Companies that ask, "What do you want to do?" - <AUTHOR>

The question comes in the form of, "What are you looking for?" or "What do you want to do here, ideally?"
I find this question incredibly difficult to answer when interviewing with startups for engineering positions. It seems incredibly rhetorical. Obviously if I could do whatever I want I wouldn't be applying for jobs in the first place!
It seems like a trick question. Am I really supposed to say, "I'm looking to get paid to program. That's why I applied here and am being interviewed now." <comment><USER2> I hire people. I ask this question because I sincerely want to know if there is a good fit. If you are honest and I am honest then we start off a little better with a higher probability of having a good working relationship.

I also ask this because I want to know if you are a curious, growing, learning organism. We want those. We don't want 9 to 5 people. Tell the truth. Why start off lying?

The truth will come out soon enough. Why hang out for a few weeks and get bounced because of a wrong fit? It's bad for everyone.

But then that's our shop. We do it our way. In Dilbertville it is probably different. But you get to choose your life, so why not do it right?

EDIT: if you answered me "I like programming. You're hiring programmers" and you showed me you really did like it, that would be a winning answer in my book. I hire tax professionals. Someone who says they really really like the hard core "work out the numbers" paperwork would be exactly what I want. Or someone who loves to figure out seemingly intractable problems.

So I think your throwaway answer is probably the best one. Say it with a laugh and then follow up with something that shows you REALLY like programming. Winner.

<comment><USER3> What if I am a _curious, growing, learning organism_ who wants to just work 9 to 5. Sorry, but I think the people who ask such questions are either lazy who cannot come up with actual questions or are not experienced enough to know a good candidate from a bad one. If you are looking for a specific trait then I feel that you should look around in the people you already know who have that trait first. And then check if the people you are interviewing are similar to the ones you admire. Questions like these and where do you see yourself in 2 years don't really bring out anything in the candidate if you are looking for anybody other than sales guys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This question is about fit. I've interviewed places where this kind of question led to discussion that resulted in both sides realizing it wasn't a good fit. That's useful to know. The company doesn't want to hire you if you won't stick around and you'll just end up unhappy and looking for work again quickly.

Here are some things to consider when answering this question:

\- What areas of programming do you like? Do you want to work on databases, low level coding, front end web dev stuff, etc.

\- Do you like starting things from scratch or would you rather work on adding features to an established code base?

\- What type of scheduling do you like? Are you okay with tasks changing rapidly or do you prefer your work schedule to be more planned in advance?

\- What size of team do you like to work with? How do you prefer to interact with your other team members?

\- Are you hoping to learn from more senior devs? Do you want to move up to take on more responsibility (senior or lead positions)?

</comment><comment><USER5> Sure you're being paid to program, but do you want to create something from scratch? Do maintenance work? Build internal tools? There must be something interesting you can say. Imagine you're on a first date and you get asked "where do you see this night ending?" You shouldn't say "my place" even though that's what you want. You should say something more charming.

EDIT: If you are interviewing for a startup, a good answer is that you are excited to be a part of something from the very beginning, and being able to shape it as it grows. If it is an established company you can say you are excited to see how an established player has dealt with the challenges of serving a large customer base, etc.</comment>


Ask HN:150+ hits,25 download of beta in 1 day but what's next? - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
I have posted about my first android app "Dawg", social news updater. Though my post not appeared in ASK HN category, still got decent response. I am trying my hard to reach masses and collect feedback  but don't know best way to for it? I haven't thought of business plan and how m gonna make money just followed my heart and executed idea into reality. I still need review to take it to next level. Check my post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2109084 and guide me what i need to do for pre-launch buzz. <comment><AUTHOR> My earlier post <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2109084> Link to beta : www.zubhalabs.com</comment>


Why entrepreneurs should create $1,000 startups - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2013/10/15/why-entrepreneurs-should-create-a-1000-startups/

<comment><AUTHOR> The fact that it's considered contrarian to advise people to start with building a profitable and sustainable business model is a sad testament to the "startup culture" that emphasizes hype over substance.</comment>


3 Asian Major Social Networks form partnership - <AUTHOR> http://asiajin.com/blog/2010/09/10/mixi-partners-with-renren-and-cyworld-3-asian-major-social-networks-cooperate/

<comment><USER2> A sensible move. I know that Cyworld is big in Korea (well... it was), don't know much about the other two. But strength in numbers to fight off the Facebook threat makes sense.</comment>


AMD has published the full code of the HSA Runtime library - <AUTHOR> http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1411.1/04487.html

<comment><USER2> "Heterogeneous System Architecture Runtime", if you were wondering like I was.

<comment><USER3> To add to that, it's an alternative to OpenCL as I understood it.

 _"...HSA Foundation seeks to create applications that seamlessly blend scalar processing on the CPU, parallel processing on the GPU, and optimized processing on the DSP via high bandwidth shared memory access enabling greater application performance at low power consumption. The HSA Foundation is defining key interfaces for parallel computation utilizing CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and other programmable and fixed-function devices, thus supporting a diverse set of high-level programming languages and creating the next generation in general-purpose computing."_

<comment><USER4> > it's an alternative to OpenCL

It's also complementary in that the goal of the hardware part is to offer zero-copy and unified memory between CPU and GPU (unified virtual memory and pointer-passing for dedicated GPU, unified main memory for IGP/APU), which I expect would be useful to OpenCL.

<comment><USER5> Does "unified virtual memory and pointer-passing for dedicated GPU" suggest some kind of cooperative paging between the CPU and GPU? But it's not as if the GPU could just fault in pages that it needs on demand, right?

<comment><USER4> > But it's not as if the GPU could just fault in pages that it needs on > demand, right?

That seems to be the idea, actually. And Carmack has been advocating exactly that: [http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/misc/gpuDataPaging.htm](http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/misc/gpuDataPaging.htm)

And CUDA6 already does that: [http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/unified-memory- in-...](http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/unified-memory-in-cuda-6/) (though there are limitations, see Mark Harris's comments and [http://users.ices.utexas.edu/~sreepai/automem/](http://users.ices.utexas.edu/~sreepai/automem/) notes it generates redundant transfers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great news! This is going to help java be gpu accelerated! Using Graal/Sumatra to speed up java8 stream based computations.</comment>


Data analytics from Prime day 2017, Product Ideas compiled - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RhX-1AZ7FVJf9jBc4GEfMg0lIXXDN77mGdf5zjljp64/edit#gid=674087206 <comment><USER2> Quite interesting data, tool used seems to be very advanced in terms of data collection and analysis....

</comment><comment><USER3> Good stuff! Interesting way to look at data basis Amazon Prime Day sales

</comment><comment><USER4> Really helpful data, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER5> what if everyone start selling the same product!! great list</comment>


Does the EU's Article13 law give way to global mass surveillance? - <AUTHOR> Considering Article13 requires that companies filter out copyrighted material, and that companies like google, twitter, and facebook among the largest in the world must abide by these laws, the only possible feasible method of enforcing these rules is by scanning and filtering every single piece of digital information. Does this not then give way to a global mass surveillance system? <comment><USER2> If you're already posting it publicly then what do you care if an algorithm reads it too?

Does article 13 apply to private messages?</comment>


1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ... = -1/12 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XTVZXww <comment><USER2> Oy mate! Don't you have a pint of cider to drink in a cozy pub somewhere instead of producing videos of such bollocks?

The series $\sum_{n=1}^\infty n$ is divergent, so you can't say anything about its sum. For more info on the 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 +1 ... see: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Grandi's_series](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Grandi's_series) This quote from the page is telling:

       G. H. Hardy dismisses both of these as "little more than nonsense."

<comment><USER3> It is not totally nonsense but the use of the benign sign = associating the analytic continuation of a series where it converges to a place where it does not without huge warning is not very rigorous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Properties of numbers change at infinity. It is not conceivable to me, we can use normal arithmetic operations on quantities tending to infinity. For example, consider this...

       9999999999........... infinity
      -9999999999........... infinity
       </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
       00000000000............ infinity
       </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Now, subtracting infinite numbers from infinite numbers should give a infinite result. All we have is infinite zeros here, which cannot be inifinity.

<comment><USER5> You cannot understand "infinite numbers" without understanding how equality is defined (bijection).

<comment><USER4> Ok.. My post was a bait :).. Please tell me more or can you suggest me some books i can read?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for links/tutorials on implementing responsive css design - <AUTHOR>

If anyone has some good links to share on the topic of responsive design. I need to redo my sites css so it looks right on mobile devices as well as the web. Any link/tutorial is appreciated. <comment><USER2> Have you looked at the Twitter Bootstrap yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> If I see one more bootstrap site I'm gonna throw up!</comment></comment>


Baidu Unveils New Research Results from SVAIL - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/baidu-unveils-new-research-results-from-svail/ <comment><USER2> Related discussion (on Baidu's Deep Speech 2 results) from 2 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10707538](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10707538)</comment>


When a Country Bans Social Media - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/sri-lanka-social-media-ban-tk/587728/ <comment><USER2> A good start with Sri Lanka...now how to get the other clueless countries in on this.</comment>


Fully referenced facts about Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ <comment><USER2> For those unfamiliar with the source, it is not an unbiased or reliable one[1].

Generally speaking, one should be wary of any article (even a purported review) without a name attached to it.

1\. [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/swiss-policy- research/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/swiss-policy-research/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "German virologist Hendrik Streeck explains the final results of his pioneering antibody study. Professor Streeck found a Covid19 lethality of 0.36%, but explains that this is an upper limit and the lethality is probably in the range of 0.24 to 0.26% or even below. The average age of test-positive deceased was approximately 81 years. Professor Streeck argues that "waiting for a vaccine" is not a good strategy because both the feasibility and effectiveness of a vaccine are uncertain. Biology professor and Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt, who has been analyzing the spread of Covid19 since February, describes the general lockdown as a "huge mistake" and calls for more targeted measures, especially to protect risk groups"

<comment><USER3> The IFR rate cited here is in agreement with the latest CDC information as well.

[https://in.dental-tribune.com/news/new-estimate-by-the- cdc-b...](https://in.dental-tribune.com/news/new-estimate-by-the-cdc-brings- down-the-covid-19-death-rate-to-just-0-26-as-against-whos-3-4/)

And here if you want to see the CDC details.

[https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning- scena...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning- scenarios.html)

While I can understand some of these experts indicating that the lockdown was a mistake I think it ignores a larger world wide cultural issue that has come about. People have become increasingly risk adverse and expect experts to protect them. Let's not forget in Italy scientist were convicted of manslaughter for not knowing if there was going to be a earthquake and not trying to cause a panic based on their uncertainty.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_L%27Aquila_earthquake)

The current cultural climate is to always err towards the most extreme risk adverse action it seems.</comment></comment>


Tenth Grade Tech Trends - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/product-design/d8d4f2300cf3 <comment><USER3> I'm not sure this has as much to do with her age as her gender (although I'm sure the former does play some kind of a role). My sister uses snapchat, instagram, and facetime all the time in the same ways as you described your sister does, and she's graduated from college. She uses it predominantly to communicate with her other female friends.

I also know several girls my age (25/26) who use these services in the same way. It tends to be mostly the "social butterfly" type of girls. It's funny because these are the same girls who would flood their facebook walls with pictures throughout the day, and now they rarely if ever make a post. I could be wrong, but I don't see any guys using the services in the same way.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm in 11th and I read Hacker News on a daily basis, so I'm a bit outside the general population when it comes to issues like this. With that said, her thoughts on Facebook are echoed by everyone who I've talked to. Many are sick of it, and fewer each day check it regularly.

If I need to contact someone, even someone with Facebook on their smartphone, it takes hours to get a reply. If I use SMS I'm acknowledged near instantly.

<comment><USER5> I feel like Facebook has become the boring Uncle of our digital lives. Nobody really likes it, except for those blissfully ignorant people who haven't realised how dumb they look posting all the time, but we can't get rid of it. I agree that texting is usually faster than Facebook messaging (though because I use WP7 the line is pretty well blurred between the two for me) but you tend to be Facebook friends with more people than you have phone numbers for and/or text regularly. Maybe this is a little different for you because you are still in school, but as a young adult Facebook is the quick, reliable place where everyone I know is stored.

I read a description of the computer desktop as the place which you can always find on your computer, and so the place where unconfident computer users end up storing all of their files. I think Facebook is the equivalent of the desktop for social contacts on the web. Which I think will give it a lot of resilience to unpopularity, so even if no one loves it, it'll probably stick around.

<comment><USER4> I use Facebook as the "universal directory" if I don't have contact details for someone, which is the infuriating part. If I need to contact someone I don't have a phone number or some IM contact for, I go to Facebook and look there.

A great analogy would be phone books. I've not found a person who actually likes getting or using them, but they were the best place to find someone's phone number if all you had was a name and a bit of an address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think he missed the point about FaceTime. Not /that/ many 10th graders have iPhones. 110.00 a month is too much, so the push the limits of their iPods.

We don't need a new app so kids can do video chat, there's Skype and others for that. They like the ease if use. The problem is to tack in another data plan restriction removal to open FaceTime with AT&T and possibly others is the barrier.

I have a 4gs and can't use FaceTime over the cellular network without paying AT&T more money or losing my unlimited plan. So I don't use it.

All this comes down to the same conclusion the author had. There's a huge market in the term category. They have deep pockets by proxy of their patents. But parents won't drop that much more for FaceTime. Want to tap that market AT&T, Verizon, etc? Allows FaceTime on your network. And Apple, open iMessage and FaceTime so that it can be coded on Sndroid and everything else. Apple gets brand recognition ala "FireWire" and we get a service we want that there no reason to pay more for.

29.00 a month for unlimited texts. Insane. 90% of my friends have iPhones. But messages from my bank, pharmacy,etc go through a non iMessage service. Apple needs to open up the protocol and allow an API gateway so regular SMS messages can get through. Then we can all dump the unlimited text plans or the 30 cents ala carte text plans.

<comment><USER7> You don't need an iPhone to use Facetime.

I have a 6 and 8 yr old and both received iPad minis for Christmas and they have already FaceTimed with their friends and cousins via their new devices.

And we are now spending a lot of time educating our children how to properly utilize technology to communicate with their friends. That includes a number of very firm rules and regulations.

<comment><USER8> Do the rules/regs end up being fodder for creativity on how to break said rules/regs? I would imagine that is one of the problems with having smart and clever kids.

<comment><USER7> Not if you are an active and involved parent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady I don't think the Facebook issue has anything to do with their brand. I think the attitude that Facebook is addicting actually has more to do with people becoming bored with the service and noticing how much time they actually spend on it.

Edit:

>> "... my friends and I used Myspace in middle school, and we too abandoned it (for Facebook) once we reached high school"

The conclusion drawn here might be incorrect. I'm not sure of the age of the author but could it be that he reached high school at the time when Myspace had fallen out of favour with most people and everyone was beginning to transition to Facebook?

It's an interesting post, particularly the part about Snapchat. His sister's use of it seems to fit with the way Facebook was advertising Poke (I thought they just had to find another angle besides sexting but it sounds like there are other uses for it). After hearing this description it sounds like something I might use. A lot of the photos I share on Twitter/Instagram and things I find interesting or funny but I never need to see again. I usually have to then go and delete them from my camera roll and occasionally I go back through my Instagram feed and delete them. The idea of Snapchat (expiring images) seems to be what I need.

<comment><USER9> > I think the attitude that Facebook is addicting actually has more to do with > people becoming bored with the service and noticing how much time they > actually spend on it.

This is still something Facebook should solve. Facebook, despite its public groups and pages, still fosters incredibly insular communities, and those can get tedious very quickly. The reason Tumblr and Twitter have any popularity is that they encourage finding and following new, interesting people. They have a lot more novel content and it's easy to explore and find more of it. If Facebook gets seen as the boring, traditional social network (which to some degree it has), then that seriously damages its credibility.

<comment><USER10> > The reason Tumblr and Twitter have any popularity is that they encourage > finding and following new, interesting people.

Yes yes yes. There's a huge unsolved problem in the social networking space: meeting new people near you (for purposes other than dating or sex, but that too)

That'll be the next truly big thing, I think. It might focus on places or events, like connecting people who are going to a concert or a bar. That's sort of what I hoped FourSquare would be, but it's even more insular and boring.

<comment><USER11> Facebook used to solve this (at least for college students) with class listings. That was a really killer feature for a large part of their user base that got axed when they launched the app platform and expected an app to take its place. Problem is, of course, 50 apps took its place and none of them won.

<comment><USER12> What were class listings?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "she swore all of her friends would use if one of my "entrepreneur friends" built it: a FaceTime-esque app that's free."

I don't get it - aren't there a ton of video chat apps? Not only the big ones (google, skype), but lots of startups as well - oovoo, etc?

<comment><USER14> Must be the data consumption part. AT&T starter package is 300 MB a month.

<comment><USER15> Yep. The answer might be in someone who figures out how to optimize video chat for efficiency.

<comment><USER16> If the quality is too low, though, the benefits to communication from seeing your partner's facial features synchronized with their voice disappear, and people won't bother using it.

If software identified the user's face in live video and transmitted just that at high resolution, discarding or compressing the rest, how much efficiency could be gained?

<comment><USER15> Actually an interesting idea - in this context Facebook's purchase of Face.com might seem prescient.

Separately - as data gets cheaper and video chat is further optimized, video chat over 3G/4G becomes more feasible. Probably our answer to this is in the countries that have abundant bandwidth? What do high schoolers in Korea/Scandinavia use for video chat?

<comment><USER17> My girlfriend is Korean and she uses Skype for video chat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand the FaceTime is too expensive comment. Before iOS 6 it was completely free, and now it's only not free in terms of celluar data usage when not on WiFi. When you switch a phone call over to FaceTime, it stops taking minutes away.

The real drawback to FaceTime is that it's iOS/MacOS only.

</comment><comment><USER19> I was baffled by the "Facetime is expensive" comment. I'm in the UK. Are data plans that limited and WiFi that uncommon? How much data does Facetime use?

The Facetime/iMessage slant is interesting. Do any of her peers have Android phones? Do platform choices follow class/ethnicity/age/region patterns to the extent where it's not even on her radar?

<comment><USER20> You are right to be baffled. We in the US are also baffled.

The US has a horrible wireless data market. It's not like the UK or Europe in general. The companies here have a strong enough legal lobbies to keep their monopolistic control over data. We're behind in terms of the amount of bandwidth we can access and how much it costs. These companies typically make over 50% margin on profits while at the same time complain that they do not have the resources to expand bandwidth, or that the US is too geographically spread out.

Almost all the "unlimited" plans in the US actually has a limit. Typically, after a certain amount of usage, the bitrate gets capped. There are a good bit of wifi, but I suppose that then depends on if you want to find a coffee shop just to chat on FaceTime.

I'm assuming the article was written by an author living in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't understand why FaceTime is viewed as expensive. Isn't it free? I guess you pay for data, but 95% of the time I'm on wifi (home, office), and I'd assume schools, wherever kids spend time (coffee shops?), etc. have wifi too.

<comment><USER22> High schools generally don't have much in the way of WiFi coverage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm also a 15 years old teenager living in Argentina, but here things are somewhat different.

First, no one has a "real" smartphone, most are cheap Nokia phones with some applications for Facebook: People who have money usually buy BlackBerries, I have a Samsung Galaxy Ace (Being an Android fan) that I bought in Spain: but truth is smartphones are really expensive.

Facebook... everything is about Facebook here: Teenagers don't use any other IM service besides Facebook Messenger, they even use it in their phones. I find it extremely painful to communicate because I need to keep a Facebook window tab opened if I want to chat with someone (Well, I use Pidgin now).

I don't even go into Facebook, the Facebook feed looks like browsing /r/funny New in Reddit, people don't post original content: Just memes copied from the internet and cristian stuff.

People tend to have a lot of friends in Facebook: I think I don't have more than 50 friends: Those who I really would like to talk with me and have access to my pictures.

What people __really __use here is ask.fm , I'm not sure if people in other countries use it: but the basic idea is that you create an account and people (Logged, or as Anonymous) post you questions and you answer: Then it gets posted in your Facebook.

I don't understand why would anyone want to use that service: The questions are dumb and nosense. Other questions are personal, and some people still answer that. Nowadays most of my Facebook feed is 75% ask.fm links, it's really annoying.

Other services? Some people use Twitter, but not really; mostly teenagers following One Direction and Justin Bieber.

Blogging? Nah, no one reads blogs: they don't like reading anything larger than a couple lines of text (I think this: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we- ma...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/) can be relevant).

Youtube... they like dumb vlogs and some people like gameplays, I find this kind of videos very annoying and dumb.

Oh, not even mention Mail: most of people can't remember their passwords, for me, Mail is vital. Tumblr? No one knows what that is. Ah, no one uses Instagram either, and I'm glad...

So resuming: Teenagers only use the internet for Facebook, and, sometimes, reading the Wikipedia (When they have to do something for school) and that's __really __bad: They have a wonderful tool that they don't want to use, although the language (Most of teenagers don't have a good level of English, or at least they refuse to read English) can be an impediment.

For me the internet is amazing: you can learn whatever you want, for free, thanks to tools like Khan Academy, Coursera and Udacity: But people refuse to, and the language is not the only issue. I think we should focus our knowledge into motivating the Teenagers to get interested into this, instead of developing more applications like Poke or a Facetime killer.

<comment><USER24> The person who figures out how to get teens to spend their free time learning instead of socializing is going to go down in history. The answer likely lies somewhere in the socializing, but I have no idea what it is.

And way to take advantage of the myriad of educational opportunities that exist online. I would have done anything for access to them when I was a kid; instead, I had to go to the ( _gasp_ ) library.

I think we are going to see a growing intellectual gulf between the few that take advantage of these tools and the masses who don't. There are so many opportunities that can really give somebody a significant boost; a much greater boost than was offered to those of us who didn't have much more than books in the past. And I'm always encouraged when I see the kids who do take advantage of it.

<comment><USER25> I think learning is inherently social.

Part of the problem is the mindset that creates a false dichotomy between "learning" and "socializing." One consequence of this mindset is the idea or impression that "learning" involves locking oneself in a room, opening a book, and sticking with it until one learns the material.

An example in language acquisition: [http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius...](http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.html)

<comment><USER5> Language acquisition is not a good example to use here. Our minds are primed with pre-built language circuitry and as children we pick up the specifics of our environmental language effortlessly.

The learning we do throughout our post-infancy lives bears no resemblance to language learning. It is done using that effortlessly-acquired language structure, but in itself it takes hard work and effort. Unlike language, it goes "against the grain" of our evolved instincts. It can indeed be catalysed through judicious social interaction - comparing results, swapping tips, etc. - but the core of adult learning is focused, isolated study. Social environments for learning are a supplement, useful in moderation, but usually destructive and much more likely to result in groupthink, lowest-common- denominator mediocrity, and poor efficiencies in failing to optimise for the wide range of needs and aptitudes distributed among individuals when used in excess.

<comment><USER25> For sure. Do you have any research I can read?

There's tons of ink spilled about child development and learning, but precious little about adult learning.

I help run Dev Bootcamp so knowing as much about this as I can is really important to me. :)

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I can see how reading my comment would give the impression that I speak from great authority, but I was mostly just voicing my own preferences and prejudices about learning. I took a look at the introductory video for your service and it seems like a very professional, carefully-structured course - <USER2> do think learning in groups can work well if there is a clear, thoughfully- conceived structure for interaction. And it must surely help that you select for motivated, intelligent people - motivation is the key to real learning at any stage in life, I'd say.

I have had some experience with attempts to get groups of people to create or work together in groups with little to no structure and it never works. But I have not had much experience with the sort of structured social learning you offer (I think architect schools do a lot of this sort of structured, group creation-cum-learning - might be worth checking out.)

I do think that locking yourself in a room with a book and focussing is important, at least to build the platform of understanding from which you can move to group interactions. That's certainly my preference for the things I teach myself, and I think it is crucial for building basic understanding and confidence with the ideas. Of course there are chokepoints, especially with something like coding where at some point you need to actually start creating, where measured, structured guidance must be immensely helpful. But I think you need a rhythm - independent learning, then taking the problems and confusions you've built up into a social setting, then independent work again - I think real, 100% focus on a problem is a solitary activity. But perhaps from your own experience with DBC you can offer me some counter-examples?

<comment><USER26> "I do think that locking yourself in a room with a book and focussing is important, at least to build the platform of understanding from which you can move to group interactions."

Studying learning is inherently difficult because it requires intelligent people to try and figure out how they got that way. The tendency is to extend personal learning styles upon the population!

In this case, I bet that you learn the best from sitting down and reading a book. I'd double down and suggest that you take incredible notes and that your favourite books are thick with notes and underlined passages.

If I'm correct, it means that you learn best from reading/writing. This is one of the most common learning styles. However, some people are auditory learners (they learn the best during lectures), others are visual learners (they learn best when graphics are used to explain the concepts), and still others are kinesthetic (they learn best from doing).

To complicate matters, these learning styles are far from perfect type theories. In practice, people employ different learning strategies in different situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This diverse view is very good. It's always promising to pay attention outside of your generation and use-case. Family and friends are a great starter, but try different neighborhoods , cities, or even countries - there are a LOT more opportunities out there.

Sadly, one thing I've found with people's suggestions (and I've heard a lot of "next hot app" suggestions as I'm sure you have as well) already exist. They just don't know that they do. Maybe there's a job for bringing those apps to those people? How meta.

</comment><comment><USER15> Curious - all of our parents' preferred methods of communication cost money...letters, long distance phone calls, mobile phone calls. All of Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing (Instagram, Facebook, Kik, Twitter, Tumblr). Just an observation. Implications of this? Will companies one day pay us to talk to each other?!

Separately - isn't Skype basically Facetime over 3G/4G (and not just wi-fi)? What is Skype lacking here?

<comment><USER28> _Josh's sister's (and her peer sets) methods of communication cost nothing_

You gotta have a data plan to access these from anywhere. Most schools don't have wifi. So, the actually can cost more than phone calls, letter etc...

<comment><USER15> Fair point actually - didn't consider that the cost is embedded. That said, How often are those the data hogs? (Anecdotally from myself, I rarely come near the data caps). My assumption is that even today, video apps are the most data intensive - outside of those, are folks hitting their data caps on a regular basis?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting to me are the generational service abandonment patterns.

The author mentions abandoning MySpace moving into highschool like the subject graduates past Tumblr.

It's symbolic of the maturing nature of the individual. In the future perhaps social networks will find a way to iterate their brand with each generation to prevent losing users to another new service.

<comment><USER30> Is it so much the individual maturing, and not just the platform itself losing relevance? The whole nature of these social platforms seems to be entirely ephemeral - they spread by word of mouth because others are using it. The problem comes in when you consider that a person isn't going to use more than 2 or 3 of these platforms. So as soon as a new platform is released, older platforms are guaranteed to lose users even if the new platform is worse, as it will take a number of weeks or months for a typical user to understand and then reject the new platform. During that time, the older platform isn't being used.

This exact issue seems to apply to online gaming as well, so this isn't some new discovery of human behavior. There are some 'big' games (warcraft, cod) that retain their users even after a decade - but they do this by reinventing themselves and recreating their products constantly. I think social media and gaming are similar enough for a lot of these behavior traits to apply to social media also - which means the correct approach is to redesign/improve core parts of your social platform at least once a year to keep it relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> 15 year olds definitely want to have "compatibility with different systems" including the source of their pay packets, allowance, and access to resources - ie old people and their old email.

But it turns out email, even if used infrequently, is still important. It's easy to have multiple accounts sit there indefinitely. Not controlled by one fatcat pulling privacy strings and strategizing your online activity.

Meanwhile another million blue 'f' logos are printed, each destined for a shopfront window, cash register, door. Beckoning the registration and sign up and sign over of your stuff. In return, FB tells a few advertisers about you and your stuff. And FB also reserves the right to build the mechanics of your social communications, private and public, the particulars of which will be in accordance with Facebook's sole decision and strategy in an advertiser-hungry world... And other things without notice and so on.

<comment><USER32> To be clear, Facebook doesn't tell any advertisers any information about any users. Advertisers tell Facebook what kinds of people they want to see their advertisement, and Facebook shows the advertisement to those kinds of people.

<comment><USER33> Supposedly :-) I am always amazed at how poorly personalized facebook are for me or my friends. Basically it's always made of 60% "meeting someone from the area" aka some shaddy semi-porn website. I am really curious of the efficient of advertisement on FB. I know some large brand (GM I think?) pulled off FB because they did not see any ROI.

I wonder if it holds true worldwide and for smaller brands...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> FTA:

 _For me, Twitter is predominantly a link discovery service — admittedly, that is a simplified view, but it's helpful for these purposes — so I followed-up on her Twitter comments by asking where she discovers links. "What do you mean?" She couldn't even understand what I was asking. I rephrased the question: "What links do you read? What sites do they come from? What blogs?"_

 _"I don't read links. I don't read blogs. I don't know. You mean like funny videos on Facebook? Sometimes people post funny links there. But I'm not really interested in anything yet, like you are."_

Television was a major blow to reading for decades up until the internet, but now even the internet is starting to destroy literacy. It's very unsettling.

<comment><USER5> My impression is the exact opposite: I see people reading and debating more than ever thanks to the internet. I think thanks to the internet we are in a golden era of literacy, but we just don't notice it because we're too busy complaining with other highly-literate people on highly debate-focussed websites such at this one about the more obvious non-literary manifestations of popular culture.

<comment><USER34> One need only look as far as Reddit to see that HN is highly unusual in this respect.

<comment><USER5> People were plenty stupid before the Internet. It was just hidden before, now it's all out in the open.

Let's just see what happens next - remember, we're only about three to four years into a fully online society :)

<comment><USER34> Stupid is one thing. Disinterested in reading is my primary concern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm going to break the "Don't mention my age." rule to write this post. Only because here it's relevant.

What you use and how you use it has a lot of factors besides age. It has to do with your friends, their friends, where you live, what school you go to or what job you have, etc etc.

I'd like to share an anecdote about umwelt. A few days ago, I walked into a coffee shop. I sat in that coffee shop for two hours.[0] When I first walked in my jaw hit the floor as I scanned the room. Everyone had tablets, young, old, there was no common pattern. There was one person I could see reading a physical book, and two graphic designers in the back with Macbooks. My first thought was "Either I'm living in a bubble, or coffee shops are a bubble.".

I figured that if this is what it looks like in suburbia, then it must be even crazier elsewhere. That's when it hit me. If silicon valley developers do their work in coffee shops, and all they ever see there is mobile devices, then they'll naturally develop for mobile devices. But then mobile is new, hot, and growing all the time. IIRC mobile sales have already outdone consumer desktop and laptop sales.

Are developers choosing mobile because it's new and big, or because they see it in coffee shops all the time? Probably both. They're not exactly mutually exclusive. Just like how you have to ask if consumers are switching to tablets because laptops are too bulky, or because they're more usable, or because that's where the focus of every up and coming developer is right now? Probably a combination of all three and more.

All of that might have seemed pretty obvious to you. Well it wasn't to me, heres why:

1\. In my circle of friends, everyone still uses desktops or laptops. Having only a laptop seems to be a result of financial concerns, not a lack of demand for a desktop.

2\. At my school a handful of people have tablets. Me being one of them. A group of kids asked me what kind of cellphone it was when I first used it in class.

3\. Among my friends Facebook seems to be the dominant communication medium, alongside telephone services. I only use the latter.

4\. My school has uncommon demographics, The vast vast majority could be described as one or more of the following: Nerd, Hipster, Extreme anime and manga fan, Gamer. So I guess I myself sort of live in a bubble. I don't even own a cellphone.

I live on the west coast of the US. Not exactly a remote location.

[0]: This was the first time I've ever actually sat down in a coffee shop.

<comment><USER36> You actually didn't mention your age. I gather from the rest of your comment, you're in high school?

You have a lot of good thoughts about the mobile/tablet stuff and I think you're right. Just to add some quantitative info to it, I work for an e-commerce site and a quarter of our traffic is mobile, and that's not including people using our native mobile apps, which means that our real mobile traffic is more than 25%. I don't believe that includes tablets, but I'm not sure (there isn't a tablet-specific site, although we do have native tablet apps.)

<comment><USER35> > You actually didn't mention your age. I gather from the rest of your > comment, you're in high school?

Yes.

Honestly, every time I use a tablet the first thing on my mind is the firmware invading my privacy. The next thing though is input devices. (I'll probably end up flashing cyanogen mod.)

Input devices, for most users, and even most developers, are something assumed. For desktop it's keyboard and mouse, for laptop it's keyboard and some kind of mouse-like input device. For tablets it's touch or buttons. For phones it's touch or buttons. (I don't think most tablets that use buttons, like e-readers, are open for development. Correct me if I'm wrong though.)

I'm going to reiterate what I've already said before, touch sucks as a universal interface. [0] So my question ends up being "What peripherals make sense for a mobile device?". Recently I received a tiny bluetooth keyboard to type on my Nexus 7. That's a step in the right direction, as typing things out with the on-screen keyboard is painful and awkward. (And since a stylus is too slow, smudges up the display...)

For a pointer device I am using a capacitive stylus. My current hypothesis is that the dominant paradigm for tablets will be keyboard and pen. Though for delicate tasks such as drawing, a capacitive stylus leaves much to be desired. IMO touch should be, in the majority of cases, a fallback interface for people without peripherals. For most applications it doesn't beat traditional input devices such as pens keyboards and mice of one sort or another.

[0]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606002>

<comment><USER34> Touch beats pens, keyboards, and mice in the respect that you don't have to carry around a bunch of peripherals. Nearly everybody has fingers and spent the first couple years of their lives learning to use them.

Your complaint about touch interfaces probably has more to do with buying a really shitty MP3 player than anything inherent about touch.

<comment><USER35> >Your complaint about touch interfaces probably has more to do with buying a really shitty MP3 player than anything inherent about touch.

I just mentioned I have a Nexus 7. Same complaints mostly. Though the touch _is_ more responsive in the 7, doesn't really alleviate my complaints. (I never complained about latency on the Sanza because it's a sub $100 device and can't be expected to have decent capacitive touch hardware. Which is part of the reason it should use buttons, there was no reason to _make it a device driven by touch_.)

That and I haven't seen very many "gestures" in the android apps I use. Though I've heard a lot of hype about them.

>Touch beats pens, keyboards, and mice in the respect that you don't have to carry around a bunch of peripherals. Nearly everybody has fingers and spent the first couple years of their lives learning to use them.

Yes, yes it does. Which is why it was probably a smart idea to force developers to assume only a touch screen for most applications, it stops them from requiring a stylus for stuff that doesn't need it. At the same time, using a tablet with just your fingers is really painful, and theres no way I'm the only person who holds this opinion.

And theres a reason tablet keyboards are so small, and usually clamp onto the device they're built for, it's because nobody is going to lug around a full sized 104 key desktop keyboard. And pens are small, they fit in your pocket easily. Together they probably fix enough of the weaknesses touch has as an interface to make a tablet usable as more than a toy.

when I say touch should be a "fallback" interface, that might imply it shouldn't receive regular use. I really mean something closer to "default". A good example might be GIMP. (Or any other image editor, like photoshop.) People who are serious about drawing digitally usually buy a drawing tablet, or in decades past some sort of light pen. But because drawing tablets work like any other pointing device from the operating systems perspective, users who prefer a drawing tablet can use one without locking out users who only have an optical mouse, and vice versa.

A capacitive touch stylus is compatible with touch screens, meaning that for applications that don't require extreme delicacy, pens and touch can co-exist without carrying around any large peripherals. Users who don't want to buy any fancy add-ons are happy, users who can't stand smudging their screen and cleaning it with a glasses cloth are happy too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think it makes total sense that no one she knows reads blogs. Most kids don't read the paper, or read books for fun. This is not so much devolution of reading habits as democratization of computer usage.

<comment><USER38> This is true, but there are also kids her age who do read the paper, and it's actually a prime age for pleasure reading. His sister probably isn't going to take up reading or writing for reasons other than necessity. SaMo is not a crappy community - it's a wealthy one really - and very well educated, so if she's not interested now, she probably won't be in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Tenth graders are customers without credit cards. How are snapchat and all the free apps generating revenue? ads?

<comment><USER39> They have credit /debit cards linked to parent accounts.

<comment><USER40> Don't they have debit cards in their own name?

<comment><USER41> Pretty hard to do if you're under 18, banks want a legally responsible person to own the account.

<comment><USER42> Debit cards in theory do not allow any debt, thus there's not so much of a problem allowing under 18s to have them.

See this UK account for 11 to 18 year olds which allows a debit card.

([http://www.rbs.co.uk/personal/current- accounts/g1/young/revo...](http://www.rbs.co.uk/personal/current- accounts/g1/young/revolve.ashx))

HSBC give you a savings account when you're seven, and add a current account when you're 11, with a VISA debit card.

([https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/current-accounts/under-18-bank- ac...](https://www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/current-accounts/under-18-bank- account?HBEU_dyn_lnk=CurrentAccount_FilterTool_MyMoney_FindOutMore_ProductNameLinkButton))

<comment><USER43> A lot of US banks still want 18-year olds or a parental guarantee.

US banks love overage fees (making credit card interest rates an amazing bargain). Plus there is the liability of checks/ACH which can cause overdrafts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Being an 11th grader I can honestly say this is bizarre since I associate so well with both Josh and his sister at the same time. Kids use social media differently than the middle-aged.

<comment><USER45> Josh being in his 20s, it's funny to see that high schoolers already consider us "middle aged" :)

<comment><USER35> I don't think that's a majority opinion. And if it is then it's certainly not a new trend.

I don't plan on dying at 40 anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Look, some people get into Princeton, and some don't. LOl.

People are different, and in my experience, some brainy people like twitter and other link finding services, to find things to READ. We watch instructional videos or download all the awesome lectures that universities have posted. We use facebook, but end up posting links to news stories and even longer things like wikipedia articles and actual papers and prose. We like Reddit and even stackexchange. We love wikipedia.

We're a minority. Way more people like to take photos of each other and send them to each other. They like to share photos of the cat, babies, etc. They share inspirational poetry.

Even more people just want videophone of some kind, or something like twitter, but sans too much linking. More photos. t.co for everything.

I know someone who got internet mainly for consuming porn and maybe some video games. He's an adult, has a college degree, and works with people who wish kids would read more, or be more interested in school, or basically be more like the brainy kids. He didn't go to college because he loved knowledge. He went to get a middle class job, and because his parents went to college.

Personally, I was the first to go to college in my family, and went to a good one. I'm a big nerd. My brother and I taught ourselves to program computers. (He's smarter than me, too.) I liked to read. I still mostly read online. I've put up a few left-wing websites, have an almost obligatory anger toward the boss (comes from growing up working class), and still buy books.

I just accept that people are different. Some people are into reading, and others aren't. Some people like to think about things, and others are more about looking at people. Some people go with the flow, and others don't.

<comment><USER46> I'm not quite sure what statement you're making here? Where does Princeton, or education at all, have to do with what 15 year olds use for technology?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> My take on social Internet trends and technology seems to be everything is rushing towards mobility and has been since about 2004.

When I first got on the Internet in the early 90s you sat at a desk with a CRT monitor and used a dial-up 14.4Kbps modem when the phone wasn't being used by your mom or sister. I didn't even have a cellphone yet.

Then into the PDA phase, wifi came along, cable Internet, then better phones, more people on the web, commerce really picked up and then blogs etc.

Each generation is exposed to mobile technology that's more powerful and the Internet it seems to young people isn't seen as a thing that is on monitor but a poor version of it is now on my phone, it's a tool to be used. Even tablets I can't see being popular like phones since they're too big, now if you had a folding tablet like Microsoft's killed-off Courier I could see that being popular.

I can see mobility being the only way the Internet will be used by young people teens to 20s. The desktop computer will be too formal and seen as too stuffy and slow, chained to a desk at home.

<comment><USER45> >I can see mobility being the only way the Internet will be used by young people teens to 20s. The desktop computer will be too formal and seen as too stuffy and slow, chained to a desk at home.

This is already the case. I have 2 teenage brothers; one (somewhat tech savvy) uses almost exclusively his tablet + mobile phone (he only uses his laptop to run a webradio); the other one (not tech savvy at all) only uses his cellphone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> A few observations:

1\. Facebook is trying to stay relevant by copying promising social network features (e.g. Whatsapp, Snapchat, Foursquare, ...)

2\. Although Facebook is trying hard, it's having a tough time competing with the new social network because of preconceived notion of what Facebook is. (Facebook is news feed of personal social graph, not ephemeral real-time chat like Snapchat.) More on this: [http://www.futureofsocialnetwork.com/2012/12/social- network-...](http://www.futureofsocialnetwork.com/2012/12/social-network-as- context.html)

3\. Although Facebook is having hard time competing with new, it has the big enough network to be the social platform. People still have account because of network-effect.

</comment><comment><USER49> Interesting commentary. However, a sample size on one doesn't yield a substantive-enough dataset to draw conclusions. As a high schooler, I can tell you that service use varies wildly based on location and demographic.

Moreover, Josh's sister didn't really differentiate between her preferences and the preferences of her cohort in general. She may have very idiosyncratic social media use-cases. I know the way in which I use social media is very different from the way in which some of my friends use it, which in turn differs from the way many others use it. People are different, and they use services differently.

I would take any assertion of how people use social media with a big grain of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Josh doesn't imply otherwise.

He is explicit that this post represents reflections on a conversation he had with his sister; it is indeed anecdotal.

<comment><USER20> The value of the article is not in its statistical likelihood, but rather, in recognizing how his assumptions blinded him. And actually listening to people.

<comment><USER49> How is he to know if he was "blind?"

The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect.

<comment><USER20> "The fact that one girl exhibited preferences counter to his assumptions does not mean that those assumption are incorrect." <\-- is exactly how you do not do customer development. You have stopped listening to the user.

<comment><USER50> Assuming the first user you talk to is representative of all users is exactly how you do not do customer development.

<comment><USER20> You're focusing on having things being driven by data. That is commendable. However, that only tells you a part of the story.

There's a big blind spot of people who depend on analyzing things like this. And that is, they stop listening to other people. It is usually because such people are consumed with being right, or even trying to prove themselves right. The skeptical stance gets distorted into requiring other people to challenge your assumptions. Sometimes, it is a covert (as in Jungian shadow covert) way of feeling good about being contemptuous of other people.

To really listen to other people, you give up the notion that it is all about you. In other words, it's better to assume that you don't know what you are are talking about. You don't have any preconceived notions blocking you from hearing someone out. You are not "listening" in the sense that you are waiting to for the other person to stop talking so you can tell them how they are wrong. You might even learn something.

This is exactly what customer development is about: listening to other people.

In any case, I doubt this will persuade you. That's the cool thing about this. Some people don't want to consider this, so it becomes an unfair advantage for the folks who do :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Keek might make a reasonable example of something do ewhere between facetime and instagram. It's a lot like instagram, but the medium is <36s long videos.

Just bringing it up as food for thought. No real point here.

</comment><comment><USER51> Sure there are a lot of FaceTime like apps. But the problem is none of them have done a phenomenal job marketing to their demographic to really take market share.

There are also a great deal of drawbacks to FaceTime which make it expensive. It costs cell data? That's expensive! It takes a lot of bandwidth? Also expensive.

The point is that there are so many rough edges around the product that it makes it a pain in the ass to use. Slow choppy video is also a problem.

<comment><USER52> Choppy video and cell data aren't rough edges on FaceTime. It just takes a lot of bandwidth to transmit and receive video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not really tech trends, but rather, product trends. Still interesting.

I think the biggest takeaway is: just because your parents are clueless about the generation gap doesn't mean that you are not either. Don't bring in your assumptions.

(And following that: tech is now iterating fast enough that a "generation gap" can now be seen among siblings, not just parent-children).

</comment><comment><USER53> This is one if the most interesting articles I've read on HN in a looonnng time. More tech companies should be thinking about this.

</comment><comment><USER54> <http://willsmidlein.com/blog/tech-trends/>

</comment><comment><USER55> I wouldn't be too much bothered by what tenth grade kids like, because they don't have any damn money.

<comment><USER5> Wow. You must be lost - Hackernews is, as far as I am aware, a site for intelligent, open-minded people who recognise that valuable information may be found in many inconspicuous, non-intuitive locations. People intelligent enough to realise that kids are historically early-adopters and re-shapers of technology, pioneering uses and social integrations which, while dismissed as trivial by ignorant, hidebound adults, often end up exploding into mainstream popularity and defining the future of technology.

<comment><USER55> The article describes how these kids are all using free services, and that they won't use the ones that costs money. So I'd say that if you have any business model besides "Ads, ads, glorious ads on our user-generated content!", I think teenagers are probably going to pass by your service, however good it may be.

<comment><USER11> > Ads, ads, glorious ads

Is there something wrong with that? Total US advertising expenditures for 2011 were $144 billion[0]. UGC is of course quite difficult to monetize, but it's not impossible.

[0] [http://kantarmediana.com/intelligence/press/us- advertising-e...](http://kantarmediana.com/intelligence/press/us-advertising- expenditures-increased-08-percent-2011)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> That last point about FaceTime sounds like an opportunity for Sean Parker's Airtime.

</comment><comment><USER57> > "entrepreneur friends"

Instead of /nerds/ or some such is quite a nice touch.

</comment><comment><USER58> > real time social web all the major buzz words in one phrase!</comment>


Writing papers for American college students has become lucrative overseas - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/us/college-cheating-papers.html <comment><USER2> When I studied business in college, I'd say that half of my senior year class were gunning for the same banking and consulting gigs. In either case, it was known and understood that those types of employers were obsessed with your grades.

Unless you happened to have the most amazing and prestigious internship / experience, your GPA would make or break your chances at such firms.

At the same time, we knew from internships at those types of firms that what you do / work on VS what you do at a school, varies a lot. Most knew that you didn't really need to have a 4.0 understanding of your topics to do the jr. work at an investment bank. But you still need stellar grades to land those jobs!

This, in turn, lead to a culture of test-taking and "gaming the system" rather than learning. Students would take the "easiest" and most predictable classes to maximize their grades, and would religiously study for exams rather than fully soak up the course material (because as it happens, a lot of professors liked to keep their exams fairly standardized and similar).

And, of course, if students were desperate, they'd get other people to do their school work. Writing essays, doing homework, even hiring people to do their exams, with fake ID, etc.

When I studied Engineering, however, I didn't see much of this culture. The Engineering jobs didn't have the same stringent requirements for jobs - well, not most at least.

So those are my observations. The more importance you put on grades, the more cheating and focused studying seems to appear.

edit: Also, when a college degree stops being a certification/vetting of knowledge, work ethics, and persistence, and rather becomes a mere formality to for work, people will start treating it differently. I've heard classmates say things like "It's no big deal if you don't know x and y, you'll learn it through work anyway", which seems like a bad sign to me.

<comment><USER3> As someone on the other side of this, recruiting for a big bank, it was depressing.

The reason we defaulted to the GPA was exactly because it was so easy to do the work.

Let me explain.

When we visited a school (usually Columbia or NYU for me) we had 100s, usually over a 1000, resumes. When I talked to the students, they were all bright, smart, interesting and motivated. From their resumes I got the impression any of them could do the job. And yet we had to pick maybe 10-30 from the school for that summer. (Keep in mind we recruited from many schools for many different positions).

So you have 1000 resumes and they all seem smart and interesting and you have to pick 10. What do you do?

The GPA is a great way to numerically and "objectively" make a cut. Then when you see a typo and maybe you can exclude that one and so on.

The reason you have to rely on these non predictive elements is exactly because everyone signals well on the predictive elements.

<comment><USER4> So why not try random instead?

It sounds like a great opportunity for an experiment. Say you have 20 slots, pick 10 using the GPA/nitpick method, and 10 at random, and then compare the results 5 or 10 years later.

<comment><USER5> I've done that a few times when I've had to hire people very quickly.

I numbered each resume without reading it and drew lots. We had 6 people interview ~30 people for 10 slots. Each person had 15 minutes to talk. Candidates were out of the running if 3 people said "no". We stopped when we had 10 people.

It worked out pretty good, but made HR angry. We ended up with 2 bozos, but the rest were pretty great.

I worked at another place years ago where we would mentor call center agents to become DBAs and Unix people. Those folks were all awesome, and a few had GEDs only. One of them called me to thank me for the opportunity, he just became a CIO!

Personally, if you have the time, you can mentor and get better results from a marginally qualified, engaged candidate than a person with the right credentials.

<comment><USER6> Investment > innate capability

You would think the tech industry, with its endless graveyard of technically- superior-but-undermarketed or under-supported products would recognize this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of my family members paid their way through school writing papers for others... in the 80s. I don't think this is a new thing.

I used to do consulting / tutoring for programming. Tutoring was $50 per hour, consulting was $100 per hour. Probably 50% of the students I tutored asked me to write programs for them. I'd tell them my consulting rate, in an attempt to persuade them against this path and most wouldn't bat an eye.

Cheating is way more common than people think.

<comment><USER8> what I don't understand is how they get through the tests.

<comment><USER9> Often it's more about laziness and motivation than lack of skill. A high percentage of college students _can_ write a mediocre or above 10 page paper but also just really don't want to. They'd rather do something fun and pay someone if it doesn't cost them much. Answering (typically) multiple choice questions and short-response questions is a totally different thing.

I never used such a service, but I do see the appeal. I did kind of similar things, in my own way, to reduce time spent on courses I didn't like (skipping class, skipping or skimming material, exam cramming). Not saying it's a good thing, and it probably hurts one's already poor work ethic, but life is short and I don't really blame them that much.

<comment><USER10> That suggests that these assignments are more like busy work, since the students are otherwise talented and qualified? Maybe it is a good thing after all?

<comment><USER11> Perhaps doing the assignment improves the student's understanding of the course material, which the professor thinks is a good thing, but it's possible to pass the course with only a mediocre understanding of the material?

<comment><USER12> > but it's possible to pass the course with only a mediocre understanding of > the material

probably this.

the most time-efficient strategy for studying that I found in college was simply retyping all the bullets from the powerpoints 2-3 times. I didn't understand what I was writing, but I basically trained myself to be a "chinese room" for test questions. I got As on all the tests for classes I didn't care about this way.

<comment><USER9> Pretty much exactly what I did, as well. And I'd usually do it an hour or two before each test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Visiting a high school my friend founded to be inquiry-driven project-based learning from the ground up moved me away from teaching in ways divorced from regular life. From a systemic approach, it's hard not to look at the universities and professors creating the system that this article describes: assign homework irrelevant to their lives and they'll find irrelevant ways to do it.

Since I've never written an analytical essay outside of school, I avoid assigning them in favor of projects connected to students' lives.

Maybe that's why my students' homework assignments get them covered in the Washington Post, WSJ, Forbes, Inc, and lead to them speaking in TEDx and Harvard, and in Y Combinator, funded by Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt.

<comment><USER14> You've never had to read and understand some data, analyze it, and then communicate your results via written word in your career? I'm totally willing to grant you that the majority of careers do not require this skill but most white collar work does.

Agreed that essays are overused but I'm just surprised to hear you downplay them so much.

<comment><USER15> The handful of times I've been asked to analyze something, the result has been a list or graph with some accompanying description.

I had a coworker who had a reputation for long emails. It was clear, based on hallway comments, that no one was reading them. People don't appear to have much tolerance for essays unless there's good reason for it.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. When I write an email, I usually address the topic generically, then list options or reasons or whatever, then give a takeaway or action item. Most people seem to only read the topic statement. Not sure if I have lazy coworkers or I'm not an effective emailer.

<comment><USER17> TO: hugey010@...

SUBJECT: Put the action statement in the subject line, starting tomorrow

Your colleagues read your emails in sequence. You care that they have read the action statement so they can follow up or disagree. Putting it first will get it read.

Put the action statement in the subject line, starting tomorrow. You can also repeat it at the end.

If you have a better suggestion, let me know today please.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Many people here are writing about classmates that didn't care, coasted, cheated, etc., painting a picture of that as the norm. I'm sure that goes on, but it's by no means universal, or even (in my experience) dominant. I went to a middle of the road public university because I got a full scholarship. I thought I was smart, the smartest in any room-- for about a month. (It says how young & dense I was that it took so long) Then I realized I was surrounded by people who were at least as smart, plenty of them smarter, harder working (and I wasn't lazy) and intellectually curious. I was humbled (and better for it). I have also worked in higher ed technology and in contact with many students as a result, and my experience with them was the same.

So absolutely there are cynical grade chasers, and worse those that pay their way to do it. But a very large portion are not. You probably just don't know it because they aren't loudly bragging about how they got the easiest professor, coasted to an A, plagiarizes a paper without getting caught, etc. They're just doing the work.

</comment><comment><USER19> High school tutoring appears to be the same thing but in person: the tutors basically do the homework for you (ahem, "with" you).

It was so bad that in one class at my son's high school, the kids were turning in great homework but failing the in class tests, so the parents protested and had the homework's weight increased (and test weight decreased) in the computation of the overall grade -- and had the change made in the middle of the year!

I was quite naïve and was shocked by this. I'd gone to schools where where external tutors or essay-writers weren't really viable.

</comment><comment><USER20> The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.

Will the students who purchased these essays go on to build bridges, rockets to the moon, cure cancer? Hah...

Interestingly, there is probably little or no supply of German, Dutch, Scandinavian bootleg essay mills.

<comment><USER21> Uh, the "American" rockets to the moon were built by Germans, former Nazis picked up by Operation Paperclip.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip)

Some were even accused of crimes against humanity after they were done with rocket work.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph)

<comment><USER20> It takes more than science to go to the Moon. It takes money, and most of all organization and management skills. The U.S. is good at the latter.

When Nazi scientists were imprisoned after WWII, they were secretly recorded as saying they could not believe Americans had built the A-bomb. Even though the Germans had the scientific knowledge, in-fighting and jealousy prevented them from cooperating. They never could have mustered the resources, coordination and leadership required to achieve a practical bomb. For example, the precise refining of tons of ore to get uranium.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fraternities and sororities have kept libraries of old graded exams and essays for decades. How is it fair if one group can see the Chemistry 101 exam from the previous year?

This is probably the reason why you never see your final exam or even other exams after you take it during the exam period.

<comment><USER5> It screws everyone out of the know because it screws up the curve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Once you realize the point of college is not to learn things, it's to get the degree, all of this makes sense.

<comment><USER24> Not everyone is just in it for the degree. Some people actually want to learn things, expand their mind, and meet people who are trying to do the same. We should treat these kinds of students with respect and hold everyone else to the same standard they hold themselves, which means disallowing and discouraging cheating whenever possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> To counter this sort of cheating, one of my prof had us defend our papers in a one on one 'podcast' interview with him for 10-15 minutes and then graded the paper based on our performance.

<comment><USER26> Seems like that would work only in smaller classes. It quickly becomes a real headache when you have hundreds of students.

<comment><USER27> That's what TAs are for.

Sadly, btw. Students aren't paying $30,000 per year for 23-year-old living in poverty to grade their work and do half the teaching and a checked-out professor focused on research with no passion of teaching.

Having graduated from a program with ~60% dropout rate by the second year, I appreciate the quality control side of things, but the number of professors I had to had any sort of passion for teaching was sadly low.

<comment><USER28> Who can blame faculty for having no interest in teaching introductory classes when the dropout rate is 60 % and when all the dropouts go whining to administration when they became weeded out?

High dropout rates might actually be a good sign - everyone gets to try out, and if they don't manage it's time for them to go do something else. It beats overzealous gatekeeping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I only had one proffessor that wrote reasonable writting assignments and actually graded them based on content. You could tell most writting assignments were getting graded entierly on APA formatting and word count (if the "writting" assignment wasn't just "fill in the blanks in this word document using so many words per question.")

Near the end durring capstone people wrote the most useless wordy documents because they had just spent 4 years learning how to draw small simple ideas out into paragraphs instead of comming up with enough ideas to fill a paragraph. It's not surprising that many of them are hiring other people to write them, the whole exercise seems silly.

</comment><comment><USER19> This can extend beyond school. Once we hired someone who had a good phone interview, and not that great an interview, though there were some language issues. We were growing rapidly and this person got the job.

They liked to work late, often talking on the phone...within a few days we realized that they were discussing the work with someone on the phone, who had probably been on the phone screen and probably had a day job. The employee couldn't program at all, and was employed by us about a week total.

I don't know how they made it through the interview process but the VP of engineering immediately revamped the hiring process!

</comment><comment><USER30> I would say that cheating in school isn't a problem, but it unfortunately devalues other people's work. Ideally we would live in a world in which no class was graded on a curve and in which going to college wouldn't be considered by employers at all. But I guess we don't. But cheating isn't the root problem, it's the sports like mentality we have about education (valedictorian, 3rd in your class, etc etc) that's the problem.

At some point cheating will catch up to you, I hope. But some people manage to go a _very_ long way by being total cheats.

<comment><USER27> > it's the sports like mentality

That's just the human (or maybe cultural) drive to compete. The problem is it turns into an arms race that starts with training (but the training can become overwhelming) and leads to performance-enhancing drugs (could be steroids, could be Adderall). Where do you draw the line? 4 hours of studying? Educational summer camp? 12 year olds taking the SAT? Practically mandatory extra-curriculars?

At least on the academic side, obviously smart students who just missed the cutoff for elite schools still do fine, but it's hard to tell kid who has to go to UCLA because they didn't get into Harvard that it affects their opportunities less than they'd think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm just glad I went to a very traditional uni that didn't do this essay stuff. We had tutorials, open note exams, and final year project reports.

Not much of that can be bought from outside and even if you did it wouldn't help you much because it all had to be defended in a viva voce.

I suppose you could buy the notes but the final quantum mechanics exam was pretty much of the character take what you have studied and answer questions that had not been discussed in the course. If you weren't familiar with the notes then I think you would have struggled as in fact many of my contemporaries did.

Well my tutor did assign me a project to be done in the long vacation after my second year but he didn't 'mark' it, we discussed it and I had to defend my conclusions. It didn't affect any grades anyway because the uni didn't do grades. There were end of year exams to check that you were keeping up but the class of your degree depended only on the final and the final year project report and its associated viva.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd like to know who writes those essays — and hire them!

</comment><comment><USER32> I paid to have a few history essays written for me. Judge me if you please but the class was ridiculously hard for an introductory history class and I had my plate full already.

The writer I stuck with for the semester was excellent. She was very well written, followed instructions well, and always delivered on time. I'm sure she was making good money doing it. If anything she was under charging.

</comment><comment><USER33> Since they technically retain copyright of those papers the overseas people should be able to claim their status as co-author after the paper has been published. And throw in a complimentary scholarship as well.

</comment><comment><USER34> I dropped out of highschool, and decided to learn whatever I want. How sad to incarcerate oneself with so much debt without the slightest interest in learning anything.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ready solution: make tests the only thing that matters.</comment>


Being deaf is: constant baseline soundmaking anxiety - <AUTHOR> http://blog.melchua.com/2014/11/27/being-deaf-is-constant-baseline-soundmaking-anxiety/ <comment><USER4> This article hits home for me. I was born with a severe hearing loss, and I have recently got a Med-EL Opus2 / RONDO Cochlear Implant -- which changed my life for the better.

How?

It reduced so much stress, I was surprised that I was carrying so much. It was simply things like going to the toilet (you think, "am I going to make a really awful rude noise that everyone will hate me for?") or drinking your coffee ("is this awful?!")... even typing at work, or taking to a colleague and hoping that I wasn't interrupting someone else.

Then I realised: everyone else is simply bloody loud, they generally don't care about how loud they are when they're eating, shutting doors or chatting to someone. They don't. Only I did, I was the only one who constantly worried.

It wasn't the fact that I could suddenly hear things, which I could, it was realising that I was overthinking, overanalysing every situation with that sound was involved. That included _breathing_. I would literally slow my breathing if someone were to sit next to me on a bus. Severe anxiety due to sound.

I'm still very anxious if I am to watch a movie, in my own house, by myself... in fear I'd wake the neighbours on an adjourned property. (to put this in perspective, my wife came home and she couldn't even hear the movie in the next bedroom.)

THIS was seriously the hardest thong I've had to face but it's been worth it for the reduced stress and anxiety.

Thanks for posting this!

<comment><USER5> I'm thankful for your comment and the original's author article, it helped me realize I'm not (utterly) mad.

Even though I haven't been completely deaf in a fairly long time (some form of congenital defect, sorta fixed, on and off, will get worse again), I still have a very hard time judging loudness. The way I do most things - <USER2> mindlessly simple like walking, grabbing a pen on a table or eating - <USER3> minimize sound as much as possible, like not/barely touching the floor with my heels.

I know it's kind of ridiculous to most people, but I'm also not sure the same people quite realize how continuously stressful it is to have little to no feedback from a sense you should normally be able to rely on.

These behaviors have become second nature for the most part, but I still feel like I'm letting down everybody when I do make noise, on the few occasions where I'm not mindful of my actions.

As a bit of an aside, I find it interesting that the loss of a sense generally seems to bring about a completely different level of introspection and self- awareness, not better or worse, just profoundly different (or I'm completely biased).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related: "Dorm of the Deaf" [http://dustinland.com/archives/archives319.html](http://dustinland.com/archives/archives319.html)

      > When the world around you doesn't give you feedback,
      > and the best gauge you have of your own noise level is
      > frustration on the faces of the people near you

People laugh at HN suggesting technical solutions to every problem, but this really does seem like something that could be solved (or at least mitigated) by a microphone, some small LEDs, and a gutted wristwatch. Light up more LEDs depending on how loud the sound is relative to the average level of the previous N seconds of recorded audio.

A web search for [wrist sound sensor] didn't find anything relevant, but this is probably because I don't know what such a device would be named.

edit: Following the trackback at the bottom reveals the author is a hardware hacker. I wonder if she has tried to build such a device -- if not, maybe it's much more complicated than it seems.

<comment><USER7> A LED would require to look at the device in order to notice the sound. An alternative might be haptic feedback as available in the Apple Watch.

<comment><USER8> My thought as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great post. I had _never_ considered that aspect of deafness, but it's so obvious in retrospect. Thanks.

<comment><USER10> I agree, just reading the title already gave me that feeling as if a little puzzle piece had just settled into my _Weltanschauung_.

> I type loudly during quiet thinking breaks in class, constantly rustle books > and papers in the chapel, and make munchy-slurp noises when I eat with > gusto. Until my twenties, I didn't know those things made noises.

It's a constant thing isn't it, adjusting your own _loudness_ depending on the environment you're currently in, it happens almost unconsciously. Having the need to pay attention to this all the time with the only way of getting feedback being reading other people's reactions or explicitly being told would probably make me anxious too.

This also makes me think about how essential feedback loops are for efficient learning, both in humans and machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember reading this article about a person who had no sense of smell, and how they had to always make sure that they have no BO, have to worry about not being able to smell gas or rotten food, and various other things that the rest of us didn't have to struggle with. It's these subtle things that makes the lack of a sense more challenging than one would expect from the common perception of these disabilities.

</comment><comment><USER12> My dad has very bad hearing, and can be quite noisy sometimes to the point of being annoying. I remember complaining to him about this occasionally. I never considered he might be worried about annoying others, and may be trying to hide his anxiety on top of that. I'll have to ask him. Thanks Mel.

</comment><comment><USER13> Smart watches can be valuable for things like this I guess.

Something like having an app on iPhone monitoring the mic, showing a gauge or vibrating at a threshold on the Apple Watch (might be easier on Android). Would be useful feedback. Are there any apps / devices for such purposes on the market?

</comment><comment><USER14> This sounds similar to the sort of social anxiety I've felt around trying to figure out how to avoid creeping people out.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very, very interesting. This gave me some useful perspective, also the post about the Basketball player (interrupt-driven).</comment>


The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/21/the-day-live-web-video-streaming-failed-us/ <comment><USER2> This story is exactly why TechCrunch is such a joke. You can't make giant, sweeping statements like: "The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us" and then, in the second sentence of your story, deliver a bunch of incredibly impressive stats about how successful the various streams were.

I like how the last paragraph reveals the true point of this post though. It's just a veiled advertisement for another lame P2P video service.

How does anyone take these people seriously? It's kind of fun to watch them flop around making mountains out of mole hills but anyone who considers these jokers to be a legitimate news source should re-think how they get their information.

<comment><USER3> But it did fail. For those 21 million people, the video stopped or it kicked them out or there were audio problems.

I am not sure why the article plugged some obscure video streaming software. CNN.com already does peer to peer video transferring via a flash plugin that it forces you to download.

<comment><USER2> I haven't seen anything that says all 21 million people had problems. All I see is another sensationalistic headline from TechCrunch.

There is a plug at the end because that's how blogs make money; by selling links and paid mentions.

<comment><USER4> They probably didn't make it up. I watched on Hulu and it had real problems for me, too. And CNN was impossible. It's possible most Internet users have never even heard of Hulu, and they were the best case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The big challenge for online video is staying up in a crisis. I remember on 9/11 the web failed and most of us resorted to TV & radio.

<comment><USER6> Interesting that both of those mediums are broadcast/multicast only, not unicast.

All of these video streams (with maybe the exception of CNN's P2P plugin) are unicast, TCP/IP data streams. To really survive a crisis, ISPs need to implement real multicast data streams correctly so that one server can broadcast the video feed without requiring all of the clients to have their own individual copy of the feed going out.

Edit: Sorry, looks like this is already being discussed down thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How many times must Mark Cuban say that the economics of content delivery on the internet are fucked, before people listen?

[http://blogmaverick.com/2008/05/04/the-ala-carting-of- video-...](http://blogmaverick.com/2008/05/04/the-ala-carting-of-video-on-the- net-will-it-lead-to-disaster/) [http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=economics%20vide...](http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=economics%20video%20site%3Ablogmaverick.com)

<comment><USER4> The bulk of Cuban's point here is simply that online video currently has a lower ad load (2 minutes) than network TV (8 minutes), which is a huge reduction in volume. But it doesn't acknowledge that those 2 minutes:

* can be _targeted_ much better than existing TV ads

* have a drastically lower cost of entry for advertisers, and can potentially support a much larger ecosystem of advertisers

* support fine-grained stats and analytics about viewership and popularity, rather than TV's archaic system of up-fronts, sweeps weeks, and Nielsons.

It seems likely that Internet video is going to seriously fuck up the existing networks. But the question is whether it's going to be creative destruction. There are lots of credible models that don't require middlemen to sell us air.

<comment><USER7> That's all true for the article I linked directly, but the problems are greater than just the lower ad load.

The value of a la carte viewers is lower than the value of scheduled viewers[1] and more importantly, the internet is not designed to assure successful video delivery[2].

He even proposes a mechanism[3] for fixing the economics of video distribution - by intermediating the cable companies(!), for whom a marginal viewer has no cost, between content providers and customers.

I'm truly not a Cuban fanboy, but I think he's got a point on this one.

[1]: <http://blogmaverick.com/2007/07/09/metcalfes-law-and-video/>

[2]: [http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/28/internet-video-vs- digital...](http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/28/internet-video-vs-digital-tv/)

[3]: [http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save- internet-...](http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save-internet- video/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The NYTimes website held up great. I'm on an old school T1 connection and I only experienced a few pauses.

Also, a bunch of people were in the conference room watching it on a TV and at some points I could hear my stream was actually broadcasting ahead of the TV.

</comment><comment><USER9> More here: [http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...](http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/01/akamai- limelight-and-highwinds-deliver-over-8-million-simultaneous-streams.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Is the only general solution to this problem: 'more edge servers'?

Or is there another technology that could be really helpful for this type of event?

<comment><USER11> There are some pretty interesting innovations coming down from deep packet inspection providers. In one case they're caching the data that users are serving via bittorrent and re-serving it to the second and future persons requesting it, basically giving users credit for sharing without saturating their upstreams and causing network problems.

It wouldn't surprise me if these products can do the same thing for downstream traffic as well.

Everything old is new again, it's like the 1990s proxy servers brought into the 2000s-2010s.

<comment><USER4> In this case, the "old" stuff you're talking about never really got "old". There's fundamentally not much of a difference between a proxy server and an edge overlay network fed with traffic redirection; in both cases, you're getting content from a middlebox.

<comment><USER11> Sure, conceptually. I didn't know of any big ISPs using proxies in the last 5-7 years, though, until the Comcast DPI fiasco happened.

I could well be out of the loop and not aware of any huge Squid or comparable installations, but I believed them to be archaic until recently because of how much faster commercial/service provider type WAN interfaces (DS-x, OC-x) were growing relative to consumer interfaces (DSL, cable). Of course FTTH (large bandwidth to each node) and wireless data (shared upstream + carrier optimizations for signal quality instead of bandwidth + physics) may turn this on it's head.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


John Carmack on Code Shaming vs. Coder Shaming - <AUTHOR> https://disqus.com/home/discussion/varianceexplained/a_million_lines_of_bad_code_variance_explained_20/#comment-1974419008 <comment><USER2> "An idiot wrote this code" and "this code is crap" both represent moral judgments. That is, implied wrongness/badness/and so forth, with respect to the evaluator's values.

People judged that way commonly respond in one of two ways: 1) with defensiveness/anger; or 2) taking it personally/withdrawing. OP seems to rhetorically refer to the latter, when he writes, "Would you have continued asking for help?" Alternatively, they might respond in the way Carmack describes, using the criticism as a way to grow.

I think Carmack misses a key insight, however. With respect to feelings of guilt and shame, I'm completely in agreement that they can represent a wake-up call to further self growth--but only insofar as we can link them to the human needs they are telling us to pay attention to. That's where the self growth occurs. I'm not in agreement with using guilt and shame, as tools to get people to conform, because doing so focuses our attention on what we want people to do, not why we want them to do it. They're both important; without the latter, it's just obedience training.

Maybe it was a need for efficiency/understanding of the implementation, as in OP's case, which triggered the guilt/shame, or maybe something else, as in Carmack's "WTF was I thinking" (for example, compromised quality due to lack of sleep due to schedule pressure).

With impostor syndrome so common, even with people at Carmack's skill level, I think we can do better and still preserve honesty, transparency, openness, and so forth.

<comment><USER3> If a coder writes bad code, it doesn't mean the coder is a bad coder. However, if the code keeps writing bad code time after time without refusing to improve, then the code is a bad coder and needs to be fired.

If you will not do what's necessary to become competent, to be qualify for the job you're hired to do, then you need to be fired. No one in any kind of job is excused from this. Being competent and qualified is a requirement of any job.

<comment><USER2> Thank you; I think we're in agreement, regarding a desire for co-worker competency.

I think your comment helps with demonstrating the limits of what Carmack describes as, "break[ing] through your defenses". Gulit/shame "break through" to some, with the limitations I described, but it works counter-productively, with others.

How an employer chooses to handle this hypothetical person represents another discussion entirely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the original post:

        If you're an experienced programmer and you're tempted to code-shame someone,
        try thinking back to your own million lines of bad code. Imagine someone
        had mocked you then... Would you have continued asking for help?

Yes. Yes I will criticize other peoples mistakes the way that I've been criticized for my mistakes. Because if making a mistake has no negative consequence then you (and I) will continue to make that mistake. Is it worth being ignorant of our shortcomings just to save ourselves from hurt feelings?</comment>


Ask HN: How can I find a "mission critical" company/consumer problem? - <AUTHOR>

Steven Blank describes in The Four Steps to the Epiphany that successful startups supply a "must-have" consumer product or solve a mission critical company problem.  My problem has been with idea creation. I've been developing 'cool' ideas, but nothing that people absolutely need.<p>I really like Blank's book and I agree with his theory about developing a product hypothesis then talking to potential customers to test if the product is needed. This is basically a way to find customers first, see what they want then begin to build.  But my question is, what if you don't have a product hypothesis? How can you generate product/service ideas that are "must-have?" I've been told to "scratch my own itch," but many great startups are B2B. And finding problems that specific businesses face without being apart of that business is difficult. The same can be said for specific consumer markets. <comment><USER2> Your problem isn't creating ideas or a hypothesis to test, it's finding problems. Finding problems worth solving is really difficult unless 1) you're already an industry insider (scratch your own itch) or 2) you listen very closely to industry insiders. The hard part about listening is mustering up the courage to talk to somebody you don't know. But it's well worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> lets take b2b companies, i know nothing about b2c[1]. not only do you have to find a problem, and understand the problem, and have a real answer why your team is better equipped to solve the problem than any others[2], you still need to be able to convince the customers of all this.

many of my role models became immensely successful by accident. they strove to be great, and worked hard, but didn't actively set out until a solution arose naturally from their career history, and they said "oh hey, i can do this!"

      [1] i actually know nothing about b2b other than working at
          a small pharma-industry shop
      [2] you know, more than just a few crack twenty-something
          coders -- you've got credible industry experts on your
          team

</comment><comment><USER4> Get a job. Within a couple weeks you'll have some ideas.

Corollary: If you have been at a job for more than a year, find another.

</comment><comment><USER5> You may need to develop a better mental model internally for analyzing what is critical and what's not. I have no idea what your nationality is, but most Americans seem blinded by cultural Affluenza and seem to have enormous difficulty figuring out what is "mission critical". Vast numbers of people seem to have great difficulty distinguishing, for example, style from substance.

What actual problems do you personally have that you are failing to resolve? Figure out why you are failing to resolve them and you will have some insight into why you develop "cool" ideas but nothing "mission critical"/must-have. If you aren't failing to resolve them, then odds are good that you will eventually resolve this as well, in due time.

Peace and best of luck.</comment>