OpenPGP really works - <AUTHOR> https://www.foo.be/2016/12/OpenPGP-really-works <comment><USER2> The ultimate engineer's perspective. It works so well that almost nobody uses it!

Signal isn't even that popular compared to other platforms like iMessage, but I bet more people use it than regularly PGP.

I was regularly signing messages with PGP on Fidonet all the way back in '93 (and trying to find people to swap encrypted messages with). It's a bit mind blowing that the useability of the successor program today, GPG, isn't much better than what people thought was kinda wonkish and hard back in the Compuserve days.

<comment><USER3> It isn't because GnuPG doesn't work well or because it is too hard to use that people don't use it. They don't use it because other people don't use it.

Why do people use Facebook instead of Diaspora? It's not because Facebook is better, works well, or is easier to use... It's because other people use Facebook.

Why do people use Skype instead of XMPP? It's not because Skype is better, works well, or is easier to use... It's because other people use Skype.

Why do people use WhatsApp instead of GnuPG or OTR? It's not because WhatsApp is better, works well, or is easier to use... It's because other people use WhatsApp.

It's always the same standard chicken and egg adoption problem. As shown in the article, GnuPG is used for package signing, commit signing, file encryption, and all sorts of things _that don 't involve many people_. But when it's about communication, you can only use GnuPG if the people you want to communicate with use GnuPG too... and thus the adoption problem applies.

And the reason people initially used Facebook, Skype, and WhatsApp is _not_ that they were easier to use or better. It's advertising. Notice how all of these are proprietary software made by companies with the means to advertise their software? You can bet people would use GnuPG, Diaspora, and XMPP if they had been advertised by companies like Facebook and Microsoft.

So if we want people to use open source software and open protocols instead of living in walled gardens, we need to advertise them. Advertising works.

<comment><USER4> >And the reason people initially used Facebook, Skype, and WhatsApp is not that they were easier to use or better. It's advertising. Notice how all of these are proprietary software made by companies with the means to advertise their software? You can bet people would use GnuPG, Diaspora, and XMPP if they had been advertised by companies like Facebook and Microsoft.

I know quite a few non-techies who use VLC, Firefox, LibreOffice, and other OS advertising-less projects. The difference is:

1\. Facebook, Skype and WhatsApp solved problems others didn't and became big. Now it's too late to fight.

Had Diaspora been around before FB, and as easy to work with (put name here, picture here, password here, friend here. You're all set up. Let's go), or XMPP been around before Skype (which is a _very_ old program in internet time), or Kontalk,Signal, etc. been around before WhatsApp (find friends by number, not by username), they probably would have taken off (at least to some degree).

Google came late onto the Desktop scene (Chromebooks) and are not successful while the incumbent (MS) is good.

MS came late onto the mobile scene and failed, while the incumbent (Google) is good.

<comment><USER5> > Had Diaspora been around before FB

I'd be willing to guarantee that with a name like Diaspora, it could have never achieved mass adoption under any circumstances. Most people won't know what that word means. The name sounds terrible and unfriendly, more like a disease than a social network your mother would want to join. Diaspora is another example of engineers not understanding how to make a product, top to bottom, for the general public.

<comment><USER6> I tend to agree. Naming is important and if you target masses (non-engineers, non-geeks etc.), you should name your product so that even a 5 years old kid would understand it without a second thought and memorize instantly. An anecdote, but I have harder times convincing people to use LibreOffice than OpenOffice for no reason other than a name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been using OpenPGP for years without problems. Key transition / exchange / verification can be a bit painful, but actually it is not that hard.

Also the longer you use OpenPGP, the less keys need to be verified. The start is very hard, since you start with no trusted keys at all. The longer you use it, the more fluent usage becomes.

Have been using GPG Suite on macOS and the only problem is, you may not get support for the new macOS on day 1 since apple provides no API for Mail.app. And then again, giving Apple some time to figure out their bugs of the intial major release isn't a bad idea.

<comment><USER8> > Also the longer you use OpenPGP, the less keys need to be verified. The > start is very hard, since you start with no trusted keys at all. The longer > you use it, the more fluent usage becomes.

This is exactly what scares me and the point of my "I'm giving up on PGP" article. People holding on to keys forever, moving them from laptop to laptop, never rotating them and asymptotically approaching compromise... because it's the only way to ease the pain.

<comment><USER9> How do you feel about Yubikey-based keys? Asking for a friend...

<comment><USER10> I have a YubiKey myself and they're really convenient. There's a cryptoprocessor inside so the key doesn't have to leave the device. I think it's more secure than a regular computer connected to the internet.

After reading¹² about this subject, I believe a reasonable level of security and ease-of-use can be achieved through the following process:

1\. Boot a live Linux distribution such as Tails on a computer disconnected from the Internet.

2\. Create the OpenPGP master key.

3\. Initialize the YubiKey with subkeys.

4\. Store the master key offline using paperkey³ and a machine-readable code.

The YubiKey is secure and convenient enough for daily use; the subkeys can be easily revoked and the hardware reinitialized with new keys.

Master key operations such as key signing and changing expiration dates require loading the master key into the offline live operating system. Much more of a hassle but hopefully not as frequent as YubiKey use.

Printing the master key on quality paper ensures³ it will survive for a long time.

¹ [http://security.stackexchange.com/a/51776/9252](http://security.stackexchange.com/a/51776/9252)

² [http://security.stackexchange.com/a/31598/9252](http://security.stackexchange.com/a/31598/9252)

³ [http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/](http://www.jabberwocky.com/software/paperkey/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a sort of basically reliable swiss army knife for file-based encryption problems, the kinds of problems you'd otherwise use AES passphrase-encrypted ZIP files to solve, PGP not only works but also has a bad rap.

And there are a lot of those problems! Maybe even the majority of them!

But PGP was designed for message encryption, and it's a poor choice for message encryption. The community is gradually converging on the idea that SMTP store-and-forward email is just never going to be cryptographically safe, and pretty much the only messaging application in which PGP makes any sense is SMTP email.

What's worse is, much of the PGP ecosystem really only makes sense in a messaging context. Which means that the complex parts of PGP, like key servers and subkeys and things like that, aren't really adding value, but still confuse and distract users.

<comment><USER12> A little off topic but could you point me towards some resources for learning about what pgp was meant to solve? I've read back and forth opinions about it on hackernews,reddit, etc but I've not seen a definitive description of how it attempts to solve the problem of encrypted communication that wasn't heavily editorialized.

<comment><USER13> > > As a sort of basically reliable swiss army knife for file-based encryption > problems, the kinds of problems you'd otherwise use AES passphrase-encrypted > ZIP files to solve, PGP not only works but also has a bad rap.

I have a text file. I encrypt it using a key. I send you the encrypted text file. How do you decrypt it? You need the key.

If I can send you the key securely why don't I just send the plain message using that secure mechanism?

Public key cryptography solves that problem.

<comment><USER14> Who said anything about sending the file anywhere?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> No one criticizes openPGP on the crypto point of view.

It is the UX/UI experience that anger people to the highest point. Noobs like long time users.

Correct key handling (signing, revoking, publishing and sometimes doing actually the job) is a burden.

Nothing is wrong with the code so far. Much more whatever correct the software is, it is a pain.

My guess, is that true correct cryptography requires this burden whatever the algorithms are because ensuring identity are trustable is where the more work is, and no software can do it.

<comment><USER16> > No one criticizes openPGP on the crypto point of view.

Hm?

Of course PGP is criticized for that, just less vocally.

\- Authentication is off by default in GPG

\- Even so, it's very complex, and most of the protocol isn't authenticated

[ This is problematic, because ciphers tend to be more or less easily malleable, so non-signed messages can be tampered with; this is also an issue for encrypting files symmetrically ]

(- Compression is on by default and makes everything super-slow for no good reason)

\- Widely used defaults for encryption and key derivation are rather arcane (eg. CAST5)

\- PGP signatures, by principle, are non-repudiatiable, unlike most modern encrypted chat applications, so they prove to _anyone_ _forever_ that your key signed that message.

\- PGP format announces all recipients to the world

\- No forward secrecy possible

\- ...

<comment><USER17> Would the lack of perfect forward secrecy be considered a shortcoming?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> online and offline are both important. Is pgp implemented on any formally verified code base?

<comment><USER19> No. I've only seen two, formal verifications of secure email with neither being PGP. I can't find the link to one but the other of Privacy-Enhanced Mail is here:

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b6e2/3ac057b8716ebd4ab7831f...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b6e2/3ac057b8716ebd4ab7831f4c4e03bdad59d4.pdf)

They use Kesterel's Specware tools to essentially turn it from HOL properties to a formal design with code generation following. Kesterel was kind enough to open-source some of their stuff:

[https://github.com/KestrelInstitute/Specware/](https://github.com/KestrelInstitute/Specware/)

However, recent results in other tooling suggest the best way to go about it would be using tools like F* in miTLS, CRYPTOL, SPARK Ada, and/or Frama-C. Each component of a basic, subset of PGP has already been verified in isolation. Now, the algorithms just need to be fed into such tools, the protocol speced out miTLS-style, the integration proven sound, and object code shown to match the source. It looks doable with today's formal methods. More a matter of available labor and interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My mobile Chrome is complaining about the site's certificate. Does this happen for others too? It seems it is having an issue with the issuer which is Let's Encrypt. Really strange.

</comment><comment><USER21> It doesn't</comment>


Show HN: Looking for a Great Remote Job as Fullstack Developer [HTML Animation] - <AUTHOR> https://ivanca.work/html5/your+startup?hn <comment><AUTHOR> The code for this presentation is open-source and you can find it at [https://github.com/Ivanca/PresentationIvan/](https://github.com/Ivanca/PresentationIvan/)</comment>


Coda, a "next-generation spreadsheet" – from rows and columns to custom apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16497444/coda-spreadsheet-krypton-shishir-mehrotra <comment><USER2> _> One of Mehrotra's chief frustrations with the older generation of documents was what he calls "the game of Battleship" — the need to describe rows and columns in formulas using headings like "A1 to F7," as in the old board game. In Coda documents, rows and columns are named objects, making formulas both easier to read and write. _

Lotus Improv from 1991 had "names" instead of rowcolumn coordinates. Quantrix from 2003 also has named "items" instead of rowcolumn coordinates. Neither product had widespread adoption.

It seems plausible that cryptic rowcolumns would be a major paint point for most Excel users but maybe it isn't.

Quantrix found a niche in financial modeling so maybe that domain of users (~50k users) value features like that enough to not use Excel.

Google Sheets continued the tradition of cryptic rowcols and has more adoption than either of those alternative products. (Probably because it costs $0.)

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

[2] [https://www.quantrix.com/QuantrixandExcelWhitePaper.pdf](https://www.quantrix.com/QuantrixandExcelWhitePaper.pdf)

<comment><USER3> It turns out that _not having to name things_ is a _feature_. Users often avoid naming things and dislike being forced to do so.

The reason is what developers already know: naming things is hard! (Two hard problems, etc.)

Of course, developers also know how _valuable_ good names are, so we like to take the time to pick good names. Users would rather just skip naming altogether and refer to things by letter/number or just by clicking on them.

<comment><USER2> _> It turns out that not having to name things is a feature. _

I think this is one of those great insightful points that's counterintuitive and yet has abundant real-world evidence we can't deny.

I'd guess that vast majority (99%) of programmers that program in languages requiring explicit variable names (Python, C, Java, Go, etc) will still use Excel _without named cells nor named columns_. Yes, they will _label_ their adjacent cells with freeform text (e.g. "TOTAL PRICE:") but they won't use the Excel "named regions" feature to be referenced in formulas. How do we reconcile the inconsistent attitude we have about the benefits of names?!?

It turns out that yes, naming cells is a form of "code documentation" and helps avoid "spaghetti formulas" \-- but it's also a _friction_. If programmers using Excel eschew cell names, it's a given regular users will too.

It also doesn't help that "names" in Excel is not a 1st class feature. It's a separate menu item and the name is a hidden "alias" for the cell.

With other products, the "name" of the cell is what you type into the box right there on the sheet. The UI for giving a cell a name is more immediate.

<comment><USER4> Range names come at a price. Try copying a sheet into another workbook that has conflicting names. Or copy-pasting your table in the same sheet to do something slightly different.

I use excel a lot and I found that the only convincing use case for range names is if you need to refer to ranges from VBA, then this is the only way for the code to find its way on a spreadsheet even if someone inserts some rows and columns. Otherwise range names create more problems than they solve.

<comment><USER5> >>Try copying a sheet into another workbook that has conflicting names.

This is really like copy pasting code from one namespace into other, with code in both spaces having same variable names.

You really need to think of a spreadsheet as a function. It must have single responsibility and must be called by another sheet to be used.

<comment> vertex-four And now you're designing a system which has none of the benefits of Excel for end-users, again.

<comment><USER5> We are designing nothing, excel allows you to create variables with names assured unique in a namespace(A single spreadsheet). You could use it any way you like.

But if you are copying a formula that has things like variable names into a new sheet, you have to understand that pasting the formula with its variables pointing to nothing is like inducing a NullPointerException.

<comment> vertex-four Yes, the point is, this is why people avoid naming things in Excel. Getting them to name things removes functionality.

<comment><USER5> In the following case:

         //B1 is renamed as first
         //B2 is renamed as second
         _______________
          f(x)| C3 = first * second
         _______________
           A | B | C | D
          _______________
        1|___|_2_|___|__
        2|___|_3_|___|__
        3|___|___|___|__
        4|   |   |   |

vs

         _______________
          f(x)| C3 = B1 * B2
         _______________
           A | B | C | D
          _______________
        1|___|_2_|___|__
        2|___|_3_|___|__
        3|___|___|___|__
        4|   |   |   |

It barely matters if you copy paste the first one or second one into a new sheet. C3 will be pointing to null. If anything its easy to trouble shoot former because you can chose any cell in the spreadsheet and call it 'first', chose another and call it 'second'\- Compared to say to having fixed cells B1 for first and B2 for last.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Coda is a next-generation spreadsheet designed to make Excel a thing of the > past

There are many projects aimed at making Excel "a thing of the past" but they focus on different needs:

o [https://airtable.com](https://airtable.com) \- use tables for data organization (organize anything)

o [https://fieldbook.com](https://fieldbook.com) \- spreadsheet as a database

o [https://www.rowshare.com](https://www.rowshare.com) share data (share rows, not data)

o [http://conceptoriented.com](http://conceptoriented.com) \- data transformations and data wrangling (I am the author)

o Coda - integration with documents

It is interesting if one of these approaches will eventually dominate or we will have a zoo of spreadsheet-like applications.

<comment><USER7> _There are many projects aimed at making Excel "a thing of the past" but they focus on different needs:_

I think this is why Excel/Google Sheets still dominate and will continue to.

All of these products do one or a few things things that Excel or Google Sheet do, but perhaps they make it little easier for a novice. I think what people don't understand about Excel (and to a lesser extent Google Sheets) is that it's an IDE. A novice can build interesting things, a power user can build incredible things.

The only way to make Excel a thing of the past would be to make a blow-away awesome replacement that does everything excel does but better. There's plenty of blue ocean around Excel and I think each of the products you listed could do just fine.

I would love all of Excel's power available to me but delivered like Google Sheets. That would definitely kill Excel. So far neither Microsoft nor Google seem really committed to this. Google Sheets is nice but just grabs the low hanging spreadsheet fruit. Office 365 is anemic.

If I had the time and funding I'd love to make a true Excel killer that was a faithful recreation of ALL of Excel's capabilities but delivered in a modern way. I'd pay good money for this. I believe many would. Excel may be a dinosaur, but it's still the apex predator.

<comment><USER8> I am genuinely curious to learn what do you mean by "delivered in a modern way"? Which parts of Excel are obsolete and could be modernized?

<comment><USER9> I can't speak for ryanmarsh, but I have a few thoughts.

* Excel really has two major ways of performing computations on data - formulas within the grid and actions upon the grid. Despite the utility of the formula based dataflow model, there are too many operations that have to be performed as one-shot operations via commands (or scripted via VBA). Having formula based approaches for sorting, dividing into bins, etc. would be very useful.

* It'd be nice if Excel cells could contain values other than scalars. (Arrays, tuples, lists, maps, matrices, complex numbers, etc.)

* VBA can be used to define custom functions, but there's a lot of marshalling overhead going to VBA and the programming model is slightly different. It'd be nice to fix both of those issues.

* There's no way to locally bind names within a cell formula, so often subexpressions have to be duplicated. (And I believe they're doubly evaluated too.)

<comment><USER10> Shameless plug: I'm a founder of Alphasheets, a company seeking to solve problems like these! I couldn't resist replying after seeing these comments.

We make a collaborative (Google Sheets style) spreadsheet with Python and R running in the sheet. You can define functions, plot using ggplot, embed numpy dataframes, matrices and all that good stuff. We don't let people use macros, all the code runs in cells because we think macros are too brittle. You can check out the website at [http://alphasheets.com](http://alphasheets.com) .

We're seeing that many enterprises (for example, in finance) that have Excel power users are moving to Python because of limitations like these, and are running into adoption issues because people like spreadsheets so much. That's generally where we come in and provide a bridge from the Excel world to Python through a more friendly frontend.

We're also seeing that Alphasheets can help a lot with shortening feedback cycles on more sophisticated data analyses- Excel is the most popular self- serve analytics tool out there, but doesn't cover cases where you need Python/R/fresh data.

<comment><USER7> This is very nice. Problem is, there are sooo many more features in Excel you'll have to copy to get me to move. If you ask "which ones" I'll say "all of them". I'm a power user. I build huge dashboards and analytical tools in Excel. The thing I hate most is that all my work goes into a file that I have to pray works on the other persons computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds interesting, but are they not worried that the name is taken? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_(web_development_software...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coda_\(web_development_software\))

Web editor and web spreadsheets aren't exactly the same field, but that seems close enough for a trademark collision.

<comment><USER12> Yeah - in the macOS community Coda is a fairly well known text editor for web development. The team at Panic should definitely stand their ground on this one...

<comment><USER13> Yep. I use Panic's Coda on Mac and iOS platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b I really want to hate that project (too much hype and the UI looks like this just another crappy and locked in office suite). That said there is someone out there who is going to get it right. Excel has too major problems:

1\. Legacy: newer versions will always need to support VB6 and activeX and all that garbage - that's quite a big drag.

2\. Inability to track changes easily. (Just move a table one row down, and it becomes impossible to compare the 2 versions) which causes what people call "spreadsheet risk"

That makes Excel "somewhat" vulnerable to asymmetric marketing attacks. It is in fact surprising that this hasn't happened yet. I think one of the big reasons is that most SV people don't use much Excel (not like we financial guys do)

I'm just hoping that Mike Bostock and the 2 other guys as Observable HQ are going to nail it. I'd much rather have a totally hackable front end that does the DAG for me, than a cloud-based document-editing-with-formulae...

<comment><USER4> It has many more...

There is no good way to share data between spreadsheets (linked spreadsheets are a nightmare)

There is no good way to link a word or ppt document to a spreadsheet (an extremely common use case, think reports, client presentations). Linked tables are unstable (crash and unstable rendering) and you have to do all sort of hacks to ensure the links are not screwed up if you ever modify one while the other is closed.

Excel should move away from a single grid approach per sheet (Apple's approach makes a lot of sense).

What is depressing is that outside of ensuring it runs on new platforms, Microsoft pretty much stopped development of new major features 10 years ago. If you look at the past Excel's what's new, these are mostly cosmetic/minor/maintenance changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You can make a shopping list in Excel, and you can also run a $100M+ company with it. It's probably the most important and powerful product Microsoft has made, right next to Windows itself. Anything taking on Excel would have to be able to do all that, while also offering so much more to overcome the friction of switching.

Otherwise it's just a niche product, which is still valid, but not really a next-gen spreadsheet. Coda seems like it would be great project management/CRM tool rather than a spreadsheet app.

See also:

[https://airtable.com/](https://airtable.com/)

[https://fieldbook.com/](https://fieldbook.com/)

[https://quip.com/](https://quip.com/)

<comment><USER15> and [http://documize.com](http://documize.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was confused when I saw this. I believe there is a bit of a name conflict with Coda[0] by Panic.

Nevertheless, this Coda looks quite interesting.

0: [https://panic.com/coda/](https://panic.com/coda/)

<comment><USER17> Replying for no greater reason than to shill for Panic. Coda is an amazing tool.

<comment><USER18> Panic's Coda has been around since 2007 and is a well known name. Their latest release date June 2017 and is still very active.

It has over 100 reviews on the Apple store for their mobile version and their desktop version has hundreds of reviews on independent download websites and multiple blog posts by different developers.

Writing "Coda" on Google leads to Panic's software on the first page. So does "Coda Software", "Coda App", "Coda Download" and "Coda Review".

Coda.io has been around since 19th of this month. You can get to it (well, this article on The Verge) by writing "Coda Software" on Google, but it is on page 3.

Surely naming it Coda was a mistake. It leads to confusion and hurts their branding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If something is going to be better than Excel because its "40 years ahead of it" it ought to be a native app and be more powerful than Excel. Excels value comes from its power features and ability to finesse with fine detail - simplicity isn't always the answer.

</comment><comment><USER20> After reviewing this, and the coda site, I only have a vague idea of what it does, or can do.

<comment><USER21> it really makes me wonder who upvotes those links that have no products to show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> But can it open two files with the same name? If so, they have Excel beat.

</comment><comment><USER23> For people who need this kind of thing, FileMaker can be an extremely effective solution. The article doesn't really explain what is differentiating about Coda.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was wondering how Coda differed from Quip, et al, but this article makes me pretty excited about it. As someone who used to spend all day in Excel and VBA, there's definitely room for a new "light coding" platform.

</comment><comment><USER25> The only feature required to beat Google Sheets in my book: smooth scrolling.

</comment><comment><USER26> The general idea of Coda, unifying document text and calcultion code is very attractive. Jupyter notebooks do something similar in a different Domain. Yet the result in Coda looks much more sleek and polished than Jupyters cells.

A smaller example of programs that go into the same direction would be Soulver (on OSX), NaSc (on Linux) or CalcNote (on Android). Theese three of course have a much smaller feature set and different goals than Coda.

The main culprit I see with Coda is the reliance on one closed source software product maintained by a commercial company with a closed source file format. I think Google (Reader) should have taught us something about relying on software that you don't even remotely control or understand.

Jupyters next iteration, JupyterLab, is giving users more flexibility in terms of screen estate layout, but it will look even more technical instead of more elegant and integrated. Maybe inspiration for further iterations can be drawn from Coda (and good old MathCAD) for a more integrated future version.

Until then staying with Emacs/Spacemacs and org-mode/org-babel gives you the flexibility for output in a lot of different high quality formats AND the guarantee that your carefully crafted documents will be accessible decades in the future.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think the next successful spreadsheet might be compatible with xlsx and support a handful of fundamental clean data / database concepts. Things like enforcing keys, tabular structure, NAs instead of blank fields, types. These are simple enough you can teach them to average white collar workers and powerful enough that they would dramatically improve data quality.

</comment><comment><USER28> What these guys got right is that Excel is actually an app development platform. The most successful one, ever. I wrote about it here: [http://bi- review.blogspot.ca/2017/09/excel-is-application-pl...](http://bi- review.blogspot.ca/2017/09/excel-is-application-platform.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> Relevant [http://witheve.com/](http://witheve.com/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Neat for some use cases, however the fact that its only online will cause issues for some folks.

People process a lot of data in excel - sensitive, private data. Putting that data into the cloud with a startup (regardless of pedigree) will be a bit too much risk for some.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you instead prefer your "next gen spreadsheets" simpler, open source and offline, you may like [http://strlen.com/treesheets/](http://strlen.com/treesheets/) ;)

</comment><comment><USER32> _"We haven't had an application creation tool like this since HyperCard. I think we're going to see lots and lots of good experiments."_

 _"a collaborative document editor that combines a word processor and a spreadsheet"_

I get the impression this is more like another attempt to do what Opendoc, the various 'Works' products of the '90s, OLE, Ashton-Tate's Framework, etc. promised than a spreadsheet.

Question then is what would make this succeed at doing that where those products failed. That many people think they want something like it isn't enough. Has the time for this kind of product come, is 'collaborative' the killer feature, or what?

</comment><comment><USER33> " _While Excel 5 was being designed, Lotus had shipped a "new paradigm" spreadsheet called Improv. According to the press releases, Improv was a whole new generation of spreadsheet, which was going to blow away everything that existed before it._ […] _Of course, Improv is now a footnote in history._ […] _Why? Because in Improv, it was almost impossible to just make lists. The Improv designers thought that people were using spreadsheets to create complicated multi-dimensional financial models. Turns out, if they asked people, they would discover that making lists was so much more common than multi-dimensional financial models, and in Improv, making lists was a downright_ chore, _if not impossible._ "

— Joel Spolsky

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/09/the-process-of- des...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/09/the-process-of-designing-a- product/)

Archive.org link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20170606181942/https://www.joelo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170606181942/https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/09/the- process-of-designing-a-product/)

<comment><USER34> Disclosure: Spolsky worked on Excel for several years as a product manager, and is biased.

The other reason that Microsoft Office tools succeeded is that Microsoft was very good at all of the extra-technical stuff – business deals, marketing, software bundling, legal fights, etc., some of it quite underhanded/anticompetitive.

Lotus made Improv for NeXTSTEP originally, so there was a niche platform problem for the first 2 years, and after it had been ported to Windows Improv was competing against Lotus's own previous spreadsheet program 1-2-3, creating consumer confusion and confusion within other parts of the Lotus organization.

But the main reason is probably just inertia. Once people have learned one tool that seems to work well enough for their needs, getting them to adopt something else (especially if it isn't conceptually identical) is twice as hard.

<comment><USER35> He probably is biased - but it seems they were building "spreadsheet for advanced users" when most people who use a spreadsheet are not or will ever be advanced users.

<comment><USER36> Apart from "home" use, Excel users usually lack functionality and tend to build an unmaintainable mess in their spreadsheets. Quarter of my 'system integration' work came from Excel users trying to automate and/or formalize what they created in there for years. Sadly, these types of businesses take hell of efforts to convert to good information systems; high failure rates are normal there. For me, Excel is a heroin of a business world. It drags you from reality and breaks you when you're trying to get back into it.

<comment><USER4> There aren't enough trained programmers in the world to do in code what all Excel users get done with spreadsheets. Let alone programmers who understand the business of the company they work for.

<comment><USER37> It's the dream Microsoft Access should've been, but for whatever reason never caught on.

<comment><USER38> Microsoft tried it a few times, the latest attempt was LightSwitch, recently killed in favor of PowerApps.

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jasonz/2010/08/03/introduci...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jasonz/2010/08/03/introducing- microsoft-visual-studio-lightswitch/)

[https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/](https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en- us/)

The thing is, with Excel the programming is gradual, you first just add some formulas, followed by conditional formatting, small macros, until eventually jumping into full VBA.

Alternatives, including Access, require good programming knowledge from day one.

<comment><USER4> But I still fundamentally agree with this approach. Perhaps not all users, but most users should be given a path toward more programming based approach to modelling.

I think lighswitch was stillborn when it wasn't distributed as part of office (irrespective of its merits, haven't tried it myself). Asking IT departments to deploy it was bound to fail. It needs to be available at the fingertips of excel users, like VBA is, always there, running with Excel, and you know it is available to everyone else so anything you do will run without having to install anything on their machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm going to stick with Excel for the row/column grouping feature. This seemingly minor feature enables multiple level of abstractions so different audiences can understand the spreadsheet in different views. As much as I want to move my team to Google Sheet or any other major competitors for easy collaboration, I simply can't.

</comment><comment><USER40> Seems like an extra layer of cognitive complexity. Docs and Excel sheets are popular because they are simple but not simpler.

</comment><comment><USER41> Would be interesting if cells of groups of cells in a spreadsheet could show a subset of the UI of another graphical program on the system. If it could allow user interaction with that graphical program then even better. That could allow users to build a dashboard of their running graphical software. Has this been tried before?

<comment><USER8> > Has this been tried before?

Yes, on Windows this technology is called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). It allows embedding (parts) of other applications' documents in a document. Nowadays only a few programs besides the MS Office suite provide OLE capability.

For example, you can embed a complete Word document inside an Excel cell by clicking: Insert -> Object -> Microsoft Word Document. By double clicking this object, the Word UI opens up inside Excel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've begun to use the beta and see a lot of value.

One point of concern (and PSA): After creating a document, my browser blocked a CoinHive miner. As far as I know, there isn't a "best practice" pattern for passively mining, but personally, I like to opt-in to this sort of thing.

</comment><comment><USER43> quick question for the Coda folks - How is it different from quip.com?

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't think eye candy is killer app.

Distributedly consistent spreadsheets maybe? Make inner mechanics of a complex sheet easier to tackle? Add persistence and database capabilities that blend in?

</comment><comment><USER45> i suspect more fluff than substance since this has been in the media all week with tons of fluffy articles about how much awesome it is. please prove me wrong

</comment><comment><USER46> It's about time someone re-invented FileMaker Pro.

</comment><comment><USER47> I love AirTable, which operates on a similar concept.

</comment><comment><USER13> Coda is a text editor.

</comment><comment><USER48> What's wrong with pure CSV, again?

<comment><USER49> CSV is hell. Some idiot somewhere decided that Comma Separated Values in certain locales should be based on semicolons (who would have thought files would be shared across country borders!?), so when we open CSV files that are actually comma separated all the information is in the first cell (until a semicolon appears).

To get comma separated CSVs to show properly in Excel we have to mess around with OS language settings. CSV as a format should have died years ago, it's a shame so many apps/services only export CSV files. Many developers (mainly US/UK based) are probably not aware of how much of a headache they inflict on people in other countries by using CSV files.

<comment><USER50> Actually you can change the extension from .csv (that Excel believes it can recognize) to _something else_ and open it, the "import wizard" will let you choose the "separating character" and other settings that are very useful when importing Comma (or other character) separated values (such as forcing the "data type" by column). A good idea, however is to use TSV (TAB separated values) that can be usually copy pasted directly, it still remains in many cases the "feature" that Excel has to auto-identify data types, creating a mess with a number of pieces of data (such as a columen with Hex values, half of which will be "text" and the other half "numbers").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Trademark claim incoming from Panic, Inc.</comment>


Clojure Development Environment for Excel - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/whamtet/Excel-REPL <comment><USER2> Also to call various programming (there is no Clojure listed amongst the supported languages, but Java is so it should be easy to build a bridge): [http://xlloop.sourceforge.net/](http://xlloop.sourceforge.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow this is actually really cool. Like if I had to work in Excel regularly I'd use this in a heartbeat.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's awesome. I'm wondering if there's a way to make this work with Excel for OSX. It sounds unlikely but I hope to be surprised.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's the same thing with Python for Windows & Mac

[http://xlwings.org/](http://xlwings.org/)

You can share the sheets too as it bundles a runtime

</comment><comment><USER6> Projects like this are really cool in terms of providing different tools for when you need to work with Excel. However, I don't see tools like this or for any other language being widely adopted.

Here is why:

1 - Most of the times, people are going to use Excel for basic data analysis with the built-in functions.

2 - If you need to do more complex tasks, you have two options:

* You know Clojure, Python or other programming language so you use the default environment for these languages to accomplish the task you need, or

* you know or learn VBA and stick with it because it's already built-in with Excel.

<comment><USER2> I used to work in the financial industry where _lots_ of things are built in excel, and I have my fair share of VBA programming. What I can tell you is:

1\. VBA is aweful. Sure it can communicate well with the spreadsheet, but the language is quite bad, and so is the IDE. You can't write anything complicated. 2\. Excel is really good if you want to do some calculations, and it allows you to build something user interface-like really quickly.

So building some models in Excel works fine as long as whatever you want to do is contained in the built-in functions or is not too complicated to be made in VBA, but passed a certain point in complexity, you really want to use another language. Banks have some addins in C++ or C# to export their own functions to excel, and really being able to call a more flexible language like Clojure can simplify life.

<comment><USER7> What would be really great is the equivalent of the VBA editor for C# and VB.net (there is already one for F#). With roslyn now open source I hope it will dignificantly lower the bar for someone to create it.

In fact Microsoft did create it (VSTA) but then killed it before it could make its way to office. I have no idea of why they think users are better off with VBA, a language that hasn't been updated in 15 years.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My weekend project on curating relevant deals - <AUTHOR> http://specialdeck.com/ Feedbacks are welcome :) <comment><USER2> I believe this kind of service would work better as an email newsletter. I wouldn't mind receiving a weekly/biweekly email with hot deals relevant to my interests. I think you should push deals to the people (i.e. email) instead of pulling people to the deals (website). A bare minimum would be an RSS feed although I think email would work better in this case.

<comment><USER3> I'd rather see this as a newsletter too. In fact, please reach out to me when it is available. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. I'll reach you at your email once I get it up. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      I like it - And I would use it.  I didn't know many of these existed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool :) Great to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can you provide more detais e.g. is it automated?

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me a bit of SpeakerDeck...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmmm, didn't realized that when I was doing it. I was thinking of using primary colours - RGB and since I used blue in my last project - hiredturf.com, I was just choosing between green and red. Guess is just a coincidence.</comment></comment>


Video Professor Tries To Bully Washington Post, Fails - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/28/video-professor-washington-post-scamville/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> When I watch those commercials, I always assumed the scam was that they were sending you a "free CD", but charging a good price for it with their "shipping and handling charge".

I wasn't nearly cynical enough it seems.

<comment><USER3> Agree. I've seen those ads more times than I can count, and never thought they'd be sending 30 CDs, and billing me if I didn't return 29 of them.

The ads clearly lead you to think they'll send 1 CD, possibly charging S&H, and it will prove its merits thereby leading you to purchase further products. I believe he even says as much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kudos to The WP.

<comment><USER5> I think the main kudos should go to Arrington, since it is basically his personal fight with scammers - WP only syndicates Techcrunch articles. I'd say Michael has an advantage that he is a lawyer, so he knows the boundary of what he can and can't write, so it is hard to intimidate him with letters from companies lawyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few years ago, this company's TV ads said something to the effect of, "You too can learn to RUN a computer." I always thought the word "run" was odd -- kind of like I was going to learn to run a cement mixer or something. Now, I wonder if it was an attempt at selection bias; perhaps there's a correlation between those who respond affirmatively to the notion of "running" a computer are those least likely to read the fine print or return the CDs on time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, if they're going to claim they have a good rating from the Better Business Bureau, hopefully people will start sending complaints there: <https://odr.bbb.org/odrweb/public/getstarted.aspx?siteID=33>

<comment><USER4> A little OT, but does anybody here belong to the BBB? Is it worth it, do you think?

<comment><USER8> I've joined in order to be able to display the seal on my own ecommerce site. As a single-person company, it isn't terribly expensive (it is priced per employee).

I don't have any hard evidence (such as an A/B test) to support my decision, but I'm selling monthly subscriptions to businesses and felt the impression of credibility was worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like to think that the vermin preying on the gullible elderly today will one day themselves be old, gullible, and the victims of the next generation of scammers.

Looking at it from the other side, could it be that some of the current victims were themselves scammers in their youth, and are only receiving a little bit of karmic payback?

<comment><USER10> I would much rather live in a world without scammers, even if it means the current ones won't get properly punished.

<comment><USER11> Sounds better than hoping that victims did something to deserve it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Honestly, it doesn't seem _that_ scammy. I always thought it was quite obvious it's a trial offer. I guess it depends on whether or not those CDs are good to justify the price.

<comment><USER13> Not _that_ scammy? Nowhere on the site are any of the extra charges declared. If someone bills your credit card without expressly telling you that they're going to then it's a scam.

Are you seriously trying to tell us that tricking unwary customers is not scammy?

<comment><USER12> It does notice users on the site. And people _can_ return the products afterwards. On their BBB profile it says most of their issues are resolved.

Why is everyone taking Arrington's word for it. It doesn't even seem like he did any research besides a quick glance at their site.

For all you know video professor makes it's money by tricking people to _try_ , only to have people realize it was worth the 300 dollars.

I don't deny any _tricking_ on their website, but they do have a return and refund policy that seems satisfiable. It just doesn't add up. How can they sustain their business if people can refund.

<comment><USER14> The trouble with the Video Professor website is once you drill past the homepage you don't see anything about the $289.95.

Consider someone who arrives via deep link. To that person it appears as if all they are risking is $9.95 - even through checkout. They might click _User Agreement_ during checkout but the only charge that reveals is...$9.95. If the visitor clicks into _How it Works_ they will see the wrong price: $189.95. (Check for yourself: [https://www.videoprofessor.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=shopping...](https://www.videoprofessor.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=shoppingCart.howItWorks)). Only the skeptical and curious who arrive via deep link can know what happens after the 10 day trial, and even they will be overcharged by $100.

We can debate whether the product line is worth $289.95 but that is irrelevant to this issue of checkout fraud.

<comment><USER12> It says $389.95 on that page you gave the link to.

I don't think there is checkout fraud. You checkout and you are provided enough information to know that you are purchasing a trial, you will be charged some fee (what it is is hard to determine) if you don't cancel. I think that information is provided clearly.

However if they turn out not to honor cancellation requests, that's a whole other story.

<comment><USER14> > it says $389.95 on that page you gave the link to.

I'm still seeing $189.95. Screencap: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1704650/prof.png>

Let's poll. If you're reading this, visit [https://www.videoprofessor.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=shopping...](https://www.videoprofessor.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=shoppingCart.howItWorks) then report the price you see listed on that page over here: [http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=10e098&t=10e099](http://moderator.appspot.com/#15/e=10e098&t=10e099).

<comment><USER12> That's really weird. I'm still seeing $389. Also that page at one point for me today said there will be a monthly fee of $20 something dollars instead of what it says now.

They must be updating their site today or something, but that doesn't explain why we see different prices.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple's Licensing Offer To Samsung Raises Questions About FRAND Rates  - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121022054044954

<comment><USER2> Slide 7 is just priceless.</comment>


Building Lyft's Marketing Automation Platform - <AUTHOR> https://eng.lyft.com/lyft-marketing-automation-b43b7b7537cc <comment><USER2> Netflix has written about their internal platform as well[1].

Has anyone come across other articles similar to these? I haven't been able to find many outside of these two.

1 - [https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/engineering-to- improve-m...](https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/engineering-to-improve- marketing-effectiveness-part-1-a6dd5d02bab7)

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried to become a driver, but my license plate is not from the state that I currently reside in, so I fell thru the cracks and now I am stuck in this funnel with no way out.

Every once and a while I get an obscure request from Lyft and I can't immediately tell if it's related to my identity as a rider or my identity as a driver.

Wish all of these marketing funnels had a big "PULL CHUTE" button so that users can remove themselves. I'm stuck in a hundred car dealership funnels too, and continue to get "nurtured" week after week.

<comment><USER4> > I'm stuck in a hundred car dealership funnels too, and continue to get > "nurtured" week after week.

Do you mean being a driver for car dealerships for delivery and dropoffs? What does nurtured mean exactly?

<comment><USER5> They're in the marketing funnel, because at one point in the past they were in the market to buy a car, and still receive VERY frequent messages encouraging thrm to continue down the sales process despite the fact they didn't engage with any previous marketing message and bought a car years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really curious to know more about how Lyft handles attribution here as I didn't really see it mentioned. Nor did I see much about how they approach view through metrics for display and such when that data is increasingly locked away within the ad platforms and not always exposed via API. Presumably things are mashed together in an ad server and some enterprise analytics platform with an attribution tool in the mix, perhaps with a sprinkling of MMM.

Beyond that, I'd love a deeper analysis of their actual channels and how they measure and approach them. Any additional links on that would be much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wonder if this is related to the thing where Lyft spams people with phone notifications that are really just ads/promos, and then continuing to do it for multiple years.

[https://twitter.com/asklyft/status/634509838358302722?lang=e...](https://twitter.com/asklyft/status/634509838358302722?lang=en)

</comment><comment><USER8> Are there any good products to help do this sort of thing?

It seems to me there would be lots of integration to do between the LTV predicator and quite a few other systems, so this would need quite a large team to make.

Maybe I'm wrong...

<comment><USER9> There are products that solve different parts of this problem, but most companies buy 2-4 products for their marketing stack (CDP, Marketing Automation, attribution, and analytics). For things like LTV prediction, you would either need to buy an additional piece of software or do it yourself.

Each company does marketing enough differently that there isn't a single product that could solve the problem end-to-end for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would be cool to see an actual demo. Sounds pretty amazing but I wonder how automated the process is.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fun post about efficiency from a company that is chronically loosing money.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sad to see all of this engineering effort being spent on spreading cancer (aka ads) and thus funding worldwide stalking by unethical companies.

Just imagine what humanity could've achieved if efforts like these were directed to actually worthwhile causes like science or medical research.

<comment><USER13> I used to think like this before. But then I realized the survival of these companies (similar to natural selection) is based on these efforts which makes it almost the exact opposite of cancer.

To a customer, if the value add is ride sharing to exist in some form, companies actively bidding for that customer's attention and eventually their pockets is inevitable.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Learning Swift beyond basics - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN! I'm a CS student, I have been learning Swift for a while now and I'm pretty comfortable with it.<p>Now I would like to incorporate what I have learned into a rather simple App, what are some good places I can learn Advance stuff, like views, view controllers, IBActions, making simple UI's , cocoa..
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I wouldn't consider what you are talking about with views, viewControllers, etc to be advanced. That is the Cocoa framework that you need to learn.

That has stayed the same since objective-C. I don't know of many courses that are already out there for teaching swift, but the stanford-online tutorials (available for free on iTunes) are great for getting introduced to the framework.</comment>


The Way You Learned Math Is So Old School - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2011/03/05/134277079/the-way-you-learned-math-is-so-old-school?ps=cprs <comment><USER2> At risk to be downvoted to death, I have to say that the new way of multiplication is actually _better_ than the old one, at least for kids starting to learn how to multiply.

All the new multiplication algorithm does is makes implicit additions explicit, so that you do not have to keep carry-over digit in memory. 144 is 120+24 and 720 is 600+120. Sure it trains your short memory, but we are talking about 7yr olds here. Once kid feels comfortable s/he will naturally move to the "old" way of multiplication.

And anyway... It is easy to nitpick on something we understand very well, but how about the topic? What would you do to make math more enjoyable in the classroom? I know what worked for me personally and that was not classroom drilling of multiplication, divisions, and stupid problems with two pipes filling the pool at different speeds.

What made me love math are Marin Gardner's books and other fun math books. It was much more interesting to solve crimes with what I later came to know as propositional logic, or cutting tori in different ways.

<comment><USER3> I think you've nailed it by considering the carry-overs.

With the new method there's less opportunity for error. The old way, there are _two_ sets of carry digits: those arising in the initial multiplying, then more in the final adding up (though not in the example given). Sometimes I would try to remember them; sometimes I would write them down in various places; frequently I forgot or muddled them up somehow.

Another benefit is: the new way gives you a sense of the magnitude of the final answer more quickly. Approximations are useful. Contrast with the old method which begins by multiplying the least significant digits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Either way is fine, I think, if you the child understands the underlying mechanism. I'm the father of a 3rd and 5th grader in US public schools and I think the math curriculum is very good. However, sitting down and explaining basic arithmetic is important. I also teach them to estimate and come up with a quick upper and lower bound before they start the problem.

I went to school in Germany and our methods of multiplication and especially that of long division were a little different. When I first looked at the way long division is done in the US I thought it was confusing and my first reaction was that my method was better. It took a little time to overcome my cultural bias but I'm all better now.

Still waiting for the US to switch to Celsius and metric, though...

<comment><USER5> I agree. For learning, the method shown is fine. Why? Because it teaches and honors _place value_ , an extremely important concept in developing numeracy. I'm fine with any method that uses that.

I am _not_ fine with something my kids call the "lattice method." The point of this method is simply to get the correct answer for multiplying large numbers. Is it clever? Yes. Does it work? Yes. But it does not teach _math_. If the educators' goal is simply to give a technique that works and gives the correct answer, teach them to use the calculator on their cell phones.

Lattice method for multiplication:

[http://www.coolmath4kids.com/times-tables/times-tables- lesso...](http://www.coolmath4kids.com/times-tables/times-tables-lesson- lattice-multiplication-1.html)

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure why you think this lattice method does not teach place value. The page you linked to doesn't explain (at all) why it works, sure, but the method is just a clever way of notating place. I would expect any good teacher to get his or her students to understand that, and not just mindlessly fill in numbers.

<comment><USER5> _I would expect any good teacher to get his or her students to understand that_

That's not how I've seen it used. I've seen it used as a procedure for getting the answer. Compare that to the method shown in the npr link, first line: the numerals are 2 and 3, but the numbers multiplied 20 and 30. That's what I mean by teaching place value.

In the the old-school method I learned, we respected place-value by indenting (from the right), optionally writing the zeros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surely that method of multiplication is not suited for larger numbers, to get 246 * 369 u do 200 * 300 200 * 60 200 * 9 40 * 300 40 * 60 40 * 9 6 * 300 6 * 60 6 * 9 So for x-digit multiplied by y-digit u need to write down x*y products and then sum it up, where as for the old method you need to only write down min(x,y) products and sum it up.

<comment><USER8> This is somewhat misleading. Yes, it's true if

        3 * 123456789

counts as one multiplication.

But if you're doing the 'old' version you implement it as 9 single digit multiplications:

        3*9, 3*8,....,3*1

all written down with appropriate carrying.

If you do it with the new method you again get 9 'single' digit multiplications:

        3*9, 3*80, ..., 3*100000000

which you then add up.

\---

The old methods efficiency comes from writing the steps out in a compact notation, not from reducing the number of multiplications or additions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Geez, there are so many things wrong with this article, all I could do was scream "shut up" in my head.

The only thing worse than math education in the US is the pop culture-media surrounding it.

</comment><comment><USER10> To be honest, I just _know_ 36 times 24. I've spent enough time dealing with numbers with all their prime factors small that I can just see it's 864. It might also help that I know there are 24 hours in a day, 3600 seconds in an hour, and 86,400 seconds in a day -- and I probably have a lot of random facts like this somewhere in my head that I at least occasionally pin mental arithmetic problems on.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't really think the methods are important, what's important is whether students decide to learn more advanced math later (say at least up to Calculus), and more importantly whether they like doing so. Too many people say "I hate math", learning multiplication one way or another shouldn't affect that strongly.

The article has a few nice quotes I like: "Computers do arithmetic for us, Devlin says, but making computers do the things we want them to do requires algebraic thinking."

'"You cannot become good at algebra without a mastery of arithmetic," Devlin says, "but arithmetic itself is no longer the ultimate goal." Thus the emphasis in teaching mathematics today is on getting people to be sophisticated, algebraic thinkers.'

While I can do multi-digit multiplications just fine and have a high confidence in my answer, I'd much rather a calculator do it for me, allowing me a higher confidence in the answer and just being done faster to use the result for some other purpose.

</comment><comment><USER12> I hope that I am not straying off topic, but certainly where I was schooled (Ireland), the main issue in the poor math performance falls on the "uncool" reputation which Maths has received in the past few years.

If you make it so that a child likes maths and feel's no peer pressure to just give up, the way in which one multiplies may become less significant.

</comment><comment><USER13> Changing the way the multiplication algorithm is taught isn't going to fix anything.

There needs to be a fundamental change in the way mathematics is taught. Right now what most schools teach in math class resembles trivia more than mathematics. There is no appeal to intuition or understanding, because clueless symbol manipulation and memorization of formulas is apparently what really matters. It is not necessary that the student really understands what he is doing. Why is the product of two negative numbers a positive number? "That's just the rule." Why is dividing by a fraction the same as multiplying by the reciprocal? "That's just the rule." These are very simple concepts that can be both logically and intuitively presented to students, yet growing up those were the answers I received. Even high school geometry, which used to be taught decently, has now been replaced by curriculum that does not emphasize proofs or any kind of true understanding/intuition.

Unless students discover the beauty of mathematics independent of math class, or enjoy following arbitrary rules, it is no wonder they develop a dislike for mathematics.

Although the author's writing style is a little bit annoying at parts, this is a good read: www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm pretty math-challenged these days without a calculator (gone are the days I could run the numbers in my head faster than you could punch them into your calculator), but I tend to do weird things like break stuff down into primes and then multiply it out from there.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have an 11 year old daughter who I help with math homework every week. Some of the new methods work for her, and some are terribly confusing to her. I think it's good to expose kids to a variety of methods in math. I am concerned, however, and the near-complete lack of emphasis on memorizing the basic math tables and doing calculations in your head. Doing that at a young age really helped me to understand numbers. Many of the techniques they teach in school are techniques I figured out on my own by exposing myself to large numbers of calculations.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the way I do multiplications mentally since being a child, but I never quite thought about that fact, that this is "new". How do you guys execute multiplications in mental math?

</comment><comment><USER17> Aside from the 'new' way of multiplication (which doesn't strike me as too bad), I think asking kids to make a stem-and-leaf plot of the birthdays in their class is actually really cool. It shows them how the things they learn can be applied to real things and it could open the way for interesting discussions as well (though the birthday paradox might be a bit much for 5th graders perhaps).

</comment><comment><USER18> After watching a video on Khan Academy on Lattice Multiplication, I assumed that it was the "new way" of doing multiplication by hand.

I certainly would use lattice multiplication in preference to traditional long multiplication methods if I ever had to multiply large numbers by hand. I wouldn't be able to say which method is better for a 7 year old learning the concepts though.

</comment><comment><USER19> ...Does anyone actually teach their kids with that retarded method? All it does it take up more space, and shift the burden from screwing up carries while multiplying to screwing up carries while adding.

And since it's so brain dead to implement, I can't see any significant amount of kids even reflecting on how 'the numbers work' based on that.

<comment><USER8> As far as I know every child in England is currently being taught this method.

I'm not sure that I would leap to calling it retarded. I agree that it takes up more paper but paper isn't the most expensive thing in the world.

What it does do is make explicit why the old school method works. Look at the explanation given by the article for the old method:

'Answer = 720, Because: 2x36 = 72, with a 0 added in the ones place.'

No, the reason you get 720 isn't because you 'added' a 0 in the ones place (72+0 = 72). It's because you are multiplying by 20 and not by 2. The old method hides this fact and corrects for it by a mechanical process: first write down a zero and then shift the other entries to the left.

Your criticism is analogous to calling Assembly retarded because Haskell exists. They serve different purposes.

<comment><USER20> I still encounter people who try to teach long multiplication to kids by saying "add a zero in the ones place". And college students who fail to describe _why_ they add those zeros (typically liberal arts majors (no offense. They just rarely minor in math, and many quit doing math entirely after they get the minimum to graduate)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The way the article shows is essentially calculating:

(30 + 6) * (20 + 4)

Which is great and all, but I think it would make more sense to do this:

(24 * 6) * 1 + (24 * 3) * 10

This is a lot closer to how machines actually do multiplication, so if the goal is to conceptually understand multiplication so you can have a computer do it, that makes more sense to me.

Plus it's easier to do in your head that way.

<comment><USER22> My inclination would be to be much less computer like about it. First start with some observations about the numbers. 24 is one less than 25. 4 * 25 is 100. 36 is 9 * 4. Therefor the answer is (9 * 100)-36=864. Numbers have properties. You can use these properties to do less mental work or at least take up less mental temp space. Not sure how you teach people to do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish to hell I had learned the Soroban growing up. Now it's on my unending todo list. I'll probably make a go at it when my kid is ready for it. We can learn together :)

</comment><comment><USER24> In my head I would do:

30 * 24 (which is just 3 * 24 * 10) = 720 6 * 24 (which is the same as 12 * 12) = 144 720 + 144 = 864</comment>


"Secure Boot" turn out to be "Restricted Boot" - where is the freedom of choice  - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot

<comment><USER2> Missing the "Will" from the start of the headline, and the "?" from the end. The article is about the Free Software Foundation speculating that Secure Boot _may_ (intentionally or unintentionally) make it harder to install alternative operating systems, not reporting that it definitely will.</comment>


Simple deploy script for PHP applications - <AUTHOR> http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2010/02/01/simple-deploy-script-for-php-applications/

<comment><USER2> FYI, I've had some really bad problems crop up when using sym links to deploy php releases (php selectively using files from older versions), and I've encountered others who've had similar problems. I don't know if it's been fixed in newer versions, but problems include the realpath cache not getting properly reset (and clearstatcache() wouldn't let you clear the realpath cache until 5.3).

Here's someone else who had this problem, although he claims cycling Apache would fix it (it didn't for me):

[http://www.mikebrittain.com/blog/2009/05/12/case-against- usi...](http://www.mikebrittain.com/blog/2009/05/12/case-against-using- symlinks-for-code-promotion/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Question for the peanut gallery: how do you handle user uploaded files that are not in version control if you swap out the whole site?

Create post-update, pre-swap symlinks from inside the new docroot to directories outside of the swapped docroot?

<comment><USER4> Simply don't store user-created content (images) in a folder in your main site, that doesn't scale anyway. Put pictures in pic.mysite.com or something like that (you can map an S3 bucket to that if you like).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer phing and a git post-update hook myself.

</comment><comment><USER6> this is useful, thank you.</comment>


Buddycloud's node.js server just released - <AUTHOR> http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/buddycloud-channel-server-released-v001

<comment><USER2> Buddycloud, Appleseed, Diaspora oh my, but are there intentions for the protocol to talk amongst these networks.

Are we aiming for a protocol end goal or for an application end goal?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm aiming for happy users. We have enough unused protocols specs floating around.

Happy users come from good web and mobile clients and a good project goal (open, privacy you control, multiple server codebases, business friendly (they can spin up a social network without hooking their wagon to FB))

Good clients need good APIs: secure, realtime, mobile friendly (quick syncing, good geolocation). APIs also need to be easy to implement for people familiar with http (the core protocol leverages XMPP's message passing architecture)

And all this needs a good architecture that builds off good federated systems.

So the end goal is to build something the right way and for the right reasons. If we can execute on that, I believe we will make users happy.

A good solution will sidestep every potential fail moment. We've sidestepped a few so far and I'm really happy with the quality of developers that are contributing client and server work. The good protocol is incidental.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Add a package.json and publish this to npm

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone published a Debian/Ubuntu package:

add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list: deb <http://debian.jones.dk/> sid freedombox

and execute "aptitude install channel-server"

<comment><USER3> Ummm ... just publish it to npm please.

      cd /path/to/repository
      // create a valid package.json
      npm publish .

That way I can:

      npm install channel-server

Like I do with every other node.js application.

<comment><USER4> npm is great for libraries, but what are the implications for publishing apps?

I have a node app that I'd like people to be able to get easily, but it's really meant to be modified to suit each person's needs. Right now I just have people clone/fork a git repo; what would be the process for that if they were using npm?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> yeah but it still uses BuddyCLoud channels for which you have to run an XMPP server :[</comment>


EU to ban non-meat product labels – 'veggie discs' to replace 'veggie burgers' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/04/eu-to-ban-non-meat-product-labels-veggie-burgers-and-vegan-steaks <comment><USER2> I am so happy that the EU has all its hard problems sorted out that we can now tackle this hardship. Imagine the horror of buying veggie burgers, only to find out there ain't no meat in them. That would never happen had they been called veggie discs I am sure!

<comment><USER3> man u don't understand how confusing it is living in the EU. the horrors of getting a burger and tasting beans! no way to live for anyone man!!</comment></comment>


Howto use USB to Recharge Lithium Battery (Li-Ion)  - <AUTHOR> http://dev.emcelettronica.com/howto-use-usb-to-recharge-lithium-battery-li-ion <comment><USER2> Short answer from article: Use a standard USB->battery charger IC. There are a bunch of them on the market.

Two extra tidbits:

1) Most (all?) of these ICs are surface mount only. Come to the 21st century you through hole barbarians.

2) The article implies that drawing more than 500mA will shut down a USB port. This would be nice, but consider that the people who designed your laptop/desktop/whatever can save $1/unit by leaving out the USB overcurrent protection. They probably did.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article, great the application/example Single Chip Battery CHARGER from USB

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For an embedded system with USB that requires recharging of Lithium batteries there are many considerations to be made before you can safely, accurately and quickly recharge the batteries.</comment>


Of Phishing Attacks and WordPress 0days - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/of-phishing-attacks-and-wordpress-0days/?

<comment><USER2> TLDR;

> a WordPress 0day in the wild.

Basically phishers are using compromised WP sites to send phishping emails.</comment>


Do you have a backup plan if you don't get Y Combinator funding? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> We're gonna keep on, keep on, keep on moving,

We're gonna keep on, keep on, keep on grooving.

Keep on singing and dancing all through the night.

</comment><comment><USER3> merge here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9027>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Oops, if only there were a "this looks like another article" warning button. "Are you sure you want to spam our readers?"

<comment><USER4> That could actually be done. The title of the self-referential post could be put through some Bayes analysis to list likely recent duplicates. Those could be presented to the creator of the self-ref post giving a chance to delete right away.</comment></comment>


Are graphical calculators pointless? - <AUTHOR> http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=3418 <comment><USER2> The problem here is that the mathematics education industry is bought and paid for by educational vendors in general and Texas Instruments in particular. My wife's school has its own TI Vendor who makes sure to come by every month or two with free goodies for the teachers (and frequently hosts events with free drinks for the teachers and give-aways, including free calculators.) TI also has an educator conference that it encourages member schools to pay for teachers to attend.

In return, the school pays for classroom sets of calculators, training for teachers and proprietary software and hardware that interfaces directly with the calculator for use in math and science classes. Given the number of high school math textbooks with extra sections for use with calculators and recommendations of a particular brand of calculator, it's hard to imagine that TI isn't marketing to the textbook companies as well.

With regards to education, the involved parties operate much like Oracle and the other "complete systems" vendors in the enterprise world: buy influence with the decision-makers and their subordinates, keep up the hard sell until the contract is won and then maintain the sell to ensure future business. That's not to say that the educational vendors give bad customer service, but at the same time, providing the end-users (the students) with a quality product at a reasonable price is hardly the primary concern.

</comment><comment><USER3> This drives me nuts. I am in grad school and had to go buy a TI-82 because my stats professor was convinced that a TI-81 was completely different than a TI-82. I dropped $125 for one course and I now know that I could have used what I had.

Further more. I had to buy another antiquated calculator for my finance class that cost me $75.

In the modern world, I should have been able to buy each of these for about $5 as an app on my phone.

Don't get me started on the bookstore and textbooks.

<comment><USER4> Say what you want about the price, but the HP-12c remains one of the most useful and nicest pieces of hardware I have ever had the pleasure of owning.

That thing will last a lifetime too, they're tanks.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, you do have to replace the batteries every few years, so they're not _perfect_.

(I've owned a 15c for 3-4 years and have not yet replaced the batteries. My dad has replaced the batteries in his 12c about 5 times in the past 20 years.)

<comment><USER6> I've got a Casio scientific calculator that is at least 18 years old and runs perfectly on it's in built solar panel. Amazing that they haven't done away with batteries in such calculators given advances in solar power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has also bothered me for quite awhile. I think what nails the ridiculousness of graphical calculators is illustrated in this comic: <http://xkcd.com/768/>

Seriously, though, as a student in CMU, and as a astrophysics major, I can attest to how unnecessary these calculators are. As long as it can perform trigonometry and logarithms, it satisfies the need.

I like the author's idea of using "locked-down" netbooks instead. After all, a netbook installed with Mathematica or MATLAB will be much more similar to academia/industry level calculators.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love my TI-89, which I got ~7 years ago for college physics/astro classes, and still use fairly often when the need arises, typically once or twice a month. I find the interface of a physical calculator to be far superior to a more general purpose machine when facing the tasks its built for.

However, I also think they're way overpriced for what they are. I think a lot of the price is just 'because we can'.

<comment><USER9> Are there patents that prevent competition? Why do TI's overpriced calculators have to be the standard?

<comment><USER5> They've set up a great lock-in system. They've bought off all the schools and teachers to get them to require students to use a specific TI model, and then they get the schools to buy textbooks that are written to use the TI calculators, with examples that give keystroke-by-keystroke instructions, and sample programs written in that model's dialect of BASIC. Sometimes they even get the standardized tests to require a specific calculator.

It's a great deal for lazy teachers: not only do they not have to teach their students how to perform the calculation, they don't even have to teach the student how to use their calculator to do it. If a student wants to use a different model, they're on their own. They'll have to learn the TI BASIC anyways, because the textbook doesn't even try to do a decent job of describing an algorithm in any other notation.

In most cases, breaking TI's monopoly would be as difficult as, and possibly require, busting a teachers' union.

<comment><USER10> I've heard the other reason is their math libraries. I don't know a whole lot about the calculator industry, but I've been told the number of companies with good embedded math libraries is very small, and the cost of developing one is prohibitive.

This adds big barriers to entry. You can't write your own libraries, and you can't use more powerful hardware to compensate either- TI's calculators cost them very little (the popular TI-83 uses a CPU designed in 1976), and will shove you right out of the market with their huge profit margin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Graphing calculators aren't pointless, but most people using them are missing the point. (And TI likes it that way.)

Why not just put Mathematica on a netbook? Aside from the fact that a netbook is 3-5 times larger and thus less portable, it's all about the user interface. What's the smallest laptop you can get that has a real number pad, with its own enter, +, -, x, and / keys? It's probably bigger than any netbook. A graphing calculator should have a keyboard that is designed not around general-purpose text entry, but around entering math. Even the graphing calculators that have QWERTY keyboards also a dedicated number pad and a bunch of other keys.

Even though I have a full-size 109-key keyboard and a pair of monitors totaling over 4 megapixels, and I have MATLAB, Mathematica, and a bunch of other math programs installed, I still keep my HP-50g on my desk right under my monitor. It turns on instantly, has a pretty good keyboard layout, and even though the screen resolution is monochrome 131x80, it makes good use of the whole screen to display just what I'm working on. MATLAB _et al_ are basically worthless for short computations even if you do keep them running at all times, and while they are both faster for large computations and have more features, they aren't as interactive and simpler functions are take too many keystrokes to get to when compared with my calculator. (I will occasionally actually use a 50g emulator on my desktop for some of the tasks that are a bit cumbersome without a full QWERTY keyboard, but still suck with native software.)

\</comment><comment>

Of course, the above is only why we _should_ be continuing to use and develop graphing calculators. It has nothing to do with the current markets. (Astute readers will have guessed this based on my use of an HP calculator as an example.)

The current reality in the calculator market is that calculators are designed for and marketed to teachers who train their students to be machines that operate calculators. TI and Casio are competing to see who can better enable bad teaching methods. They do this by offering standardized platforms, fully locked-down to assuage teachers' fears about kinds of cheating that shouldn't even help on a properly designed math test, and they partner with textbook authors and publishers to integrate their model's functionality in to the "curriculum".

Nobody is designing or marketing calculators to engineers anymore, and engineers are for the most part not using handheld calculators as much as they used to. I don't think it's clear which is the cause and which is the effect. What is clear is that you can't judge the entire concept of a handheld graphing calculator based solely on the models that weren't meant to be useful. Almost anything a good calculator can do, it will do better than a general-purpose machine.

<comment><USER11> "What's the smallest laptop you can get that has a real number pad, with its own enter, +, -, x, and / keys?"

An arbitrarily-small laptop of your choice, up to and including cell phones, plus one of these: [http://www.amazon.com/Targus-PAUK10U-Ultra-Mini- Keypad/dp/B0...](http://www.amazon.com/Targus-PAUK10U-Ultra-Mini- Keypad/dp/B00008NG7N/ref=pd_cp_e_1)

Not good enough? Tack a few more keys on and sell it for $30 instead. But I would be quite sure the average student would be happy to use the keypad and on-screen buttons for sin, cos, tan, e^x, and the two or three other things they actually use in school. For that matter most kids are going to be fine with the cell phone as-is, which, I might remind you, also frequently has dedicated numeric keys and enough other repurposeable keys to get you quite a ways.

(Still not enough keys? Try turning on num lock on your netbook's keyboard. Most still have them. Then bind the other keys to useful functions. It may not be optimal but with only a bit of practice it probably won't be a stopper. The keyboard is your slave, not your master.)

Yes, this won't permit very fast entry, but you and I (mmm, sweet sweet RPN) are not the norm. Go look at your average TI-82 user; IIRC, they are hunting and pecking those keyboards anyhow.

To be honest I swing the other way myself; eliminate them entirely. But at least 15 years ago when I bought my HP-48G for very similar amounts of money I was actually getting something. If we are going to be turning out these calculators, they ought to be $30, not $130.

<comment><USER5> Why buy a netbook _and_ an add-on keypad if the user interface is _still_ going to be the bottleneck? The CPUs in current generation calculators are fast enough for basically any undergraduate use case. (With better software, the HP's 75Mhz CPU would be able to keep up with any computation task that makes sense for a device with a small screen.)

Yes, they ought to be a lot cheaper, but I think your target of $30 isn't quite realistic. Good keyboards aren't cheap, and neither are chips with power consumption low enough for running off AAAs. Certainly, if you want a high- contrast high-resolution screen and a lot of RAM, you'll be looking at a lot more than $30.

<comment><USER11> "Good keyboards aren't cheap... high-contrast high-resolution screen... lot of RAM..."

You want those things. I do not disrespect that. It sounds like you are a serious user. But you're asking students who will effectively throw these things away when they are done taking their remedial college math courses to spend $100 for those things. Why should they do that?

Also, we are talking TI, not HP; as I recall those keyboards sucked 15 years ago and I doubt they got better. Even then, the TIs felt like toys where my HP felt like a real tool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While the author has a point that calculators are essentially pointless (if not downright scammy) these day, I know more than a few people learned to program on their HP calculators. It was my first experience learning the ins and outs of an entire API, eventually deciding it wasn't sufficient and then digging deeper into the previously hidden world of the firmware below and eventually to the CPU itself. Of course you can do that on any device, but it was helpful be able to play around in class without suspicion.

<comment><USER13> I learned assembly on my TI calculator while I was bored in math class. But that doesn't seem like a reason to keep the calculators: whatever ends up in its place can also be where people 'learn to program', and it might even be better to learn in another environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe not pointless, but I am thankful I took my math classes when we still had to memorize the shape of the important functions and what happened when you did a + f(x-b) to f(x).

Well, I guess I think they are pointless, but I would be that teacher that doesn't let anyone use calculators at all, at least until 9th grade. Graphs are very useful in analyzing data, but then you want a real software package. But for learning math, honestly I think you get more by exercising doing lots of problems, memorizing the key facts (yes, memorizing), and drawing your own damn graphs (get off my lawn you kids!).

</comment><comment><USER15> If you're using an Android phone, you can get a really nice graphical calculator app. Now called "Andy-83", you can probably guess which major semiconductor company asked its developer to change its name a few weeks ago...

<http://www.supware.net/android/andy-83/>

No interest to declare: just a happy user :). I don't need to use a calculator very often -- when I do I am much more likely to have my phone on me than to be anywhere near a 'real' calculator.

</comment><comment><USER16> I got a TI-86 my freshman year of highschool, taught myself the BASIC dialect, etc. Useful machine with a nice menu system (menus sit at the bottom of the screen, rather than modally filling the screen like a TI-82/83/84).

I fell in love with RPN at my first internship, where I noticed a lot of the (mechanical) engineers used HP-12 calculators for most everything. I later bought an HP-48 and, eventually, an HP-50G. To my mind, the HP graphing calculators are the Unix of the calculator world, while TI calcs are more like Windows. Most people use TI, but the HP calculators have a longer lineage, a great if somewhat noob-unfriendly interface, and more powerful hardware (75 MHz ARM processor, 2 MB of storage/512 KB of RAM, SD card slot, and the higher-quality HP keyboard).

I haven't used my calculator in a while, but I think that's largely because I'm working with operating systems at the moment and don't need to do more than integer arithmetic. I occasionally reach for my Android phone with the HP-48 app on it, but without being able to feel the keys under my fingers it is sadly lacking.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm fond of my TI-89, but I keep it around for nostalgia more than anything else. (Serial number 750, manufactured July 1998, purchased new. Ah, memories.) When it breaks, I won't be replacing it.

When I do use it, it tends to be for simple arithmetic.

<comment><USER18> I still have mine. Great little calculator, and the CAS is actually quite competent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I carry a $20 Casio that's light and small enough to go unnoticed in my bag, while providing better tactile response than a smartphone calculator. For anything more substantial I break out MATLAB.

The problem with graphing calculators is that they're autistic. With MATLAB it's trivial to load a data file, run some calculations, generate plots, and export to PDF for use in a document. Graphing calculators are fine for working through problem sets in high school, but outside school they fall in an awkward gap between being too big and heavy to carry around and too limited for real work.

</comment><comment><USER20> In the classroom setting there are a few more reasons why they are appealing, relative to a computer they are less distracting (although there are still games for them) and they can be used in tests without to much fear of them being misused for teaching. They also allow a teacher to learn one tool and be able to help students rather than having to deal with varying hardware configurations and maths programs.

</comment><comment><USER21> I hope the author realizes that TI does a _ton_ more than make graphing calculators... they're probably one of the biggest manufacturers of ICs out there (about to swallow National Semiconductor or something).

</comment><comment><USER22> Rote memorization and learning processes is what's important in today's education system. Not learning, inference and discovery of new knowledge.

<comment><USER23> I'm going to stop you there. Not everyone can learn though wrote memorization. People learn in different ways. Second, do you remember every proof and formula (excluding ones used reguarly)? We are taught to understand and apply these things, not to spend 90 percent of our time learning them for one or two classes.

<comment><USER5> "Not everyone can learn though rote memorization. People learn in different ways."

That doesn't mean that current mathematics teaching methods take that in to account. Try looking in a current middle-school or high-school math textbook. I think you'll be surprised, and disappointed.

When I was learning high-school level math, I found that the quality and usefulness of a math textbook was inversely proportional to the probability of the public schools using it (and, perhaps not too coincidentally, the colorfulness of the textbook).

In recent years, my local schools tried to get away from a rote curriculum by replacing it with a curriculum that basically eschewed teaching, instead relying on "guided discovery" or something like that. It didn't help the standardized test scores _or_ the students' mastery of what they were supposed to learn.

<comment><USER23> Actually I wasn't thinking in that extreme of fashion. It helps to allow the user of formula sheets. That would be a good first step in the right direction.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alan Haberman, Who Ushered In the Bar Code, Dies at 81 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/business/16haberman.html <comment><USER2> Interesting mention of UPC codes.</comment>


Advertisers using face recognition to watch people watching TV - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/02/13/bbc-ads-crowdemotion/ <comment><USER2> "Koyaanisqatsi" director Godfrey Reggio made a film using just the blank gazes of kids watching TV: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuI_nCADnW0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuI_nCADnW0)

When people talk about how kids are spending too much time on their smart phones or internet, at least it's interactive and participatory where as TV is a bizarre receptive one way experience.

<comment><USER3> But at least this was the BBC. If you are going to watch mindlessly then at least watch the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article is extremely slim on details, but it seems more like they are using the webcams of study participants to watch people watching TV, and using facial recognition to process the data. The headline on fortune seems to imply that they are somehow _secretly_ watching you.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article just seems to be a rehash of this BBC blog post (from 2014): [http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/worldwide/2014/labs- crowdem...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/worldwide/2014/labs-crowdemotion) The link gives a clearer idea of what's being done than the article does.

</comment><comment><USER6> _" By visiting this site, you agree that Site, Inc. may activate your computer's camera, identify you by facial recognition, record and analyze your facial expressions, and track your eye movements. We use this information to select ads which draw your attention."_

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't this technique against all privacy ethics/manners?</comment>