My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/dec/18/my-students-have-paid-9000-and-now-they-think-they-own-me <comment><USER2> This is definitely a consequence of charging ridiculous tuition prices. £9,000 is not much compared with US tuition prices, either. Students have become customers, and I think it's absolutely driving grade inflation. If I were paying $30,000+ per year for tuition, I also would feel like a customer. It's a natural reaction and a highly negative outcome for academia, where rigor and curiosity should be main drivers instead of A's-for-pays.

Anecdata from a professor I know: Students' parents also feel like customers, because they are often the ones paying the tuition. So they call the university and complain if their child gets a sub-par grade, citing the cost of tuition. Bad incentives all round.

MOOCs as they evolve will be part of the answer and probably could replace large lectures in a pre-college period before students get on campus. Maybe college should be shorter (2-3 years) and focus on small-group seminars that build on what students learned on their own via MOOCs. It could help lower costs to more reasonable levels. Of course universities will fight this tooth and nail because loss of revenue.

<comment><USER3> While the use of MOOCs to replace large lectures and focus on one-on-one and few-to-few interaction is eminently logical, this is something that's arguably been an option since the widespread availability of VCRs.

I'm not quite ready to pronounce the death of MOOCs in the transform college education as opposed to a new form of vocational training yet but IMO we're pretty close. Whatever impact they've had on overachievers who may or may not have had access to traditional higher education, they have failed to broadly change education in any way and the major VC-funded examples haven't succeeded financially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a clear misalignment in the actual goals of the three core groups in universities: Administrators, Professors, Students.

Administrators want to grow the school budget and increase prestige for themselves and the university. Professors want to do research and make an impact in their field, and to their peers. Students want to be able to get a job and have an interesting experience.

In _theory_ all three groups should have as a primary goal the expansion of the circle of knowledge [1] at some level. Administrators by providing a space for professors and students to do that, professors by partly focusing on students' needs and partly by having separate research periods and Students by expanding their own circles.

Reality is, it's all about money, just like everything else. Each group is trying to get the most of it so they can do what they want individually. Everyone is a customer in this scenario.

[1][http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in- pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

<comment><USER5> Excellent response. I went back to university for fun recently at a major research institution. I found that the administration wanted more money, and professors wanted to teach less and research more. Students bristled at the belief that a professors primary job is not to teach, but to research, while the administration continued to raise prices, and add pointless classes; do we REALLY need a 4 hour taught by a GTA lab twice a week on research methods in psychology?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at matching students with explainations of concepts.

If I just wanted a chance to learn, then I could go to the public library. However there are many explainations of the same concept, so in the interest of not wasting my time during the _most productive decade_ of my life, I go see a proffesional to explain things to me.

If teachers cannot be bothered to perform their sole function, then I will take my money elsewhere.

[edit] The attitude of teachers astounds me

> Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my > lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately > but imply that my low grade was their fault?

Of course it is the teacher's fault. Examine the facts:

1) The student did not understand the material at the beginnng of the term _otherwise the student would not be there in the first place_

2) The student then sought to correct this defficiency in their education by contracting a proffesional.

3) The teacher fails to significantly improve the student's understanding, despite many weeks of interaction with student (student fails exam)

4) Teacher blames student for failing to grasp their perfect explaination that works perfectly well for themselves.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding. And teachers wonder why society is only willing to pay them so little?

<comment><USER7> You seem to be confusing grade school and university.

The lecturers and professors you will find at university are not experts in pedagogy, and the vast majority will never have claimed they were. They are experts and leading _active_ researchers in their chosen field. They have devoted their professional life to studying and extending the state of the art of knowledge in their chosen field.

If you want to study a subject at university level, it's likely that some of the material that you would learn at university is _not yet in_ published books, because the only people who currently _know_ the material are the researchers at your university who just discovered it, and are trying hard to find the time to write a book on it, around furthering their research, writing papers for journals (which they need to do, and which books do not count towards) and giving however many classes of lectures a week that they've been told to get on with, without a vast amount of training.

In grade school, the material you will learn are basics of subjects that have been understood for a while, and written and refined in books some time ago. The material can be understood by people competent (but not necessarily expert) in the field, and can therefore be passed on, or spoon-fed, by people who are expert professional teachers. This is required in grade school, because students in grade school are not yet adults, and generally don't yet have enough self-discipline and self-awareness to put in the work now for later benefit without being shepherded the whole way.

When you get to university, it is presumed that you are mature enough to have the self-discipline and self-awareness to figure out partly for yourself how to learn from the people who are the most advanced in the world in your chosen field, rather than the best teachers.

That presumption seems to have worked out pretty well for modern universities for the last 500 years.

Maybe university is not actually the place you want to be.

<comment><USER6> I seem to have missed the part of university where we were learning things _not yet in published books_. If you think that undergraduates are reaching the cutting edge of research as part of their reguarly scheduled syllabus, I don't know what to say to correct this impression.

You seem to forget that not every university is Stanford, where there are true leading experts that students can engage with _beyond the context of class_. There is no global _university level_. The trope of students conducting cutting edge research as undergrads is based on a few outliers who are widely publisied. The experience for the vast majority of us down in the trenches however is limited to the simplified model of physics that is safe for undergrads. Basing your expectations for a university education on the behavior of the top %0.001 of students is like expeciting your minivan to handle as well as a Grand-Prix racecar.

My question to you is then "Why the hell did society decide to co-opt researches into passing on the information, rather than create a new class of specialists like society has done for every other field of human endevor?"

<comment><USER8> > I seem to have missed the part of university where we were learning things > not yet in published books.

You had an access to the teachers, who are all supposed to be active, well- connected, bleeding-edge researchers. You had a fair amount of their time allocated for you solely and more of that time for your class.

Now, it was 100% _your_ responsibility to extort all the bleeding edge knowledge from them, to loiter around their laboratories, to get a summer job as a lab assistant, and all that. This is what universities are for.

> like society has done for every other field of human endevor?

What? When did it happen, exactly? The master-apprentice model is still alive and kicking in _most_ of the professions. There are no alternatives to it. Dedicated pedagogues can teach you to read, write and count your fingers (on one hand). The rest must be passed on by the _real_ professionals.

<comment><USER9> > You had a fair amount of their time allocated for you solely and more of > that time for your class.

Talking (and not teaching) to 200 ppl over 2 hours is not time allocation to "me". That is something I could watch without the presence of the teacher. There is no added value in this case compared to any MOOC class.

University courses should follow the possibilities what technology has to offer and focus on really teaching. The rest can be watched at home.

> Now, it was 100% your responsibility to extort all the bleeding edge > knowledge from them.

Yes, 18 yrs old kids have the power and character to chase and force teachers without a backfire. You might be such character, but not everyone is such persuasive as you, yet they can be a great scientist.

<comment><USER8> > Talking (and not teaching) to 200 ppl over 2 hours is not time allocation to > "me".

I'm not talking about the lectures (they're useless unless most of the time is spent on Q&A). There is always a certain amount of time teachers must spend with their students individually, upon request. Smart students use that time, the others may not even know they've got a right to harass their teachers occasionally.

<comment><USER9> > There is always a certain amount of time teachers must spend with their > students

Not at my university, or at any university my friends attended. In many cases, you could just simply piss off the teachers asking tough questions or pointing to errors in their thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Each time I'm reading stories like these, I'm glad I avoided both sides of what's described here. Clueless students that takes everything for granted and will put the minimum amount of effort learning anything. And, the boring teacher who thinks classes are only an unimportant part of the mandatory stuff he has to do to continue doing what he likes.

Where I've been studying, they removed the teachers, the classes and the grades (kind of). Learning is stimulated by peers and projects; correction and 'exams' are done by a computer (no negotiations with "unjust" grades, you failed == you failed); classes are optional and you usually don't need them to succeed on the projects. In results, you get interested people in classes when you explain something, and if you do your job well, they won't come to bother you after that. And from the students' side, you get motivated teammates that won't complain and try to help each others when you are crashing on a crazy deadline on a Sunday night at 11:42pm.

Damn that was great. I wish it could be easily done with other fields and not only in software engineering.

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr: professor has a few bad experiences with students and, combining them with a choice anecdote from an unnamed colleague, proceeds to generalize to not only the (presumably) hundreds of students he has taught, but students, everywhere, in general.

Having been a student myself, I _could_ recount the time when a professor chose to replace her all twelve of her lectures with student presentations, then tested us on entirely untaught content; or perhaps the other time when submitted assignments and tests were not marked or discussed, at all, so that the only feedback was a numerical result at the end of the semester.

I _could_ choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt.

Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers.

What did the writer teach? I hope it is not statistics.

edit: that's some fast negative karma there. Those of you that downvoted, I would love to hear your thoughts.

<comment><USER12> Personally, I tend to downvote people who whine about karma. I can get enough of that crap on reddit.

Someone can disagree with you without having to get into an extended debate. That's why the voting buttons exist.

<comment><USER13> No, that is exactly and perfectly wrong. Downvoting because you disagree is against the rules. As a student I wholeheartedly agree - I have classes now where a tutor comes in, tosses a two page pdf with an assigment in Labview (which we were never taught or even got to use before) to do during class and ITS GRADED right after that class. He also throws a hissing fit every time anyone dares to ask him for help.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure you've brought this behavior up with the professor though, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lazy people everywhere. Lazy students who can't be bothered to do something as simple as an assignment and then complain about it. Lazy professors who repeat the same lectures for over a decade, don't give any feedback and don't give a fuck about what the pupils are learning. In my university we don't even get to see the corrected exam we handed in. We receive a numerical grade by email and that's it. I have no idea what that meant. It's disgusting... :(

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm doing my PhD in a Russell group British university. In one of our big group meetings someone asked about what was being done to encourage students to take theoretical CS courses, because after first year (when they're forced to take one) almost no students took them.

When someone suggested we "go ask the students" the Profs and Lecturers shot it down saying "they'd only lie". I did go ask some of the undergrads and the reasons almost universally that the prof who taught it in first year was a harsh marker, bad lecturer, and that it wasn't worth losing the credit points in years two onward when they could get a better grade elsewhere and come out with a better degree at the end of it.

The staff don't trust the students and the students want to make sure they get their money's worth; even if it means missing on some important stuff.

</comment><comment><USER17> Giving a German view on that, where tuition is free: In Germany imho sometimes the problem is that professors don't really care much about the teaching, because they actually want to do research and teaching is just an nuisance for them. But that it is kind of okay, because you don't pay anything and you can always skip classes, as attendance is not mandatory. So basically if you don't learn shit in that lecture just go to the library or study at home (or do bbq in the park if you can afford it).

Now, I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people pay a shitload of tuition. If the university has bad teaching, people don't go there and the university doesn't get money. I read somewhere that e. g. the MIT has a grades for their professors by the students and the professors get into trouble if their grades are bad.

So from my viewpoint, students have the right to demand good teaching if they pay money. But this doesn't give you a free ticket for a degree (if you just can pay money to get a degree, the degree is not worth anything). A degree comes with after you have a certain knowledge in a field (not fully accurate, but that's about it). Professors should have to care of their students. It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to just do research but their university makes money with it. If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for teaching, the system of the university is broken. This is imho the cases for many universities (I'm especially talking about all the research paper print factories which call themselves universities).

The article with the posters of the students is a typical example of getting problems wrong (by going to extremes).

<comment><USER14> Context: I attended a small (1500 students, no grad school), private (read: expensive), liberal arts college from 2004-2008 and dropped out. I finished my degree in 2014 at the same institution because I was so close it was pointless not to.

> _I was under the impression the problem of shitty professors / lectures, who > don't want to teach or are bad at it, was solved in the US because people > pay a shitload of tuition._

Some people pay a shitload of tuition, yes. It's somewhat like buying a car (in the US). Nobody pays sticker price. There is a _lot_ of very cheap money floating around (gov't loans, grants, scholarships), which is keeping the price artificially high.

The sticker price of my school was about $35k/yr, or $140,000 for a degree. I left in 2008 with about $22k in loans. The rest was grants and scholarships. I did well in HS but not so well that you would immediately think people would throw $120k at me for school. The important thing here is that _the school actually received the $140k_. They've got zero incentive to control costs.

> _If the university has bad teaching, people don 't go there and the > university doesn't get money._

This is true to an extent, but I had no instructional interaction with the professors prior to my first day of classes. I spoke to a few as a visiting HS senior, but even the professors were in sales mode at that point.

> _It might be just a small part of their workload and they actually want to > just do research but their university makes money with it._

It's misaligned incentives (mentioned in greater detail elsewhere in the comments here). The professors do not get any more money if all of their students understand the subject perfectly and go on to become professors themselves compared to if half the class fails. The only mitigating factor to this is some universities place promotion/review weight to student evaluations, but even then it's only an issue until one receives tenure.

My college was primarily a teaching college, and approximately 2/3 of the professor workload was teaching, grading, and related. Some of the larger survey classes would have a few TAs that would do reviews for smaller groups, but a TA leading a class was unheard of. There was no graduate school (they've since added a few Master's programs), so the TA's were just other undergrads who had gotten A's in the course in previous semesters.

> _If their university gives them too much workload and not enough time for > teaching, the system of the university is broken._

I don't think anyone will disagree with you here :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My lectures are designed to supplement learning that my students are expected to have done prior to class. The lectures are a summary of the material, with worked examples, a chance to ask questions to clear up misunderstandings, and for discussion of key concepts.

Lectures are attended by dozens of students, so they cannot be a personalized tutorial service. That's what office hours are for. My best students don't usually need office hours as they are pretty much self-taught, but the next tier down show up regularly and we sit down together and go through exactly the material they want to focus on in the detail they need.

I tailor my pedagogy to these engaged students, not to the ones who expect to be handed an A for a minimum amount of effort. If you don't work, you'll deservedly do very poorly, and I'm not willing to waste my limited resources on you. And, no, I'm not going to curve your grade up either, because that's not fair on the good students.

Unsurprisingly, poor students don't show up to office hours, don't take advantage of our free tutoring service, turn in material late, and regularly miss lectures. All these failings are entirely their own responsibility, not mine.

<comment><USER6> Then change the fee schedule to reflect this.

The problem I have is that your system does not serve 2/3rds of the customers. Your best students are _pretty much self-taught_ , so why do you charge them for all of the your time. The poor students do not show up either, so why are you charging them for your time as well?

I am not critizing your specific method of teaching, just your fee schedule. You admit that your services are basically useless to 2/3rds of the sutdents, yet you charge twice that of a personal tutor service _for each and every one of your students_. That is where the anger is coming from.

<comment><USER18> I don't admit anything of the sort; you came up with the 2/3 figure.

My best students _are_ pretty much self-taught _within the academic environment_ , which offers them a lot more than any series of MOOCs could.

Maybe around 1/4 of my freshman students shouldn't be in university, and most of these leave during their first year. I'd be happy if admissions standards were increased, as it would be better for all concerned if individuals lacking the necessary ability and motivation didn't waste everyone's time as well as their own money.

Once again, it is the responsibility of each potential student to determine whether they should accept a place at a university, not mine. As long as they're here, I'll give every student as much assistance as I can, but some of them can't or won't be helped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my > lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately > but imply that my low grade was their fault?

It's not surprising that students want to get a second opinion on grading.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03bqlht](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03bqlht)

> More than 90,000 GCSE and A-level results were changed after challenges to > grades awarded this summer - the highest on record.

> The figures represent an increase of 17% compared with last year.

> Results have a significant impact on both students and institutions, > affecting whether or not pupils gain a university place and where schools > appear in league tables.

(GCSE exams are taken in school by 16 year olds. A level exams are taken in schools or colleges by 18 year olds, and are what is used to get entry to university.)

EDIT: In 2013 there were 850,752 GCSE exams taken. So 90,000 incorrect grades is more than 10% - and these are just the exams that asked for a re-grade. When students have seen a serious error in their grades, or the grades of a friend, it's not surprising that they realise that just asking for a regrade could increase their marks.

</comment><comment><USER20> Its a sad state of this world where there is a price for everything but no value for anything.

I have had my share of teachers who proved that "those who cannot do, teach". I read that in Sweden, you have to be in the top 5 percentile if you want to qualify as a teacher. Plus a lot of teachers are so disconnected from the professional world that the student are confused when I come to work which I have experienced myself and seem over again as an "intern-trainer" at my work as a Software Developer.

Education has been so commercialized that some universities look more like a mall than a university. Cannot blame the students for expecting a degree after all the money they have paid. In a lot of collages, the entrance exam is just a scam.

This state is specially true in India where we are taught to respect in the order of "Mother, Father, Teacher, God". Even God deserves less respect than teacher. But there also, if you cannot find any job. Then the next option is teaching.

</comment><comment><USER8> The idiots do not realise they're paying for a _chance_ to learn, not for a _product_ to be delivered to them no matter what.

<comment><USER6> I would be happy to sell you a chance to eat, or a chance for medial care, or a chance for housing. Education is as necessary as a public utility. To charge any price for a _chance_ to learn while billing as a product (actually knowing things about the world) is a pure example of fraud.

<comment><USER21> Food can be guaranteed. Functionality of medical care doesn't often depend on the actions of the patient.

Learning can only happen with active studying. Nobody can push the knowledge into your brain. All you are offered is the _chance_ to learn, and no guarantees of graduating if you turn out to be incompetent at it.

<comment><USER22> > Functionality of medical care doesn't often depend on the actions of the > patient.

Actually, the functionality of medical care _does_ depend on the actions of the patient to do what the medical system instructs them to do. When a person doesn't follow doctor's orders, there is a high possibility that the person in need of medical care doesn't actually get the results they expect.

> All you are offered is the chance to learn, and no guarantees of graduating > if you turn out to be incompetent at it.

While I agree with your sentiment and the principle of what you're suggesting, most universities aren't packaging it like this. When you see the ads and you read their propaganda... er, I mean their pretty glossy brochures, they are selling it as exactly that: "Come to XU, get a degree in Y, our graduates have a 100% career placement success." "Get a degree in X, the best value in the country, no other University offers our graduation statistics." They might as well be a play by play from the consumer manipulation handbook. So I can't blame students for playing it both ways. I don't think students are stupid at all, I'm sure many of them know that they're not actually buying the degree, but they're all too well versed in how the media is being used to manipulate things to their own ends, and the student playing dumb to that manipulation and using it to their own ends is a classic example of using the University's own tactics against them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think she hit the nail on the head with this one. Students, especially my fellow Americans, seem to take university for granted. As a divine right, received not earned, and free from hard work, obligation, respect, and consequences.

</comment><comment><USER22> I can see both sides of this argument. On one hand, when you pay £9,000 for an education, you expect to get exactly that - an education, not someone pointing you towards a bunch of information that you could have found yourself with half a dozen Google searches and the wherewithal to do dig through yourself... for free. It brings to mind a quote from Good Will Hunting: "you dropped 150 grand on a fuckin' education you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library!" So I completely understand the mentality that when I pay you £9,000 for an education, I expect you to actively participate in educating me - doubly so when every student in that classroom is paying equally.

On the other hand, I disagree with the sentiment that students feel like they are buying a degree. At least from my perspective, the degree itself is largely meaningless. It's the education piece I'm after. I am buying education via access to a pre-vetted, qualified and educated mentor that I can go to with all questions I have regarding my understandings and misunderstandings. I can do the learning piece myself, but I can't ask YouTube and online course material questions if I don't understand it, or to clarify my understanding of it... and I expect that as long as I meet my obligation to work hard to understand the material you are presenting me with and submit the coursework required for the course, I _am_ indirectly buying that degree - and that withstanding, I _expect_ to get the degree that I not only shed blood, sweat and tears for, but also paid £9,000 for.

As a person, I also demand respect, not because I think the world owes me that, certainly not because I feel like I'm naturally entitled to it, but because I understand just as you do that we all have lives outside of the situation in which we interface. Sometimes those lives get in the way of our best intentions, some days trying to juggle those lives and get to work on time is all but impossible, and just as we are expected to afford respect to those around us, I expect the same affordance, no more, no less. So if my circumstances have prevented me from handing an assignment in on time, I expect some consideration for those circumstances, just as I am expected to afford the professor consideration for not attending class today because their real life prevented them from doing that, and you know what, given that I paid £9,000 to be in that classroom, I _do_ feel like some respect should be given to that.

As a lifelong student, watching the exponential increase in tuition fees and the attitudes of students towards educational systems _and vice versa_ , I find it hard to blame the student. The education system is broken, tuition fees keep going up, the quality of education remains mediocre at best, through no fault of the professors who work hard and get pittance compared to what the university makes off the students. The media constantly bangs the drum of entitlement and consumerism into everyone from an early age; and the media is really just a product of the society that we began building in the 1950's... Guess what? Consequences.

<comment><USER6> You express this better than I.

<comment><USER22> It's because I'm procrastinating because one of my tests is failing and I can't figure out how to fix it :P</comment></comment></comment>


Carbon-neutral fuel made from sunlight and air - <AUTHOR> https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/06/pr-solar-mini-refinery.html <comment><USER2> No matter how far batteries come, were always likely going to need some form of hydrocarbon fuel for industries like aviation. Exciting to see research done in this area! I wonder how the theoritia efficiency of a technology like this compares to the efficiency of using centralized production of electricity using wind and solar followed by centralized production of hydrocarbons in a reactor offsite? Especially if the hydrocarbons are produced from electricity right near the airport so that transport costs are for transporting electricity instead of the fuel?</comment>


Magic Paper - <AUTHOR> http://cognitivemedium.com/magic_paper/ <comment><USER2> > _An interesting project would be to create a single environment which can be > used for both education and research._

This does happen sometimes, by accident. I wrote Quirk [1] as an educational tool for learning about quantum circuits. But then I started finding it useful as a tool for optimizing circuits to use fewer gates, just by dragging things around and seeing what happens (there's still enough low-hanging fruit for that to be viable). The paper "Halving the cost of quantum addition" [2] only exists because of a "that's strange..." moment while I was messing around with a decomposition of the Toffoli gate in Quirk.

(I bet Michael Nielsen, the author of the linked article, gets a particular kick out of this example. He's also the co-author of the de-facto standard textbook for quantum computing.)

1: [http://algassert.com/quirk](http://algassert.com/quirk)

2: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.06648](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.06648)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is excellent! Not only is it a great concept and a well-written article ("reify" is my new favourite word), but it completely succeeds in its goal of teaching a non-trivial concept. I'm very excited to see where this goes.

I've followed the work of some others in this space (like Bret Victor) for quite a while, and inspired by what I've seen and read (and also by frustration in college courses and elsewhere) I've started prototyping a new way to do derivations. It's effectively only a mock-up in its current stage but as it fits in the "new media for thinking" category I thought I'd share it anyway:

[https://oisinmoran.com/projects/derivation.html](https://oisinmoran.com/projects/derivation.html)

If you want to work on or talk about this open source project I'd love to hear from you! (Email is in bio)

<comment><USER4> I guess you are working on purely symbolic thinking? I think the approach works best when it's just not equations being manipulated, but visualized instantiations of specific (and concrete) examples.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but I feel there is room for more than one approach. For something as specific as derivations--which tend to have a linear, step-by-step approach I think this makes sense. Similar to how different programming languages excel at different tasks I imagine different thinking media will also excel at different cognitive tasks.

There is also the terseness of mathematical notation to compete with--I can't think of a better way to replace the sum of something over the range 1 to 1000 than the current sigma notation, or even a for loop or some other construct like "sum(f(x), 1...1000)". I don't know if there is a good way to make something like a large summation visual but I am definitely open to any ideas. I wish that every mathematical concept or object could be visualised effectively but again I doubt this is the case with the hope of being proven wrong.

<comment><USER5> If your interest is future pedagogic utility in academia (funny etymology for pedagogue: 'leader of children') that's one thing. If your interest is in what can be called today the cognitive dynamics of creativity as experienced by highly creative individuals then who better than Albert Einstein to report on his experiences. In mathematician Jacques Hadamard's 'The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field' (Dover (1954),ISBN 0486201074, pp. 142-3) Einstein reports his creative cognitive processes in response to a questionnaire titled 'An inquiry into the working methods of mathematicians' as follows:

A) The words or language as they are written or spoken do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined...

B) The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associated play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

Or what might be called today visual/tactile qualial imagery manipulated in cognitive workspace (Baars). So yeah it would seem, 'a visual medium (can) be used to do serious mathematical exploration', at least as a lead-in to transcription from conceptual imagery to reporting.

<comment><USER3> This is an incredibly interesting comment! I think you've hit the nail on the head that this is better suited for pedagogy than for exploration. The extracts from the book are especially insightful and really something I had not considered before so thank you for that--I may just have to read the whole book (and it's by the same Hadamard of the Hadamard gate! It seems that anyone even slightly related to quantum computing has an interest in exploring and enhancing creative thought--that's 3 just in this thread).

I hope I didn't come across as suggesting that a visual medium couldn't be used to do serious mathematical exploration--I definitely think it can (and Strilanc's comment proves that it can). To clarify, I was more suggesting that it could be the case that not every mathematical concept is conducive to being explained or taught effectively using a visual medium, or even more loosely that in some cases a symbolic approach could be more effective than a visual one. However, I agree that for most concepts visual trumps symbolic and I currently have no concrete examples of the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For all Spanish speaking folks here in HN, I just learned that "reify" means "cosificar". And I just learned that "cosificar" is an actual Spanish word[1] !

1\. tr. Convertir algo abstracto en una cosa concreta.

2\. tr. Reducir a la condición de cosa a una persona.

[1] [http://dle.rae.es/?id=B58Iitz](http://dle.rae.es/?id=B58Iitz)

<comment><USER7> Reificar is also a spanish word :) the Real Academia does not register it but you can see its use going at least as back as Marx translations through [https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reificaci%C3%B3n](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reificaci%C3%B3n)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> to reify means to make an abstract concept concrete (reified abstract classes...) but it's interesting that reification is actually the name of a formal logical fallacy: "Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_\(fallacy\))

<comment><USER4> Reification of abstract concepts is an important technique in thinking. Few of us, if any, are pure abstract thinkers, and we will form examples in our head when presented with an abstraction (e.g. we will see an some kind of real apple when we hear the word apple).

<comment><USER9> seems to me to be related to 'ripe', because in german that's "reif", which in "ausgereifte idee" has almost the same meaning and it's probably from "Reifen" ('tire') cognate to ring, so _round_ or rather _whole_.

The semantic distinction between abstract and concrete idea is still virtual, though. The ripe apple you think about is still a virtual image. Or rather original, because even scientifically in e.g. biology, specific specimen are used as arch example to define clades and such. We care very much about relational structure, after all. An abstraction thus is something loosely or not at all connected to the currently favoured theory of the overall structure of life.

<comment><USER10> It's from Latin 'res' meaning 'thing'. If that's cognate to 'reif' I wouldn't know. I'd be happy with 'thingify' but that's at least less established. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bret Victor has done a lot of work on this, as well, and his paper Magic Ink[1] goes into a quite a bit of details. His work is referenced by Magic Paper, and like most things from Bret, it's probably worth looking at.

It's nice to see more stuff coming out of this.

1: [http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/](http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/)

<comment><USER12> This line of thinking goes back even further. Back to 1968 when GRAIL was developed:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhVQ1UG6aM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhVQ1UG6aM)

Pretty amazing stuff, even today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't have a lot to add the the discussion, but I am excited that some people are still working to find new and better ways to think, communicate, and iterate.

<comment><USER14> Me, too! Humans are very good at instinctively making decisions, so if you can present a problem in the simplest possible manner, intuition can take over and solve a problem much easier than when the problem is defined using, for instance, algebra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The proof looks similar to the proof that every continuous function can be integrated over a finite interval.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow this looks awesome. I think I might use this for some notes on topological quantum computing or something .

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm less and less into technology.

I really believe the matter is just human. We just need to take time to speak to each others peacefully. Instead we delegate to hurried teachers in potentially shamefull classes, or technology to do exercises..

<comment><USER18> I agree, technology has not been a significant help. Even being able to knock out quick test scripts in python has never been the pivotal issue. The real issue is understanding the material, and a human teacher who really understands what is going on and can ask the right motivating questions to spur the answer is most helpful. I've only encountered a handful of teachers like this, who can really get to the heart of something and not get lost in the weeds.

<comment><USER17> I'd add a few things:

We're humans, we like human relationships, sharing beauty/knowledge is part of that, that's why hurried teachers and classrooms are subpar, they turn it into a domination scheme (harsh words but I stand by them). On the other hand someone who shares the beauty he feels in a subject, his passion, will drive a pupil in the deepest of ways.

It will also remove some imaginary need for "school" to understand the world.

Lastly it will make people sense that sharing and exchanging is key. I'd like to see more of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The project will be more useful for education and research.</comment>


The bug that almost killed Google's Pac-Man doodle - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/pac-man-s-siren-call-4b589ea1d1e <comment><USER2> I did one of the code reviews for the Pac-Man doodle (and actually, the part I was responsible for reviewing focused specifically on sound, so this was kinda my bad). We had an early sneak-peak: Marcin was a UX designer for what was my 80% project at the time, so he'd passed it around the office looking for feedback.

One of the factors we'd identified in the post-mortem was actually the difference in Google culture vs. the rest of the world culture. When we heard strange whirring noises coming from nearby computers in the office, our first impulse was "Woah, that's really cool! We're seriously going to launch this on the home page? Can I help?" While at many other offices, if you hear strange whirring noises from an employee's computer, the reaction is "You're fired!"

Similar cultural mismatches have been responsible for a few other gaffes, eg. Google Buzz was a huge hit internally because pretty much everything inside Google is (was?) public anyway and people are very tolerant of different opinions, and it never occurred to us that people could be seriously harmed by others' knowing details of their lives.

<comment><USER3> > _it never occurred to us [Google] that people could be seriously harmed by > others ' knowing details of their lives._

This explains _so much_.

EDIT: A year ago I wrote this, and it seems I was right:

> _Google is self-selecting to employ those people who are fine with the idea > of Google recording everything they do. This does not bode well for the rest > of us._

([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8591417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8591417))

<comment><USER2> It actually was far worse in the past than it is now, both because Google management does learn from their mistakes and because Google is much bigger now and so they employ more people from marginalized backgrounds.

I'd say that peak "all your data are belong to us" was back in 2010, before the launch of Google Buzz and various location/wifi privacy flaps in Europe.

I would be more worried now about the same dynamic existing in every other startup that takes off. When a startup is on a break-out trajectory, it has its pick of applicants from a wide number of elite institutions. Most of them will never have experienced powerlessness or marginalization, because _that 's what it takes to get into a hot startup_. And so they generally won't be able to empathize with what it's like to have arbitrary fact X in your background taken and used against you in devastating ways, even if they do genuinely sympathize.

<comment><USER4> > I would be more worried now about the same dynamic existing in every other > startup that takes off. When a startup is on a break-out trajectory, it has > its pick of applicants from a wide number of elite institutions. Most of > them will never have experienced powerlessness or marginalization, because > that's what it takes to get into a hot startup. And so they generally won't > be able to empathize with what it's like to have arbitrary fact X in your > background taken and used against you in devastating ways, even if they do > genuinely sympathize.

That's not "what it takes to get into a hot startup"; it's a self-selecting property that people reinforce, consciously or otherwise. You can and should make a conscious effort to counter that bias, and leaving aside all the other reasons you might want to do so, you'll counter the monoculture that can lead to "let's build things people like us want" (which fails if it becomes "and almost nobody else does").

<comment><USER2> I don't disagree, but at the same time: who gets hired by hot startups is not something under my control, and they have legitimate reasons (mixed in with illegitimate ones) for preferring people with a solid track record and name- brand affiliations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am of the opinion that web sites should _never_ make noise automatically. Never, no matter what site. I often have my sound on without even realizing it. Nothing is more disturbing to me or those near me than me going to a site and having stuff come over the speaker. I almost always close the tab immediately. Please never autoplay anything.

<comment><USER6> You must never use youtube then? That seems to be a popular site

<comment><USER7> Even on youtube, autoplay is annoying.

<comment><USER8> Especially when you re-open some browser session and then one of those tabs happens to be a youtube one playing some video.

<comment><USER9> That shouldn't happen in Safari or Chrome anymore - videos don't autoplay until you actually open the tab for the first time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real problem was autoplaying the sound -- they should not have auto- enabled sound... if they were worried that users wouldn't know there was sound, they could have put in a prominent button to turn it on, but auto-sound sucks.

There are plenty of ways to trigger it accidentally, like loading Google, then walking away from your desk, or doing a google search in a presentation and pausing to talk about something.

I might expect an autoplaying video with sound at a news or social media site, but I certainly wouldn't expect it from Google.com

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember this day which was fairly close to when I was hired at Mozilla. What this looked like from the Mozilla side several bugs filed [1]. Support forums had hundreds of questions about this [2][3]. The data from input.mozilla.org is gone or archived offline, I recall that blowing up as well. I vaguely recall this doodle causing a graphics crash on a specific set of hardware as well (though maybe that was a different doodle).

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=567398%...](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=567398%2C567402%2C567406%2C567431%2C567445%2C567453%2C567456) [2] [https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ainput.moz...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ainput.mozilla.org%20pacman%20coolpreviews#hl=en&q=site:support.mozilla.org+pacman+coolpreviews) [3] [https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amozillazi...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Amozillazine.org%20pacman%20coolpreviews)

</comment><comment><USER12> I love these kinds of stories. They're like the programmer's version of a detective story, with the twist that you always somehow learn some weird obscure fact about people or the Internet:

\- A web browser plug-in loads Google's homepage in the background.

\- There's a weird standard to writing Polish characters with diacritics.

\- Some Windows systems carry around this decades-old bitmapped font.

I think it's similar to why I love those lists titled "X myths that programmers believe about Y". It's insane how varied the world is and how that comes out when we deal with as many domains as we do when programming.

<comment><USER13> Reminds me of the 500 mile email, my absolute favorite bug story: [http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

<comment><USER14> That's a classic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really don't like the last step of the post-mortem. "Who is to blame?" I much much prefer "how did the system fail?" We want engineers trying crazy things and hit bumpers when they, for example, autoplay sound. The alternative is being hesitant about trying crazy things.

I mean, yeah, personal responsibility, but google already has a preflight checklist with code reviews and tests and such. Treating it as a systemic feature protects a lot of stuff you want.

<comment><USER2> I was a little surprised he added that, because

1.) post-mortems at Google don't blame people, they blame processes, and then they suggest ways those processes could be fixed.

2.) I know Marcin personally and I've never known him to blame anyone either. And indeed, he didn't: the takeaway from the article was that the complexity of the web was at fault.

My best guess is that he included that because many _other_ organizations who do post-mortems, who he might want to reach with his writing, do think in terms of "Who is to blame?", and addressing it explicitly may be better than leaving it unanswered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Where did this title come from? Not only is it not the title of the post in question, but it's quite inaccurate -- the article doesn't even come close to claiming that anything "almost killed" the doodle.

With that said, I clicked the click-bait title, and I enjoyed the article. (shrug.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Computers should be seen, not heard unless explicitly instructed to do so by their users.

</comment><comment><USER17> this story is way too long for the amount of content.

tldr; google homepage pacman game auto played sound, and a browser extension in firefox was silently loading google.com.

<comment><USER18> That's sort of like saying that really, Sherlock Holmes stories are too long, and the Hound of the Baskervilles merely was painted with phosphorus.

Telling a story in an entertaining way isn't just listing the facts.

<comment><USER19> The actual "bug hunt" wasn't really touched upon though:

> I don't remember how exactly we figured it all out

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It was Google's fault. You should never play sound for a user automatically. I cringed when I read that before the article revealed the problem.

<comment><USER21> Indeed. I'm not really sure why the author went with "the complexity of the web" is the real culprit. It was google, and specifically this guy's team, that was at fault. They put auto-playing sound on one of the most popular webpages in the world, and as he noted, this page never made sound before.

The rest of the article was an interesting read, but not fully taking the blame seems wrong to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > The day I talked to my father for the last time

Was expecting some explaining of this bit, but it's the only time he mentions it. That is indeed a crazy day!

</comment><comment><USER23> That reminds me of this, which was even more insidious and probably caused more than a few unnecessary hardware replacements:

[http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f10/strange- mysteriou...](http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f10/strange-mysterious- two-random-scratch-sounds-intermittent-342048.html)

[http://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/windows-xp- computer-...](http://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/windows-xp-computer- makes-random-annoying-woosh-woosh-sound.619402/)

[http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/624611](http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/624611)

</comment><comment><USER24> > We initially brushed off these complaints — "tell them to just close the > Google homepage"

Yep, that sounds like Google support alright.

</comment><comment><USER25> Awesome essay! It looks like some version of the source code at least is available here: [https://github.com/macek/google_pacman](https://github.com/macek/google_pacman)

</comment><comment><USER26> An unrelated aside concerning the blog's author, Marcin Wichary. He's also a photographer, including a number of wonderful photos of historical computer equipment.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72157629963516...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/albums/72157629963516325)

When I read this blog post, I thought the name was familiar and was very pleased to be reminded of his good work in this area as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> I met Marcin at SXSW back in 2011 where he talked about this project (and other doodles). Some more info is here [http://searchengineland.com/behind- the-scenes-with-googles-d...](http://searchengineland.com/behind-the-scenes- with-googles-doodlers-68049). Also invited him to come speak at Microsoft to share more about his work (some interesting internal debates about a Googler coming to talk at MSFT ;)

<comment><USER27> Here's a video presentation from I/O that has more background on the doodle [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttavBa4giPc&hd=1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttavBa4giPc&hd=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The other fun part is that, back in 2010, I also had to reintroduce a bug > from the original Pac-Man code… but that's a whole different article.

Any idea what the bug was?

<comment><USER29> IIRC it was the bug that allows you to pass through ghosts. I vaguely recall learning about it because of something the author wrote when this was released. Apparently speedrunners and the like have memorized patterns that exploit this if you can play with perfect timing.

Explanation of the bug at [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossie...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3938/the_pacman_dossier.php?print=1), in the section "Just Passing Through".

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just sayin' that we see this as first of a series of amazing stories about bugs--ones that are so vexing, with fixes so illuminating, that telling the story casts light beyond the specific problem... If you got 'em, respond to this piece on the page!</comment>


An Explanation of Twitter's Poor Performance this Week - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/06/perfect-stormof-whales.html

<comment><USER2> _Our internal network wasn't appropriately being monitored._

After 4 years and how much investment?</comment>


HAKMEM (1972) - <AUTHOR> http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html <comment><USER2> I think there's a typo in HAKMEM: item 70 is a chess problem purportedly stolen from Lasker's _Chess for Fun, Chess for Blood_. As far as I can tell, it is problem 66 from Lasker's book, on page 145 [1]. However, there's a crucial mistake: the white bishop is supposed to be on QB8 (f8), not QB7 (f7). HAKMEM's version [3] is still a mate in 3 like advertised, but the original problem as Lasker has it [2] is _much_ more interesting.

[1] You can see it on Google Books [https://books.google.ca/books?id=y90UTQeLeeIC&pg=PA145](https://books.google.ca/books?id=y90UTQeLeeIC&pg=PA145)

[2] FEN for Lasker's version: 5B2/6P1/1p6/8/1N6/kP6/2K5/8 w - - 1 1

[3] FEN for HAKMEM's version: 8/5BP1/1p6/8/1N6/kP6/2K5/8 w - - 1 1

</comment><comment><USER3> People that write memos, articles, papers, blogs, or reports need to start off with a 2-sentence Wikipedia-style description of what it is that we're looking at:

 _HAKMEM, alternatively known as AI Memo 239, is a February 1972 "memo" (technical report) of the MIT AI Lab containing a wide variety of hacks, including useful and clever algorithms for mathematical computation, some number theory and schematic diagrams for hardware — in Guy L. Steele's words, "a bizarre and eclectic potpourri of technical trivia". Contributors included about two dozen members and associates of the AI Lab. The title of the report is short for "hacks memo"._ \-- Wikipedia

EDIT: I'm aware that further down the memo says, _" Here is some little known data which may be of interest to computer hackers."_ But that's not very helpful; hackers might be interested in a lot of things like cryptography, space flight, electronics, and typesetting, just looking at the HN front page.

<comment><USER4> Otherwise known as an "abstract". Arguably this document has one, but it's a few lines down behind what would in the printed original be on the inside front cover.

 _" Here is some little known data which may be of interest to computer hackers. The items and examples are so sketchy that to decipher them may require more sincerity and curiosity than a non-hacker can muster. Doubtless, little of this is new, but nowadays it's hard to tell. So we must be content to give you an insight, or save you some cycles, and to welcome further contributions of items, new or used."_

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Prior discussions: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=HAKMEM%20points%3E10&sort=byDa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=HAKMEM%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0).

<comment><USER6> Why cutoff at 10, Dang?

Let's try this again: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=HAKMEM&sort=byDate&dateRange=a...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=HAKMEM&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

<comment><USER5> I was trying to omit the threads with no comments. "> 4" would have been better.</comment></comment></comment>


Oliver Sacks - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/14/oliver-sacks <comment><USER2> The book referenced by Sacks - The Machine Sleeps - is positively, absolutely wonderful. It is, equally wonderfully, free for all, having been published in 1909: [http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)

To have so clearly seen the future (not ours, but the one ours portends) is truly, completely, and utterly remarkable. I cannot recommend it enough, and it is tantalising to me that Sacks devoted some of his last days to its exposition. To have had just a little more time...

Here is my favorite passage:

"Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. Oh, I have no remedy - or, at least, only one - to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes."

<comment><USER3> I think you mean "The Machine Stops". I just did a search for The Machine Sleeps and I got a bunch of white noise generators and a book about sleep apnea :-)

<comment><USER2> This is of course correct - I myself needed some sleep when writing the comment ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was a great article. One of the best since his passing. I've read The Machine Stops, many years ago in high school, but I'm going to read it again.

Here's the free epub over at goodreads:

[https://www.goodreads.com/ebooks/download/135676.The_Machine...](https://www.goodreads.com/ebooks/download/135676.The_Machine_Stops_and_Other_Stories)

</comment><comment><USER5> In the last few months there have been a couple of fantastic interviews with Sacks on the Radiolab podcast. They are easy to get, for anyone who wants to hear more. [http://www.radiolab.org/search/?q=Sacks](http://www.radiolab.org/search/?q=Sacks)

</comment><comment><USER6> One surpising side of Oliver Sacks that I discovered recently was that when he was hanging round Muscle Beach in the 60's, he had a 600lb squat. Brains and Brawn.

<comment><USER7> Not very likely. Do you have a source for this? For comparison, Bryce Harper, one of the strongest MLB players and a physical freak, squats 405. And that's with modern training and nutrition.

Also compare to the CURRENT world record squats for a man of Sacks' likely size in the 1960s, and you'll see how unlikely this is.

(Edit: I looked it up. Looks like Sacks did indeed set a CA state record with a 600-lb "power lift", which is slightly different from a squat, but certainly close enough. Mea culpa:

[http://nymag.com/news/features/oliver- sacks-2012-11/index2.h...](http://nymag.com/news/features/oliver- sacks-2012-11/index2.html)

)

<comment><USER6> This page mentions a Full Squat: [http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/05/01/2015/the-other- si...](http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/05/01/2015/the-other-side-of- oliver-sacks.html) I'd put the mention of a "power lift" down to journalists not understanding the difference between powerlifting and bodybuilding.

A 400lb squat is nothing special, btw. I'm a fat 44 year old and can manage 370lb or so.

Finally - young Oliver Sacks was a bit of a bad-ass: [http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00967/b6bcf...](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00967/b6bcf75a-4f4f-11e5-_967492c.jpg)

//edit//

Found a pic of the actual lift!! [http://flashbak.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/08/oliver-sachs....](http://flashbak.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/08/oliver-sachs.jpg)</comment></comment></comment>


Windows now open source - <AUTHOR> http://linuxtreat.blogspot.com/2008/07/windows-now-open-source.html

<comment><USER2> Misleading title. The article talks about Linux distros that look like Windows and ends with this: "Microsoft products will never go open source. The above list is some flavor of Linux distribution targeted at new users with Windows background."</comment>


The Myth of Executive Stress - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-myth-of-executive-str <comment><USER2> This article is bullshit. I have never in my life experienced anything more stressful than running my own software company and being responsible for making payroll.

<comment><USER3> > I have never in my life experienced anything more stressful than running my > own software company and being responsible for making payroll.

That statement, I think, says more about your background than anything else. Running your own company is stressful, sure. But compare it to a situation that is just as stressful where you don't have control. For me? High school was dramatically worse.

And that says a lot about my life experience. That I've never experienced anything worse than high school. I'm certain that anyone who has spent any time, say in jail has had it much worse.

Or what about those minimum wage service jobs? that's gotta be pretty bad. I remember the other day in taco bell listening to another customer berate the staff for misspelling his name. I can imagine feeling trapped in one of those jobs. That would be pretty bad. I've never had a job where I didn't feel like I could quit and have a better job within a week. This simply isn't the case for the vast majority of the population; if you work at taco bell, and you get fired? it could be quite some time before someone else gives you a chance. And what about your opportunities for advancement? For me to feel okay about myself, personally, I need to know that I'm 'making progress' \- even if you aren't a greedy jerk like me who measures himself with money, I can imagine that the prospect of supporting yourself and your family on near minimum wage- with little hope of improving that would be a lot more stressful than doing the same thing when you have reason to believe that you will be doing better in the future.

Or, what about the military? You can literally be shot for walking off the job. You're paid peanuts and can only change commanders with the permission of your superiors. Even before we talk about combat (which I'm not qualified to talk about.) that's gotta be pretty stressful.

Yeah, I'm not buying the idea that running a company can be rated 'very stressful' on the scale of general human experiences. You have a lot of control over your situation.

I do agree that it can be rated as 'very stressful' on the scale of upper- middle class experiences. But I think that people who run businesses? we are far less likely to fear getting fired. If you have what it takes to run a business, you probably have what it takes to sell yourself to a new employer. The same job is going to be less stressful for us than for most people because we don't fear getting fired like they do.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should I start with modern JS? - <AUTHOR> I've got a little experience with Python, and I like how the simplistic syntax works. I'm keen to  develop JS code, but I'm confused by the current JS ecosystem. Is it best to learn normal JS, or some compiles-to-JS language (like coffeescript etc). And is there anywhere I can learn about the apparently huge number of JS tools and workflows out there? <comment><USER2> Start with pure JS. No JQuery, no React, no Angular. Just pure JS.

Once you get a grip on what the language is capable of and how to use it, then you can understand how the frameworks work and why they save time / make life easier (or harder).

I once worked with a programmer that learned Laravel without actually learning PHP. That's great - he could jump into Laravel projects, but when it came time for him to help on anything custom or WP sites; he was completely lost. He also had no idea how or why Laravel worked; just that he memorized x snippets of code and they produced a result.

It'll make you a better programmer in the long run.

<comment><USER3> I'd add: no Node, no NPM. Learn the browser and it's tools. Avoid _all_ dependencies at first so that going forward, there will be a basis for determining if taking a dependency is worth the long term cost and the upfront cost of using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A good place to start is MDN (Mozilla Developer Network): [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/)

MDN Javascript resources: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript)

Before starting the tutorials, take some time to learn what's available in the Firefox developer tools. You won't need most of them at first, but knowing what's available will help as you gain experience.

The two developer tools you'll probably use most when leaning are the Scratchpad ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Scratchpad](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Scratchpad)) and Console ([https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Web_Console](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Web_Console))

[https://jsfiddle.net/](https://jsfiddle.net/) & [http://jshint.com/](http://jshint.com/) will also be very useful while learning JS

I haven't taken any but Udacity has some javascript courses ([https://www.udacity.com/courses/all](https://www.udacity.com/courses/all)), just tick the "Javascript" checkbox under "Technology" in the left menu

Some additional resources:

[https://developer.chrome.com/devtools](https://developer.chrome.com/devtools)

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/bg182326(v=vs.85)](https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/bg182326\(v=vs.85\))

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/d1et7k7c(v=vs.94).a...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/d1et7k7c\(v=vs.94\).aspx)

[http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/6.0/index.html](http://www.ecma- international.org/ecma-262/6.0/index.html)

[https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS](https://github.com/getify/You- Dont-Know-JS)

[https://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/b...](https://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/)

Dated but still worth watching:

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo36MrBfTk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo36MrBfTk4)

edit: added addl. resources</comment>


What Happens When You Try to Flirt with 100+ Women in Two Weeks in Amsterdam? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ndoherty.com/flirt/ <comment><USER2> Probably needless to say but this only works as long as you don't care about the person in front of you. If your expectations of a dating life consist of "getting lucky" with random hot strangers this is a good strategy because there is an endless supply of random hot strangers available. Of course, women adore confidence above many other traits; so the good news is you can train for it, but I think it's foolish to forget that this is a fundamentally empty experience.

I also believe if there is something most people have too much of, it's confidence and a disproportional sense of superiority. We waste a lot of effort trying to seem exceptional instead of trying to become more exceptional.

Nothing illustrates this as well as people who consider themselves hot. Dealing with people who think they're hot is a grating experience, even later on during the relationship. Is it really a good idea to work on making yourself more accessible to them?

<comment><AUTHOR> You shouldn't care about the person in front of you until they have proven their worth. "Hotness" is simply giving the women a chance to prove herself. If she does, then you can create a good connection. It doesn't have to end up as an empty experience. If she doesn't have a mind past that hotness, then walk away (or have an empty experience to learn). It would be wrong to say it's always empty.

Higher value is an overrated trait. It's definitely important but it isn't the end-all, be-all. Confidence/fun/etc. is.

"Hot" is subjective. Your hot could be average to me and vice versa. It depends on what your priorities are in a relationship. If you found a hot catch and you are willing to challenge other candidates, why not? That could be fun within itself. If you want a one night stand, that's you. If you want a long term relationship with a decent enough girl, that's cool too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nothing surprising here. Read anything else on being a pick up artist and you find the same results. What these sort of exercises ultimately achieve is confidence in approaching and _engaging_ with complete strangers in conversation--male or female, hot or ugly. Social skills that most of us don't "naturally" possess--nerd or otherwise.

We all know it works, it's just easier said than done for most people.

</comment><comment><USER4> Reminds of of HN frequenter Jason Shen's rejection therapy. It's all about getting over the initial reptilian fear, or resistance. Also see "Do The Work" by Steven Pressfield, dedicated fully to this "resistance".

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool experiment but I actually found his about page a lot more interesting and, perhaps, HN-appropriate: <http://www.ndoherty.com/about/></comment>


Gender-inclusive French is a 'mortal danger' to the language - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/27/gender-inclusive-french-mortal-danger-language-academie-francaise/ <comment><USER2> oh ffs [eyeroll]

the Academie is the most preposterous, most close-minded collection of people so behind the times I doubt they're aware that they are no longer a force of colonialism

<comment><USER3> Brute forcing an entire language to meet the PC brigades march of the day marks the decendency, rather than ascendency of empires. The east laughs at the west once more.</comment></comment>


DND-1 Source Code by Richard Garriott (1979) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://d2sx9mrt4zumaq.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/DND1_Complete.pdf

<comment><USER2> Very cool.

Isn't the challenge here, though, simply to write an interpreter/emulator for that exact version of BASIC, rather than actually "porting a game", as such? Given the requirements it seems like attempting to re-write the original code would be a non-starter compared with any emulated approach.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is explained at [https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=39149](https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=39149), which nkurz helpfully also posted [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617762](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7617762). I originally buried the latter as a dupe, but the posts, though closely related, are also really cool. So let's have them both.

Edit: A text version that loads faster and is more readable is at [https://gist.github.com/daeken/11123897](https://gist.github.com/daeken/11123897) (via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7618313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7618313)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I wasn't sure which was more interesting, so I posted both. Combining would be fine if you think that's more appropriate. Thanks for all the weeding and cultivating you've been doing!

If you happen to see this, I do have a couple questions about other recent posts. Could you pull back the curtain a bit on what happened to these two:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612301
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7611891

My guess is that the first was autokilled because of something in the title, and the second was 'supressed' because it's from the Register? Or is that vox.com is prohibited and the second was flagged for some other reason?

<comment><USER3> Vox.com was banned 4 years ago. I unbanned it yesterday (I think) when someone told me it's Ezra Klein's and Matt Yglesias' new thing. Hopefully it won't be the source of too many off-topic articles here.

Register.co.uk isn't banned, but it's penalized as a lightweight site for having been the source of countless fluff, linkbait, and trollery over the years.</comment></comment></comment>


Eric Schmidt talks about AI at MIT conference - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFgPGwH9Oec <comment><USER2> It's nice to hear him talk about demographic challenges and urban fertility. We are entering an idiocracy sort of situation in the Western democracies, as well as Asian countries including China, where the the people who will have the kinds of children who can perform these elite jobs aren't having children. He doesn't seem to take the step to imagine what that means for the wide swaths of people in the future.

</comment><comment><USER3> Eric is such a legend, he always has something smart to say

</comment><comment><USER4> Super interesting conversation. I wonder why Google bought and then resold Boston Robotics...</comment>


Funnel Plots and Publication Bias - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/8nc/funnel_plots_the_study_that_didnt_bark_or/

<comment><USER2> I participate in the same behavioral genetics seminar attended by Tom Bouchard and his colleagues

<http://www.psych.umn.edu/courses/fall10/psy8935/default.htm>

from the University of Minnesota Twin Study most weeks during the school year, in an effort to learn more about the latest research on human behavioral genetics. The larger lesson here is that most initial studies of genetic associations with ANYTHING of interest in human beings get a lot of press from their gee-whiz value. Human beings have a cognitive bias toward assuming that their differences with other human beings are a matter of nature rather than nurture, if the other person can be deemed to be inferior. (The fundamental attribution error in psychology

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error>

results in most human beings most of the time concluding that their own faults and foibles are an outcome of the press of circumstances, while the other person's faults are mostly an outcome of the other person being a bad person by nature.) In fact, what human genetic research has shown over and over and over again is that any one genetic influence (from any one gene) on human behavior is very small indeed, usually all but undetectable even in large sample sizes, and that many human characteristics thought to be highly controlled by genes (highly "heritiable") are exquisitely sensitive to environmental influences.

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20\(2011\)%20commentaryvariation.txt)

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer_darnimrod%20comm%20\(2011\).pdf)

[http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...](http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20\(2009\).pdf)

It will take a long time for the general public and people who mostly read blogs to get their information about science to catch up with what the professional research literature says on this point, especially because human cognitive biases run against understanding the facts on this issue. But if the research program continues thoughtfully, we may eventually have opportunity to form a more correct understanding of just how much and also how little influence genes have on human behavior.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is why clinical trial registries are so important. Unfortunately the last I heard they were a confusing mess, with many not actually providing the openness that was necessary for them to be effective.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about "publish or perish"? If you spend a year doing a study, then I'd say you're going to publish the results, particularly if a lack of publications is going to mean that you're denied tenure or promotion.

That doesn't square well with the data here.

One possible explanation (and I'm open to others) is that the data shown here are not necessarily representative, but were selected to illustrate a particular idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> This particular plot appears to show evidence of winner's curse rather than publication bias.</comment>


Ask HN: What makes a good educational robot? - <AUTHOR> What criteria makes a good educational robot?
- Wheels vs arms vs legs
- Visual vs text based programming - Gamified vs serious - At home vs at school<p>I am interested in practical experiences and feeling you had using them/watching kids use them. <comment><AUTHOR> I have used this one: [https://www.poppy-project.org/en/robots/poppy-ergo- jr](https://www.poppy-project.org/en/robots/poppy-ergo-jr) but not with kids around.

It is nice for makers as you get to build it and can modify its shape. It is a basic arm but with 6 motors you get more cool movement out of it. And it is controlled via a RPI and is all open source which I like.

But for kids I don't know if the age target is suitable, the project targets education [https://www.poppy-project.org/en/education/](https://www.poppy- project.org/en/education/) with visual programming and activities but I never tried..

</comment><comment><USER2> Start by asking what makes a good teacher. Then ask yourself which of those tasks can be done by a robot.

Teachers also have a pedagogical mission. They are supposed to teach social values. So you might want a robot with an AI good enough to analyse group behavior in real-time and intervene appropriately.</comment>


Ank HN: going paperless with android? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for an app with the following requirements:
- make photos of documents
- automatic OCR (output preferably a PDF, but image and txt would be OK, too)
- no cloud
- batch photographing multiple pages
- touch to focus for half-empty pages where the cam refuses to focus in the center.
---
So far I have found nothing good among the 13(!) apps I tested.
Cloud infested: Abby FineScanner (even though they sell a mobile sdk for ocr, their app doesn't use it), Adobe Scan, the Google thing, Ms Office Lense
And the rest has various faults:
- Bad OCR (only letter by letter, not language assisted, so loads of typos, especially for german (ß/B, u/ü)). Sadly within this bunch while otherwise my best candidate: Scanbot.
- weird focusing or flash
- auto capturing out of focus
- a manual straightening step (I'd even build a shoe-box rig for scanning if I have to)
- no flash vignette removal (can't be that hard and would improve the OCR a lot, though here again a shoe-box rig with led strips could work ) <comment><USER2> I have got Samsung Galaxy Tab S3. It comes with S pen stylus. My setup involves, OneNote, Xodo (pdf reader), Squid (note taking), S Note, Termux (terminal emulation), Firefox, Office Lense etc. OneNote is perfectfor taking notes and sharing them immediately with fellow classmates in pdf format or sharing the whole notebook. There are plethora of note taking apps available in android including native Samsung app, but I have found myself fixated with the OneNote because of the reliability and desktop version of the app. I dont use android in stand alone mode, I have windows non-touch laptop which I use for fixing my notes in desktop version of OneNote as android version of OneNote lacks many essential features.

I hate the inability to copy rich text or images to clipboard inside android, otherwise Tab S3 is good to go as a slate.

If you are thinking of buying an android tablet, make sure you get a good stylus for yourself, otherwise your transition to paperless will be painful. for example you can check the features like palm rejection, pressure sensitivity, battery life, tilt support etc.. Surface devices are hailed for surface pen, but when I use them I find the pen bit heavy and big.

You can use office lense to take photos of your previous notes.

That is all ,there is to android.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

I don't want to scan through office lense because of the cloud though :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if this is counter to what you want to do, but I would encourage you to consider investing in a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500. It'll help you go paperless, and they have iOS/Android apps that you can scan direct to your mobile device. You also have the option of scanning direct to $CLOUD (it supports multiple cloud ecosystems).

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hi! I use FineScanner a lot and it literally saves me during my study period. I scan all abstracts and textbooks to not carry them with me all the time (that's about OCR). It also works pretty well with multi-page docs :) Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Automatic OCR of what? The entire document?

What type of documents? No cloud because of a regulation?

Once you have the document what are you going to do with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> ORC from pictures of Snail-Mail and Bills.

No cloud because of personal preference.

I want OCR mainly for full-text search (so it does not have to be perfect or detect columns)

I want to put all my mail in a shoebox and only if I really need the original I want to dig through it again (hopefully I can estimate at which height in the box by the position of the files in their equivalent folder).</comment></comment>