomorrow."

</comment><comment><USER8> Anyone that uses the phrase 'monthly expense profile' to indicate they have large monthly expenses is clearly great at marketing. Your credentials are proven sir.

As an employee you get paid employee wages. If you want founder wages then you need to become a founder. Instead of joining an existing company/start-up I recommend you reach out to your network and join up with others starting a company.

Alternatively you could start your on your own. As a marketing expert you should have the skills to market your new business to others that need marketing skills. If you cannot, then your marketing skills are not that great!

<comment><USER9> I think you are being overly presumptuous, CEO != founder.

<comment><USER8> A CEO does not get hundreds of millions unless they have a large chunk of the company. So either a founder or given lots of shares so they are like a founder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my 30+ years in the workforce I've worked at large companies, small companies, startups, government organizations, and not-for-profits. Whether or not I ever get rich, I'm planning on spending the rest of my career working for startups. Why? Because it is exciting, it is fun, it is fast paced. I get to build things, I get to innovate, I get to play with and try the very latest technology. There is minimal bureaucracy. I know the names of everyone in my company. I find my work is infinitely more satisfying than just going in, doing what I have to, collecting a paycheck (regardless of its size), and coming home. Young people think I'm cool. It is a lifestyle and career choice and after all those other experiments - one that is working for me.

<comment><USER11> I work in a gigantic company and I feel I get a lot of flexibility and the scope to be creative. I worked at a startup previously and I was tightly bound by the technology stack and had to deal with silos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dear Abby type article. No actual data on compensation packages (salary, % options of company) for any of the companies, nor a clear financial perspective of any of the "exits" these companies saw.

Spidey sense is tingling.

</comment><comment><USER13> Being an employee at a startup does mean you took a risk, but nothing in comparison to the founders who built it.

Most employees don't understand that a lot of things change along with way when building a company. Most product companies start with dreams of IPO or getting sold to a large company at a massive valuation. This seldom happens for the vast majority of startups - who either go bust, sell to slightly larger players or becoming SMBs for life.

The owners of a company will make money in most of the above cases - <USER2> won't, and rightfully so.

<comment><USER4> > Being an employee at a startup does mean you took a risk, but nothing in > comparison to the founders who built it.

Bullshit. I hate this sort of rhetoric. Founders took no more risk than the first employees. The founders got funding, and if they did not they convinced some poor schlub to waste their time on the startup. That's the only difference between early startup employees and founders. Many employees at tech startups may be just as capable as the founders, but are not in the same position of power. That's the only difference. Founders take no more risk and get much more reward, if a startup succeeds, than employees, often not for any good reason other than they did it and the employee did not. I mean obviously chances of success are only ~<30% if you do your job well, but still.

If a startup fails the founders still got paid a salary, just like employees, as long as they got funding. If not then they paid out money out of their pocket, to pay a few employees a small salary which was below market. This is the only case in which founders come out worse off than if they took a job with a salary, so take more risk. The rest of it, their outcome is much better just because they did it and you did not and you believed them.

<comment><USER14> > founders still got paid a salary

Founders get paid a salary? That hasn't always been true in my experience.

> Founders took no more risk than the first employees.

If it's actually that easy you should go be a startup founder. After all, there's no risk, right?

<comment><USER15> Let's be honest: people who found startups fall in three categories:

* Those who have funds to fall back on in case the startup fails

* Those who got VC funding

* Those who are actually risking things because they invested everything in their startup

I'd wager the first two categories make up 90% of startup founders. These people take absolutely zero risks. Whoop, startup fails. Oh well, it was either not your money or you've still got a comfortable amount to sit on.

Thsoe last 10 percent, yes, they do take risks. Don't expect me to cry for the others.

<comment><USER16> This word "risk." I do not think it means what you think it means.

Just because someone has lots of money (their own or a VC's) doesn't mean they aren't risking that money when they put it into a startup. The money is at risk because it probably WON'T be returned, let alone increased.

I think what you're conflating with risk is actually diversification. You're only willing to cry for the people who are "all in" on a single investment. Arguably, being diversified is the sensible thing to do and it's the idiots who don't make sensible choices who you shouldn't cry for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The way I see it, the first time you 'make it' you make someone else rich. It's only the 2nd time you make it that you make yourself rich.

</comment><comment><USER18> Company 1) "I got my first job working in the marketing department for a wireless device company, ten years ago. I got paid the market rate which was very good, but as you know, Northern California is an expensive place to live. My first company got sold. I had stock options but they ended up being worthless after the deal."

\---> That does not count. You stayed for 10 years, learned a lot, and it seems you came in at the wrong time and were under water. It is unclear whether your CEO made "millions," but if somebody did, it was the owners, and you were not a significant owner. And you chose to live in the Bay Area, so hey, it costs to be there but you got compensated by living in a great spot. So you chose to spend the money on real estate, blah blah. Seems a little whiney right now since there are people who are REALLY struggling to live in SF and feed their families. It does not seem that you were in this category.

Company 2) "The CEO told us, 'We have an exit strategy. We will get bought by a public company and your stock options will be converted into stock in the company that buys us, or else we will go public and then your stock options will have liquidity.' That was false. We ended up merging with another company and then the combined firm was bought by a privately-owned tech company and once again I had nothing to show for my hard work. When I got laid off the second time, I had a huge monthly expense profile and I had to get a new job quickly. "

\---> No, it was not FALSE. It simply did not work out the way the CEO thought it would. Now, it's not like CEOs don't want their company to be the next hot IPO or acquisition target, but hey, welcome to the real world. Things CHANGE. It is unclear whether the CEO this time made "millions," but I assume some people did: the "owners." Again, you were not an OWNER, or at least it is unclear that you had skin in this second company. Did you take a huge hair cut to work there? Did you invest your own money? But again, you kept living beyond your means. HINT HINT.

Company 3) "I had a couple of opportunities, and I took a job with a well- known serial entrepreneur who has been on many magazine covers. Once again, just a few months ago, I got laid off with three months of severance. That's better than nothing, but my marketing programs and advice helped my ex-boss, the CEO, to make hundreds of millions of dollars. Now I sit in northern California with a $6,500/month mortgage and no job, and I'm disgusted. What am I doing wrong? How could I make three CEOs filthy rich and make nothing more than my weekly salary for myself?"

\---> well, it seems you were not given significant ownership. And why would you spend $6500 mortgage if you could not afford it?

It seems your best decision was to move to San Francisco and buy a house. What is your return on that? I bet not insignificant. You deserve that. I don't see how you deserve any of the millions the owners got. Seems you got compensated well for the job you did, so it seems your bosses were square with you on each pay day right?

Or are investors now supposed to dilute themselves on the company they own when they are already paying market rate for the people who work at their companies?

<comment><USER19> > I don't see how you deserve any of the millions they got

I also don't see how they did. Did they work so much harder as to 'deserve' a ten to hundred fold turnout of their investment?

<comment><USER20> Capitalist success isn't something paid out by the hour. They capitalized on an opportunity. They made out big. Its the system we live under.

<comment><USER21> Well, it seems like the OP was supposed to get stock options at these places where they worked, but somehow their stakes vaporized in some kind of finance shell game. But of course, it's all caveat employtor, right? Silicon valley companies were illegally depressing wages for years, and it's all about the individual workers not "negotiating good enuf". Fuck off. Capitalism is broken because the owners are scamming the workers en masse.

<comment><USER20> Yeah if it takes too long, initial valuation may suffer and stock options vaporize. Its dangerous to stick around after a revaluation downward, with no new stock options offered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Off-topic, but if Forbes don't disable their adblocker-blocker, they will soon be broke too...

<comment><USER23> People with adblockers don't make Forbes any money to begin with; losing them doesn't cost anything.

<comment><USER22> That's one way to see it.

Another way is that the people who cannot access Forbes will access something else. Soon everybody will be going to this something else and Forbes will be another dinosaur.

Bullying the users never worked in favor of any online company.

<comment><USER23> A non-subscribing, ad-blocking readership is no different from 0 readership at all. There is no reason to retain a user whose LTV is and always will be $0.

Professional journalists aren't going to decide one day that paychecks are overrated. Your "something else" will be one big native advertisement (in which case, why are ad-blocking users reading it at all?) or else a hell of a lot lower quality.

Employing people to serve users from which you don't and can't extract value only works in tech, and only for a few years before the next crash.

<comment><USER22> I think I didn't make my point clear, which was that by not allowing the ad- blocking users they risk losing the paying users too.

<comment><USER16> That doesn't follow. If they had one reader, who paid them a million dollars per year, then they'd still be in business. So, if they had a million users, who paid them one dollar per year, they MIGHT be in business because it would cost a lot more to deliver to a million people than to one person.

By throwing up the ad blocker wall they're saving the cost of serving anything more than an ad blocker wall to the people who aren't paying them. Sure, they're limiting their audience, but they're limiting themselves to a PAYING audience.

The people who are willing to pay them might change their minds in the future, but their decision won't have anything to do with the unknown number of people bouncing off of the ad blocker wall.

<comment><USER22> > That doesn't follow.

What do you mean? Look the short-history of internet. It is full of stories like this. Companies that refuse to find other ways earn money from users who don't want to pay (be it actual dollars or ads) open the opportunity to new businesses who are willing to to do so.

Emails. You had to pay to have access to email. Then hotmail said, screw that, we are giving email for free, and we will find other ways to fund this.

How many companies charge for email today?

<comment><USER23> >(be it actual dollars or ads)

There are none. All publishing can reach for right now are more subtle forms of advertising (sell editorial influence, pass off highest-bidder content as if it were reporting). This is a horrific societal problem and also still advertising.

Companies give away email for free because it helps them sell ads, or ropes you into an ecosystem that monetizes you in other ways.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Find Programming Mentors - <AUTHOR> http://breckyunits.com/6_specific_ways_to_find_programming_mentors

<comment><USER2> Join a good open source project and start helping out. Forget about almost any other way. You'll find mentors, make good friends, help the world and improve your CV.

</comment><comment><USER3> On a sort of similar note, I've been looking for active developers to follow on Twitter that regularly tweet about programming-related matters. I like to hear about how their project is progressing, or what the like/hate/learned about a certain language or framework, and potentially, I can @ them if I have a related question.

Any suggestions (or volunteers)?

</comment><comment><USER4> Unlike many numbered lists, this has some good, concrete suggestions. (Though I don't think that HN quite qualifies as a 'job site' :))

<comment><USER5> Except for like, the job site portion of HN.

<comment><USER6> it's quite limited, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> a lot of great points. very insightful</comment>


Segregated Opinions – Woo It Boo It - <AUTHOR> http://wooitbooit.com <comment><USER2> How do I vote? I click on the buttons and nothing happens.</comment>


Manage the recruiter: four questions to ask - <AUTHOR> http://roosterpark.com/blog/four-questions-for-an-agency-recruiter/

<comment><USER2> Excellent advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good read Scott!</comment>


Show HN: Transcrypt Python to JavaScript compiler can now generate native JavaScript components - <AUTHOR> http://www.transcrypt.org/docs/html/special_facilities.html#transcrypt-s-unit-mechanism-and-creating-native-javascript-component-frameworks <comment><AUTHOR> Starting with Transcrypt v3.6.101 it is now possible to create native JavaScript component frameworks using the Transcrypt Python to JavaScript compiler. This makes it possible to write compact, fast JavaScript components for the browser in Python.

The project can be found at:

[https://github.com/qquick/Transcrypt](https://github.com/qquick/Transcrypt)

Components can be freely mixed on a page without requiring recompilation. A developer doesn't need Transcrypt or any knowledge of it to use such a framework.

Each page has one unit that contains the Transcrypt runtime and, if needed, any central facilities. It is compiled with the -u .run switch. In addition each page can hold as many separate components as needed. Compile these with the -u .com switch.

A loader is generated, accepting a list of components. By varying this list, each page can have its own subset of components, without the need to recompile. The generated JavaScript code for components can be very small, typically a few hundred bytes. The runtime and central facilities are included in the page only once.</comment>


Jackline: XMPP client in OCaml - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hannesm/jackline <comment><USER2> The license on this is...interesting.

<comment><USER3> I can't tell if it's a troll or not. Regardless, it's a wonderful way to get your work/license dismissed as non-free software, as non-professional, _and_ as offensive all at the same time, regardless of the intent. Completely undistributable.

Very sad, considering the software itself seems useful.

<comment><USER4> It's actually kind of funny, because unless I'm missing something, my girlfriend is allowed to download the software, relicense it under a license of her choosing or release it into the public domain, and then send the sanitized version on to me. Not only that, but there's no mechanism for someone to prove that this didn't happen if I simply do it myself. I guess that's why you don't try to write a license!

<comment><USER5> What you could be missing is that the goal of this license is not to protect this not-so-important piece of software but to give you (?) a sense of what institutional discrimination feels like.

As a white heterosexual male, it does make me think.

<comment><USER3> > As a white heterosexual male, it does make me think.

All it achieved here is made me immediately lose trust in the person who wrote the software and dismiss what they were trying to put forward (which was only mildly related to the license).

Then again, I have that same reaction whenever I see anyone being racist/sexist/xenophobic or what have you, whether it's towards me or someone else. So maybe you're right.

But I don't think humanity has ever solved a problem by doing it to other people. "I'm gonna be sexist to men just to show THEM what it's like!" doesn't just seem dumb, it's also counterproductive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Please consider making this work with keysync:

[https://guardianproject.info/apps/keysync/](https://guardianproject.info/apps/keysync/)

<comment><USER6> [author of jackline here] interesting idea, but since I'm not willing to audit all the other xmpp clients, I won't import any OTR private keys. I'm willing to import trusted fingerprints of contacts, though.

also, imho people should get used to key rollover / revocation / renewals, rather than pretending that you have a life-long key.

<comment> mike-cardwell It's not that I want to keep a key for a long time, it's that I have several different clients and I want to share whatever key I'm currently using across them. That way I only have to stick the fingerprint of one OTR key on my business cards.

<comment><USER6> why not then print a shared secret on your business card, and use the socialist millionaires problem ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_millionaire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_millionaire))?

edited, added some explanation: (since there's a time span between handing out your card and verifying the FP, in which your key might have get compromised... and thus the one who received the card cannot verify whether you really got compromised and needed to update your key, or an attacker intercepted with a new key)...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will a MOOC certificate impress entry level Python employers? - <AUTHOR> Will it make a difference to employers of entry level developers if you have a MOOC certificate? Is it worth pursuing for this aim, or will they be interested only to see what a potential employee has built? <comment> ng-user Don't pursue it for the credentials. Apply what you learn in the class to practical projects you're interested in. Build a GitHub profile of various repositories showcasing what you've learned and it will impress a future employer far more than credentials on paper ever will!

<comment><USER2> Agreed. Having both the intro to programming MOOC down and a GitHub is really the way to go. This way if you apply to somewhere where the primary business is not programming you will have something to show HR and also something to show whomever is interviewing you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If I had a choice between an entry-level candidate with a MOOC certificate and an entry-level candidate with a Github repo with some interesting projects, I think the latter candidate would be in with a better chance.

Not all candidates are created equal however but the ones that I have hired (and ones I wish I could have hired) all had at least some sort of online coding portfolio which demonstrated a good working knowledge of data structures and algorithms.

As an engineer and an employer, I am more interested in what experience you have than your educational pedigree. I would see a MOOC certificate as neutral.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it's particularly helpful to hear directly from an employer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd say a MOOC certificate in Python is unlikely to impress professional programmers. It may impress ordinary business persons. So in terms of hiring, it might be useful in terms of working for a business whose primary business is not programming. It probably won't directly eliminate a candidate from a job in a business whose primary business is programming.

However, there are not vast numbers of "employers of entry level developers" relative to the vast number of potential entry level developers. A job as an entry level developer is most likely to be found by job hunting not taking a MOOC. More importantly, taking a MOOC is a lot easier for many people than actively job hunting because active job hunts are hard, involve a lot of rejection and being ignored, and often take much longer than a MOOC. The key to getting an entry level Python job is to find someone who is hiring entry level Python developers.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Useful information, thanks.</comment></comment>


Microsoft cutting MSN news production workers and replacing them with AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/business/local-business/microsoft-is-cutting-dozens-of-msn-news-production-workers-and-replacing-them-with-artificial-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> "Microsoft is to replace dozens of contract journalists on its MSN website and use automated systems to select news stories, US and UK media report.

The curating of stories from news organisations and selection of headlines and pictures for the MSN site is currently done by journalists.

Artificial intelligence will perform these news production tasks, sources told the Seattle Times.

Microsoft said it was part of an evaluation of its business."

</comment><comment><USER3> Or, in other words, MSN to be more like Google News or Flipboard or any other news aggregators out there that selects and ranks news automatically.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not 'robots'. Automated curation. Rubbish title from the BBC (and the Guardian).

<comment><USER5> Was going to make a joke but I wonder if robots could make better headlines than the sensationalist nonsense we are subjected to day in and day out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rubbish title. They are automating the curating of the news section of MSN. I'm sur it will turn out swimmingly because most of the curating algorithms I've encountered so far have done a piss poor job of being informative. We can expect their AI to be gamed by press releases.

Primary sources still need to work and an AI can't replicate that.

</comment><comment><USER7> More and more news is regurgitated from other sites, or from press releases. Doesn't take much for someone to spin a story in one way or another and it's all over the world before the journalists have got their shoes on.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wouldn't exactly call theses workers journalists.

</comment><comment><USER9> They weren't doing that already?

</comment><comment><USER10> At this point, most "journalists" could be replaced with robots; many equivalents already are being replaced.

Make sure to do your job well, because if you do it poorly enough, even fairly primitive automated systems can do it better. Churnalism is an actual tractable problem for AI.

That said, this is more AI-replaceable "journalism" from the BBC. Microsoft isn't actually setting up AI authors for articles, they're just letting AI delete some.</comment>


Gamifying Algebra  - <AUTHOR> http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/gamifying-algebra/

<comment><USER2> _'My own son can get quite frustrated after performing a lengthy series of computations to solve an algebra problem, only to be told that the answer was wrong due to an arithmetic error; I am sure this experience is common to many other schoolchildren'_

This frustration is largely due to the fact that such a useful lesson for life is generally neglected, skimmed-over or outright deliberately denied in order to satisfy the ideologues of 'modern education'.

Thus many people are way too much surprised that being right is what matters, not the amount of effort it took to get there.

<comment><USER3> So are you opposed to teachers offering partial credit for problems that are mechanically correct but have clerical or arithmetic errors?

For me, algebra is easy, but writing out steps is very difficult, and sometimes I prefer to use a process other than the one taught in class. Should the goal of math education be to solve problems or to learn processes?

In the real world, it's solving problems that matters—I wouldn't say "being right", necessarily—but it's also important to be able to weigh different potential solutions to find the best or most efficient. Programming is a decent example of this—don't go for the O(n²) algorithm when the O(n log n) is just as easy to implement.

But even better, consider a startup. If you want to build an online store application in 1995, and doing it in Lisp means you expend less effort than your Lispless competitors to get to the same "right answer", then you should take the advantage. The amount of effort _does_ matter.

<comment><USER4> _For me, algebra is easy, but writing out steps is very difficult, and sometimes I prefer to use a process other than the one taught in class. Should the goal of math education be to solve problems or to learn processes?_

That is a false dichotomy. The goal of math education is to "learn processes" to "solve problems". You can't skip the processes and jump straight to solving. Before you can pick a proper algorithm, you have to already know a few -- that's the learning processes part in programming. This holds for any skill you choose to learn; before you can do something well, you have to be able to do it in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Playing the demo game, I think the idea has merit. But I'm concerned that even the presence of numbers is a turn off - that aspect certainly _looks_ unappealing.

Perhaps reverse the application of the initial observation, that many games use maths, and start with a game without any figures, then, show the numbers behind it, in phases. This would create a link between something kids already grasp, and something new (numbers), which is a great way of learning. It would give the experience of a deeper world being revealed. And if using the numbers also made it easier to beat the game, it would give them a motivation; an example of useful application; and a sense of mastery.

For the game designer, that initial version with no maths would also make it clear whether the game was any fun in its own right. (It seems educational aims often obscure this.)

<comment><USER6> ... now I'm also reminded of Alligator Eggs ( <http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/> ) - a symbol-free kinda-gamification of lambda calculus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Idea for a simple mobile game, Gauss Jordan Golf:

\- Specify 18 (or a multiple thereof with minor number changes) equations of varying difficulty.

\- Allow free choice of standard computer calculated operations, and a give-up button once you reach, say, 5 strokes.

\- Keep a highscore.

Could be extended by viewing Gauss Jordan class of problems as a golf course and adding other courses.

The emphasis on a low stroke count as well as removing the obstacle of arithmetic makes the experience more like a game, just like Tao is suggesting. This assumes a low stroke count is a good metric, as well as something necessarily desirable - something that might not be true for all classes of elementary mechanical problems.

<comment><USER8> I agree; the whole thing could be done with pictures rather than numbers. Lay out an actual grid, with objects -- seven ladybugs in the third row, fourth column, etc. When you subtract one row from another, you physically drag the ladybugs from one row over the other row, and when they 'match' they disappear. You can tap into physical intuition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure that gamifying algebra will make it any more desirable to kids. I think that those who want to see it as a game already see it as a game in their heads. I know I certainly did back in high school.

Still a cool idea though!

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm reminded of Manufactoria ( <http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/> ), which does a rather nice job of 'gamifying' a concept that's effectively Turing Machines.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems that the main improvement here is not anything magical about "gamification" but the idea of presenting students with progressively harder algebra problems in which they get to try out new problem solving methods gradually.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work in many classrooms because the teacher has to manage too many different students learning at different rates and can't tailor the lessons appropriately to all of them at once.

<comment><USER11> I'd think that a huge benefit "gamification" is that it allows students to learn at their own pace and without much teacher guidance. Kids figure out how to play Portal and Civilization, for instance, without a teacher hovering over them to tailor their lessons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the wrong sort of of 'gamification'.

The part of gamification that works is dripping out little bursts of serotonin based on intermittent reward schedules.

Farmville has proved you could addict people to successful algebra manipulation, but it won't be in an interface like this, in fact, there isn't a need for the cute dragons and fairies and stuff at all -- just levels, achievements, cool rare rewards, sound and a little bling all around doing the algebra problem correctly.

One thing I think the scratch demo does get right is the per-step nature of solving these problems. I would imagine that you'd have a directed graph of possible intermediate steps for solving and reward along the way for a harder problem if you were serious about teaching algebra this way.

<comment><USER13> You're kind of missing the point. Tao is under the impression that most "gamified" math education software is based on rewards for solving entire problems. He believes that rewarding smaller steps on the path to the solution of more complex algebraic problems would be more effective. He's not trying to suggest the specific rewards to use with his demo, only the reward schedule.

(I say "under the impression" because the first comment on his post implies that games which break things down this way already exist. I don't actually know the truth of it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had a similar idea after watching my kid staring at the blank paper. The idea was to have an interactive white board where you could manipulate an equation. The kid can try several things but the computer will only allow those that are valid. I even made a very crud attempt to show the concept. Please take a look at it. <http://algebraexplorer.appspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER15> I absolutely love this concept. The game mechanics have the potential to make the concepts extremely clear, though we might end up with a generation of people who need "algebra calculators". I suppose that is why he suggest in game points for doing things by hand.

</comment><comment><USER16> Math Blaster needs to make a comeback!

</comment><comment><USER17> Can you still edit the post title? It's missing an important question mark.</comment>


Power beamed to camera via ambient wi-fi signals - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33020523 <comment><USER2> This is incredibly idiotic. They purposefully filled the airwaves with garbage packets, to collect bare milliwatts. And the "camera" took a B&W photo at tiny resolution and sent it nowhere.

They even used already existing (and not even the best) energy harvesting chip. The only innovative thing here is somehow getting this to get posted on HN

<comment><USER3> It might be better idea to use other ISM bands to power the device, and keep 2.4GHz as communications only and be a good WiFi / BT / Zigbee neighbor.

<comment><USER4> > keep 2.4GHz as communications only

communications and heating food

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, at least they're not really forming wifi beams, which would run the risk of damaging your innards. But this still seems incredibly wasteful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Psh. This is nothing. [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/self_powered_camera...](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/self_powered_camera/)

</comment><comment><USER7> An aside: I'm very glad that the BBC included a link to the actual paper, not enough news sources do that these days.</comment>