Identity Beyond Usernames - <AUTHOR> https://lord.io/blog/2020/usernames/ <comment><USER2> If you want to learn how to do accessibility, specifically alt texts, properly, this guy does it exactly right.

I'm a screen reader user and don't encounter those often. There's even some fun in those alt texts, i.e.

"screenshot of unicode character inspector revealing "epic" to actually be "еріс". of course you, a screen reader user, aren't fooled."

Btw, most people would just label that "screenshot", which is extremely infuriating.

<comment><USER3> I regularly use the speech feature of macOS to read web pages aloud to me, so I was also pleasantly surprised to hear meaningful descriptions of the images from the alt text.

Maybe one day computers will be able to describe to me what is in an image without a person having to type it.

<comment><USER2> This is very slowly happening for some Chrome users. Generating meaningful, accurate descriptions is a general AI task, though.

As an aside, Chrome does the autolabeling (including OCR) only if there's no alt provided, so alts like "screenshot", "photo" etc. actually cause more harm than good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's fairly long and winding but the main point seems to be that because Unicode exists, and Unicode supports characters that are problematic for the concept of a unique identity, then it is the concept of a unique identity that is the problem.

It also presents a front-end solution (fuzzy-text matching for @'ing someone's display name in a Slack channel) but does nothing to address the ever-present back-end need to actually validate that a client is who they say they are.

There's a _good_ reason you can't make your bank username 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕜𝕚𝕟𝕘 , and it's not "because developers are anglo-centric and intrinsically against all the wonderful individual expression and identity that Unicode could bring us."

Since the article mentioned Punycode, I actually think the current implementation is an elegant solution to a real problem. Of course we should enable folks from anywhere around the world to experience the Internet in their native language. That's the reason the Chrome algorithm to determine whether to show Punycode is so complex - it has to carefully balance the desire to show text the way it was intended while considering that it might be a malicious attempt to phish someone using characters outside their typical locale. In this case, the front-end solution of asking the user "which google.com from this list of two identical-looking google.com's is the one you want" just won't fly.

<comment><USER5> Your bank doesn't _need_ the concept of a username. A service may need a username if it's going to have social features, public content, or other ways in which users interact with each other. If people just log in and use the service, let them use an email address as their login (which is already unique), and don't make them pick a username at all.

<comment><USER4> In that case, the email is the username, and the problem remains: are firstname.lastname@example.com and jоsh@gmail.com the same user?

To the system, of course they're different - it's just looking at the bytes. Problem comes when a human interacts with the account. Maybe they see the email on the account and manually type it in to another system. Or records are printed as part of a lawsuit and has to be transcribed.

Allowing indistinguishable characters in unique tokens creates confusion at best. Broadly I agree that we should reduce our reliance on unique identifiers, and I don't have a good answer for the right approach, but certainly we can't abandon the concept of a unique identifier altogether: it predates computers and the character encoding mess we made, by a long time.

<comment><USER6> > _are email@example.com and jоsh@gmail.com the same user?_

I like to think I have a keen eye and pay attention to subtle details. I don't think I see a difference between the two addresses. Your message seems to state they're different though. Did HN normalize the differences? Did my browser?

In a blaze of stupidity, I decided to to copy and paste into my terminal and pipe it through a hex dump [0].

* The character difference doesn't show up in the viewport in Firefox; of course, it's rendered.

* The character difference doesn't show up in the HTML editor; of course, it's showing the "raw text" and the "raw text" is valid unicode.

* It doesn't show up in the browser's network inspection of the response payload. That's the scariest part in Firefox IMO.

* It doesn't show up in my Terminal either. Why shouldn't it? We've fought long and hard for terminals to support Unicode.

Of course, then there's the fact that I decided to copy and paste from a browser into my terminal even though I already knew I shouldn't [1]. What _else_ could be hidden in unicode? An entire bash script starting with `sudo`, perhaps? Websites can already inject their shitware into the clipboard with clipboard events [1].

[0]: [https://knightoftheinter.net/img/hacker%20news%20id%20237743...](https://knightoftheinter.net/img/hacker%20news%20id%2023774300.png)

[1]: [https://security.stackexchange.com/q/39118/47800](https://security.stackexchange.com/q/39118/47800)

<comment><USER7> The second email address uses the Cyrillic small letter O, which renders the same as the Latin small O in almost all fonts. You can see this in your hex dump, too: Instead of a single o, your hex dump shows two bytes for the second character in the second email address.

<comment><USER6> Yup! I was surprised they're rendered the same. The hex dump didn't lie even though everything until then did.

<comment><USER8> They aren't "lying", it's the same glyph in many fonts.

That you think homoglyphs would somehow look different in any of those steps of your post is peculiar to me. l and I are the same in some fonts and they are in the ascii set.

<comment><USER6> > _They aren 't "lying", it's the same glyph in many fonts._

While it might represent the same glyph, it certainly isn't the same sequence of bytes. I think the real failure is that's not made clear.

<comment><USER8> That's what I mean, looking at the bytes is the only way to know.

How would you solve homograph/glyph attacks though? One idea is yet another encoding where there are no homoglyphs, only whitelisted diacritic sequences, and there aren't more than one way to assemble the same character ("ó" vs "o"+"´". So tough potatoes for Cyrillic "o", it's forced to use its nearest equivalent: 0x6f Latin "o" in the ascii set.

<comment><USER6> > _How would you solve homograph /glyph attacks though? One idea is yet > another encoding where there are no homoglyphs_

First, modern operating systems (should?) already provide APIs to canonicalize UTF.

Second, perhaps an additional API needs to be created which suggests similarities between characters intended for use by an intelligence (artificial or otherwise...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > This even allows them to have fully-Unicode usernames; username phishing is > less of a problem when users expect duplicate usernames, and none of your > systems depend on username uniqueness.

It's surprising but providing an extra degree of freedom makes the system more robust. Username phishing is a real problem on Twitter because people expect unique names associated with each person they interact with but if usernames can not be assumed to be unique then using the name as a heuristic for identity is no longer a viable shortcut so people have to develop other ways of making sure they're talking to who they think they're talking to.

On a related note, keybase (keybase.io) proofs never made sense to me until I started thinking about how I would prove to people that I am indeed who I say I am. Keybase provides a cryptographic basis for trust, which is much better than what most social media systems currently support with their verification mechanisms. I personally trust cryptographic signatures over whatever verification mechanism Twitter is using to provide blue check marks to verified accounts.

</comment><comment><USER10> _> The only solution is to develop systems that don't have usernames._

I disagree that this is the only solution. The OP comes very close to discovering an alternative one: don't allow users the power to select their own arbitrary username.

When a user makes an account on your site (and if your site actually needs publicly-displayed usernames in the first place), give them the option of, say, ten usernames generated by the site itself; these _don 't_ need to be numeric codes like WeChat does, they can be pronounceable phrases in the same manner that Gfycat generates URLs. Everyone will end up with names like "questionable wet aplomado falcon", "each unlawful harlequin bug", "icy inferior iceland gull", which honestly isn't any worse than the average name I encounter on Reddit or elsewhere.

The biggest downside(?) of this approach is that it makes it harder for someone to build their personal brand, but the older I get the more I think it's a bad idea to use a consistent nickname across different websites.

<comment><USER11> > The biggest downside(?) of this approach

I tried this approach for a service awhile back, and the biggest hurdle was educating the users. Even determining what to call it was a huge challenge, as it's clearly not a 'username'.

<comment><USER10> In what way would the user need to be educated? Social products like IRC, Twitter, and Reddit have accustomed users to seeing opaque, often-nonsensical strings next to every action taken by every user, and the only difference here is that a given user hasn't had the opportunity to select their own opaque and nonsensical string to associate with their actions. They wouldn't even need to remember this string to log in, because sites use email or third-party login services for that (and even if they did need to know their own username to log in, their browser would remember it for them).

<comment><USER11> I'll happily accept any wireframes you may have that wouldn't increase friction beyond the typical "choose your username and password".

You may be overestimating the typical non-hackernews user. It's at least as challenging as getting users to use things like 2fa and/or recovery codes.

<comment><USER10> New wireframes don't need to be made, because this paradigm already exists in a roundabout way. For many websites that I have signed up for, any attempt to register an already-taken username will present the user with multiple suggested alternative usernames. It's been decades since I signed up for Gmail, but I'm pretty sure that on the sign-up screen you would enter your name, "John Smith", and then your desired email, "johnsmith@gmail", and then when that failed you would be given a list like "john_smith@gmail", "smithj@gmail", "johnsmith2@gmail", etc.

This is the same UI flow as the above, except that it's not based on anything that the user has already entered and it doesn't provide any way for the user to override the suggestions, which actually makes it simpler than the existing flow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the petname approach that GNS[0] takes - there _are_ stable identifiers (they're public keys) but users are meant to refer to identifiers using local names (or names that their contacts have set).

[0] [https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-schanzen- gns-01.html](https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-schanzen-gns-01.html)

<comment><USER9> Generally, using cryptography or associated cryptographic functions is the way to go when trying to make robust systems. Joe Armstrong has a great talk where he outlines how to create a content addressable store for storing and working with knowledge/data. He suggests using SHA256 content hashing because giving items of data unique names is a hard problem so we might as well name pieces of data by their content hashes and then have a human readable pointer.

\--

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unicode usernames in Discord are my bane. I can't search for them. I can't type them in manually. I can't even copy their official name because the app interface doesn't allow selecting them. If the right click context menu doesn't allow the operation I need, I'm just SOL. A complete clustertruck.

</comment><comment><USER14> The author's choice of the epic / epic web sites was inspired too: those Cyrillic characters spell out "Eris" the goddess of...discord!

</comment><comment><USER15> The author's solution is to shift the problem of uniqueness of usernames to email, as if email is less likely to change than a site-specific username.

The opposite is actually true - there are many reasons to change your email, while changing your username on the vast majority of websites is simply unnecessary (e.g. anything without a social component, such as banks, shops, Healthcare providers etc.).

Not to mention, if you don't have a system for ensuring unique usernames, you also shift the burden of ensuring identity to your other users, who now have to understand how to distinguish different users with the same name.

<comment><USER16> to me it seems the suggestion is to allow aliases (nicknames, images, utf, qr- code, text) and stick with numerical ids (or whatever you use as the true primary key, which can be email or phone number i guess, but hope not).

Even hints that for directories, etc at the end.

<comment> crooked-v Discord and Blizzard both use a unique numerical ID as the true source of identity (your name displays like "Mr. Bob#1234", but only the "1234" part is actually important), while using email for logging in. The email and the display name can both be changed at any time.

<comment><USER17> And ICQ! While AIM was letting people choose usernames, ICQ looked deep into your soul and assigned you an ID based on the order in which you joined :)

<comment><USER18> Still remember my ICQ number even though it got account hijacked LONG ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Purely as an implementation note, the Slack rich text editing widget is quite poor, and the Discord rich text editing widget is _lousy_. Both have serious bugs (Discord's seems to be almost nothing _but_ bugs) where their widget just doesn't behave like a normal <input type=text> or even contenteditable (which behaves subtly differently), in decidedly off-putting ways.

On @-mention autocompleters in general (and :emoji-code: completers too, and GitHub/GitLab issue/PR #-reference completers), I honestly can't think of one that I'm completely happy with. Every last one I've experienced harms the editing experience with surprising and inconsistent behaviour.

It's all surprisingly hard to get right, and very few people that implement seem to even _try_ to actually get it _right_.

Perhaps I should perform a more detailed study, enumerating the problems clearly, and try to create one that's as close to flawless as is possible. (I'm sceptical that flawless is actually _possible_ with the tools given web tech, especially in Blink and I think WebKit which don't properly support the difference between before-end and after-end in selection in contenteditable, which matters more than you might think.)

</comment><comment><USER20> The author lists a bunch of gripes with alphanumeric usernames but I'm fact many of these shortcomings are not worth a switch away towards non-unique, freeform names (John Smith), or towards random ID allocation (whether purely numeric or word-like).

In spite of what I'd personally have bet on a decade ago, I don't actually know many international users who complain about alphanumeric handles. People can/should still have Unicode-ish display names on top of handles, change those, and be searched by those. Twitter does this well for example.

But a human-readable, ASCII-friendly, user-chosen unique handle is the best thing I've seen so far for disambiguation on a social network.

</comment><comment><USER21> GDPR adds an interesting wrinkle in all this. GDPR requires both the right of removal (removing @-mentions) and the right of rectification (updating them.) So if I change my name from notJim to notJohn, GDPR requires* services to update previous @-mentions from notJim to notJohn, and similarly requires services to remove old mentions of notJim if I request removal. Using an identifier behind the scenes greatly simplifies this, because instead of dealing with text, you fetch the appropriate display name at render time.

* IANAL, etc, and I'm sure requirements and interpretations of GDPR vary, but I do know that my company invested quite a lot into systems to fix this @-mentioning issue, so at least some people thinks it requires this and are willing to spend probably millions of dollars of engineering time to comply with said requirement. Personally, I support this provision.

</comment><comment><USER22> Here's a thought I had when Twitter was still very new:

1\. Sites should forbid dots in "normal" usernames. 2\. Usernames with dots can only be registered by demonstrating ownership of the corresponding DNS domain.

Now you can have your favorite "brand" across all sites, nobody else can register it before you, etc.

This is obviously not very non-techie friendly at this time...

</comment><comment><USER23> This is why I like hexl-mode[1].

[1] [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HexlMode](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HexlMode)

</comment><comment><USER24> Unicode is what happens when humans see the Tower of Babel and someone says, "hold my beer - I got this."</comment>


Ask HN: Rackspace Dedicated customers – Are things going ok with your accounts? - <AUTHOR> I've been a Rackspace (dedicated) customer since 2008. We've had some rough patches, however in the last 6 months, our account, and attention to detail to nearly any request is worse than I've ever experienced. I've enjoyed Rackspace for years, great service, I'm having trouble justifying the relationship lately.<p>Just wondering if anyone else is seeing this kind of drop in quality from RS. <comment><USER2> Not anything like that, but they've recently removed the ability to delete cloud servers via the dashboard or api. They require a phone call, which sometimes comes with an upsell to "save 20%" on servers.

Ridiculous.</comment>


Aaron Swartz's last gift to journalism and online privacy finds a new home - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/15/aaron-swartzs-last-gift-to-journalism-and-online-privacy-finds-a-new-home/ <comment><USER2> From the University of Washington security audit:

"The conclusion of our analysis is that many of the technical properties of DeadDrop are decent; however, we do not believe that DeadDrop is yet ready for deployment in an ecosystem with nation-state capable adversaries and non- expert users. The lack of software versioning, reliance on VPN, the errors in the installation and deployment documentation, leaking of document metadata, and lack of anonymity best practices all contribute to our reluctance for suggesting that DeadDrop is ready for mass deployment.

Additionally, the usability of the system is sometimes lacking, potentially leading to insecure use. For example, DeadDrop requires a fair amount of technical sophistication on behalf of journalists (such as being able to use the GPG encryption software)6 and sources (such as being able to sanitize the metadata in the submitted documents). We believe that this lack of usability may lead to failures in anonymization. We enumerate the usability pitfalls we found, as well as suggested remediation approaches in our report."

<comment><USER3> [Speaking as a contributor to the project] We tried to fix as many of the security issues in that audit as we could before the 0.1 release, but we think that the project could be redesigned to be more usable. Pull requests are welcome! You can see some of the more pressing issues at [https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/issues?mileston...](https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/issues?milestone=2&state=open).

One interesting question is: can we have the same level of security if we use one server instead of three? [https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/issues/85](https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/issues/85)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Github repo: [https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/](https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Source where you can donate to help the project along:

[https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop](https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop)

<comment><USER6> Pull requests welcome! (speaking as a contributor to the project)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'd be nice to hear some kind of numbers of whether it got much use at the New Yorker, and what kind of hang ups they ran into. Aaron was a great person and the kind of civic coder we need more of, but that doesn't mean he was an immaculate expert at coding interfaces (both graphical and conceptual), and the accessibility of this application is key. Accessibility, besides cryptographic soundness, is probably the most important feature...its side effect is adaptability, and while such an app is bound to have a small niche, it needs active users and maintainers...Even the Tor Firefox browser fails without proper updates

<comment><USER8> The security audit linked in the article [1] mentions that the researchers submitted several documents via StrongBox, but never got a response.

[1] [http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~aczeskis/research/pubs/UW- CS...](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~aczeskis/research/pubs/UW- CSE-13-08-02.PDF)

<comment><USER6> According to the New Yorker, they received the documents but did not respond because they mistook them for input generated by their own internal tests. See [1], linked from [2]

[1] [http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~aczeskis/research/pubs/DeadD...](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~aczeskis/research/pubs/DeadDrop- The_New_Yorker-Reply-2013-09-03.pdf) [2] [https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/10/how-we- plan-...](https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/10/how-we-plan-keeping- securedrop-secure-possible)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Since then, the application has gone through an extensive security audit led > by a team at the University of Washington, which also included input from > noted information security experts Bruce Schneier and Jacob Appelbaum.

I bet this is like that time Jake was in the room when a bunch of Europeans cracked the PKI and he made sure to get his name on the list.

Seeing him listed next to people who actually know what they're doing is a sad testament to his ability to play the media.

</comment><comment><USER3> SF folks who want to contribute to SecureDrop: we're having a SecureDrop hackathon as part of the Aaron Swartz Memorial Hackathon series Nov. 8-10: [http://aaronswartzhackathon.org/](http://aaronswartzhackathon.org/)

The event kicks off at Internet Archive on Friday night, and will be at Noisebridge all weekend after that.

<comment><USER10> I blush for MIT. There's something grossly wrong at the admin level of a lot of schools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excellent. Journalists are the prime example of people who "have something to hide" for a good reason. I hope this tech continues to get refined.

</comment><comment><USER12> Question for contributors/maintainers:

Once a reporter has taken possession/responsibility for your communication, do your future communications still end up in the general bucket, or can they be restricted only to that reporter?

<comment><USER6> They still end up in the general bucket.

At the moment, the design is such that there is a single "master" public key for each Securedrop installation that all submissions are encrypted with. The journalists are advised to download the encrypted submissions, transfer them to the airgapped Viewing Station, decrypt them with the "master" private key (which is only stored there), and then optionally re-encrypt them to their personal public key if they want to transfer them to their personal workstations.

It would certainly be possible for this process to be automated with some additions to the journalist backend, and in that case once a journalist had taken responsibility for a particular source's communications, further communications could be restricted for their eyes only.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the info! I imagine that for people reaching out who may need to establish an ongoing, anonymous, relationship with a reporter, the ability to use the same system the reporter is familiar with, but know that it will only be them viewing it, might be a useful feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just wondering how its secure, and anonymous when every meta/sub/unknown/etc...particle(WIMPs/etc..) is monitored in (more then[future analysis through simulation])real-time for each individual entity in/out-of existence.

Whatever, you'll know when it hits you...

<comment><USER14> My attempt at a translation: I wonder how secure and anonymous it can be, when it seems that everything, maybe even subatomic particles, are monitored in real time. (And people are possibly using simulations to predict the future?)

<comment><USER15> Your ability to speak 'stoned' is amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A great project. RIP AS. HOPE and BUILD HOPE. Thank you.</comment>


Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-teaching/ <comment><USER2> A couple of weeks ago, my Uber driver was a math teacher in the San Francisco school district. He advised me that if I could afford it, that I should unequivocally send my kids to private school and not to public school. The reason is that they now mix students of all abilities together, instead of separating them out and concentrating on each group separately like they did when we were kids. The thought was the good students would "pull up" and "positively influence" the students with less aptitude. However, what it did instead was to give the incentive to teachers to focus on worse students, who tended to be more disruptive, and essentially abandon the good students and let them fend for themselves. He mentioned that the "independent learners" were identified, and instead of being accelerated, they were left alone so that the poorer students could be concentrated on by the teachers.

As a side note, I don't remember being taught algebra before the 9th grade either, in an excellent school district, and I was in a gifted class. I still kept my algebra textbook from the 10th grade and it's pretty standard algebra. In fact, I didn't even learn Calculus until college and I wasn't negatively impacted by that at all. However, this was almost 30 years ago so I'm sure educational standards have increased, but it's funny that what I learned back then is no longer "good enough".

<comment><USER3> I'm 30 now and had a similar math education to you. Gifted track in middle/HS yet no algebra until 9th grade. No Calculus at all (although AP Calc was one of four AP classes my school offered).

I did not major in CS so I've never taken a formal Calc class. If anyone has a good recommendation for a MOOC or similar for a working professional to learn Calculus I'd love to take it. Doesn't need to be free, would probably be more motivated to do well if it wasn't :)

<comment><USER4> Do they actually call it a "gifted" track?!

<comment><USER5> Yes. What do they call it where you attended school?

In the US, the term used is "Gifted & Talented" (abbreviated to "GT"). So, you frequently see courses or tracks labelled "gifted", "GT", etc.

At the high-school level, the label frequently changes to "honors" or "advanced". And you will also see Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) which are brand names for honors/advanced curriculums that often offer college credit with high marks on exams.

<comment><USER4> Oh that's really interesting! I went to school in the UK and they just divided it into numbered sets e.g Set 1 (top set) to Set 6 (bottom set). The US naming is an interesting affirmation of the child's difference from their peers - I've not heard of that sort of thing over here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _But as UNC 's Domina points out, most schools have also found it very difficult to institute what Katy Tang calls a "one-size-fits-all" mathematical curriculum without boring the math nerds to tears._

Here in lies the fundamental issue of the (well intentioned) focus on No Child Left Behind. The schools tend to underserve the best students because energy is focused on the weakest. (If the weakest were being well served, this would be a worthy trade. My experience in large cities is this is the exception rather than the rule.)

This used to bother me quite a bit, but I think the best students can find other ways to be intellectually stimulated. (Online, etc) The downside is for most of school they're bored out of their mind, and this can develop bad habits for when school eventually catches up to their abilities.

<comment><USER7> Your last point can't be overstated. It's a major problem, but imho can be remediated during high schools years with things like dual-enrollment in a local community college, MOOC participation, local special interest research groups, etc.

My wife & I are taking the approach that responsibility for primary education lies with parents first, then teachers, so, to your first point, we don't particularly perceive this as a huge personal problem.... The fact is, education in America is classist and the kids of white collars households have incredibly unfair advantages. Bootstrapping from poverty & ignorance to professional success and higher education is harder than it's ever been.

<comment><USER8> I know several kids who never went to highschool. At 12-13 they enrolled in the local community college and got their GED at 16-17. It cost (at the time, in district) $2000 - $2500 per semester at the junior college. Although that's significant, the school district was actually paying ~$10,000 per student per year for public school so it was actually WAY cheaper.

Regardless, those kids who went straight to college from middle school seemed 10x better off and all of the ones I know (or am friends with) are doing great.

<comment><USER9> A minor quibble: The state subsidizes all public colleges, most likely including your community college. Where I live (Minnesota) that subsidy accounts somewhere around half of the total cost. So community college probably costs about the same as high school.

<comment><USER8> Fair point, I also know our city and county tax went there as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I grew up in San Francisco and experienced both public and private school mathematics . The former of which was astoundingly poorly run. It seemed the only way to actually make headway for students that were ahead was for them to study on their own.

The primary issue imo is that math teachers do not seek to inspire students to see mathematics for what is is- a structure way to reason as opposed to a calculation tool replaced by computers. These breeds not only an aversion to the subject by fails to fulfill the basic reason for teaching math.

My best math teacher in school gave us a lecture on chaos - this was algebra class and we were able to generate a fractal by a simple set of coin tosses. This evolved into the discussion of how prbability, physics/randomness of coin tosses and the general notions of chaos and dynamical systems. But such initiative and teachers were never rewarded.

It's sad to see that the education problems seem to be regressing

</comment><comment><USER11> Having finished high school, a little over a year ago, I cannot understand how this can be beneficial in any way. We began pre-algebra in 6th grade and a large majority of kids did Algebra I 7th grade, possibly a harder class like Geometry, depending on how ahead they are. Sure, you could delve deeper into each topic, but when your classmates, are still struggling with basic Algebra, how much time does your teacher have to focus on giving you extra work?

The accelerated kids would essentially be forcibly held back. The curriculum at my high school for the normal accelerated student was Algebra II, Trig/Calc A (calc I), calc BC (calc II), then calc III, and we had students even more accelerated than this. Starting at Algebra I in high school, would essentially shift everything back two years.

</comment><comment><USER12> a teacher's rebuttal on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4p0uc3/why_di...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4p0uc3/why_did_san_francisco_schools_stop_teaching/d4h7me7)

<comment><USER13> The teacher's last sentence:

tl;dr Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School? They didn't. The topics of algebra are now spread through the middle school courses along with other foundations of geometry and probability/statistics. However, they did restructure the names and pathways in high school in such a way that might impact the way ability of a student to take a 2nd course in Calculus by Senior year of high school.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand why they can't teach algebra in tandem with lower levels in math such as basic arithmetic. The abstract method of balancing both sides of the equation could boulster overall understanding. --Introduce algebra in grade school. As children learn things like fractions, introduce linear algebra. This, I think, would reduce some of the "when am I ever going to use this, i'm not going to even try".

<comment><USER15> They do, this is part of common core (which some people love and some people hate). My daughter has been doing very basic algebra since 2nd or 3rd grade? I do not remember EVER seeing an equation with an X in it until 6th grade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Why did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School?

Because the school superintendent and the board of education believe much more strongly in wealth redistribution and social equality than many of the constituents do. Local elections: They matter.

Also, as the article says, the headline is clickbait. Common Core scatters algebra all over elementary school. The "traditional" curriculum, many years of arithmetic followed by Algebra I and II, geometry (plus proofs), trigonometry, and calculus, that is a harmful segmentation of math. Many students learn to hate and reject math before they even reach the parts that are useful to daily life.

The trick is getting teachers to teach the Common Core curriculum. The uncomfortable truth is that many teachers have no business teaching math, and leave students horribly confused about what math actually is. I even encountered a (SFUSD) middle school math teacher who uses jokes to try to make math fun, but his children (going to SFUSD schools) grew up hating math.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's not all that great to be super advanced in math very early either.

I tested out of pre algebra in 7th grade because my dad basically taught me it over the summer. Took geometry in 8th grade. Took algebra 2 at community college over summer took pre calculus my freshman year, and took ap calculus my sophomore year but halfway through the year I found it too slow so I took calc bc online with Stanford.

But then I took multivariate calc my junior year at a local cc and got a B in a math class for the first time ever. I got burnt out. And I hadn't learned the study methods required to succeed in college level mathematics. So even though I had always loved math and went into college first semester taking upper div math, I found myself disliking it more and more and eventually switching to economics. I think, had I not rushed so much, I may have have actually enjoyed it more and fully majored in it.

<comment><USER18> No offense, but if you were really going to go for it as a math major I think a minor stumble like getting a 'B' would have just made you double down. Point set topology was the gut-check class for me.

On the article topic, this is pretty bad. Common Core 'intuitive' BS aside, kids need earlier exposure to algebraic concepts, it was the main reason they failed the elementary calculus and probability courses in college that I ended up teaching them. It was very draining to be wasting my time trying to explain to a senior at Georgia Tech how to solve 2x=1 and then by analogy 3x=1, though they could see no similarities between the two equations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I read the district's explanation.

[http://www.sfusdmath.org/uploads/2/4/0/9/24098802/ccss- math-...](http://www.sfusdmath.org/uploads/2/4/0/9/24098802/ccss-math-faq.pdf)

It says that Algebra was previously introduced in 8th grade and students were not prepared. Therefore they have moved that algebra content into normal math for grades 6-8, gradually introducing contents, along with other concepts. Then the full Common Core compliant Algebra class that focuses solely on Algebra is in 9th grade and they are hoping that students will do better with this approach.

The article and the commentary here indicate that neither the author nor any but a very small number of commenters here bothered to look at the actual program, preferring to revel in personal suppositions and speculations.

</comment><comment><USER20> How old is 8th grade? I'm just curious to compare it to the UK school system where the subjects aren't broken up so rigidly. I only learnt Maths, not Algebra 1/Calc 1, etc.

<comment><USER5> The sibling responses are correct. A little further detail... US schools generally follow this pattern...

Elementary School (Primary in the UK): Kindergarten First through Sixth grades

Middle School: 7th and 8th grades

High School (Secondary in UK): 9th through 12th grade (or, freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior).

The boundary between each level varies, but I'd guess 70-80% of districts follow the above. The most common variation seems to be grouping 6th grade into middle school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This really hurts the talented kids with less educated parents. Educated or well-off parents can always supplement with lessons at home or supplementary school (kumon)

</comment><comment><USER22> And the answer is: because all the kids have to be taught the same thing and they all have to be fit to the public school mold. I've heard it said that public schools are great for making factory workers.

Of course, in most places private schools and even home schooling is an option, so all hope is not lost. And public education is good for many kids.

It's the one-size-fits-all approach that is not always so effective.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why don't we start teaching the basics of set theory and algebra during elementary school?

I know I'd have dealt with that far better than the "Do this page of 100 addition/subtraction problems as fast as you can" human calculator stupidity thrust upon us as math education. At least it sounds like common core is getting away from that sort of stuff.

<comment><USER24> "Why don't we start teaching the basics of set theory and algebra during elementary school?"

Based on what I'm saw coming home from my first grader, they are. The common core stuff at least comes from people who understood that having the student do a couple thousand "1 + 2 = ____" problems tends to promote the incorrect idea that the = symbol means "do the thing on the left and write it down", and I noticed a mix of "1 + __ = 3" and "___ = 1 + 2" in the problem sets.

I noticed enough other places where the good ideas had been visibly chewed on by "the process" that I'm still not ecstatic about "common core", but at least the bits I've seen (up to first grade now) I do concede that there were good ideas at the beginning of the process. I'm not entirely convinced they made it through correctly, but they were there at the start. (Still a bit pissed that they took my kid who was adding single-digit numbers in his head and _forced_ him to count on his fingers because That's What The Curriculum Says, though. Seems to have gotten over it by the end of the year, though, so no permanent damage. Still.)

<comment><USER25> > I noticed enough other places where the good ideas had been visibly chewed > on by "the process" that I'm still not ecstatic about "common core", but at > least the bits I've seen (up to first grade now) I do concede that there > were good ideas at the beginning of the process. I'm not entirely convinced > they made it through correctly, but they were there at the start. (Still a > bit pissed that they took my kid who was adding single-digit numbers in his > head and forced him to count on his fingers because That's What The > Curriculum Says, though. Seems to have gotten over it by the end of the > year, though, so no permanent damage. Still.)

The standards are being ruined by terrible curricula providers, to the point where people conflate the standards and the curricula.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Over the past ten years I've spent a lot of time volunteering in poor urban middle schools, mostly in math tutoring/teaching roles. Sure enough, one of the big hangups kids have is algebra. The article is right that it's one of the first real abstract problem solving skills we try to teach kids, and that definitely makes it harder for them. In my experience there is an additional problem: Basic arithmetic skills.

If a kid can't do division and knows it, how can they approach a problem like, "It is 800 miles from Denver to LA by train. train A leaves from Denver to LA at 80mph while train B leaves from LA to Denver at 70mph. How far from LA do the trains cross paths?" We can start breaking this down:

        70mi*x/h + 80mi*x/h = 800mi
        x * 70mi/h = M

        150mi*x/h = 800mi
        x = 800mi/(150mi/h)
        x = 5.33...h

        M = 5.33h * 70mi/h
        M = 373.333...mi

OK, that's all well and done. Now do that without division. Do that without a clear grasp of 1. what division does and 2. how to do division. The only thing you really know about division is that when you take tests on it, you tend to do poorly. You can't do this problem. You look at it and don't see any tools you can use to attack it because the only thing that works on it is division and you do not get division.

The problem is, a _lot_ of kids don't get division. Why? That's above my pay grade. If I was going to take a stab in the dark, I'd say that at the highest level it's to do with passing kids who shouldn't be passing, and then teaching the next year's class as if they already know what they need to know. Every year they fall a little bit more behind, until finally they're so lost it's hopeless. It's easy to take aim at algebra but what about the shaky foundation we're trying to build it on? Of course, this would require a lot of kids to be held back, and that's not an appealing solution. I think we need to assess where in our math education kids start to fall behind, and figure out what's wrong there. Unfortunately for the kids, the solution will probably involve more multiplication/division drill sheets, and more word problems to test those skills.

The article also points out the difficulty in starting a STEM degree without calculus. I started a STEM degree without calculus. I was lucky to get into the university I got into without calculus, and the calc 1 course was taught as a remedial class for all the folks who got 4s instead of 5s on their AP calc exams. This is where I had my own first brush with trying to build the next layer of mathematics education on a shaky foundation. It was very difficult, I nearly quit, and it fucked up my GPA enough I was still paying for it four years later at my graduation. I was 18 and had a bright future to look forward to in graduating from a respected university with a STEM degree, and it was nearly too much for me. I don't see how we can ask 13 year old kids to do the same with algebra. We need to work out the kinks on the way there. When it's time for them to learn algebra we want them to have all the tools they need so they can focus on the algebra, not on the arithmetic.

To be clear, I don't have any solutions here. Just a lot of problems.

<comment><USER27> You're absolutely right. I volunteer for an adult literacy program and focus on adult basic education for math and see many of the same problems that you see with school-age students.

There are many reasons why students fall behind (many of which have nothing to do with school at all), but one of the reasons they _stay_ behind is failure of the educational system to focus on "THE BASICS" before moving on to more advanced topics.

The thing about mathematics education is that there are no shortcuts. Students HAVE TO understand and master previous material before moving on to the next topic.

I think it is smart the SF schools are waiting until high school to teach algebra. Most kids simply aren't ready for algebra before that time. The few that are ready can always get on an advanced track but it won't be many.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> >Why Did San Francisco Schools Stop Teaching Algebra in Middle School?

Mandated equal outcomes coupled with racial diversity.

</comment><comment><USER29> hmmm...

> but ensures that all students enter high school with the same mathematical > foundation

There's a saying among conservative wags: "The opposite of quality is equality."

That seems to be the case here.</comment>


Reuters totally clueless about the meaning of "hacking" - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/03/idUS201473221420120203 <comment><USER2> I'm not angry at Reuters for using the word hacker in the common way, since it is used by everyone that way, and they are not in the wrong for using a term with the definition the public uses. I'm angry that Reuters used Mark saying that he is a hacker to imply that he is associated with people who damaged Fortune 500 companies, _especially when he (Mark) defines hacker to mean something completely different to the common, and they use that in the article._ This entire article was a thinly veiled attempt to launch an ad hominem attack against Silicon Valley for opposing SOPA. The opposition of SOPA by Silicon Valley was even mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER3> > The opposition of SOPA by Silicon Valley was even mentioned in the article.

Unsurprising given that this was originally published in a Hollywood Biz rag: [http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/facebook-ipo- mark-z...](http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/facebook-ipo-mark- zuckerbergs-bizarre-ode-hackers-35060)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Wait, what? He clearly quotes Mark saying, "In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done." Then he (the author) says, "That's a spirited defense of a means of protest that has wreaked havoc on a litany of Fortune 500 companies over the last year." How is building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done, a means of protest, and how does that wreak havoc on Fortune 500 companies?

And I found this pretty insulting too, "Wall Street probably won't mind all the idealism as long as it doesn't get in the way of the stock price -- provided Anonymous isn't a featured speaker at the next shareholders meeting."

What happened to proper journalism, where the author did at least a little bit of background research before publishing an article?

<comment><USER4> > What happened to proper journalism, where the author did at least a little > bit of background research before publishing an article?

That's always been rare. Deadlines, on the other hand, are never in short supply.

<comment><USER2> Plus, this was written by a pro-Hollywood news site, so I'm assuming the author probably knew a little bit, but decided to attempt to twist Mark's words in a negative. Admittedly, he pretty much failed.

<comment><USER5> To us and other technologically-informed people, he failed. But to the general public who already associates the term "hacker" with a destructive force, the author probably further reinforced the negative connotations. People hear (read) what they want to hear, especially if it already agrees with their current understandings.

And it's a shame really. I wonder if some day, with the help of hackers, technology, and the resultant spread of information, the general public won't be so ignorant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just a note to everyone: this isn't "Reuters" writing this. If you notice the byline, "By Brent Lang at TheWrap", this is content syndicated from "The Wrap", which appears to be some Hollywood celeb gossip rag.

<comment><USER7> This story appears on Reuters.com with the Reuters layout and Reuters branding. Whether it is syndicated or not, it is Reuters-endorsed content that, in my opinion, should bear the same weight as the Associated Press. It's kind of sad that content of this quality has made it to their site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I will definitely agree that Reuters missed Zuckerberg's point.

But this made me think of another point: Who are we to assign connotations to "hacker"? The only complaint we legitimately have is the corruption of language, if you want to make the argument that the definition of the word was originally 'tinkerer' and not 'exploiter of systematic weaknesses or loopholes' (or even more crudely, digital breaker-and-enterer).

If somebody is using a systematic weakness in IP to take down a website, that's within a class of thing, we can call it A. If somebody wants to take apart a device and re-purpose it, that's within another class of thing, we can call it B.

So you and I, more or less, consider A as a subset of B. Over here, we define "hacking" as B, while the media tends to define it as A. Meanwhile we get up on our high horse, saying that "real hacking" is actually B (which, again, encompasses A). But, apart from the corruption of the language, who cares? I think that our reaction to the media calling A both evil, and "hacking", puts us on the defensive, because we think of "hacking" as B, and as such, to us it sounds like the media is attacking tinkering as dangerous.

But that's nonsense, the media doesn't care about, or understand, tinkering. We could just as well change the name of B to "tinkering" and dodge any negative connotation. The only reason we stick to "hacking" _for better or worse_ (I'm not saying we should run away), is that it's our legacy, in a way. So given all that, I think we're in the position of promoting a definition of "hacker" that is new to the media, rather than telling them that they're using the "wrong" definition.

<comment><USER9> I actually don't think too many engineers are 'hackers'.

I certainly don't consider myself much of a hacker, and I don't think many here are either.

We are programmers. We build stuff. We need to know everything there is to know about security risks, but most of us stopped coding windows trojans and worms after high school.

I don't think many of us know (or care) how to write keygens and cracks for games, or invisibly extract cash from a bank via social engineering.

That's the definition I subscribe to. Hackers are highly specialized in computer security, whether they're white-hat or black-hat.

So Reuters is not using the wrong definition. It just feels like school kids giving new meanings to words, then laughing at their 'lame' parents who don't understand.

"Tinkering" sounds kind of lame, but it is what it is.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I'm posting on Hacker News! The new meaning is fine, but don't act like other people are stupid for not getting it.

<comment><USER8> To be clear, I don't know that it's a new meaning. Stallman always says that the "tinkerer" is the original meaning, and that the "tinkerer with security holes" subset became the popular definition later.

<comment><USER10> I think it might be better to say that in the days when the meaning of the word "hacker" was still entirely up in the air, getting at the insides of things (especially infrastructural things) was often associated with being "one of the bad guys."

And the "thing" (for lack of a better word) about computing (and also to some extension all sorts of other fields) that interested the relevant loosely- defined subculture consisted, while certainly not entirely, at least substantially of the insides of things. So you ended up dealing with security even if that wasn't your primary interest.

That's about as clearly as I can put it, anyway. Please do note that I'm not saying it's a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When you realize it's just syndicated off of The Wrap, which is apparently some Hollywood news site, it makes more sense.

[http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/facebook-ipo- mark-z...](http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/facebook-ipo-mark- zuckerbergs-bizarre-ode-hackers-35060)

<comment><USER12> How weird is that? A global news agency syndicating content from a small news site out of nowhere.

<comment><USER13> How is it that weird? It makes perfect sense for global news distributors to source content from small providers.

Not saying they did a good job of it here... but the principle is sound.

<comment><USER12> The role of news agencies like Reuters is to produce quality news on matters that smaller papers might not have the resources to report themselves... like TheWrap just exemplified.

<comment><USER14> No Reuters and AP are in the business of providing cheap content to fill up gaps in publications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> steve-howard I found it funny that the in-text "also read this" spam was about Megaupload. Might be something in my adblock, but it didn't show up any different than the article text and wasn't a link.

<comment><USER15> Same but I don't have any adblock on, I think someone had copy and paste fail.

<comment><USER16> It turns up from time to time in print publications as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The key error the author makes is that he fails to _Notice His Confusion_. When something confuses you, you have to _stop_ and figure out why you're wrong. You can't be confused and right at the same time. If you are confused, then something you believe is false.

So when a man known to be highly intelligent and very successful makes a statement which you find "bizarre", you don't write an article "Zuckerberg makes baffling statement", you think "Why am I baffled? Clearly I'm missing something about what's going on here", and you _do more research_. The concept 'I am confused' is not newsworthy.

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/>

</comment><comment><USER18> Timeline:

4:28MEZ "The word 'hacker' has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers," Zuckerberg wrote.

YEP!

4:28MEZ "In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. [...]"

Yeah, kinda...

4:28MEZ That's a spirited defense of a means of protest that has wrecked havoc on a litany of Fortune 500 companies over the last year.

Erm? Troll?

4:28MEZ Back on HN.

</comment><comment><USER19> Seriously though, when I first found HN I was wondering what I had stumbled in to. A few days later I was hooked. Now over a year later, when I read the term hacker about someone doing something illegal I react weirdly to it.

Most people still don't know what silicon valley and HN mean when they say hacker yet.

<comment><USER20> This wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't included the part about Zuck actually explaining what he meant by the "hacker way". It's like they breezed right over it and started making references to Anonymous as if that has anything to do with what he was talking about.

<comment><USER19> I do think there was some link bait in there too. It was basically a bunch of keywords jammed in to badly written sentences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wrote a corrections request to both Reuters and The Wrap. Little good it will do, I'm sure, but it offends me to see a journalist spend so little effort trying to be correct. How absurd to use quotes which actually indicate the opposite of your conclusion? It's the equivalent of quoting "Many companies in our industry treat their employees poorly, but we're different.", and concluding "Mr. X and his company take advantage of the poor standards of the industry to mistreat their employees".

</comment><comment><USER22> In all fairness, the word gets used in many ways. Further down the HN front page there's a story "VeriSign Hit by Hackers."

They don't mean that VeriSign was hit by people who built cool software over the weekend.

Reuters is a major news organization, and they should know the definition as Zuckerberg is using it... especially since he explains it in the quote. But they aren't making up a new definition out of thin air.

<comment><USER23> I note that that story _also_ comes from Reuters. However, it is clear that the definition they are using is an established one. You can tell because our response when the word "hacker" is used that way is "You shouldn't use the word 'hacker' that way. Our definition is older", as opposed to "That's a bizarre and wrong usage of the word 'hacker'".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just another pointless post upvoted because it has the word 'hacker' in it.

You don't have to give attention to every lame story that "doesn't get it." Even if this _was_ a story by Reuters, _which it is not_ , it still wouldn't matter. Welcome to 20 years ago when the media stopped giving a shit about giving hackers a fair shake.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was going to leave a comment, but the comments are closed on that article. Reuters allows comments for a "limited period after publication" but the article has only been there for less than 3 hours. Smells a little fishy to me, maybe they were called out for their nonsense?

<comment><USER26> Fishy but not unexpected. Online publications always switch off comments when they see a huge traffic bump and realize they have made fools of themselves and are being told as much in the comments.

For example, a few weeks ago the NYTimes Public Editor made a blog post about whether it should be their policy to note in articles when public figures are obviously lying in their remarks. (They're worried about seeming like the liberal media and they think they should "fairly balance" truth and fiction on issues like climate change or what percentage of planned parenthood's money is spent on abortions.) This resulted in immediate outrage from the commenters and vicious comments. Not profanity -- articulate rebuttals that just made the NYTimes look like idiots. Comments switched off. Later they attempted to walk it back, poorly. Same articulate rebuttals, NYTimes look like idiots again. Comments switched off even faster. Not even sure why they enabled them on the second post to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > ... provided Anonymous isn't a featured speaker at the next shareholders > meeting.

Not content with mere ignorance about what "hacking" is and conflating it with cracking and script kiddies, the author ices the article by demonstrating ignorance about cracking and script kiddies as well.

</comment><comment><USER28> I bet Brent Lang from Reuters will really fall off his chair when he realizes his article has been trending second on -- gasp -- Hacker News! You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy...

LOL

</comment><comment><USER29> Obviously the author of this article has a bone to pick with the technology industry as a result of SOPA being shut down for now, but if we divorce ourselves from our knowledge of tech lingo, this doesn't read as a "thinly veiled attempt to launch an ad hominem attack against Silicon Valley." The author clearly is unfamiliar with the way we use the term "hacker" or even that it has another definition and, therefore, when Zuckerberg says that the term "has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers," he doesn't realize Zuckerberg is trying to say that the term has an entirely different meaning from breaking into computers. He clearly thinks Zuckerberg is saying that hackers (which he reads as "people who break into computers") are unfairly portrayed as people who break into computers to do bad, when in reality they sometimes break into computers for constructive reasons. He doesn't realize Zuckerberg is literally saying that the media mistakenly interprets "hackers" as "people who break into computers, period." Zuckerberg's use of "connotation" instead of "denotation" makes it sound like he's defending cracking philosophically as opposed to saying that hacking has a totally different meaning to people in the tech industry.

I've reprinted his quote of Zuckerberg with parenthetical glosses showing how the author and anyone not innoculated by knowledge of hacker culture would probably interpret it.

"In reality, hacking (breaking into computers) just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it (breaking into computers) can be used for good (to fight what you perceive as unjustice) or bad (personal gain or schadenfreude), but the vast majority of hackers I've met tend to be idealistic people (hippies who hate corporations) who want to have a positive impact on the world (by getting rid of capitalism)."

With that reading, I think most of us too would be disappointed or even furious with Zuckerberg. I'm glad that wealth and fame haven't compromized Zuckerberg's view of himself as a hacker in our sense of the word, but I think he did a really bad job explaining to the media that the word is used completely differently by techies. That is unfortunate since he is one of the few people with enough influence to get the public to understand and adopt our usage of the word.

</comment><comment><USER30> This was an excellent article, when looked at through the lens of making ad revenue, which is the only lens through which this drivel could flourish. Simply put, online content providers (I refuse to call this crap "news") need eyeballs, and writing crap like this causes eyeballs to appear.

Fortunately, about 50% of the eyeballs are protected by adblockers, but still a great day at the office, for which I suspect he will get much kudos, and be asked to write similar crap again.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hacktivism is still a fairly big part of "the hacker way", and so it should be. I think the concept of wreaking havoc on fortune 500 companies is actually a fair representation of the hacker spirit, whether it is done by damaging their websites, or creating small startups to compete against them. I prefer the latter, but it is perfectly ok to associate the former as part of the same hacker ideal.

<comment><USER32> _> I think the concept of wreaking havoc on fortune 500 companies is actually a fair representation of the hacker spirit, whether it is done by damaging their websites, or creating small startups to compete against them. I prefer the latter, but it is perfectly ok to associate the former as part of the same hacker ideal._

While that may be your opinion -- and I don't necessarily disagree with it -- the point remains that the author took Zuckerberg's comments about hackers to mean that he considered himself what we know as a "black hat" hacker, which he clearly did not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Once societal mainstream embraces -- and misuses -- a word that a subset of society previously held dearly, it's time for that subset to let the word go, regardless of how much they romanticized or embraced it.

<comment><USER34> _it's time for that subset to let the word go, regardless of how much they romanticized or embraced it._

Except for the fact that's just not going to happen.

<comment><USER33> I agree, but it would sure be nice if people worried more about what they do than what they're called. It's just a word that people get attached to. When I talk to my friends/family about what I do, I certainly don't call myself a "hacker", nor would I even if they all understood the true meaning of the word. The fact that people are so irrationally passionate about the word, to me, says a lot more about them than the people who use it the wrong way.

<comment><USER34> It's a _concept_ , not just a word and there's no other word for the concept. Sure, if everyone were to agree to start using the word "wizfoo" instead of "hacker" for the concept, maybe that would help avoid the confusion that occurs due to some people confounding different definitions for the word. On the other hand, the English language is filled to the brim with words that have multiple (and sometimes opposite) definitions, so I see no reason why the world can't deal with that fact here. If there's blame to be placed here, it is certainly the fault of the journalists who refuse to acknowledge the distinction, as it is their job to be masters of words, and to understand these sorts of issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> title should read: 'Brent Lang, Film reporter at TheWrap.com, totally clueless about the meaning of "hacking"'

</comment><comment><USER36> This article was syndicated by Reuters. By contrast, here is an article about Facebook written by Reuters. <http://s831.us/AEOd8B>

</comment><comment><USER37> Unfortunately, I would say this is technically not news. If a mainstream news source _wasn't_ totally clueless about hacking, that would be news.

<comment><USER38> Hey, if I ever find any reporter at Bloomberg that screws up like this I will personally walk over and fix the situation. If you wanted the same news without the personal editorial, this was our take:

[http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-02/zuckerberg-s- hac...](http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-02/zuckerberg-s-hacker-way- not-profit-to-guide-post-ipo-facebook.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> <https://twitter.com/#!/BrentALang>

Send him a message and let him know.

</comment><comment><USER40> My brother thinks that hackers are all blackhats, and isnt aware of the terms black hat or white hat, lol hes fucking retarded, plus he thinks he knows how to use a computer yet tcip completely slipped out of his vocabulary

</comment><comment><USER41> Love how neither of their "Also Read" are hyperlinks.

</comment><comment><USER42> Just another crap blogger. Move along, people.

</comment><comment><USER43> Wow. Just wow.

</comment><comment><USER44> hacker != cracker

</comment><comment><USER45> Good find, thanks. I wouldn't say Reuters is 'clueless' about the meaning and they quoted Zuck several times laying out exactly what it means to him. Their point really was that the word hacker has different connotations to most people and this was an odd time for him to attempt to sway public opinion on the definition of the word. I agree with them, it was an odd time. That doesn't make it bad, maybe it was brilliant - but it was a strange thing to see in an IPO filing (again strange != bad).

</comment><comment><USER46> I believe that a good developer or engineer is also a good hacker. Peace, dude!</comment>


How Much to Charge as a Freelance Computer Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://gun.io/blog/how-much-to-charge-as-a-freelance-computer-programmer/

<comment><USER2> One of my father's best friends was a jeweler. He was struggling with what to charge, and how to increase his business. My father told him to double or triple it. At first he was very hesitant. This seemed nuts.

Yet, my father asked him how much a $500 ring was worth to a consumer? Then if you put a $2000 price tag on a ring how much it was worth?

When it comes to some things, the price equals the quality. For jeweler this is especially true. Jewelry is something you're trying to impress with, and a $2000 ring is a lot more impressive than a $500 ring.

In a certain way, its an intangible, just like programming. A $25/hr programmer sounds probably pretty green to me and not that great. Yet, someone who is charging $150/hr must be pretty damn good.

Of course, if you can't deliver the goods, none of this works, but assuming that you can competently deliver, raise the prices. You'll compete more that way than trying to lower yourself to beat the lowest guy on eLance.

<comment><USER3> > _In a certain way, its an intangible, just like programming._

OTOH, I don't check references when buying jewelry. If I can't find somebody telling me a guy/gal is worth that much an hour, no sale.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely agreed. If you can't do the output, you can't charge for it. But the limiting factor here is you.

If you've got exceedingly happy customers and solid output, charging $25/hr is just silly.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How HN improved your life? - <AUTHOR>

Maybe you quit your job, maybe you started your own business, or you're getting more sleep, or you're dieting, or you're practicing mindful meditation.<p>What life improving event or practices you started after reading a HN thread? <comment><USER2> It has made me more aware of my own ability. It is really easy to see yourself as better than you are when your peers aren't expert, but on Hacker News I don't have that problem as so many of you are above me. This helps me to keep improving.

It has also exposed me to concepts that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. For example, I was introduced to Lisp through Clojure in part through this site. This exposure to other ideas is pretty awesome, since it helps me get a more nuanced picture of the tech world. In my C++ class I have a teacher who preaches object oriented programming as the most revolutionary idea since the wheel (which you can model with object oriented programming..) while online I'm exposed to the many advocates of functional and even event driven programming. I could give more examples.

I think some people might find these things to be inconsequential. I mean, it isn't getting a job or a wife. However, these little things are constantly adding up to more intelligent decisions which are leading to other wise choices. I think it qualifies.

I think that I can safely say that Hacker News has made me a slightly wiser person.

Oh, and god willing I'll be able to get an internship through contacts on Hacker News. Wish me luck. =)

</comment><comment><USER3> I discuss world-changing news with my son after dinner. NASA discoveries, social phenomena, whatever. I get it all from HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hrrrm.... I don't know that I'd say HN has "changed my life" in any specific, grand sense. But I've definitely learned a lot from hanging out here. If I had to cite one thing in particular that I've gotten out of my time here, it would probably be "being exposed to the Customer Development methodology." I'm pretty sure it was a link or two from here that first got me reading about CD, and led me to buying Steve's book, which I would cite as being "life changing" (or at least on the verge of it.)

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks to HN, I found out that only my persistence and creativity is the limit regarding my software development career. Being a corporate software drone is not the only viable way of having a decent life.

</comment><comment><USER6> You asked this 16 hours ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2176759>

Any particular reason for asking it again?

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought the question was not well formulated. Sorry about that

<comment><USER7> Tough crowd

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So far, I wouldn't say it has "changed my life", at least not on the scale that usually suggests. I would like it to. I have a project in mind that I would like to get support for/feedback on. I completely suck at starting discussions and the things I "submit" are generally largely ignored -- which is a problem I have historically in other forums, it isn't particular to HN. I hardly slept this week and then slept like 9 or so hours last night. Maybe this weekend or some other weekend, I will figure out what to ask. :-/ Or maybe not. Time will tell.

<comment><USER9> It sounds like you should be testing more.

What is different about the questions you ask and the ones that get responses?

How can you make your questions more like theirs?

Ultimately, just throw up a lot of crap and see what sticks. Then improve on what sticks.

<comment><USER8> Just throwing up a lot of crap and seeing what sticks doesn't generally work for me. To me, that's the slowest, most painful way to figure out what works. Studying the successes of others is my preferred route. This particular idea is kind of newly born, so probably best to let it incubate a bit anyway. And, as I said, I have not slept well this week. Posting with a clear head generally gets better results.

<comment><USER9> Obviously, not sleeping isn't the greatest way to have your best thoughts. I understand that.

However, I think you're missing out on a huge upside. You are judged by your best works not your failures.

The problem with studying the success of others is that you're not doing anything. I would know, I spent 2 years doing it and had nothing to show for it.

When I say throw up a lot of crap, what I really mean is throw up good enough stuff to validate the idea. Then go from there. It maybe painful, but it works. It certainly isn't slow. I can throw up an outline of 5 blog posts and say, "Which one do you want to read?" and then write the post everyone likes. Or I can study how the best bloggers do it and start tomorrow(which never comes).

<comment><USER8> Oh, I actually do plenty of that or I wouldn't still be posting here. I'm a woman and very open about that. Women sometimes comment here that it's a tough environment for a woman. And it can be. But it's also a growth experience. If I get badly downvoted or something, I wonder why, I wonder what I can do differently, rather than just feeling burned and going away to lick my wounds.

In this case, I really think my impetus to immediately post and start asking questions is probably a bad one, a premature impetus. It will be better for me to do some of the legwork before posting and requesting feedback. I'm not a patient person. :-) So I don't really want to wait. But I think it is best, not just because I am not in a good place mentally today but for other reasons as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://blog.lifeasparesh.in/2010/07/what-social-skills-i- lea...](http://blog.lifeasparesh.in/2010/07/what-social-skills-i-learn-from- hn.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> It didn't.</comment>


Show HN: Bedtime Bulb – A low-blue light bulb for healthy sleep - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I'm Greg Yeutter, the founder of Bedtime Bulb (https://bedtimebulb.com/). We make a low-blue light bulb for healthy sleep. For every bulb purchased, we give the gift of healthy light to one person in need (https://bedtimebulb.com/mission/).
I've been obsessed with the problem of blue light at night for almost a decade. Blue light at night has been shown to interfere with the circadian rhythm, which could result in poor quality sleep and reduced productivity. I've built several products in the space so far, but I believe Bedtime Bulb has the best product-market fit for consumers.
Bedtime Bulb not only produces drastically less blue light than other light sources (especially most LEDs), but it is also the right light for the evening. Based on extensive research, other products that claim to do the something similar are too bright and don't give you the warm, comfortable light that calms you before bed.
We are pre-launch but have 1,000 units shipping to the U.S. right now to make sure we got everything right. If you are interested in giving us feedback on one of these prototypes, I would love to have you join our beta program.
For $5 (covers the cost of shipping to CONUS), you'll get:
- One of the beta bulbs, yours to keep
- A guarantee that you'll get the best discount on the final product
Join the beta program: https://bedtimebulb.com/beta-program/
or sign up for our newsletter: https://bedtimebulb.com/newsletter-signup/
I'd also love to get your feedback on the current website and copy.
Thank you!
Greg
Learn more: https://bedtimebulb.com/
Our mission: https://bedtimebulb.com/mission/
Beta Program: https://bedtimebulb.com/beta-program/ <comment> core-questions Any chance of shipping to Canada?

Thoughts on offering a plug-in nightlight or something in that form factor? My son has an LED nightlight in his room that's waaaay too blue. Would love to change it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'll do that! Thank you for your interest!

One thing to note is that this is not really a night light replacement. It's a bit too bright for that. More likely, you would use it in the hour or so before bed.

If you are solely focused on a night light replacement, I can definitely point you in the right direction. Let me know!</comment></comment>


The Dangers of the "Google Analytics-Powered Startup" - <AUTHOR> http://simontorring.com/google-analytics/ <comment><USER2> The criticism of sampling in this blogpost is way overblown. (1) there's virtually no difference between the accuracy of a sample size of 10k and one of 100k, and those are the sample sizes you're usually working with (2) in particular, when working with custom reports you get from the API, you can actually specify the accuracy you want (high, normal, low) as part of your API request.

To boot, 9 times out of 10 what you're interested in as an analyst is not the absolute numbers anyway, but ratios and trends. So whether or not e.g. every precious little pageview gets counted is irrelevant, as long as the way it is counted is stable over time.

This is endemic to so many discussions about big data: "if we don't have every individual data point ever, all hell will break loose and we lose the ability to make any sense of the data." Take an intro to basic probability and statistics, will ya.

There's legitimate problems with using Google Analytics for a startup, but they're mostly related to the fact that it doesn't provide good tooling around A/B, customer lifecycle management and custom metrics – they're possible but you're not making it easy on yourself. These things are the bread and butter of SaaS and app analytics (as opposed to ecommerce or media) so it makes sense to invest in something like Mixpanel/Heap/Keen/KISSMetrics. But those are issues with Google Analytics as a product, not with the quality of its data.

<comment><USER3> Yes and no.

Exporting visit trends over 5 landing pages and a month? Sure.

Exporting page views for 100,000 products each of whom got 5-100 views? Then that 5% sample is going to exclude most products. The latter approach is however necessary if you're trying to determine how each product category is really performing.

Two alternatives I prefer to Google Analytics Premium (once you get to that size): Webtrekk, a small but competent German company whose product costs around 1/10th as much per year, has a fraction of the bugs, and does reliable unsampled daily dumps (moving to hourly, I believe), although the UI is a little less intuitive; and a self-hosted Piwik instance, so you don't need to worry about data exports. The truth is modern relational databases are incredibly powerful and will easily scale even with information like impressions in onsite search. There are multi-TB instances of Postgres out there. I really suggest installing either in parallel to GA or on their own when you set up tracking.

I do agree with you that anybody involved in any kind of job that includes "analytics" in the title, or indeed most people in management, should take an intro stats course. I particularly like Introduction to Statistical Learning because of its brevity, relatively high abstraction level, and lack of maths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google Analytics is really designed for, and works well for, _websites_. If your startup is a website, as opposed to an app or service which happens to be on the web, then it's a good option.

For our web app, we use Mixpanel, along with tracking events into our own database. This allows you to track custom events for the things that matter in your app - think 'someone added something to the cart' or 'someone clicked the reply button', not 'someone visited this page'.

Yes, google analytics does let you track custom events, but it's extremely limited compared to mixpanel which lets you attach a properties object with as many custom properties as you like to each event, and then do retroactive analysis on them instantly.

</comment><comment><USER5> > _It's a bit like how Gallup can summarise Indonesians' smartphone habits by > calling 1,500 of them; it works fine if you're looking for a general > pattern, but it might skew the data if you're looking for data about a tiny > niche of smartphone users or if Gallup happened to call up relatively too > many Nokia users that day._

This is an incorrect statement and interpretation of how statistics work. Is there a chance that the 1,500 Indonesians that they call that day not representative of the over population? Of course, but the probability of that is very low. This concept specifically is known as statistical significance[0]. The conclusion is: sampling error can lead to incorrect conclusions, but if you can eliminate any biases to your sampling, then it can indeed be representative. Personally, the more important take away is this: before you start deriving conclusions from your metrics, it's necessary to fully grok the concept of statistics.

[0] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance)

</comment><comment><USER6> Completely agree. Sampling is fine; but you need to understand that the free version of Google Analytics isn't a replacement for a proper BI tool. GA also doesn't even do sampling until your traffic is over a certain threshold, so at low traffic levels it's actually accurate (though those levels are also low enough that you probably shouldn't try to draw too many insights).

This is not to say that GA is bad; in fact I would call you stupid if your web startup went out and bought a tool before you launched. GA is free, it works well, it's super-easy to implement, and people should use it; but once you've reached the point where you can afford something better (usually in addition to GA, not in replacement of) you should look into doing so.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Google Analytics is much better than nothing, and until you reach a certain scale (I used the estimate of ~1 million monthly sessions) I think it's sufficient.

What I am mainly arguing is that relying completely on GA for reports and performance measurements is dangerous and frustrating.

\- Simon

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have various low traffic websites, and just because I hated having to go through the burden of creating accounts for all of them in Google Analytics, I wrote a very simple web analytics engine called Microanalytics[1].

It is a Couchapp (which means it only takes a CouchDB database to work, no other server or backend) and it allows for emitting of custom events with a simple `ma(event, [optional_value])`.

Every event is tied to a session, so later you can analyse and filter events based on session, see exactly who did what on your site, see if the same user came back at some other day, things like this.

So, in my small websites I can clearly see when a person enters the site and all that. Also, 1 visitor makes a difference, and when I tested having Google Analytics alongside Microanalytics what I saw was that Google Analytics statistics showed a lot more visitors than Microanalytics. I know Microanalytics can't be wrong, because it literally counts me in real time when I enter the site, so I don't know what to think. The only thing it doesn't count is visitors without Javascript, but are there so much of them? Does Google Analytics count them? I think not.

\---

Also good to say: the way Microanalytics does data visualization is through a command line tool that prints to STDIN, so you can do all sorts of things with Unix pipes. For example, for doing an A/B Test experiment once, I just called `ma('version', versionName)` in each tested page, `ma('conversion', 'converted')` when appropriate, and later ran the following:

        for name in versionA versionB
            echo $name
            set v (microanalytics identifier inspect sessions --limit 300 | grep $name | wc -l)
            set c (microanalytics identifier inspect sessions --limit 300 | grep $name | grep converted | wc -l)
            echo $v $c (echo "$c / $v" | bc -l)
            echo
        end

(This example is in the fish shell, but you can do the same in bash, obviously.)

[1]: [https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics](https://github.com/fiatjaf/microanalytics)

<comment><USER8> Awesome work!

You'd have to dig into the details (referer, user agent, etc.) on the Google Analytics side to see the differences... GA probably tracks every random web scraping (search engine) hit by monitoring the loading of the JavaScript file.

<comment><USER7> Oh, I forgot they could monitor the loading of the tracking file!

So that's it, I can't do that in CouchDB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What drives me nuts about Google Analytics is their foot-dragging on mobile.

Despite the mobile version of Google Analytics, trying to do anything meaningful, like analyse app retention, it's a huge pain.

All the newer players to mobile analytics, like Flury or Localytics, have this stuff nailed but Google Analytics leaves you with out-dated, web-oriented reports like the "New vs. Returning" and "Loyalty" and generally prefers to push you towards looking at sessions instead of actually understanding what your users are doing.

OK time to stop here before I start to rant...

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't explored the current functionality for mobile apps, but we're currently working multi-funnel analysis and it's a complete nightmare given that most purchases journeys happen across more than one device. And that's with GA Premium..

\- Simon

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So, what happened to collecting traffic information yourself?

You know, from Apache logs and similar tools.

Yes, I know google analytics gives a lot of bells and whistles and tools and whatnot.

But it's still YOUR website, YOUR data, YOUR traffic. YOU can get (most of) the info that GA is sampling down.

<comment><USER11> Collecting data from YOUR website - costs time/money. Google Analytics is FREE and low cost time/money to install.

It's true the data is there and we can get to it... but this takes some foresight that having installed analytics does not require. e.g. a few months after the original apache logs have rotated - you realize it would be nice to know how many mobile safari users are coming to your site vs chrome android users... because you're trying to determine the impact of releasing that next feature that requires webrtc. You can add the analysis to future traffic and give it a few extra weeks but wouldn't it be nice to know right now?

GA is nice because it lets you avoid the investment in time/money and you can still go back and look at historical data points you might not have imagined being useful before...

I think in this way sampling is really not a big deal... if it is you're right - absolute right. collect the data points that require this level of accuracy yourself... but I don't think if you need that level of accuracy early on you're focusing on the right things...

<comment><USER12> Not sure I agree with that.

There are, or used to be, plenty of tools for parsing the web logs, crunching the numbers, and spitting out pretty graphs.

Again, maybe not as pretty as GA, and not as many bells and whistles, but good enough.

<comment><USER11> but that can't be as easy as copy pasting a snippet of javascript code into your website?

<comment><USER10> Oh wow, yeah, reading files in /var/log/httpd/ is soooo hard.

I agree that not all people have the capability to work with this (read, front-end developers, Wordpress customizers, etc) still, I mean, even CPanel lets you download it from past months.

<comment><USER13> cPanel has multiple log analyzers built in. So the user doesn't have to go through that work. If your site is on a shared host and it uses cPanel, just log into cPanel and you'll find them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A quick spin through Segment.com's list of integrations show a TON of GA-like services. Anyone have any suggestions for an alternative to GA that provides the same type of data without the sampling / bloat / etc of GA?

<comment><USER15> Hey Noah, an unfortunate side effect of GA's power is its steeper learning curve. A new driver sitting in a Ferrari might consider all the paddle shifters and gauges to be "bloat," but in the right hands the car is a beast ...

Don't get me wrong, I do wish Google spent more time improving GA, but I think many of the alternatives sacrifice too much just to be beginner-friendly. What we need is a Tesla for web analytics.

<comment><USER14> Agreed - I've used GA for many years and it's indeed extremely powerful (especially for a free tool). And the tradeoff is fair, I think -- Google gives us a ton of power to analyze site data in exchange for, well, Google being able to analyze site data :) But it does take a bit of a kitchen-sink approach to things.

I guess I should rephrase my question to be less broad -- of the companies that purport to be competitive, do any of them do a particularly good job (even if just at subsets of GA's features)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr: Google Analytics is a great tool and informs you exactly what it does very well. You need to read what it does though.

I would say its a click bait.

<comment> grey-area Having dealt with lots of customers who take the stats generated by GA as gospel despite multiple problems, I disagree.

Some example problems: referrals unreliable, countries unreliable, sampling distorting figures, no warnings when data displayed is based on very little data, sessions often misinterpreted as clicks by users, inexplicable disparities with other methods of tracking because their methods are pretty opaque and because of sampling, in-page analytics looking deceptively like click-tracking when in most cases it uses page load data. Some of that you can attribute to user error, but it is not good for the market that google dominates tracking like this, and GA is sometimes misleading.

Just as an example of a problem I ran into recently - the free GA doesn't offer referral stats for https websites, but this isn't made clear to end users. As a result they simply trust that referrals have collapsed if a referring site switches to https.

<comment><USER15> The https referral issue isn't unique to GA, nor is it their fault. The browser doesn't pass a referrer value for HTTPS->HTTP traffic. Best way around this is to use HTTPS yourself, or use custom UTM tags on your link (if you have any say).

<comment> grey-area GA gives prominence to referrals in a world where more and more sites use https. People are making real business decisions based on this flawed stat, and most people have no idea that this is in fact a useless stat without https if any of your referrers are secure pages. Google says website x was your top referrer, and they just take that as truth.

I think they should just take it out and recommend using campaign links or landing pages or at the very least make it very clear that this is only a partial and distorted view. Same goes for in-page analytics etc. the presentation of overlays on page items (implying clicks) is misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The real issue if find about that, is StartUp with this kind of thinking tend to put number before people or actual results. And most of the time, you cannot reduce problem or solution with crunching number.

Once the breach is opened, it became a nightmare explaining your coworker that a small drop in Session does not probably need a complete restructuration of the website.

Currently working in this kind of startup, doing a good job is actually impossible as we changed everything every 3 month or so, because number changed in analytics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that's exactly the kind of frustrations that I've experienced countless times and hope to get better at combatting by exploring how GA really works and how/where it's limited. Slowly getting there..

\- Simon

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I loved the article. I think it tracks very much in line with the kind of experiences that I have personally had in working with Google Analytics data -- both via their reporting API and in the dashboard itself. I think GA is a great service though, when the caveats are considered and understood. It's great that you took the opportunity to state and consolidate this information in one place.

I also just want to shout out that I work for a startup called Narrative Science that offers a free product called Quill Engage ([https://quillengage.narrativescience.com/](https://quillengage.narrativescience.com/)) that can help identify some of the key insights from your GA data in a free weekly and monthly automated report.

</comment><comment><USER19> I agree with most of the points. We use GA for general traffic patterns, definitely not conversion tracking. It is horrible at true conversion tracking.

<comment><USER15> What kind of conversions are you trying to track? Although it takes some configuration, I've had no problems tracking all kinds of conversions for different sites--ecommerce, SaaS, leadgen, etc.

<comment><USER4> The worst thing about GA for conversion tracking is it's not retroactive, so you have to go though a slow configure/wait a few days/see if the data looks right/reconfigure cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not free, you're giving your users to google massive tracking machine.</comment>