Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/24/teacher-spends-two-days-as-a-student-and-is-shocked-at-what-she-learned/?tid=sm_fb <comment><USER2> Saved you a click (from the top comment the last time this was posted):

The three points from the article:

> [1] Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.

> [2] High School students are sitting passively and listening during > approximately 90% of their classes.

> [3] You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.

People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel). I look at this list (especially [2] and the lack of autonomy that follows) and the reason seems really clear. The basic model seems broken.

Previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067)

Original source of the story here: [http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran- teach...](http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2014/10/10/a-veteran-teacher- turned-coach-shadows-2-students-for-2-days-a-sobering-lesson-learned/)

<comment><USER3> _People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel)_

They don't wonder it at all; it's not some mystery solved by sitting in a classroom. Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions. Items 1 and 3 are common in the working world, and there's a few jobs out there as a 2 as well (particularly if you focus on the 'lack of autonomy' part), yet we don't see the same kinds of behaviour from those workers.

Adolescence is a time where you're finally becoming an adult, finding where the boundaries are, and putting your own flavour on life. There's a certain amount of experimentation with that, and it's entirely normal to have more unruliness amongst adolescents.

<comment><USER4> I do sit a lot during my day job, but I can tell you that my sitting conditions are vastly more preferable than those of the typical high school student. I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break.

In high school, I sat in chairs that often felt like they were going to fall apart, and my butt was numb or in pain half the time and sometimes my back too. The desk rarely was big enough to accommodate even just a book and a sheet of paper side by side, which was incredibly infuriating to me. Classrooms were typically horrifyingly dreary. And just getting up to stretch or walk around often wasn't an option.

<comment><USER5> > I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a > huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break.

Truly a representative case!

<comment><USER4> It's pretty representative of tons of professional workers I know from many industries and extremely typical in technology companies. Most high quality office chairs are pretty expensive; the Aeron chair that is used at so many tech companies is easily in that price range, depending on where you buy it (and in what quantity).

Maybe the only thing that's slightly unusual is the window.

If your company is not providing comfortable working spaces, then there are plenty of competitors which are.

The real point, though, is that high school classrooms are often downright uncomfortable and unaccommodating. I'd rather stand all day than have to sit at those desks again for long periods of time. (And that'd be a lot healthier, too.)

<comment><USER5> Up-thread there was a comparison from office workers to high school students. Do you really think that the "average office worker" has a chair (in the price-range of an Aeron), an office with a view, and a flexible schedule?

<comment><USER6> As a paper pusher during college, I had a $400ish chair, a desk with more than enough space to spread out the documents I was working with and the keyboard I was using, and could get up and take a quick break whenever I felt like it, just to stretch my legs, go to the bathroom without asking, grab a quick bit of food, or whatever. I could snack at my desk as I saw fit. While they preferred I not take personal calls at work, it was similarly acceptable to momentarily step out to answer important calls. They were more concerned I moved a bunch of papers than I sat obediently at my desk every second of every day. The only difference is that I wasn't sat next to a window, but across a cubicle farm from one, but I could clearly see out a bank of windows if I lifted my head a bit from my desk.

So yes, I actually think that it's fairly representative of the experience of US office workers when compared to high-schoolers, which are given a much smaller work area in much worse conditions with considerably less freedom to deal with the reality of every day life.

<comment><USER5> Most of these comments follow a similar pattern:

      <Single Anecdote>

      Therefore, I believe that my experiences are
      fairly representative the entire population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember high school.

During class I hid whatever book I actually wanted to read at the time inside the class book and drowned out the teacher.

If homework was worth >10% of the total grade for the class (so that you couldn't get an A from tests/quizzes alone), I would copy the homework from someone else the period before.

Tests & quizzes are so gameable it's a complete joke. Standardized tests even more so. Without any actual learning from the class itself, you can generally come close to ace'ing most high school tests by being moderately intelligent.

There was one class where I got busted for copying the homework and actually had to apply myself for the rest of the semester to avoid being failed, and this was only because the teacher felt I could rise to my potential if challenged to do so. Thankfully, that was actually one of the more interesting classes I had to attend.

I was warned constantly that college was going to tear me apart if I didn't instill good study habits, but it was mostly more of the same. It actually required even less work because most classes relied more heavily on quiz & test scores than High School did. After my freshman year, I went to class about 2 hours a week (out of ~18) and still kept above a 3.5 GPA.

At the two corporate jobs I've held so far, the same formula still seems to apply where you can avoid applying yourself 98% of the time as long as you can shine during the corporate equivalent of "tests."

To date, it's the hardest thing in the world for me to garner the self control to apply myself to a task if I'm not passionate about it (even forcing myself to pay bills is a challenge), and I think a large part of that is due to the fact that I've been able to coast through every "challenge" quite easily, and everything has seemed to work itself out so far.

This next month I'm actually striking out on my own, thankfully on something I'm passionate about (and have been working on for the past six months on the side), and I'm scared to death I won't be able to actually follow through on the hard work required to be successful as an entrepreneur.

<comment><USER8> One thing that's missing here is that college really is a "you get out what you get in" situation. As a prof, you see people like this all the time, and hopefully you take the time to try and engage them more, but at the end of the day it isn't your responsibility if they choose to waste the opportunity. The "challenge" in college isn't to make a 4.0 GPA, it's to push yourself to find your own boundaries. Many profs will bend over backwards to help a student who is doing this, and (unlike high school) you can scale up your program to meet and exceed any persons abilities.

Sure, maybe you can skate by and manage a decent GPA, but you aren't doing yourself any favors, your basically telling us that you half assed four years of personal development, and you should know that it is probably obvious to those you've worked with and for. The corporate world has its share of people too, skating just like they were. Typically they are the ones not being considered for rapid advancement and grooming for bigger things.

Of course, you may just be exceptional. And it's not like you can't recover from this with hard work. But consider this as you head out on your own: Sometimes you just get lucky, but it's more likely that you will succeed or fail now largely on the back of hard work (and here's the tricky part) applied to the right places. Consider an alternative universe "you" who grabbed hold of college with both hands and squeezed until it gave up as much useful stuff as it could....

That guy would be eating your lunch right now. Not because of the college, per se, but because of the attitude and experience.

<comment><USER7> Well, I think that theoretical guy would just be succeeding in a different industry than the one I happened to succeed in so far.

It's not like I didn't apply myself to anything, just not to schoolwork; except when I found a class interesting. As it turns out, the things I did apply myself to became my career rather than what I had gone to school for.

There's a large difference between "half assed four years of personal development" and simply concentrating more on things that are unrelated to your official studies.

In fact, one of the big reasons I'm striking out on my own (well, as part of a team) now is that I realized my day job was no longer providing me with nearly as much opportunity for personal development as it had during the first few years I worked there.

Edit: And the fact that it's entirely what you make of it isn't what's told to the 18 & 19 year olds heading off to college (at least not in the circle's I was in). What's told to kids is that it's the piece of paper that matters in today's society. Once you get it, you can do anything you want, but make sure you get that piece of paper or all opportunity will shut down for you forever and for always.

What causes these situations is the combined narrative that the piece of paper is what matters alongside the fact that getting that piece of paper is a highly gameable activity.

<comment><USER8> Ok, "half assed four years..." was making some assumptions I shouldn't have. You could well have been doing other useful things at the time. At ~2hrs a week, you didn't actually find out what you could have done there, so that's a waste, but I understand being afraid to follow that conviction and drop college in favor of whatever you were finding interesting. I'm the last one to support the everyone-must-go-to-college message, but I understand it feeling risky.

Even in your circle though, I'm sure the (unfortunate) message was clear that the piece of paper was table stakes, not success. And every university has some variation of this message, repeatedly.

Table stakes get you a seat at the table, that's all. It's the things that aren't shown on that paper that decide what sort of a player you are. And success, in the end, is most of the time dependent on getting good at doing many of the sort of things you describe as struggling with, not because it's what you want to do, but because it's what is necessary to achieve what you are trying to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting analysis, but as a current student I would find the things she wanted to change to be annoying in high school. It probably depends a lot on the student, but I really just wanted to listen to the teacher teach. My best teachers really knew their stuff and assigned interesting work for homework.

The ones that tried to get us to hop around were not appreciated. I'm there because I want to learn, not do jumping jacks.

<comment><USER10> Seriously, it was so annoying when the teacher would have us get up and "move", for instance to demonstrate a math concept. She doesn't seem to get it that physically commanding students like that is demeaning, treating them like a dog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The money quote to me is this one:

"I was struck by this takeaway [#2] in particular because it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing."

What strikes me about this is how none of the solutions the author offers fix this problem. In fact, it's unfixable with our current concept of what a school is. No amount of monkeying with how classes are taught will change the fact that the kids are there because they have to be there, not because they chose to be there.

<comment><USER10> Exactly, school is a prison. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_DJAZ- ByV0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_DJAZ-ByV0)

It would be nice to see more attention on unschooling-style homeschooling and also on non-coercive schools where children are free to play and explore for themselves, so-called "democratic free schools" like Sudbury Valley School in MA. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI)

<comment><USER12> I've been thinking more like that lately, and came here to say pretty much that. School is an inherently coercive institution. I think it's designed to snuff out independence and creativity and churn out people who blindly follow orders, who will be good corporate peons, Army privates, or something similar for their masters, and outcomes other than that are achieved more in spite of it than because of any attempts at positive change in the system.

I don't know exactly what removing it would look like. I tend to think it needs to be less of a top-down organized system. More people doing whatever feels interesting to them at the time and getting as much help and support at it as we can practically provide, whether that's building cars, writing computer programs, reading about history, playing sports, or just screwing around for a while. I think that people inherently want to learn and do stuff, and you'll get much better results just letting them go do what they want to as great of an extent as possible than by ordering them around and restricting their options as much as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is this so surprising? Wasn't every teacher a high school student at some point? Is the experience so traumatic that they completely forget what the schedule was like once they become teachers themselves?

<comment><USER14> I'm in my 4th year of teaching, yet I graduated from high school 10 years ago. How well do you remember your daily schedule from 10 years ago? Do you remember what made you restless? What made you tired? What made you stop paying attention? And were you so meta cognizant that you recognized the source of that restlessness?

Doubt it.

It is rare for teachers to have the time to truly consider the student's perspective in their class, and the context of how that fits into the entire school day experience.

EDIT: I should note that I read this article a few days ago. The entire staff at my school held a discussion on how to make school better in that regard. This blog post alone will at minimum affect the 1400 students at our school, but given the number of places I've seen it shared, it will have a much larger impact than that. Always a good reminder.

<comment><USER13> I can appreciate the fresh aspect of it, but I do definitely recall the stark contrast between 12th grade and my first semester at the local community college. Just the fact that you didn't always have to be in a class room -- you could schedule an hour break between classes, and go hang out in the cafeteria or library to catch up on some work. Or go outside between classes and walk around (in high school it was like being in a day prison, not allowed to leave the building). Oh, and you didn't need to get anyone's permission to use the washroom. Not to mention that there was no forced group activities such as dodge ball (any athletics was strictly up to you signing up for it).

<comment><USER15> For me, the biggest change between high school and college was honestly just being able to wake up at 8 AM instead of 6-something. Suddenly my recurring insomnia, and my tendency to just flat-out fall asleep during afternoon classes, were mostly gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think to some extent she underestimated the differences in her own body after 15 years. I recall being bored and fidgety in school, but I was never so physically drained just from sitting in the way that she describes. That's probably something an increasingly inflexible adult experiences more than a child does.

<comment><USER17> I personally was constantly fiddling with something, be it drilling holes in erasers or doodling or whatever, but I was always doing something. Had I not been able to do something (allowed... now that's a different story ;)) I would never have passed a single subject! Just tiny tasks to keep myself busy while I was listening. Even to this day, a couple of decades later, I can't really concentrate on one task.

That said, people learn differently. Some people can just put their mind to it and grind through material, others, like me, aren't quite so fortunate. If only there was a way to gauge the learning method most suitable for a child, and put that child in an appropriate class... I believe things in education would look a lot brighter.

<comment><USER18> It's really funny, later in life, to be in a meeting full of people who have similar coping mechanisms. A dozen grown-ass adults spinning pens, playing with badges, anything but sitting still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I recently spent a year as a full-time language student in a college (in China, so more like US high school in many ways) after teaching English for 10 yrs, and also unexpectedly discovered point no. 1, i.e. how tiring it is to sit down all day, and almost never did so as a teacher. Even after 1 year I was still often yawning after 2 or 3 hrs of near continuous sitting, and always got up to walk around outside for 5 or 15 minutes during breaks. Most other students were much younger, usually 20-ish, and often stayed sitting in class during breaks. I don't know how they do it, but maybe it's just their age, or maybe they haven't done a job where they're on their feet all day for 10 yrs.

</comment><comment><USER20> ...does she learn how to write clickbait headlines?

<comment><USER21> The headline must have changed since the link was posted to HN- it's currently "Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns", which is about as matter-of-fact and non-clickbaity as it gets. It's just a literal description of the article contents. What was it originally that was so sensationalistic?

<comment><USER22> "$person does $thing and is shocked by what they find/learn/discover" is definitely in the first chapter of the Blogger's Guide To Clickbait Titles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I do wish that my school had had the block scheduling this school seems to have. We had 8 periods in a day (school was a half period) and they were all ~50 minutes. This is barely enough time to accomplish anything, and days where the classes were shorter (teachers' meetings) then each class was worthless.

<comment><USER24> The problem is that it's near impossible for a student to pay attention during longer classes. I think you're trying to measure accomplishing things by the amount of material you work through during a given class, instead of by the amount of information the student actually absorbs during that time.

That seemed to be one of the main points in the article, just getting through material was a terrible way to look at classroom learning.

<comment><USER23> >The problem is that it's near impossible for a student to pay attention during longer classes.

Impossible seems a bit harsh. The situation could certainly be improved, and it might certainly be improved if the instructor has more time to engage in students as individuals, which can't be done much in a short period system (this was my main complaint with HS and why I never took a huge lecture course). I do agree that the current method of engagement, overall, is not ideal.

<comment><USER25> The problem is not the engagement as much as trying to sit and pay attention for 90 minutes. You will way better results by having a 5-15 minute break every 45 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is one of the reasons I like my school. Points 1 and 3 in the article are pretty close to nonexistent.

[1]: We operate on a 4x4 schedule (4 classes August - December, 4 classes January - June). So we sit in one class for 90 minutes, a good time to focus on a task and get it done.

[2]: Issue 2 is a problem with every school I've been in and seen. I can't think of any school that has managed time in a way that will cover curriculum and capture student's attention.

[3]: I'm lucky that my school is only 3 years old, extremely new for my district. I can easily form personal connections with my teachers and administration. My teachers know my extracurriculars and understand if I didn't complete my homework that day (I turn it in later, but I do have to finish it).

Overall, this article was a reflective experience and made me even more thankful of my school.

<comment><USER27> My experience with a 4x4 schedule was that I would lose focus about 15 to 20 minutes in, start trying to work whatever homework the teacher had assigned, realize I didn't understand it, refocus on the lecture, and realize that I had missed half of it. The only reason I graduated High School on time was because one of my math teachers gave out D's. This was really only an issue in Math classes, where we were expected to passively absorb information. The classes I did really well in were Honors English, AP English, and History/Social Studies courses where the teachers asked us to think about what they were telling us.

Looking back, the only reason that I was able to go to college, get a degree, and end up working in Engineering is that my parents were willing to support me monetarily while I replaced my shitty High School record with a good Community College record.

<comment><USER28> I recall one of my best math class grades was pre-cal my Junior year. I would normally fall into the trap you did, and completely failed Algebra 2 but somehow didn't swing back on it..

Anyway, the teacher, the girls soccer couch, actually gave us a good amount of time after the lecturing to work on our homework. And often he would start the class about 10-15 minutes late and I knew it was to give us a chance to polish off the homework. I recall being in a class of mostly Seniors, and a group of us always ended up working together.. The baseball teams pitcher, who was actually quite sharp, his friend, and a girl I don't quite remember that well. The teacher encouraged us to move our desks together as needed. This arrangement worked out fantastically. We would often divide and conquer the homework, or race through the problems individually. Both had advantages; somebody(me or the pitcher) would almost always have a particular problem figured out if the rest were stuck. It created this interaction that was part competitive and part cooperative/supportive. I suspect we all had fun, learned a lot, and did great on the tests and grades(I did).

I had three main takeaways from this:

1.)The lectures were focused, dense, and did not take up the entire 90 minutes.

2.)We had plenty of time to practice the problems and help each other/get help during the period

3.)I now just recall that this was our lunch period as well, which we took the 2nd to last slot, so we had a break before the last bit of the period. This was quite nice.

As an aside, three of the coaches I had for academic classes are probably in my top 5 list. Their classes were very engaging.. I find this interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wasn't there a previous discussion/article on this (or at least something very similar)?

<comment><USER29> Yes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8442067)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I found her description of being tired in an icky way very good. I remember feeling exactly that way at the end of the day in high school.

I also agree with her suggestions. Short bursts of information, plenty of chances for physical motion, participation rather than passive listening. I believe all of this would have greatly improved what I got out of high school.

Oh, and also cutting out a significant portion of the bullshit and indoctrination which was passed off as eduction but which was not. That's a different topic though I guess.

</comment><comment><USER31> When I was a student teacher I asked permission to do this and, without exception, was met with baffled looks. What specifically are you hoping find out? I was asked. Why would you want to that? my mentor teacher wanted to know. It's not that anyone had objections, they just couldn't fathom why an adult would want to do it.

My biggest take away was how out of control and unpleasant lunch period was. Also, how much the kids got yelled at during class transitions.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why were they only taking 4 classes per day?

They are 30 minutes longer than my high school classes were, but we had 7+ different classes per day. I'm pretty sure our day lasted till 3:30 or 4pm. We had 5 minutes to get to the next class, and on a big campus, that could result in some pretty good cardio workouts. So maybe inadvertently we were getting those stretches recommended by the author.

<comment><USER33> The article covers this:

      (Note: we have a block schedule; not all classes meet each day)

The reality is that in a typical 1-hour class with 5 minute breaks between classes on a big campus you lose the first 5 minutes of class to people arriving late and the last 5 minutes to everyone packing up their books so they can rush our the door. So you get 50-minute classes, or about 5/6 of your nominal instruction time. And if you have to do a lab or something, you either have to do double-period classes or stick to labs that can be effectively completed in 40-45 minutes (because you need time to set up and clean up too).

So enter block scheduling: the idea is to lengthen the classes to 90 minutes or so and alternate days when they meet. You still lose 10 minutes of each class, but that's 8/9 of your nominal instruction time, not 5/6\. And teachers get a bit more flexibility in terms of what things can be done with a class. The drawback is that if you lecture for the full 80 minutes, the outcome is typically not so great: it takes an exceptional lecturer, or an exceptional student, or for some sorts of material both, to pull off someone still being able to absorb information in a lecture that's longer than an hour.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I found this interesting. I worked for a few years teaching technical subjects to mid-career adults and ended up adopting an educational theory not too dissimilar to the author, but for mostly different reasons.

Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8251569)

I remember high school very well, and it was a pretty torturous experience. If you could design an educational program that was almost guaranteed not to be a conducive learning environment with poor mastery outcomes, the public k-12 system in the U.S. would probably be it. Even worse, when they measure educational outcomes, the place systems like South Korea's at the top, a system that's absolutely optimized and excels at the lowest possible form of learning, rote memorization.

In the previous discussion, I point out that I believe students need to "complete the circuit", go from input/reception to output/production to say they've learned a topic. In today's school environment, _if_ this happens at all, it happens by accident:

1) The teacher gives a lecture, information is shoved in

2) The students do homework and tests, okay, the students "produce" what they've learned, usually a brain dump of what they've memorized, but let's be honest, not a demonstration of learning or mastery.

3) The homework and tests get an impersonal grade, the "feedback loop" necessary to complete the circuit. But if the student got it wrong? Too bad, the lesson is moving on anyways. There's no time really spent in education to have the student go back with this new course correction and see if they got it now. And out of schedule help in most schools is woeful.

Because of this systematic failure, by the time many students are involved in "advanced" topics in high school, their foundational knowledge is so flimsy and filled with holes that new topics are like turning a strong fan on in a room with a house of cards. Yet the professional educational establishment seems unable to figure this out and correct it.

Keep in mind, without even a template of any kind, we're all fluently able to learn a complex language, a mass of complex social rules so complex that libraries are full of books describing them and how to sanitarily complete a digestion cycle on our own (everybody poops) before we even show up for day 1 of 1st grade. Keep in mind that we spent the first two of those 6-7 years not even being able to talk - so we did all that in about the same time it takes to get through high school. If we learned as much in our 4 years of high school, we'd all be leaving with the equivalent of advanced degrees in physics.

Children can learn at phenomenal paces, yet it takes _years_ before students accumulate any worthwhile new skills in this kind of environment -- skills that should take them weeks or months.

School is doing it wrong.

<comment><USER34> As an example, people routinely study a foreign language for 3+ years and come out with zero ability to actually use the language. While a couple of months in the same country will produce a person with real useful usable skills in the language.

If you believed that school was there to teach people this is shocking. But it all makes sense on the basis that school is there to keep young people out of the way.

<comment><USER12> I don't think of myself as being good at learning foreign languages, and I don't know enough of any of them to have any useful conversation, but I kinda disagree that just being in a country that speaks that language will get you started.

I've spent weeks in Mexico, and my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time. I didn't feel like I gained anything at that point by being surrounded by Spanish speech and media.

I think that the first hard part or learning a new language is just bridging that gap of memorizing thousands of new words and their meanings. If you haven't done that, any amount of exposure to the language is mostly meaningless gibberish that you don't know where to start at deciphering. I don't see how that helps you learn it.

For what it's worth, I learned a lot more from using Duolingo for a while than from immersion. I figure a better way to really get started would be to work at that, and translate newspaper articles by hand for a few hours a day, not that I've tried it.

<comment><USER35> > _my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant > most of the time_ //

So you didn't eat out, how did you manage getting your shopping in, buying bus tickets and such without learning any of the local language, just hoped people spoke English?

<comment><USER12> It was a trip for work, so I was mostly accompanied by people who did speak Spanish.

<comment><USER35> Ah, people speaking other languages around me annoys me enough that I want to know what they're saying!

<comment><USER12> Yeah, it could be kind of annoying in a way. I could catch maybe 5-10% of a Spanish conversation. Like I was saying in the original, I think I'd need to boost my vocabulary by at least 10x before listening to spoken Spanish would have much benefit.

Trying to listen actually kinda reminds me of learning Vim, where you spend what feels like forever at first totally lost, and doing the simplest edit seems to require so much mental effort that you can't actually think about the code you're working on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> One of the best high school teachers I had used to teach Dutch to adult immigrants before becoming a Dutch high school teacher. She treated her previous students with respect and expected them to do the same. She taught us with the same approach and had thoughtful discussions with us, and it made a world of difference.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's true in any profession that one learns a lot by spending a day in your customers' shoes.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is reminiscent of a book called My Freshman Year, by a college professor who actually enrolled as a student at the same school. She writes about numerous discoveries that she found shocking, despite having taught at the same school for many years. It's a great read.

</comment><comment><USER39> iirc either McDonalds or BK has rumors of an internal rule that even the uppermost layers of management have to spend at least one full day each year standing behind the cash register and selling burgers.

It would be nice if a) this was more than an urban legend and b) if more companies embraced variations of this rule.

I believe it to be a good way to catch problems (e.g. unrealistic expectations of workers) before shit hits the fan like in a Mannheim (Germany) hospital where medical instruments were not disinfected properly due to too few workers and time - and reports to upper levels vanished in bureaucracy.

<comment><USER40> There's a reality tv show based on this premise called "Undercover Boss".

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It would be easier for teachers to notice these things if their schedules included some time for reflection and preparation instead of packing as many classes as possible into an eight hour day.

</comment><comment><USER42> "Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for- learning-type activities [...]"

Is that normal usage of "blitzkrieg"? Do you use it in everyday language?

</comment><comment><USER43> Aren't teachers supposed to go through college / university before they become teachers? Why are their own experiences irrelevant?

</comment><comment><USER44> This article actually made me angry, to the point of pacing and muttering, that these points are not commonly understood and addressed.

How can these be new concepts? how can this be news? Students are bored because they have no autonomy, are force to sit and be talked down to all day, are not empowered to be involved in their own learning. WOW! AMAZING!

How out of touch do educators have to be for this to be considered innovative thinking?

</comment><comment><USER45> From now on I'll be more tolerant when someone plays with their cellphone during one of my presentations.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow, 7:45 sounds awfully early. And out at 2:35?

<comment><AUTHOR> I lived in a rural area during this time in my life. School started at 7:30am, the school bus picked us up at 6:30am, which meant I had to be up at 5:30-6:00 to eat breakfast, shower and get ready for the day.

This meant a 9:30 bed-time.

This also meant that I got home by about 3:30-4:00 depending on traffic. An hour for dinner gave me 4.5 hours to study. Let's be honest, I also took an hour for free-time otherwise I wouldn't have any. So 3.5 hours to study every day.

In college at least, when you plan your schedule, you should plan 2-3 hours of study-time per week for every hour of class time. As you can see I really only had time to study 1 subject a day, maybe 2 if I didn't give myself free time by that standard.

Recipe for success? Ha!

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> How can someone who has been teaching for 14 years pass themselves off as a 16 year old?

<comment><USER48> OFFS, RTFA.

<comment><USER47> The question stands, She isn't experiencing what a student experiences she is experiencing what a student experiences when there is another adult in the room. Two very different things.

<comment><USER3> Are you taking the position that she can gain no useful insight at all from the activity?

<comment><USER47> No but the problem with the schools isn't that kids don't get to play basketball a minute before class. My history teacher sent me to the office for saying columbus was a slaver, my computer teacher wrote me up for proving he wrote insecure code (sql injection), my science teacher chewed me out for stating that every legitimate scientific body acknowledges evolution is a fact. The problem is the education system isn't about education it's about control.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Reports First Quarterly Loss in 4 Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/technology/amazon-reports-its-first-quarterly-loss-in-four-years.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> Shares already recovering, loss was "better" than expectations, a lot of their spending is on important business stuff (warehouses, kindle, web properties) that will yield returns later.

In other words, revenue is nearly identical and there's no profit, presumably because of these new things.

Amazon is one of the few very large companies that has extremely high potential for growth. I made an OK amount of money buying them after post- earnings panic and selling 1 day to 60 days later this year and last.

If it ever goes back down to 190 I might throw some % of my long term money their way.

(100% of my long term money, which is about $1000 every two weeks, is currently just going to TGT, another long term big company that already has a dividend but still has plenty growth potential)

((90% of my short term money, on the other hand, was buying 10K shares of OCZ at 4.90. Now its at 1.36. Ouch!))

<comment><USER3> Dumb question, as I literally know nothing about stock or savings: isn't it generally a bad idea to put 100% of your long term money in any one place?

<comment><USER4> Isn't it stupid to just to have one job, one car, be a citizen of one country, have one house and one family. I mean really - one must diversify. What would you do if you lost any one of those?

No, it's not stupid to concentrate wealth. Problems only arise when you do it stupidly, like buying too big a house, being part of the wrong family, living in the wrong country or buying an unsafe car.

Diversification does not reduce risk but it cuts your returns in half. All correlations go to one in a crisis and you can't hedge the end of the world.

Note: To all downvoters - putting all your eggs in multiple baskets does not protect you from an asteroid impact any more than a person with all eggs in one basket.

People who think diversification makes them safe are frankly wrong.

<comment><USER5> > Isn't it stupid to just to have one job, one car,

Indeed people who own a job, a car or a house are well advised to have insurance. And insurance is a form of diversification.

For countries the analogy is flimsy, but if you live in a country that has had any of: wars, dictators, property confiscation or high rate of violent crime in the recent past (which describes most of the non-developed world, including emerging countries), it's a good idea to have a passport and a way to move elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> Then buy insurance - put out a costless collar if you are that worried.

If you want to diversify you need to actually buy reverse correlated assets. So go ahead - hedge with options, hedge with futures, hedge with shorting the indices.

But don't think buying disparate companies protects you - it doesn't.

<comment><USER6> There are degrees of protection. No protection is perfect, but you're a lot less likely to be totally wiped out with a diversified portfolio. 100% of my wealth is in company A, and it goes bankrupt, I have nothing. If I have it in two companies, unless they are perfectly interdependent, I lower my likelihood of being completely wiped out from 100% to <100%. Concentrating wealth in a single company increases the variance in your outcome, which is something most people consider bad in financial planning. It also requires active management, because even most temporarily successful companies do eventually go bankrupt.

This is basic personal finance. TBH, I'm really surprised your comments aren't all at the lightest shade of gray already.

<comment><USER4> > _basic personal finance_

I fully understand the arguments for diversification. Just like I fully understand CAPM, modern portfolio theory and the assumption that var=risk.

But it's all bullshit. Why are you investing in companies that have that risk? If you understand which companies return higher returns - why aren't you all in on them?

It's bloody hard to find good companies and when you do - why on earth would you diversify into their worse off counterparts? You need to have heavy concentration in great companies where you are perfectly fine having a 10 year hold on at the right price.

<comment><USER7> > _basic investing_

Either I'm misunderstanding your argument or you are missing a fundamental tenant of finance (and indeed, most things in life). Higher returns typically comes with higher risk. A brand new startup is high risk with high reward if it pays out. The same thing applies to financial investments in high risk companies.

People take risks because they want to try and beat the historical growth in their portfolio. By taking on that risk, they know that they may lose money instead of grow their money.

Diversifying allows them to adjust how much risk they want to take above the standard market growth.

"Great Companies" is such a bad guide star for investing. Sears looked like a "great company" 10 years ago. Kodak? Any big box retailer?

Anyway, there are perfectly sound investing theories that say investing in _the worst companies_ can result in higher returns than any "great company" investment portfolio. Value investing at it's most extreme. You just need a few of the losers to become mediocre to make huge gains, while trying to get great companies to grow past their high stock price is extremely hard.

I agree with your long-term strategy...but I don't see any reason to hold long-term stakes in individual companies. Why not just hold long term on index funds?

<comment><USER4> Risk and return are not correlated. There are risks and there are returns. See AAA bonds during GFC. Great businesses are great companies at reasonable prices not overvalued growth stocks.

Most of modern economic and finance theory is based on fundamentally broken models of risk and return.

<comment><USER7> Define "great company".

Known risks and future returns are certainly correlated. Unknown risks (financial crisis meltdown) are obviously uncorrelated because they are unknown. You can't control for those, which is why you _diversify_.

What are you going to do when your "great company" has a horrible CEO scandal and sinks the company? That's an unknown risk that would be prevented by diversifying your investments.

Known risks (such as "can this company execute it's vision well enough to be profitable at 500m revenue/year?") are what you weigh against the return ("I personally think so, but the market doesn't, so I'm getting a discount on the stock price when it eventually succeeds").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Important tidbit buried in there: "Amazon said it lost 60 cents a share in the third quarter, but more than half of that was from its investment in the daily deals site Living Social"

</comment><comment><USER9> About two months ago I was thinking that the bubble, of which everyones been talking about for the past years, might finally pop soon. I thought I might short some major tech companies and make some money off of it. I had two indicators that I was looking at to determine the start of it:

1-Zynga begins laying off people. (really, any big web 2.0 company begins laying off people, but zynga seemed like the logical choice.) The way I see it is this: if a flood of veteran web-devs, artists, PMs, etc hit the SF market, salaries will go down slightly as demand goes down. Since techies spend their money on tech, this will lead to revenues going down within the industry. This will begin a positive feedback loop because everything seems to be built on top of itself right now.

2-Second indicator is that Amazon's stock would fall. This is because they are essentially the bellwether of the tech industry: everyone runs their stuff on AWS. If their revs go down (which it doesnt look like they have), that means companies are feeling the pinch. Again, a positive feedback loop could quickly ensue.

Now that my two indicators have come to pass, I still don't believe strongly enough in the bubble theory to short the industry. But if anyone else wants to take my theory to the bank, I would be happy to take a 10% referral fee on any and all gains :)

<comment><USER10> Amazon does not breakout revenue for AWS -- it's grouped into the "Other" category. Analysts estimate it could be nearing a $1B business, but Amazon has a yearly revenue exceeding $48B. I don't think the stock market places much value on AWS today, so a slowdown should not greatly impact the stock (if the market did, we would have seen the stock decline during AWS outages).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> With its price-to-earnings multiple in the stratosphere, Amazon often comes up in conversation as being "overpriced." While this conclusion may be true, it's not because Amazon is unprofitable...

Publicly traded companies optimize for return-on-invested-capital (ROIC), which includes profits (dividends) plus increases in equity value (share price).

Stable companies in stable markets often make the greatest returns by increasing revenue and reducing costs (i.e., optimizing for earnings). Companies in high-growth markets (esp. competitive ones) typically optimize for long-term market share/growth (which manifests as increases in equity value). Amazon falls into the latter category.

Not sure this makes sense to/helps anyone, but yeah, that's why Amazon operates the way it does.

<comment><USER12> Get big fast. Amazon is still getting bigger, and accelerating the pace recently.

The "low margin retailer" comments about AWS are funny too. AWS is effectively a billion dollar company, eligible for HUGE subsidies (from retail), under effectively no pressure for revenue/profits, and is ok with 3% margins. That sounds like a nightmare to compete with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think Amazon's profit per employee is around $6K. Compare to Apple at $600K. Amazon is practically a non-profit. Not surprising, as they play in a shitty, ghetto space--retail.

<comment><USER7> Besides what other people have mentioned, there is also the fact that Amazon employs a lot of people, and many of them are performing relatively mundane service jobs. Picking and packing products from the Amazon warehouses requires a large workforce, despite all the advancements in automatic warehousing.

Profit per employee isn't really a useful number in this respect.

<comment><USER13> This is my point; that Amazon is a shitty business because they have chosen a terrible sector: retail. That's what you get when your main competitor is Walmart. Look at the absolute profit numbers: 1/40th the profits of Microsoft; 1/100th the annual profits of Apple; 1/30th the annual profits of Google.

That said, they are desperately trying to get into real tech. businesses.

<comment><USER7> Fair point - everyone knows that retail is a razor-thin margin arena to play in.

I would argue that their profitability is a lot more stable than Apple. A few missteps and Apple is no longer the golden child. They have to continue to innovate or they lose their special status. Executing on a retail strategy is in many ways simpler than "build the next innovative consumer electronics widget...sell for astronomical price".

I'd take stock in Amazon over Apple any day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If I had any cash sitting in my brokerage account, I'd probably buy a few more shares of AMZN with it right now.

<comment><USER15> I like the company but at 250-300 times earnings it's a darn expensive stock.

<comment><USER16> I'm guessing everyone is waiting until Amazon is the only game in town and can increase margins every product but those that would allow a new competitor to survive to profitability.

Once they are in a position to increase margins without risk of lost market share, the current valuation will be justified.

<comment><USER17> Fresh competition is never more than a click away.

I get that Amazon is playing the long game, forgoe profits now to build a dominant company for the future. But how long have they been playing this long game for? How much longer before it pays off? This is a 17 year old company. People younger than Amazon are getting married and having kids.

<comment><USER18> During that time, they've been building an amazing infrastructure, and that won't be easy for a new competitor to match.

I ordered from a different retailer last Saturday night, and I had forgotten how long it takes to get stuff shipped in the real world: FedEx didn't receive the package until Tuesday at 8pm. With Prime, I'd already have it by Tuesday night.

Shipping speed isn't the most important aspect of online shopping, but I think it's indicative of how Amazon's size is already providing a competitive advantage that is hard to match.

<comment><USER19> The fact that people are willing to wait a couple of days for Amazon when they can buy exactly the same product immediately for slightly more money at the local Best Buy speaks to how much they're willing to put up with for a marginal cost savings. I think that anyone who expects a "sinister phase II" where Amazon takes advantage of their market share by jacking up prices fundamentally misunderstands Amazon. They are, and always will be, a low- margin retailer.

<comment><USER20> From my experience, sitting on the couch and ordering something is a whole lot easier than actually going out and getting it. And it comes right to the door. In a day or two. Subscribe and save was even better when the kids were little. Diapers and wipes. Delivered automatically.

I don't find that amazon's prices are that amazingly good. Sometimes they're better, sometimes they're not. I've found small things for half the price in local shops sometimes. Newegg will beat them for anything electronic, but their shipping is really erratic. And since I'm in WA, there's no tax savings.

Maybe I'm a special case. I don't live in a big city, but you can see one from the beach. It's 45 minutes to Walmart, 2x that to Target, Trader Joe's, the Apple Store and other pillars of civilization. Hell, it's 10 minutes to the nearest store (plus whatever time it takes to get the kids into shoes and strapped into the car).

Amazon wins on predictable convenience. They're the biggest store in the world, and they're right here. And whatever I want will be here in 2 days, shipped free. (yeah, we have prime. it's like crack)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Say what you want about some of their other business practices, but they appear to have successfully destroyed rents in the retail industry, which is great for consumers of retail. Regardless of how they do for their shareholders, that is a real benefit to society.

Right?

<comment><USER22> That is a difficult question to answer. A good parallel to what amazon is doing to retail is what globalization did to manufacturing. As we all know, manufacturing in the US has been gutted and is now largely based in developing countries. While this is good for the consumer because products are cheaper, this also resulted in a great deal of unemployment for a certain category of workers (primarily low skill). Retail, which is also a major employment source for low skill workers, is now facing similar pressure from companies like Amazon, who employ significantly fewer people than the companies that they replace.

Ultimately, developed countries are going to have a difficult time finding good paying, reliable jobs for low skilled employees. This is an inevitable by-product of our shift to a globalized, modern economy and is one of the primary reasons why the US and Europe are struggling to keep their social safety programs solvent.

<comment><USER23> > As we all know, manufacturing in the US has been gutted and is now largely > based in developing countries

We all know it, and yet it's not actually true. America is the largest manufacturer in the world.

The main that happened is America switched from making many multiples of cheap item, to making smaller quantities of much more expensive and complicated items.

<comment><USER24> The CNC mills have revolutionized small production runs. For example, it used to be very hard to restore old cars for which parts were no longer available. For example, decades ago a guy down the street restored some old Mercedes limousine he showed me, and I asked him how he dealt with the unavailablity of parts. He said "oh, I just made them" and showed me his fully equipped machine shop in his basement.

That can now be done with a simple CNC machine.

A lot of shops have sprung up that apparently have libraries of CNC designs, and they manufacture the parts on demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I feel like if Jason Fried were to comment on this article that he would say there is no time like the present to practice earning money.

I'm not buying the "we'll grow really fast and then profit later" - didn't we learn about how that worked out already with the dotbomb?

<comment><USER26> I think the difference here is that Amazon is taking in massive revenue and investing it in future infrastructure. Jason Fried advises against taking no revenue now while expecting to "figure out" some way to make some revenue in the future. Both have little or profit now, but Amazon can reasonably expect to make profit in the future, while that SuperCoolFreeApp can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Microsoft also reported their first loss not too long ago.</comment>


Alienware Console Lets You Play PC Games On Your TV - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/08/alienware-alpha/

<comment><USER2> It was supposed to run Steam Machine but Steam has delayed SteamOS until 2015. Still a very heathly piece of hardware though for its size.

[http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse#announcements...](http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamuniverse#announcements/detail/1820891223906967821)</comment>


Show HN: I combined Milligram, Skeleton, and Normalize into a single CSS project - <AUTHOR> https://sscaffold-css.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've been a fan of skeleton and then milligram for a while, but milligram has gone quiet recently and has a few issues, and skeleton has been quiet for a long time. Both of them have normalize.css as a dependency.

I wanted an updated CSS file with the same aesthetic, so I've taken some time to stitch it all together. There are a few differences from milligram, but I've tried to keep those at a minimum.

It's on Github at [https://github.com/robsheldon/sscaffold- css/](https://github.com/robsheldon/sscaffold-css/). Now's a great time to open up some issues on it before its first release.

<comment><USER2> Ditch the thin light-grey font on white background. I have 20/20 vision and I have to attain my eyes to read the text.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good suggestion, I'll read up on good higher-contrast colors and fix it.

<comment><USER3> You should also change the thin Montserrat, which is only suitable as a display face. It looks awkward and is very hard to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really love you have picked up from skeleton / milligram.

A suggestion, you might want to included a minified version of the css because it looks to be 22kb and you'll be compared against skeleton which is just 2kb.

[https://github.com/robsheldon/sscaffold- css/blob/master/ssca...](https://github.com/robsheldon/sscaffold- css/blob/master/sscaffold.css)

Edit: typo

<comment><USER5> Unrelated: What's the reason for mentioning an edit for a typo? As far as I can tell there's no indication that your comment has been edited so nobody would know, unless I don't have enough karma to see this indication or something?

<comment><USER6> It's convention to be extremely transparent about edits because of irritation with people who change their comments after being replied to, making the replies look irrelevant or incorrect. The only way for people to know about an edit is to see that comment changing. Sometimes you'll see allegations posted about surreptitious comment editing. It's just easier to always say you've edited.

<comment><USER5> I understand that, but was curious about typo edits in particular. A typo fix doesn't change the meaning of the comment in 99% of cases.

<comment><USER7> It's a habit. I sometimes do that too, without thinking much about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can barely read that low-contrast thin font, and I have average vision.

<comment><USER9> I agree, the thin font is annoying, I have no problems with vision. But for some reason it's also ridiculously big, I had to turn my browser's zoom to 67% because it was hard to read that big, Skeleton's defaults are much better. Interestingly Medium and a few other rare sites have the same problem, I think web devs have forgot that people might have 5:4 aspect ratios.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like there's some kind of weird font sizing happening for some devices. I'll expand the CBT device list and try to fix it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Skelton user here. Nice to see this effort but some issues. Your page margins are too thin on mobile and the typography is off. Line height to font size to rendered stroke width ratios are not correct.

</comment><comment><USER11> Skeleton lib fell away and was forked and revitalized as Barebones which is better, then Skeleton had the resurgance as it were, but still, may I suggest you replace Skeleton with it as it is superior [https://acahir.github.io/Barebones/](https://acahir.github.io/Barebones/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Good work! I like the concept of creating a new project based two formerly popular css projects that now seem to be abandoned.

A nice way to pay respect to the work done by previous contributors, and also giving the projects a chance at a second life. Could be a good way to drive interest again, and encourage further development!

</comment><comment><USER13> I used to use skeleton until CSS Grid support became widespread.

</comment><comment><USER14> Suggestion: tell me up front the minimized size and minimized + gzipped size. Otherwise looks pretty good, so the size decides whether it's lightweight enough for certain projects.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there other similar options, but are also mature, lean, well maintained and a good enough replacement for Bootstrap for most common components/layouts?

<comment><USER16> [https://semantic-ui.com](https://semantic-ui.com) would come to mind. There is also a well maintained react fork available.

Another one is [https://bulma.io](https://bulma.io) which is less blown up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Do you even need stuff like this when we have CSS Grid now?

</comment><comment><USER18> What were the issues with skeleton/milligram that you are looking to fix? I have never used either library, but have considered them both in the past.</comment>


How to recover from a start-up failure? - <AUTHOR>

I'd love some suggestions. I'm still having dificulties to let it go, but all the signs are there. <comment><USER2> I recently wrote up my own experience on how to recover from a startup failure.

<http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/riding-a-bike.html>

Hope it helps. If there is any other way I can help, please comment. Good luck.

\--Denny--

Denny K Miu

<comment><AUTHOR> Denny,

That was beautiful! Thank's a lot. Despite what's said everywhere, I think I'm too old to do anything else, so I'll give it another try (and another, and...:)

Rafael

<comment><USER2> Rafael:

Good luck. It helps to know that none of us is alone in our struggle.

\--Denny--

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I suggest that if it's at all possible, try to recycle or preserve the work you've already done so you might derive some value from it.

For example, if it's a web site/application/service, can you maintain it in a minimal and economical way, such as moving to shared hosting from more expensive options? In this case you may find that traffic grows as more users find the site, or you may come up with some new ideas after taking a break, etc. Perhaps you can scale back or put a new twist on your original concept.

At minimum it could be a portfolio site or demo app when seeking out client work to pay the bills.

Of course this all depends on the nature of the failure and your particular circumstances.

I haven't burned many bridges in life, but I do regret some I've allowed to rot and fall away.

</comment><comment><USER4> I agree with optimal's comment: Don't throw any files away for at least six months. Let your emotions cool down, there may be quite a bit that can be salvaged or recycled. Write up a personal list of lessons learned, so that you can translate your mental "if only" to "next time." Review the list every few months as you gain more perspective and revise it. Try and stay friendly with everyone involved, even if they are blaming you for the moment. With time and some perspective you may reach some different conclusions about what really happened (and what you will do differently next time). There is a quote by Eric Hoffer I find useful:

Our Achievements Speak For Themselves.

What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of failure and decay.

</comment><comment><USER5> learn from it...

but I can tell you when you do let it go and move on, you will feel a lot better about yourself, and the whole experience, you will realize how much you have learned. You should also realize that nothing is more valuable than your time, so the sooner you can let it go the more time you have wasted on it, and the less of a failure it will be.

Mark Cuban said it once, that you only have to be right in your life once and thats it, it is irrelevant how many times you have failed before it. I have taken this to heart and think of it everyday.

so get out there and try again (and again and again if needed..) you'll get it right one day, and thats all the assurance that you need</comment>


660 Semi-convincing marketing articles written by AI in 45min - <AUTHOR> http://thismarketingblogdoesnotexist.com/?p=4119 <comment><AUTHOR> Written with Grover model (transformer), from AllenAI (IMO, does way better with this type of content than anything I've seen from GPT-2)</comment>


How to parse text for a DSL at compile time? (C++) - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17783393/how-to-parse-text-for-a-dsl-at-compile-time <comment><USER2> It seems like doing this in C++ is overly complex. In language's like Nim where you can just executed ordinary code at compile-time it would be far simpler.

<comment><USER3> That's what the OP meant with "Yes. That's right." In C++ circles, this loosely translates to "Let's use this ridiculously unwieldy if not downright stupid mechanism to do something just because we can".

<comment><USER4> I know it is fashionable to bash on C++ lately but I dont fully understand the motivation behind it. Could you please elaborate what drove you to write a post expressing your derision about C++? Does the frustration come from trying to use the language in the past and running into its limitations?

<comment><USER5> I don't know about the original comment writer. But my frustration comes because of overly complex, while there would be simpler way to do that.

<comment><USER6> what would be the simpler way to translate any string in a given DSL in an expression at compile time in C++ ?

<comment><USER7> 'const char* transformSrc_MyExpr(const char* src);'

We're the compiler to invoke some function like that at compile time, it would be much more simple.

I'm not suggesting this exactally, or even something very similar, but serves as an example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In practice, what you would do is write a preprocessing/code-generating _tool_ that runs in the build environment, as part of the toolchain.

<comment> Const-me +1.

In Visual Studio, a good built-in mechanism for that is T4 text templates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> D has this use case solved in a really nice way. All you have to do is write a function that converts the DSL into D code and then do something like `mixin(my_dsl_converter('foobar'))`.

</comment><comment><USER10> This may not be quite what the original poster is looking for, but boost::spirit allows one to build DSLs directly in the code. The DSL is then used to parse constructs and execute the results.</comment>


A new insomnia therapy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/14/finally-a-cure-for-insomnia <comment><USER2> What exactly is new about this? CBT+sleep efficiency is pretty much the standard advice for insomnia (after having tried reducing blue light, regular schedule etc)

<comment><USER3> > What exactly is new about this?

My thoughts exactly. I've tried all the things in the article (inluding CBT) and they are ineffective for me. This is acknowledged in the article ("we're all different") but the overall tone is that of a "miracle cure" when it's just patiently and steadily applying well-known ways to improve sleep. This is good, but it's not revolutionary.

The only part of it which resonates for me is that the majority of doctors and other medical professionals are truly, utterly crap when it comes to insomnia. They don't think it's important and they don't care that it's a living hell - "after a couple of nights without sleep, you'll sleep through anything", as one doctor glibly told me. But I've been 100 hours without sleep and that's nowhere near a record compared to other insomniacs.

Anyway, let's not get too distracted by a flashy headline and the overall tone of the article. The very fact that a group of medical professionals is taking sleep seriously is significant in itself. I hope it starts a trend.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly like my experience. I've seen more than 10 doctors for my desperately aggressive insomnia. Neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists. Not only in US, even in some European country. They always acted like "yeah just perform sleep hygiene and you'll be gucci" "doctor, I do do that but I still can't sleep for days" "it's ok habits take time" Uhhh. To me it just seemes like being unable to sleep (at all) multiple days a week seems alarming enough medical issue that they'd try harder. One time I was prescribed Ambien. I used it for 3 days and it gave me some sort of psychotic episode, it was a terrifying experience I was locked in my own body. My doctors reactions was something like "do you even want to get better???" I hate insomnia.

<comment><USER3> The drugs are appalling. They have all sorts of weird side-effects but offer only marginal benefits in terms of sleep amount and quality. I have used Mirtazapine to good effect, however, so you might yet find something which does suit you. The only other thing which has worked is just learning to accept the suffering and not get too stressed out about it. Losing sleep is bad, but getting angry about it just pushes me over the edge, so I avoid getting angry.

<comment><USER4> > The only other thing which has worked is just learning to accept the > suffering and not get too stressed out about it.

This REALLY helps. Last ~8 months has been a paradise for me because my insomnia was so mild (I spent maybe a total of 2 or 3 completely sleepless nights and my previous average was 2 or 3 _a week_ ). The only difference is that I stopped giving a shit, if I'm sleepy and feel like shit, that's fine. It really does help.

<comment><USER5> It's my experience as well (though I'm starting to think my insomnia is very mild reading this thread). I find my insomnia tends to get worse the more I fight it. So I stay up later than I'd prefer, so that I'm more tired, and less likely to be awake in the middle of my sleep. I also will get up in the middle of the night if I can't sleep and just be awake for a few hours until I feel I can go back to sleep. But if I fight it at any step sleep seems to be harder to come by, regardless of how tired or lacking if sleep I am. I also can't use an alarm clock. If I do then the odds of sleep go way down, since now there's a race and if I don't fall asleep now, then 'I might not get enough sleep' or 'I might wake up in the wrong part of my cycle'. I've also neen experimenting with lighting. Blue lighting definitely wakes me up at night so I avoid them.

But I consider myself lucky. I've mostly engineered my life such that I don't need to function before 10am (I think I'm genetically predisposed to a late sleep cycle, so far it looks like 2/3 of my kids may as well). I can afford to not use alarm clocks most of the time. And, it's possible my insomnia is nowhere near as bad as others'...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As many others have noted, the title is inaccurate; cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is a well established treatment.

There are a few other minor inaccuracies in the article: chronic insomnia requires only 3 months of sleep disturbances, not 6. And the case for the dangerousness of insomnia is dramatically overstated.

But with that said, the reality of insomnia treatment in most countries is that doctors either 1) don't know about CBT for insomnia or 2) don't have a way to refer people to see a behavioral sleep specialist. I practice in Seattle, and there are only 4 clinics that have behavioral sleep specialists. In more rural areas, it's even more uncommon.

So in truth, for most patients and most doctors, this does feel like a brand new therapy.

Thankfully, "sleep efficiency" training (aka sleep restriction) is a simple algorithm that doesn't really require hand holding, and works reasonably well when practiced through a book or online program. Motivation tends to be better when you meet with a therapist, but the recovery rates are similar for highly motivated people.

Disclosure: I provide in person CBT for insomnia and run a pay-what-you-can CBT for insomnia web app at SlumberCamp.co.

<comment><USER7> Not in the U.K., it would seem. The article gives the impression that CBT for insomnia is relatively new there.

<comment><USER6> Good point. The science has been around since the 60's and 70's, but the evidence base has only become overwhelmingly positive over the last 20 years. And from a guidelines perspective, the European Sleep Research Society started recommending it as the first line treatment in 2017 ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28875581](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28875581)). I'm not as up to date on NICE and NHS guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's finally helped me fall asleep pretty consistently is listening to hypnosis videos with a pair of those sleep headphones (flat padded speakers embedded in a soft headband). I used to listen to podcasts, and it helped to have something other than my thoughts to focus on, but I'd still frequently be awake 3-4 hours after lying down. With the hypnosis tracks, I'm consistently out within an hour after lying down.

I'm particularly fond of this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFqEWrw6jyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFqEWrw6jyg)

Of course, my wife still falls asleep within 10 minutes (I'm so jealous of her ability to just roll over and be out), versus my 45-60, but it's a vast improvement to not be lying awake for hours every night.

</comment><comment><USER9> I know this isn't really the point of the article but I was having issues waking up for several hours during the night for the last couple of years.

About 5 months ago I started doing a 3-day a week weight training program which includes full body compound movements (squats, deadlifts, etc.) and now I sleep like a baby through the whole night every night.

I know that may not work for many people but it worked wonders for me.

As an added benefit I've lost a bit of body fat, feel better mentally and physically, and have been able to reduce my blood pressure medication dosage by 2/3.

<comment><USER10> Have you changed your diet?

<comment><USER9> A little bit. I've been trying to eat less processed sugar, but that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just fell asleep reading the article.

<comment><USER12> We simply misunderstood the headline; It's not an article about a new cure for insomnia, the article IS the new cure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are there any _high-quality_ studies supporting the efficacy of CBTI? Most of the ones I've seen are terrible.

</comment><comment><USER14> The article lost me in a sea of introductory fluff, and I never made it to the end.

As always, the best solution is good old fashioned discipline.

Get up at the exact same time every single damn day. No matter how late you stayed up. When you wake up, and it's 7am or whenever your alarm goes, get up. Don't close your eyes again.

The rest is about _pretty good diet_ and _reasonably regular exercise_.

And no, you don't need to give up coffee. Have it as strong as you like.

</comment><comment><USER15> The article is very long-winded.

TLDR: CBT and observing a few physical parameters that affect your sleep (temperature, light, sound), as well as getting the right amount of sleep (not too much, not too little) will sort out most people. For me strictly banning all screens from the bedroom has helped too (I have an alarm clock with no backlight so I can't even check the time).

I did exactly this sort of thing years ago via Sleepio[1], which I highly recommend. It is a guided CBT course that completely sorted my chronic insomnia, using pretty much all the methods described in TFA. It will take you less time to sign up than to actually read said long-winded article.

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

<comment><USER16> I cannot recommend Sleepio enough everytime someone mentions sleep trouble. The time-in-bed restriction regimen is in my opinion particularily helpful and I revert to it occasionally when I don't sleep well a few nights in a row with good results.

<comment><USER15> Totally agree with you. It seems so counterintuitive that when you're struggling to sleep you may need _less_ time in bed, but it really helps in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sleep can often be improved by doing a short (15 to 30 min) simple (you don't have to be limber or do difficult poses) viniyoga program that is set up by a properly trained instructor. A new client will need 3 or 4 meetings with the instructor over a couple of months. The practice/program is done at home either in the morning or at night.

</comment><comment><USER18> An Honest Question, why are sleep related articles able to gather so much traction here on HN?

<comment><USER19> Sleep is one of the three pillars of health. There are also many fitness and diet articles that gain traction.

As to why health is popular on HN, it's hard to be interested in the other stuff if you're dead! (I don't actually know why, I'm interested in these all personally, but nearly never upvote the articles myself)

<comment><USER20> Well, many developers probably aren't in the best health because the job requires sitting all day. Everyone wants to be healthy so there will be a natural demand for articles about it amongst developers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TLDR: limiting caffeine and other stimulants and "sleep efficiency training" is successful for 80% of patients.

The description of sleep efficiency training starts at the picture labelled "A patient at the sleep clinic". That section appears to contain highly actionable advice.

</comment><comment><USER22> I really can't stand how articles like this bury the actual information (in this case, basically just CBT) deep in anecdotes and other context that I don't care about. Is it just me, or has it gotten worse lately? Maybe in the Age of the Short Attention Span, journalists have to come up with other ways of making the reader stick around?

<comment><USER23> Is there a name for this writing style?

I remember writing essays in school padded with a lot of babble, just because there was a word limit. As an adult, anyone who writes like this is just wasting my time. It's low information density.

<comment><USER24> its long form journalism

excerpt from wikipedia

> Typically this will be between 1,000 and 20,000 words. Long-form articles > often take the form of creative nonfiction or narrative journalism.

<comment><USER25> Long form journalism conveys an equally large amount of information as length. Articles like this just add fluff - anecdotes and tangential subjects that don't add meaningful contextual value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's one instance of f-word in this article. Would it have been so hard to replace that one word with something kid-friendly?

Seems like a very sneaky way of putting language like that in readers' minds.</comment>


We're planning to launch a business current account - <AUTHOR> https://monzo.com/blog/2018/11/22/business-banking/ <comment><USER3> Nice to see a cautious approach, as opposed to some of their competitors who are launching new services with little or no preparation.

I wonder though, if an app based service can ever really challenge a traditional bank when it comes to business?

Personally, I like Monzo but only use it for everyday transactions - <USER2> anything other than this I stick with the same Barclays account I've held for 15 years or so. I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is fairly typical behaviour?</comment>


ICO – Howeycoins - <AUTHOR> https://www.investor.gov/howeycoins <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17085232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17085232)

When I first saw this site, it walked an eerie sort of line. Using cryptocurrency to track travel rewards isn't the craziest cryptocurrency idea I've heard, and yet, it was at the same time satire. Clicked the big red button just to see if it was, and was not disappointed.</comment>


When should you use DateTime and when should you use Time? - aps-sids https://gist.github.com/pixeltrix/e2298822dd89d854444b <comment><AUTHOR> Two obligatory links on what a strange thing "time" is:

[1]: [http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods- programm...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time)

[2]: [http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods- pro...](http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-time)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is superbly well explained with a great example but it doesn't quite explain why I wouldn't just use DateTime for everything? Or did I miss something?

<comment><USER3> TL;DR, use Time _except_ when you need to deal with historical dates in their context.

This was actually explained in the last paragraph of that post. Emphasis mine.

> So when should use you use DateTime in Ruby and when should you use Time? > Almost certainly you'll want to _use Time since your app is probably dealing > with current dates_ and times. However, _if you need to deal with dates and > times in a historical context you 'll want to use DateTime_[...]

<comment><USER4> That's not an explanation, it's a recommendation. The author does not state _why_ Time should be preferred over DateTime.

<comment><USER5> They do, which is because Time supports timezones, etc.

<comment><USER6> The gist was updated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _We can see the actual date of Shakespeare 's death by using..._

The use of "actual" seems dubious in this context. The whole point of this gist is that time interpretation is relative. I like how the author makes the distinction with "solar years" later on.</comment>


The Arc challenge in Go - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/hoisie/web.go/blob/master/examples/arcchallenge.go <comment><USER2> Won't this return the last input entered by any user, regardless of who clicks? The spirit of the arc challenge is to output what you typed, not what anyone types.

<comment><USER3> Good catch. I guess when this is true until they implement session management. Anyways I was surprised by the cleanness of this code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So basically this doesn't meet the challenge requirements, the code looks ugly, and yet this is one of the most upvoted stories on HN today?

Would anyone have cared if this was done in VB? I realize Google has done lots of cool and impressive stuff, but Google-fandom should only be able to go that far, and this is way beyond.

<comment><USER5> I found this interesting because it isn't just a Challenge entry, it's the introduction of a new Go framework: web.go.

<http://github.com/hoisie/web.go>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I looked at your couchdb client. Why are you claiming Go can not make "generic" http requests?

There is already http.Get and http.Post. So why are you exposing http.send (which obviously is intended to be package private)?

<comment><AUTHOR> The http package can't send delete, head, or put requests. Couchdb uses all of these methods, not just post and get.

I filed an issue a few weeks ago for this: <http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=155>

<comment><USER6> Didn't consider that. (But wouldn't it make more sense to copy the code instead of requiring user change to the package?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I agree it isn't the most elegant way to do it, but the alternative is to keep a copy of go's http package in the gocouch repo, which isn't too elegant either.

My guess is that within a couple months Go will have a new http client that's fully-featured (keep-alive requests, authentication, and support for generic requests). Until then, if people have a burning need to use gocouch, they'll have to add that small method to the http package. Plus, people are used to compiling the go source code because it's the only way to install it (no binary packages yet)

<comment><USER6> Its not really an issue of elegance. Either way is not pleasing, but given that your code is the only consumer of the exposed http.Send, my recommendation is that you isolate your end users from the Go.http's evolution by including the (dup) code in your source and removing it when the update release fixes the issue. Transition would be transparent to your end users.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Seven Minute Abs - A/B testing in 7 minutes (rails) - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/paulmars/seven_minute_abs/tree/master

<comment><USER2> ... and here I thought a health related topic got to #2 on Hacker News based on the merit of maintaning a healthy lifestyle in addition to being a successful worker.

FWIW, if anyone has yet to discover the joy of swimming (and the potential impact it will have on your abs), I recommend you try it.

<comment><USER3> I will exercise the day I can check my body into a version control system. Until that day exercise is a waste of time since you must do it over and over again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We do image A/B testing in less than 5, with just javascript:

[http://blog.mixpanel.com/2009/03/introducing-display- optimiz...](http://blog.mixpanel.com/2009/03/introducing-display-optimizer- image-split-testing-in-less-than-5-minutes/)

If you do use their a/b testing framework, you should consider logging data to mixpanel.com just because we do all the pretty graphs for you too =)

</comment><comment><USER5> My plugin lets you split test at the action level so that you can create separate actions with separate variables, filters, etc: [http://github.com/flyingmachine/rails_ab_split_tester/tree/m...](http://github.com/flyingmachine/rails_ab_split_tester/tree/master)

I only made it so that it would work with Google Analytics but it wouldn't be that difficult to modify it to work with whatever you want.

</comment><comment><USER6> No weighting? I guess I should fork it.

<comment><AUTHOR> plz do, that is exactly the kinda of community i'm looking to create with a simple example

<comment><USER4> hmmm I wonder if we could hook in our platform mixpanel.com into your framework so there's a more robust solution to viewing the stats afterwords...

our ruby support is a bit weak.

<comment><AUTHOR> dm me on github and i'll send you my email if you have any questions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Internet is under attack. This is the Battle for the Net [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsyzP5hejxI <comment><AUTHOR> This needs to be pinned on the top on this site till we have won this battle!</comment>


Version control, collaborative editing and undo - <AUTHOR> http://incidentalcomplexity.com/2015/04/22/version-control/ <comment><USER2>
      Recording changes as they happen is easier than
      inferring them after the fact

That's all very well if you're trying to develop something like Google Docs, where you can define change semantics the merge process understands, then constrain the editors to only allow changes that follow those semantics.

But the moment a user wants to take the code out of your editor to process it with some other tool - perhaps they want to sort that text file, or minify that javascript, or just edit in emacs because they like the keybindings - you're back to inferring the changes after the fact.

You'd have to build a lot of tools if you want to stop your users ever wanting to use a tool outside your editor :)

<comment><USER3> It seems to me that the Eve folks have already decided to make that tradeoff though: a richer environment that is necessarily walled off at least a bit from the traditional "it's all text" approaches.

Smalltalk didn't take over the world with that approach, but it's certainly interesting to explore.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what makes it interesting to explore; it is hard to imagine a more reliable way to doom a programming tool to failure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Collaborative live programming is a pretty bad idea in the first place. There is one thing that's very important that you're missing in your analysis of "the past". All DVCS system allow the programmer to group a set of changes by commits, which constitute a consistent block of changes.

Remove that ability by constantly recording changes, and you can no longer control your code: no code review, no feature merging. Everything just becomes a giant mess. A mess that's auditable, but a mess nontheless

</comment><comment><USER5> Shout out to "Out of the tarpit" [1] that's referenced in the "functional- relational" link in the article. This is a great paper that's well worth 20 minutes of your time to read!

[1] [http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf](http://shaffner.us/cs/papers/tarpit.pdf)

<comment><USER6> You can read that in just 20 minutes?

<comment><USER5> Maybe 25...

Actually I read it a while ago - it must have resonated because I remember it being shorter :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The standard solution to any hard problem [which is] is to find someone who > solved it already and steal their answer.

Reminds me a little of the Feynman algorithm. 1) Write your question into google. 2) Open the first three results. 3) Copy what you find.

Does it already have a name?

<comment><USER8> "Stacksort" is probably the right thing to bring up here. A sorting algorithm that searches SO and copies code from there until the list is sorted.

Origin: [https://xkcd.com/1185/](https://xkcd.com/1185/)

Implementation: [http://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/](http://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/)

<comment><USER7> Very nice! I already forgot that one!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An alternative to OT is Differential Synchronization. You can find out more here:

[https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/](https://neil.fraser.name/writing/sync/)

I wrote this to help me understand the algorithm:

[http://dougmart.in/dssimulation/](http://dougmart.in/dssimulation/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I liked the fact that the Eve guys are thinking about how git and darcs work differently and how it affects the version history in the case of collaborative editing.

</comment><comment> grey-area What are these guys building?

<comment><USER11> At first i wondered if the authors even know what they're making.. then in the first blog post i found a mention of Light Table. It was the concept IDE with a live preview or visualization about what parts of code output.

It appears the Eve the language evolved from that, and still is. And it seems this DVCS (what this article is about) is meant to compliment Eve.

It made me ask the question "but what is wrong with Git? What IS the problem Yet-Another is solving?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> In the Qbix Platform ([http://platform.qbix.com](http://platform.qbix.com)) the default type of data is a Stream. A Stream is published by a User and one or more Users can be Invited and Participate. Streams are supposed be of different "types" and support posting Messages of different types. The multicasting of messages to participants who are online via sockets is handled by the pltform. Participants who are offline can maintain Subcriptions and receive offline Notifications to their native app on a device (iOS, Android, Mac) or email or sms or facebook. In addition there is Access control which specifies access to the Public as well as individual users and by Labels (like roles, but labels on contacts of the publishng User). Users can be either people or organizations.

The whole thing is supposed to "just work" and, at version 0.8, it pretty much does, stably. But we still have a lot to do.

The reason we chose this is because it supports everything from updating your status / location / whatever to chatrooms and collaborative documents. A chess game is just a stream of type "Chess/game" which supports messages like "Chess/move" and "Chess/resign".

All the developer has to do is implement their stream type, or "tools" (components) to interact with the stream or "preview" it in listings. We provide typical tools such as "Streams/related" which automatically handles showing streams related to some given stream, and can update in realtime, allow creation of more streams, etc. The developer would jst handle incoming messages and process their effects. Also sometimes a stream might Refresh because the user, say, came back to a mobile app after it was suspended in the background. In this case the stream player or preview gets the latest state instead of "replaying" what would potentially be 100s of messages. And the whole page doesnt need to be reloaded. It all works already.

Now we are working on Offline streams. For example, a stream that has been created offline isn't shared with anyone so no one else can write to it. This means we ca handle all the persistence on the client and sync it later, when the client connects.

We do not attempt to solve issues via "heuristic" diff based sync algorithms. Instead, the source of truth is the Publishing User's server and it is also the source of chronological order of the messages. The developer never has to worry about messages arriving out of order, or something else, just use the JS API. In addition, we handle the CAP theorem by requiring consistency only per stream. If one message contains (hashed) info from another message on some other strean, we know it was posted later (like bitcoin).

In the end we plan to make this platform completely distributed and power social layer for the web like wordpress powers blogs.

So that's how wedo it!

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anybody know of a good Javascript implementation for a three-way merge of JSON objects (including merging of the strings)?</comment>