Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It's Just So Darn Hard) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html <comment><USER2> I was an EE major in college at a good school and I can tell you that it is a long, hard grind. I never had a problem with the math/physics pre-reqs. In fact those were the fun classes.

It was the soph/jr/sr years where it was very difficult to tie what you are learning to anything real and concrete. The worst part is that you are being asked to remember facts/processes/patterns for a test, then you rarely have to go through them again. So you end up forgetting most of what you learned. Since you didn't know what it was used for in the real world, you end up forgetting about something you didn't even care for in the first place.

The courses I enjoyed, I really enjoyed. At a school on the quarters system, you end up taking about 50 total courses and I enjoyed < 10 of these. My junior year I built a 4-bit processor on a breadboard using discrete parts for everything but the control system (fpga). This was one of my best memories because I understood the real-world applications of a processor and I got to sit in a lab and build it myself.

It's a broken system. It's a long grind thats not effective at getting you up to speed as a professional or getting you interested in your career. Its also terribly inefficient at improving your problem solving and analytical thinking. It still improves your problem solving/analytical thinking through brute force and I think thats a necessary process, but there has to be a better way.

If there was a way to combine the rigors of academic courses (to improve analytic thinking/problem solving ability) with the hands-on experience of vocational learning, I would be all for that. It is more applicable to software than some of the more traditional engineering disciplines, but I think it could work for all of them.

(admittedly my situation was poor because I chose the wrong major. I was an EE who was taking all CE electives and I moved into software after I graduated)

As for not being able to graduate enough STEM majors, ffs let's drop the jingoism and bring in more foreign students.

<comment><USER3> _It was the soph/jr/sr years where it was very difficult to tie what you are learning to anything real and concrete. The worst part is that you are being asked to remember facts/processes/patterns for a test, then you rarely have to go through them again. So you end up forgetting most of what you learned. Since you didn't know what it was used for in the real world, you end up forgetting about something you didn't even care for in the first place._

SRS are your friend. Remember, you will forget everything you will ever know given sufficient time. It's best to exploit study technique that take into account spaced repetition. Your skills and all the things you learn are like a muscle, either you use it, or you lose it.

Right now, I have minuscule amount of haskell knowledge loaded, ready to use when I am ready to learn or code something in Haskell. Once I learn something, I add new stuff to my Haskell deck.

<comment><USER4> Can you (or someone else) recommend SRS for iOS? Ideally I'd use it while walking my dog, waiting for an elevator, etc.

<comment><USER5> Flashcards Deluxe by OrangeorApple is a great one, not only because of its great use of SRS and fantastic interface, but also because it has the massive and active Quizlet library behind it: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flashcards- deluxe/id307840670...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flashcards- deluxe/id307840670?mt=8)

I've used it to great success in a few classes in the last year. You really have to be dedicated in the first few weeks though, and not skip a day in your SRS routine. That first bit of grind really pays off down the line though, as you have to spend less and less time studying from then on. Skip though, and it'll come back to bite you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a simple solution: stop subsidizing useless degrees.

If someone wants to pay money to spend four years of their life studying Gender Studies or Semiotics then good luck to 'em, but make sure they're paying the full cost of their degree, preferably up-front. Underwater basket- weaving is a fine hobby for the idle rich.

I they want any aspect of their education subsidized, they should be studying something both useful and _hard_. Every university degree should include serious mathematical content.

What about the students who aren't good at mathematics? They're probably not benefiting from a university education anyway. Let 'em go get the low-level white-collar drudge jobs that they'd wind up in after graduation anyway, and let 'em do it at the age of eighteen and start building up some wealth rather than forcing 'em to wait 'til they're 22 with a net worth in the negative six figures.

This, of course, will never happen. But it's nice to think about.

<comment><USER7> Liberal arts degrees subsidize the hard science and engineering degrees since the per-credit-hour tuition is the same but the guy doing gender studies is way cheaper than the girl using the microbiology lab.

<comment><USER8> STEM degrees subsidize the liberal arts degrees by bringing in grants and research money.

<comment><USER9> This is generally not true; the overhead charges from grants and research money just about pay for the added cost of the (much) higher faculty salaries, travel, research equipment, and the increasingly onerous grant application and accounting/auditing/reporting processes, but not for undergraduate education. In fact it's usually prohibited to cross-subsidize education with research grants, and funding agencies are surprisingly strict about this, doing things like auditing whether computers bought on a grant are used in teaching a course (not allowed).

In many cases grant overhead doesn't even pay for the cost of research; only the top-tier research universities are particularly successful at pulling in enough, and big enough, grants to do that (see this from Georgia Tech's former Computer Science dean: [http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask- ten-su...](http://innovate-wwc.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure- fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/)).

The liberal arts, meanwhile, are so cheap to teach that in many cases they are actually _making money_ , i.e. their expenses are lower than tuition fees, and the remaining tuition is used to cross-subsidize science education: [http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows- humani...](http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humanities- really-155771.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's an odd cultural aspect to it that I'm not sure is entirely the same as difficulty per se. Among some programs, at least, there's an almost masochistic _love_ of all-nighters, long-as-hell problem sets, etc., etc., and if you're not into that culture, you'll probably feel like a foreigner.

Fortunately, where I went, that was common in engineering but not in CS, which had more of a "work smarter, not harder" attitude--- still quite a bit of work, and sometimes people pulled all-nighters, but there was a cultural difference in that people didn't see pulling all-nighters as a _good in itself_ , some sort of hazing-esque badge of pride, but just something that, unfortunately, sometimes happened due to too much work, poor planning, or procrastination.

That's a bit different from the actual difficulty of the material; you can study difficult material without that kind of culture, and in the other direction, it's quite possible to grind someone down with piles of work _even if_ they find the subject matter itself easy, depending on how you design courses and assignments.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm completely speculating, but I wonder if the bottleneck of math being hard is tied directly to how notoriously bad the standard of math in K-12 education is? I've always wondered how in the US the public school system is very weak (or at least people constantly complain about it being so) and yet they have some of the best technical colleges in the world (MIT, Stanford, Caltech, etc.) I've always wondered how students cope up with this big jump from high school to college.

<comment><USER11> I think that there is a very high variance in math education (and people) in public K-12 schools. My high school math consisted of advanced algebra, proof- based geometry, trig and a smattering of calculus. This seems to be typical for college-bound student across the country. I went to a second-tier technical university (CalPoly, San Luis Obispo) and I was well prepared for the typical first year physics and math classes. From what I can tell, the first-tier schools you cite have substantially similar first year math and science curriculum.

That said, I know people who went to the same school middle and high schools I went to, but who were never able to get past the introductory algebra class I took in 8'th grade. Sure, some people probably got better or worse teachers, but I believe some peoples brains are just better at math than others.

Then why does the US look so bad at math? I don't know. I suspect that both of these statements are true:

1\. Many countries have better alternate education paths for people who aren't that interested in college. People on these alternate paths are excluded from foreign statistics, while people who ought to be on them dilute US statistics.

2\. Doing poorly in school is more acceptable to Amercan parents than it is to parents in many other developed countries. (Ironically, this may be because a lack of alternate education paths led parents to becmoe disillusioned with the value of school)

<comment><USER12> We home educate our kids and I can tell you the differences in math ability between each child.

One of my daughters can hit anything thrown at her. My other daughter is more advanced than most kids her age at math, but I know that she has already learned more math than she will _ever_ use in her life (she is in eight grade but is doing very advanced algebra). Her interests will never lead her to a career that requires more than she already knows.

The problem is pushing everyone to one standard, when they do not need it. It makes them feel stupid, and is a waste of time that could be used developing other skills.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMHO, the tl;dr here is "math is hard." I do feel like math is the sticking point. At my school, it wasn't intro programming courses that weeded out so many CS students, it was sophomore level discrete math. That class had a 50+% failure rate.

Edited to add: I'd like to pose a question. I've always felt that math divided people into two classes -- those for whom it was mostly easy (or at least approachable) and fun and those for whom it was inherently unpleasant. As someone from the first group, it's hard for me to relate to some of the ideas in the article, such as making classes feel more socially relevant. To me, that seems superfluous. My question is, has anyone experienced these sorts of approaches directly, and how did they work for you?

<comment><USER14> The tl;dr I got was different. What I got was a.) that our society has focused too much on the stimulation of our dopamine pathways. b.) Many professors forget that the enthusiasm they posess for a subject is not self evident.

The hardness of STEM was orthogonal to this piece; the focus was on how pointless the seemingly unapplicable dry list of equations and facts were to many students. This made it hard to continue the perceived self flagellation to little gain. They gave an example of a smart kid with an 800 SAT score in math who quit to psychology because his mechanics class was dull in comparison to the more active psych class. They also mention that classes like english give better grades than chemistry and math so people switch cause they feel they are doing better.

Their prescription is more interesting and interactive classes. That is a good idea as long as the essence is not lost to fluff and education does not degenerate to an exercise in marketing I guess.

<comment><USER15> But if the more important problem is diminution of student capacity / capability for the work, better teaching helps only so much. Anecdata like "helicopter parenting" suggest more kids lack emotional preparation hard work and differentiating curricula. I certainly don't see any sign that K-12 has gotten _better_ at math preparation.

Then there is the premium attached to integration into social networks. Wall Street bankers are scarfing down large chunks of the national income, more from government guarantee of leverage than productivity. Prices are signalling to focus on placement in the social network, rather than on productive work; and once there, to get good at predicting / managing regulatory intervention. The interest in studies orienting people to the political and social milieu shouldn't be surprising. Especially when these offer less risk of marked out as a loser by poor grades.

There is a premium for government work, too. It's less remunerative, but more secure, and has very high status, in many circles. The effect carries over to nearby careers like law, and journalism. Median income, housing prices, and unemployment rates in greater Washington D.C. all suggest that the worldly payoff for public service isn't bad.

So I worry that we're training less capable people, and encouraging them to think more about where they work than how they work. It can't go on forever, but a lot of folks will get hurt as it ends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are a few things at play here.

There's "culture shock" of being comfortable within the high school world where there's a lot of busy work but it's easy to get an A in any class as long as you put in the hours and can memorize a few things, even if you don't honestly understand the material. And then getting tossed in the deep end of hard-science in college where you have to put in enough hours to actually understand the material, not just do the busy work. And you have to be able to learn in class and learn on your own as well, because there's quite a lot of material to go through. For some people this is like going from George Jetson's job to digging ditches, and it's too much to adjust to.

Relatedly, high schools have been doing a piss-poor job of actually instilling mastery of basic skills like math, reading, and writing so a lot of students will come into college at a disadvantage. When you have, realistically, about one or two years (if not more) of remedial education that you need to get through before you're able to grapple with the actual college level material then college because a lot more of a slog (and potentially a very much more expensive slog) than it might be otherwise. If you don't have calculus, trig, and technical critical reading and writing skills nailed by the time you start tackling chemistry, physics, biology, math, etc. in college you will be at a severe disadvantage.

And finally, as others have pointed out there's the grade inflation differential. When your class work tends to be things like homework problems, lab assignments, and in-class quizzes where answers are either right or wrong then your scores tend to be directly numeric. Grade inflation is a lot easier in "softer" classes where most of the scores are subjective. Though that can, of course, vary depending on the school, but the average certainly seems to be that way.

<comment><USER16> Followup: additionally I think there's the general problem that most undergraduate degree programs just aren't that good. It's a lot easier to concentrate on rote memorization and "covering" a lot of material than actually instilling a substantive knowledge of a complex technical subject. The difference is that college can easily afford to suck at providing a quality education or experience. In K-12 if the students aren't graduating the school stops receiving funding. At the college level the difference in revenue between a student who graduates and one who drops out after 2 years is less than 50% (because 100 and 200 level classes are typically cheaper to teach). And if the student merely switches majors, the school still makes money.

There's a catch-22 of sorts. If you got a bad education in HS and you get into a good technical college program you'll be in way over your head. If you get into a bad college program you'll be facing a lot of boring work with little meaning. The best case scenario is to win the lottery and have gone to a good HS and get into a good college. But even then you'll still have a crap ton of hard work in front of you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The math-science death march. Now that is a perfect name for it. It's exactly what I lived through and why I changed my major halfway through college from chemical biology to art and technology. Why, you might ask?

\- being pushed through a system that treats you like a number (In two years, I never met my advisor or received any guidance from faculty)

\- having your entire college career already planned out with no wiggle room or a chance to explore other interests (until the very last semester where there was one free elective)

\- professors who spoke English poorly

\- classes that were taught straight from books with no added knowledge or insight

And the list goes on and on. For all those who managed to make it through, more power to you. But it wasn't until I switched majors that I started enjoying the academic aspect of college.

<comment><USER18> I "made it through" with a double major (CS and math), but the issues you bring up in your post do not really describe my experience with either department (though when I was looking around at universities during high school, I did write off those that looked like they would have such problems -- #2 is the easiest to detect).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think this is BS. It's not that it's hard, it's that is too hard for what you get for it, in both money and social respect.

Actually even that is not correct.

It's harder compared to other things (Law, MBA, etc.) which can pay more and come with higher social respect, especially in America.

<comment><USER20> Law school is actually extremely hard, there is no grade inflation in law school, if anything grades are deflated because there area maximum number of As (and B's) given out (usually around 10-15% is the max for A/A- and 20% for B's) for each and every class. So you end up with a bunch of liberal arts majors who have never gotten a C and suddenly they're getting a whole heaping lot of them. They get complexes.

<comment><USER21> I'm just one data point, but I did spend one semester in law school (at Columbia) before taking a leave of absence (in good academic standing, B's in everything) and enrolling in a PhD in engineering (Berkeley).

Law school was not hard. At an elite school, it's very easy to get B's in your courses, which won't get you on law review, but will generally land you a job at a top firm from an elite school. Failure rates are astoundingly low. I would guess 97+% of the class gets a B or higher, and failing out is almost unheard of (again, at elite schools). Lower ranked schools, from what I've heard, do grade on the harsher scale you mentioned.

My PhD program at Berkeley, on the other hand, was a horror show of attrition and failure. It was so much more brutal than law school it's completely silly to compare the two. My dept at Berkeley said that 40% fail to get the PhD, but that's not counting people like me who were awarded masters degrees and so are considered to have achieved their degree goal. I'd guess that the failure rate is well above 50% - and keep in mind, this is for a very elite program that is extremely selective.

Graduate programs in math, science, and engineering are littered with the broken dreams of exceptionally smart people. It's exceptionally unusual for med, law, and mba students to fail out at elite programs. It's commonplace in top PhD programs.

<comment><USER20> I would agree with you for the most part. Top schools ("T14" for us law nerds and "the Top 14 law schools" for the lay people!) are fairly easy to get B's in given effort is extended, but A's are still hard to get. I don't know many T14 schools that have curved and capped classes. I wasn't in an extremely lower ranked school (top 30) but it was a hardcore school in terms of the curve. They've since relaxed a bit (now A's are capped around 18% I believe). I do know people that went to Boalt and got D's so it's possible but failing out is pretty unheard of in law school, period. Also the legal job market has shifted dramatically in the past 4 years so those B students at high ranked schools can't bank on an offer from a big firm based on the name of their school anymore--I know too many who are unemployed for that to be the case.

Funny thing is my husband did his UG in ME at Berkeley and that department ( and the College of Engineering in general) was a sheer nightmare. The unimaginable things that took place and the workload he endured (while working 20 hours at LBNL) blew my mind and that was just a BS. I can imagine a PhD would be insane.

But my point wasn't that one is harder, just that law is hard and it's not an easy thing to grasp because they ask you to learn and be tested in a way that is very non-traditional, at least in my experience. It makes babies out of people who thought of school as a cake walk. It was actually funny at times to see the emotional breakdown over their first B or C because they were so dramatic about it.

But I commend you on your choice to leave law school, probably smartest thing you ever did! ha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My undergrad took this to the extreme. Our lowest level math class was Calc 1 and to get into the class you had to either take Calc AB in High School or show up to school a couple months early and take it before Freshman year started. I knew people that would fail out of our engineering program and go to another and get a 4.0.

Me personally, I had to unlearn all the bad crap my Physics teacher in High School taught me. It took an entire semester to get back on track but was well worth the hard work.

You can see how much harder Engineering and the Sciences are, from my own experience I thought getting my MBA was a breeze compared to studying engineering. Nearly everyone else struggled and worked their asses off, they had zero preparation for all the math and logic problem you had to work through. The solution is to force EVERY major to take a few REAL math classes and REAL science course so people have a solid foundation.

<comment><USER23> Nobody wants to do engineering so your solution is to force them?

Maybe you should look into why nobody wants to do it. Like maybe the pay is too low compared to alternatives for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The title of this article is really misleading - it's not that "It's Just So Darn Hard" it's that the teaching of science grinds everything that's interesting about science out of the curriculum. That's the point that everyone in the actual article makes.

>> But as Mr. Moniz sat in his mechanics class in 2009, he realized he had already had enough. "I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering's all about the application, which they really didn't teach too well," he says. "It was just like, 'Do these practice problems, then you're on your own.' " >>

Engineers build things. So engineering education should have a heavy component of building things - that's what's exciting and motivating to engineering students. The theory should be in the service of the practice, and most classes get this completely backwards. So they lose students, and grump that kids don't want to work hard.

</comment><comment><USER25> Engineering is hard, if you are not that smart and cannot optimize problem solving. If you can't see the shortcuts (e.g. zero force members in Statics problems), it takes longer. I struggled.

This is how engineering education was explained to me:

1st year: Well-defined problems, well-defined answers

2nd year: Less-defined problems (labs)

3rd year: Harder problems where part of it is defining what the problem is, more labs

4th year: A vague problem like design a plant to process X and produce Y

I believe the purpose of engineering education is to teach you effective problem solving. Yes,

<comment><USER26> I may be biased, but I actually prefer the most elusive 4th year labs being done in 1st year, as the projects to be built are much more easier and it is way more rewarding when a teacher hands you a specification sheet and tells you how to use (for example) an AND and OR gate with absolutely no mention of the project.

You can truly call the creation your own, and if you really get stuck you can go talk with the very helpful teacher (or other students) and they will lead you into the right direction without directly giving the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The less support you have the harder it is. I have a graduate degree in engineering, and it was hard, but a lot of that came from having to face difficult challenges on my own. Classes are short, and the hours spent at home studying are long. Getting time with the professor is difficult, and his hours are limited.

We need to give students more support, don't let them stress out and drop out, we need to be there for them. Sitting at home for hours staring at a badly written text book is not productive and burns kids out.

Now how we do this... more teachers? higher costs? Can maybe technology be the key to lowering costs while increasing support? I'm interested in working on this problem.

<comment><USER26> My school has teachers in their office for most of the week willing to help you out with all the problems you have, and it certainly helps but it isn't enough to fix everything (15% of students who start the program I was in end up graduating)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I concur that this is a very significant issue. One of the things they did not mention was that the way the course loads are designed, it is very easy for a student to get burned out. For example, pre-med students often take, in their first semester of college, Biology, Chemistry, Calculus, and then usually some fine art to clear requirements. Its the same thing the next semester. Then you're onto physics, organic chemistry, higher level biology classes. These are all incredibly difficult courses that require hours and hours of reading, studying, and practicing. Many students get completely burned out and drop pre-med because of it.

<comment><USER29> If spending 30-60 hours/week on studies causes medical students to burn out, that's a good thing. It's much better for them to burn out during year 1 of (cheap) undergrad than in year 1 of (expensive) medical school.

<comment><USER28> I certainly agree. There is also a different kind of burnout that comes into effect. It is very hard to focus on all science, all of the time. So you get burned out because you can't spend your time learning or doing anything other than science (most of which is in no way interesting and is simply a requirement that you have to take).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It isn't that the math is too hard, it's that the students want to run before they learn to walk.

I'm a 17 year old in high school right now and having taken Calculus AB and BC (I and II) the teacher was constantly skipping material that I think was very important to have a general understanding of Calculus. Needless to say, I read the book to learn everything she was skipping, and I was also the only one who got a 5 on the AP exam. My classmates weren't stupid, they had just learned to solve very specific problems rather than actually learning Calculus. The very specific testing curricula hurt actual learning.

Another issue lies in the fact that (at least at my school) calculus and other high maths are seen as only for the very smartest kids. We need to change that. If students are required to have been exposed to calculus they won't be in as much shock when they get to college.

The availability of higher classes is a big problem as well. I was super lucky to find a public school program that allowed me to take classes with a community college, because otherwise there would have been no classes for me to take past sophomore year and Calculus I. I'm taking Multivariate Calculus next semester, and I doubt many high school students have this opportunity at all.

I realize that I'm in the minority here. Not many high school students have the opportunity to take Calculus III their senior year, and that really needs to change.

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks like the nytimes got scooped by the onion on this one... almost a decade ago

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-science- foundation...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/national-science-foundation- science-hard,1405/)

</comment><comment><USER31> "I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering's all about the application, which they really didn't teach too well" - Matthew Moniz from the article

He's absolutely right, and no first year design project is going to fix this if the rest of the degree is structured the same as before. I think the bigger problem is simply that university is the wrong way to teach engineering.

I graduated 10 years ago with an EE degree (power systems major) and have worked in the field since, so I'm going to pick on EE here. During my degree, I was mainly taught theoretical models of electrical systems, interspersed with contrived lab experiments.

Very few 18 year old kids are going to appreciate the standard equivalent circuit of a transformer or a synchronous machine, less so more abstract things like Fortescue's symmetrical components. Because no kid has ever had much of a chance to look at power transformers or machines in service. Sure, they've seen power lines, but how many have seriously looked closely at them? Or maybe even asked themselves why there are strange, ceramic looking things connected to them?

So the first time I saw a real synchronous machine was in a lab. But looking back, it was really a contrived situation, with everything looking like it came out of a Bob the Builder toy set, alligator clips and all. You would never see a machine hooked up like that in real life... but only work experience has taught me that.

When I graduated, I was clueless. And in the intervening years since, I came across countless graduates just as clueless as I was. It's almost surely a systemic problem. I only met one graduate who really had a clue, and it turned out that he was a qualified electrician before he did his degree.

Which brings me back to my point - IMHO the pure university system is the wrong approach to train engineers. Their premise is that you learn the theory first, then apply it in context after you graduate (with some lame attempts at "practical" teaching in between). This works for some, but I'd wager that for most, it's a waste of time and you'll end up having to learn it all twice.

I would prefer to see a hybrid apprenticeship - university system, similar to the way you train tradespeople, but with more coursework components. The work is aligned with the study (or at least the student-apprentice gets exposure to real environments) and modules don't necessarily have to be done in a set order. It could potentially even be set up on a competency basis (like Western Governors University).

I don't know if this scheme would work, but I sure know that universities conceived for training academic researchers do not do such a good job of training practicing engineers.

</comment><comment><USER32> I also think it's quite difficult for an 8th grader (I'll argue few develop a deep aptitude in math unless they start early) to understand why anything beyond basic math is important and worth learning. Further, I think we would be better off teaching the majority of students basic calculus and statistics in lieu of calculus. Get some stats and probability under your belt and you might even develop a clear motivation to learn calculus!

</comment><comment><USER33> A co-worker, Asian-born, says that she knows an awful lot of ABC (American- born Chinese) kids majoring in business. This I think is not uncommon for groups either getting to the states or making their way into the professional classes. One generation does the hard stuff to get a job that pays well; the next generation notices that a) the business school is easier, and b) the MBAs get to lay off the BSEEs and send their jobs offshore.

<comment><USER34> As an MBA I can tell you, that the degree is not as highly valued as it once was. A STEM degree is much valuable even is rolls that were once filled by business types (some finance rolls, operations, etc.)

A MBA is a relatively easy Masters, but I think it's relevance is rapidly fading.

<comment><USER35> I'm glad to hear this. I often wonder what skills an MBA might have that someone with a strong engineering background can't learn on the job.

<comment><USER34> There are plenty of "soft skills" and it is good to have some academic work done in management, ops, marketing, finance, etc. However, this does not necessarily mean that this knowledge & these skills can't be acquired either on the job or through proper mentoring.

I'm not bashing my degree necessarily, it's just that there are too many MBAs @ the moment. In the end, if you are interested in management you can do better by reading Drucker than attending management courses, or read Porter & Ansoff (side note: Igor Ansoff is great example of what I am babbling about) if you are interested in marketing, etc.

<comment><USER36> Be careful. I once thought that the MBA degree was worthless, too. However I recently found that a friend of mine is earning 30% more than me at the same job, same company, because she has an MBA and I chose to get an MS Economics. We were both hired directly out of grad school with comparable work experience.

Whether or not the MBA teaches you anything, businesses still believe it does.

<comment><USER34> Agreed and a good point. Not worthless, just not worth as much as it once was. Simple supply & demand, same problem w/ JDs at the moment.

Credentials still have market value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I looked at the graph, and it looked like only 2.4% of students are majoring in computer science. I would have thought that was much higher with all the buzz about social networks, startups and VC money falling from the skies. I guess I live in a bubble when it comes to that kind of news, at least to some extent.

I'm used to seeing students follow the money, like they did with engineering in the 1980's. I had to get a 3.5 GPA to get accepted to the EE program at my school. The school used GPA as it's valve to restrict students, which had it's drawbacks, but demand was so high for EE back then, they had to raise the GPA that high.

I also wonder if it isn't the calculus the keeps CS majors from completing, it's the recursion, pointers and such that really tied my brain in knots.

Likewise with EE, which was my major - I handled calculus, but eventually I ended up solving systems of equations with complex numbers and doing math beyond freshman calculus.

Of course, I gained problem solving skills that I use throughout my life and a career that's been great. I'm not sure how to better communicate those benefits to an 18-year-old in a way they'd understand.

<comment><USER38> Why would the legend of Facebook motivate someone to finish a degree in CS? Zuckerberg dropped out!

Steve Jobs dropped out, Bill Gates dropped out, I believe Steve Wozniak saved himself the trouble of dropping out by never going in the first place... Larry and Sergey have big-time CS degrees, but they also aren't as famous.

Let's assume (apparently falsely, according to Alexis Ohanian's anecdotes) that PG is universally famous among techie 18-year-olds. PG literally wrote important books in CS. But does PG encourage everyone who applies to YC to get their CS degree as a top priority? Methinks not. He wants you to build something. To the extent that studying engineering and math doesn't feel like building anything, it doesn't feel like a hot new SV startup.

There's a big demand for software talent, but how are teenagers supposed to grasp that getting a difficult CS degree is the best way to acquire or demonstrate that talent? Especially when we're not even very sure that's true? On the one hand, I've got a lot of Ph.D.-trained colleagues in my job (though, perhaps tellingly, none are in CS) but on the other hand several of our most valuable colleagues have degrees in music or English, and others are too young to have a degree at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The arrogance of a lot of the comments is depressing. What would you think if a Humanities major said that Math, Science, etc. were _easy_ because they were simply formalisms. Simply gather the inputs, put them through a fixed series of steps and receive your precious "objective answers". And remember a mere computer (and we all know they are simply stupid, passive machines) can solve math problems.

That position is a caricature - and completely wrongheaded, but it's not much worse than many of the statements here about Humanities. There is no simple move from "non-objective answer" to "easy", nor - even more - from "non- objective and many possible answers" to "anything goes random subjectivism". That's just sloppy thinking.

tl;dr If you find yourself comparing an entire academic field to a degree in basket weaving, you've gone off the rails.

</comment><comment><USER40> When the article says, "We're losing an alarming proportion of our nation's science talent once the students get to college", and the reason is they can't hack hard math, it seems to me we are not "losing our nation's science talent", because those students weren't part of the small number that are capable of original research to begin with.

A better question to ask would be to look into why those who ARE capable choose to do other things, like become Quants for Goldman Sachs.

Wringing hands over why those who were never capable to begin with give up isn't worth worrying about any more than we should worry about the clumsy overweight and weakling kids who didn't make it into the state football team when they got to college.

<comment><USER41> The problem may not be that you are losing those capable of original research (though I am sure that many of them _are_ lost), but that not all scientists need to be able to do that research. For each researcher, you need people capable of assisting, people in factories making the tools and reagents and measuring devices, etc.

These may be considered not as prestigious as research, but they are just as valuable nonetheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Great to see a reference to the WPI plan (my alma mater).

I think one of the advantages of an engineering school is that you are all in the same boat with needing to get through the tough classes (and maybe are less distracted by business majors with more time on their hands). I had a tightly nit group of friends who helped each other get through the harder classes like signals & systems, cryptography, etc.

WPI is quarter based so there is intense focus on each subject over a seven week period. If things go truly off the rails and you snowflake it is possible to recover (with semesters the concept of failing seems almost inconceivable).

</comment><comment><USER43> It could also be the pace at which the information is conveyed. The lovely information is dished out at such a fast pace that students who would like to absorb the info at a deeper and more intuitive level are left behind while the equation-memorizers win even though they would not be able to describe WHY something is so. Secondly, science has become so compartmentalized that students with a "big picture" view of what science can do get turned off by classes that start off by focusing on microscopic aspect of some part of science.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's probably telling that when I see the phrase "Science Majors" I don't consider Computer Science to be a part of that group.

Of course, the article also includes Engineering, etc.

I started as a physics major, changed to computer science after 3 years. Mostly because I knew physics would require a PhD to do anything interesting, and CS would just take a couple more years.

Math wasn't really a factor, but there was of course a lot less of it in CS, as compared to physics anyway.

</comment><comment><USER45> I disagree; I think the tl;dr is a combination of (1) Math is hard AND (2) Teaching methods and student support optional are optimized for a minor subset of the student population

Point 1 is fixed; for most people, math _is_ hard, and that's that. Regarding the second point, though, I imagine that there is a certain aspect of social engineering that could take place that would increase retention, without changing the curriculum at all.

</comment><comment><USER46> Yeah it's hard. Pre-med students dropped out of my physics classes because the lack of grade inflation (higher risk = higher reward though)

I think STEM degrees should actively be subsidized a bit more than other degrees, even at the cost of other degrees, at state universities for a few reasons. First and foremost, they're probably the most likely to be retaken, and secondly to increase the demand and attractiveness of a STEM degree.

</comment><comment><USER47> There's also the problem that it's made to be intentionally difficult. I know several very bright people that went to CalTech and transferred to "easier" schools like UCLA, Berkeley, and Brown. These were often students who were considered not only the top science/math students in their class in HS, but in some cases considered the top sci/math student the school had seen in years.

<comment><USER48> Rigor for the sake of reputation is completely unnecessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools"

I wonder if this is a visible effect of the fact that the most "prestigious" schools typically hire faculty solely on their research record and care not one whit about how good or interested they are at teaching...

</comment><comment><USER50> For CS, at least, the problem is that people arrive at college knowing nothing, and the solution is to make CS/programming part of the core curriculum in high school, alongside math and science (replace home economics or something).

How many English majors would there be if everyone matriculated into college illiterate?

<comment><USER51> this makes no sense. english majors aren't majoring in how to speak english, they are honing their reading analysis and craft of writing. cs students aren't majoring in how to write computer code, they are learning how to apply their mathematical skills cultivated throughout school.

<comment><USER50> That's almost exactly my point. Being an English major isn't about literacy, but literacy is a prerequisite. Being a CS major isn't about programming, but programming is a prerequisite. Literacy is taught from a young age; programming isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Maybe i am just weird,but i double majored in Math&Computer science primarily because it is easier to prove the teacher wrong.The arts are just too subjective to be sure the teacher is fair.

</comment><comment><USER53> Math isn't "too hard". It's about grade inflation. When my parents were in school, a 2.5 grade-point average was around the median, and 3.0 was good enough to get into graduate school.

Math and science courses still give real grades, with Bs and Cs for average work. Liberal arts classes have been inflated at most universities, to the point that getting a C is essentially failure. People get this perception that math is "harder" because of grading skew.

Also, with top employers refusing to look at resumes with GPAs below 3.5 (regardless of university, major, etc.) it makes sense that people would gravitate toward the "easier" majors.

<comment><USER54> I don't know that it's grade inflation.. I think it's the fear of being wrong.

Look at Moniz (in the article), he bailed on engineering and went to an English/Psych where the classes are "a lot more discussion based."

In math, there are right and wrong answers. In physics, there are right and wrong answers. In engineering - where math & science hit the real world - there are "best answers given the requirements" but it's a similar concept.

In English & Psychology, not so much. There are points of view, interpretations, theories, speculation, and working models, but there are very few "right answers" and lots of "reasonable interpretations."

<comment><USER55> > Look at Moniz (in the article), he bailed on engineering and went to an > English/Psych where the classes are "a lot more discussion based."

The impression that I got wasn't that he bailed for discussion courses because he was afraid of being wrong, but rather that the discussions in English classes at least gave him some outlet to feel like he was applying what he was learning.

There's a very weird death march of lectures for 2-3 years in some engineering programs during which you're expected to cram in a ton of knowledge but given zero opportunity to see how it will be applied in the real world. Compared with my own CS background it looks horrific; if I had been expected to spend my sophomore and junior years doing nothing but sit in lecture halls doing theory courses and "practical" courses in which I memorized syntax for programming languages, or facts about OpenGL, or the ISA of a MIPS CPU, etc without being allowed near a computer to actually build some kind of project using that knowledge, I'd have fucked off into Philosophy or English, too. At least it would have made time for me to make stabs at using what I was learning to _do philosophy_ instead of simply regurgitate facts. But luckily for my future employability, CS isn't so lost to bad pedagogy that it's thrown out most of its practical learning opportunities.

My primary take away from this piece, and talking to people who have burned out of physics and engineering programs, has been that a lot of said programs are simply structured in a way almost guaranteed to try the patience of a lot of otherwise bright people who just wanted to feel like they were making progress towards being able to accomplish something more than regurgitate facts on midterms.

<comment><USER56> Science / Math courses force you to very objectively face how good you are at the subject being taught. Fields which are more subjective leave your expertise as a much less defined concept and hence do not force the student to confront the limit of their abilities.

<comment><USER55> Sure, but that doesn't mean that everyone switching out of STEM courses "failed to measure up" or was "afraid of facts".

If I attempted to teach Computing Science to people by having them sit in 400 person lecture halls while I read K&R and CLRS at them for 4 years, any number of bright people who could succeed in comp sci would rightly get fed up with the uselessness of my shitty curriculum and drop out or switch majors. And yet a surprising number of Engineering curriculums are structured this way, because it's cheap and easy for the professors.

<comment><USER56> I recently started teaching technical subjects and here are some points from the other side of the classroom a) Every class has outliers on either side of the performance spectrum and teaching is a resource allocation problem on part of the teachers time on how to deliver maximal benefit to the students at large. b) The number of people who are simultaneously entertaining, inspiring and educational is very few. Look around you and shortlist the number of people whom you consider extremely knowledgeable about some subject, now remove from that list the number of people who have great people skills. Of course people skills can be improved over time but it takes real effort and time. c) As a teacher the best one can do while teaching challenging material is spend time in the first part of a lecture developing the motivation for getting students interested. Usually that leaves little time for interactivity in the latter part of the lesson. d) Classes where students ask no questions are very hard to make interesting. When this is happening your teacher is probably feeling like a comic doing an act where no one is laughing. Next time youre stuck in a class which seems overly dull try to help out your teacher by asking intelligent questions. e) In some challenging material there is simply not enough time to do it justice. In those cases the best a teacher can do is do a non interactive session where they do a brain dump hoping that students will be motivated enough to follow up with the material in their own time. f) There is also the philosophical question about who gets to teach - 1) someone who is at the pinnacle of their field and hence can earn a livelihood by teaching people so that they can contribute with original research. 2) someone who is a great educator.

g) I think truly great teachers occur with the same frequency as truly great comics because both fields have something in common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The secret is to make high school a lot HARDER. Not wanting to do a 'when I was young rant' but I learned the calculus at age 15-16 US grade 9-10. Then in our 'senior' high schools we only studied core subjects eg. maths+physics

Now I lecture to physics undergrads who have never been taught calculus. So not only do we have to teach them intro maths techniques but they have never really studied physics - they have been shown fun and interesting demonstrations and given a simple hand-waving 'explanation' - but without being able to follow the maths you can't explain it.

I'm sorry but the answer to fixing the science and engineering problem isn't more fun science games in high school, or pretty computer demos of experiments - it's concentrating on lots of hard boring maths earlier and earlier.

<comment><USER41> Why on earth would you want to make something HARDER when faced with a large group of people who already think it's too hard or non-relevant? It's not a weed-out contest.

I have an undergrad degree in EE. If someone could find a way to make today's undergrads learn the same material, but have a much easier time of it, why would anyone oppose that? Do I really need to feel bitter because I struggled but a whole new bunch of kids breeze through the material?

Sure, we don't want to waste time, but if the "fun science games" can lead to better understanding of the math behind it so much the better. I once used a weight hanging on a long string held up to my nose as an explanation of conservation of energy: "bet that this weight won't hit me in the face when I let it swing out and back?" "Why didn't it hit me?" "What can I change so it will smack me in the face?"

It's a "game," but they did learn something useful from it.

<comment><USER58> Math is to brain what lifting weights is to muscles. We teach math not because of some useful skills but to increase brain capacity. For the same reason languages used to be taught in the past. As same as with weight lifting it has to be hard to get results otherwise it's a waste of time.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: best php deployment setting - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
I am setting up a webserver with php + mysql, and was wondering which is the recommended web server these days.
Also, how realistic/stable is hip hop over wordpress? did some google searches, but didn't find much about it.
Thanks <comment><USER2> nginx+APC+WP-Super-Cache should be able to capably handle a non-trivial amount of traffic on relatively minimal hardware specs.</comment>


Color schemes for Sublime Text 2 and Textmate - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/daylerees/colour-schemes?hn

<comment><USER2> Nice themes! It's pretty cool to see all these screenshots and the background color leaking into the tabs... I'm the designer of the Sublime Text UI theme and Jon was adamant about making the tab background using the color of the theme background color. It was really, really hard (lots of PNGs and lots of switching between PNGs depending on the luminosity of the background color, lots of pixel tweaking) and it's not perfect for all luminosity values, but these screenshots make it look pretty snazzy :)

<comment><USER3> So, do you have any updates on ST2 development? The quiet has been going for too long :)

<comment><USER4> ST2 is out. Your ST1 licence should work with ST2 which is nice of them.

Not guarantees that's the case for ST3.

Oh and you could have been using the development builds for ST2 for quite some time, it worked quite nicely for me.

<comment><USER3> Sure, I mean there haven't been new releases for a while :) thanks anyway

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think these are all quite nice, however... am I the only person out there who likes comments to show up in a nice bright color (my preference, usually a bright terminal green). The faded comment look that most of these share is really hard for me to read.

<comment><USER6> I prefer faded comments, because some of my code is quite heavily commented. The code itself is what I always read, and I want it to jump out at me. The comments are background info, observations, sometimes wordy descriptions of why things are the way they are, and so on. If I've been away from the code for a while, I'll read the comments to help reestablish the context, refresh my memory of failed experiments, of shortcuts, optimizations, and so on. Most of the time, I don't need to read these comments, so having them faded into the background works for me in every way except for the briefer, more urgent type of comment that SHOULD jump out.

One thing I would like to have is an editor that responded to tags within comments (so it wouldn't be a part of the programming lang syntax, but just a convention used by the programmer) which would apply different colors to different types of comments. I would then use a faded color for wordy background info or comments needed by anyone proposing to change the code but not needed for reading the code, brighter colors for brief comments on the intent of a chunk of code (making the code easier to skim) and maybe a very bright color for WARNING, or FIXME, or STUB-ONLY, or TODO, etc.

<comment><USER7> I kinda disagree; if your comments, observations etc don't JUMP OUT AT YOU READ THIS THIS IS IMPORTANT!1one, they're not important, apparently. This also goes for other people's code, really. There is often a difference between code and comments, which causes people to read the code instead of the comments. However, one cause is that comments don't draw the attention because they're often in a dimmed, 'this is not important' color scheme - the other is that there's too much comments that don't add value to the code.

<comment><USER8> I found this thread fascinating. It seems the more heavily people comment, the less they care about reading comments all the time: <http://akkartik.name/blog/2012-11-24-18-10-36-soc>.

It's almost like there's a law of conservation at work. The law of conservation of human attention. Comments can be used either as background hum or as salient landmarks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really love the Tomorrow Theme - <https://github.com/chriskempson/tomorrow- theme>

<comment><USER10> Tomorrow (and base16, its next incarnation) are awesome. But there's one thing I like about Pastie more: the way it _highlights_ literal strings (and heredocs and herestrings)...

look at this image: [http://steverandytantra.com/gridfs/4fff15cc1c1cc6a0cb00000c-...](http://steverandytantra.com/gridfs/4fff15cc1c1cc6a0cb00000c-soda- theme.png)

<comment><USER11> You may be interested in "Made of Code" [http://madeofcode.com/posts/29-photo- my-new-textmate-theme-8...](http://madeofcode.com/posts/29-photo-my-new- textmate-theme-8220-made-of-code-8221-mdash-download-9-feb-2010-update-t)

Sample of Made of code theme in SL2: <http://d.not.mn/made_of_code_sample.png> (the code is [https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/swift/proxy/c...](https://github.com/openstack/swift/blob/master/swift/proxy/controllers/base.py#L602))

<comment><USER12> I have tried a couple of color scheme and for me Made Of Code is the best, by far!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Open Terminal...

      cd /Users/dan/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages
      git clone https://github.com/daylerees/colour-schemes

In Sublime -> Preferences -> Color Scheme

<comment><USER14> But this would require git, right? i use mercurial and don't have git installed.

<comment><USER7> Nobody's stopping you from installing Git alongside Mercurial; even if you're not going to use it on a day to day basis, things like sublime text themes and whatnots are easily installed with a git clone.

<comment><USER15> Yeah use the right tool for the job, and don't be afraid to try out others, even if you've already 'picked a stack' for your latest project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I use a very simple color scheme for Textmate. Basically black text on a light-yellowish background, with only string literals and comments in a subdued color. I have found that syntax highlighting with many colors distracts from the code. [http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/textmate- colorscheme...](http://www.michielovertoom.com/incoming/textmate- colorscheme.png)

</comment><comment><USER17> Hi all,

Dayle Rees here, glad you like my themes! If you do, please remember to star the repo! Also if you like some of the themes, but would prefer them slightly different, please let me know using the github issues feature and I will create an alternate version! Also taking requests the same way!

Thanks!

<comment><USER18> I like the colours, but the schemes are incomplete. Most egregiously, there is no colour setting for variables, which affects Ruby, where you want instance variables ("@foo") to be colorized.

The colorization for indent guides is much too high-contrast for me. I don't look at indent guides unless I am "lost" in a particular region of nesting.

Likewise, too much contrast for trailing spaces. Sure, I want to see when I am erroneously inserting trailing whitespace myself, but I often have to work on other people's files, and I don't such a file to light up like a Christmas tree when it's full of trailing spaces. (And usually I don't want to fix them, either. It's bad gitiquette to correct other people's bad tabs/trailing space unless you are intentionally creating a patch to fix those things.)

Screen shots comparing my current theme (modified version of Monokai) with yours: <http://i.imgur.com/dkcPh.png>, <http://i.imgur.com/WYubo.png>. (Notice subtle indent/space colorization, and variable colorization.)

<comment><USER19> +1 for instance variable colorization

<comment><USER18> This is my theme, if anyone is interested: <https://gist.github.com/4140677>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> By changing the general theme, the background color of the build panel won't change automatically (screenshot: <http://i.imgur.com/35N6Z.png>).

You can change the build panel's background color (in Ubuntu) by editing the ~/.config/sublime-text/\Packages\Theme - Default\Widget.sublime-settings file and replacing the current line in the file with

       "color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme - Default/<insert-your-current-theme>.tmTheme"

<comment><USER3> Also, if you get a messed up window when changing UI themes (happens in W7), two F11's (fullsreen) make it ok again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone know of a them for Sublime that looks exactly like Chrome?

<comment><USER22> This is the best theme I've found: <https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme>

<comment><USER21> Thanks!

<comment><USER3> For Chrome like tab styles, set "soda_classic_tabs": true in your user config.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The font color for comments is too close to the background color -- could use some more contrast. This goes for almost all of the included themes.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm a huge fan of Phoenix Theme and Color Schemes. <https://github.com/netatoo/phoenix-theme>

It's based off Soda Theme. Currently I'm using Tomorrow-Night Color Scheme, but I'm digging the Dark Green and Dark Blue too. You can also configure color of folders and tabs.

</comment><comment><USER25> At <http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/community> (package control website), there are tons of color schemes (just search for scheme) with their corresponding github repo (most of them with screenshots to preview).

</comment><comment><USER26> Something with less colors: [https://raw.github.com/mihaifm/Visual- Studio.tmTheme/master/...](https://raw.github.com/mihaifm/Visual- Studio.tmTheme/master/screen.png)

</comment><comment><USER27> Any vim ports?

<comment><USER28> You can convert any Textmate/ST2 theme to Vim using this tool: <http://coloration.sickill.net/>

I've used it myself, it works great.

<comment><USER29> That app does not seem to be working correctly ATM, but you can use the commandline tools for converting: <https://github.com/sickill/coloration>

<comment><USER30> Coloration is fantastic - the converted VIM versions of the schemes are in the repository now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Obligatory plug for my own Dogs colour scheme: <https://github.com/radiosilence/dogs-colour-scheme>

</comment><comment><USER32> Awesome selection I especially like the font!

There is plenty of themes listed here as well <http://textmatetheme.com/>

</comment><comment><USER33> Seems like this is now available in Sublime Package Control via the "Dayle Rees Color Schemes" package name.

</comment><comment><USER34> Install instructions would be helpful.

<comment><USER35> Install ST2 Package Manager (<http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control>)

Cmd+Shift+P -> "Install..." -> [name of theme] -> [enter] -> done.

(editted) Ugh, apparently these are not in the package manger. Call me lazy but I'm not going to clone these on all four of the machines I use ST2 on. (The "ugh" seems unappreciative, that was more due to my incorrect assumption; don't mean to sound ungrateful, a couple of these look very excellent.)

<comment><USER36> >I'm not going to clone these on all four of the machines I use ST2 on.

I use a portable version of Sublime 2 synced via Dropbox. It works pretty well. One copy of settings/themes/snippets.

<comment><USER3> Was getting too many conflicts moving from home to work, trying to sync only Packages/User with Git now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> sweet ...but every time I find a new favorite color scheme, it only lasts for a week max ...after this some part of my brain pulls me into changing back to my good ol' Visual Studio-like color scheme ...wonder if this happens to anyone else too

</comment><comment><USER38> Looking at these makes me want to write code again. Clean, elegant code. Weird.

<comment><USER39> Stranger yet, the code example is PHP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> i'm using carbonight now because i'm a boring person

</comment><comment><USER41> What is the font used in the screenshots?

<comment><USER42> The editor used in the screenshots is Sublime Text 2 on Mac OSX with the font Source Code Pro.

[http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code- pro....](http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2012/09/source-code-pro.html)

<comment><USER3> That font changes so much with "font_options": ["directwrite"], on and off - any idea which one is closer to the designer intentions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Gorgeous, many thanks!

</comment><comment><USER44> can you add the default theme from smultron/fraise??

</comment><comment><USER45> Very well balanced color palettes, beautiful. Thanks for this!

Does anyone know how to convert them to Xcode? I googled around but didn't find anything to get the job done.</comment>


An Insulin Index of Foods (1994) - <AUTHOR> https://fermatslibrary.com/s/an-insulin-index-of-foods-the-insulin-demand-generated-by-1000-kj-portions-of-common-foods#email-newsletter <comment><USER2> > However, some proteinand fat-rich foods (eggs, beef, fish, lentils, cheese, > cake, anddoughnuts) induced as much insulin secretion as did some > carbohydrate-rich foods (eg, beef was equal to brown rice andfish was equal > to grain bread).

what? that makes zero sense, at least in case with fat. anybody got quick explanation for this?

Edit: found the TLDR explanation in another part of the paper

> postprandial insulin responses are not always proportional to blood glucose > concentrations or to a meal's totalcarbohydrate content. Several > insulinotropic factors are knownto potentiate the stimulatory effect of > glucose and mediatepostprandial insulin secretion. These include fructose, > certainamino acids and fatty acids, and gastrointestinal hormones suchas > gastric inhibitory peptide, glucagon, and cholecystokiin(25, 26). Thus, > protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion despite > producing relatively small bloodglucose responses.

<comment><USER3> This actually makes a ton of sense and is what people on the sidelines of the insulin debate have been screaming since Gary Taubes starting publishing his work about dietary sugar. Unfortunately it's given people a very non-nuanced view of the science.

The problem is _not_ dietary sugar, it is blood sugar levels, which are elevated by many things (including protein and fat), but more than anything by excess calories. The problem is _not_ peak blood sugar levels, it is _average_ blood sugar levels.

Edit: to quickly reply to your TLDR edit:

> Thus, protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion > despite producing relatively small bloodglucose responses.

This is only true if you completely ignore everything else going on in the body. Gluconeogenesis is a thing, and just because dietary fat or protein doesn't immediately increase blood sugar levels does not mean long term they don't. This stuff can't just be looked at as "input/output" you have to take into consideration the existing state of the person before the input. /edit

You can reason about this fairly easily: take a caloric intake of 2000 calories consumed all at once vs in 10 meals over the day. The all at once crowd gets a huge insulin spike. Oh no! Fat storage, right? Sure, but what happens the rest of the day when there is no dietary input? Fat burn! The 10 meals/day crowd probably never gets as high blood sugar levels, but also has much higher throughout the day, and accesses fat stores less. But guess what? Net the body is really pretty good at smoothing this stuff out, it's sort of the entire point of fat storage.

Where this gets tricky is that high insulin can eventually lead to low blood sugar dips. People without diabetes can simply wait this out, and the body will start burning fat again and raise the blood sugar. But this also makes many people _feel_ hungry, and so they eat more, which raises their average blood sugar levels, and the cycle continues. Some people have a hard time with this, others do not, but it's really important to understand that the insulin is causing people to consume more calories which is causing damage, not the insulin itself.

<comment><USER4> Sorry for the dumb question, but given the total calories are the same, does this mean that it is generally healthier to eat one big meal per day rather than 10 small ones?

Given my current understanding from all the intermittent fasting hype lately, it is indeed better to eat big meals rarely rather than small meals frequently. For some reason, your post got me slightly confused because I lack the necessary knowledge to have a proper model about nutrition in place.

<comment><USER3> > Sorry for the dumb question, but given the total calories are the same, does > this mean that it is generally healthier to eat one big meal per day rather > than 10 small ones?

We can't answer this confidently, the way I would say it is: there isn't strong evidence to support the idea that either is better.

> Given my current understanding from all the intermittent fasting hype > lately, it is indeed better to eat big meals rarely rather than small meals > frequently. For some reason, your post got me slightly confused because I > lack the necessary knowledge to have a proper model about nutrition in > place.

The IF people (along with the Keto people) use a variety of tricks to try and prove their point. There is absolutely not a single paper showing calorically balanced food intake has different clinically significant outcomes. Period, full stop etc. There are tons of papers saying things like if you force people to eat in constrained windows they eat fewer calories (or if you force people to eat high fat diets they eat fewer calories etc.). Those are all useful outcomes: they are "compliance hacks." But they idea that any of these are significantly metabolically different is not at all supported by the science.

As for yourself: nutritional science is weak, and if the nutritional science says do something, and you observe a bad outcome in yourself from doing it, I'd take your own personal data over the nutritional science, frankly. For instance: fiber is a great modulator. If you go to a GI specialist and say "I'm having dietary issues," increasing fiber is usually the first thing they recommend. But also, sometimes that doesn't work and then the next thing is decreasing fiber (FODMAP diet). So it's really hard to make sweeping recommendations because the body is so complex and nutrition involves so many different cooperating systems that can all go slightly wrong.

<comment><USER5> >>But they idea that any of these are significantly metabolically different is not at all supported by the science.

This doesn't seem correct. IF has statistically significant benefits:

[https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting- sur...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising- update-2018062914156)

(Supporting papers linked at the end)

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry to just repost my paragraph from above, but I believe I already responded to this:

> The IF people (along with the Keto people) use a variety of tricks to try > and prove their point. _There is absolutely not a single paper showing > calorically balanced food intake has clinically significant outcomes._ > Period, full stop etc. There are tons of papers saying things like if you > force people to eat in constrained windows they eat fewer calories (or if > you force people to eat high fat diets they eat fewer calories etc.). Those > are all useful outcomes: they are "compliance hacks." But they idea that any > of these are significantly metabolically different is not at all supported > by the science.

1\. These papers do not show different outcomes with calorically controlled inputs, as I mentioned. One of the tricks used by the IF scientific community is to _serve_ the same number of calories and so it looks like the same number of calories were consumed in the abstract. They never are, because if this did happen it would have _massive_ implications for our understanding of the human body. It would require us to be wrong about a lot of things.

2\. There is a difference between statistical significance (which could be, but has not been, shown in calorically controlled diets), and clinical significance (which definitely has not been shown in calorically controlled diets, and likely will not).

<comment><USER6> > They never are, because if this did happen it would have massive > implications for our understanding of the human body. It would require us to > be wrong about a lot of things.

Yeah, welcome to medicine. If you've ever encountered these things in a non- theoretic perspective (i.e., having some condition), you quickly see that doctors don't know shit.

Perhaps not surprising, given that human experimentation is taboo.

Anyways, how does what you're saying mesh with the fact that extra glucose is stored in your body's reserves while ketones are secreted with urine and breath?

<comment><USER3> > Yeah, welcome to medicine. If you've ever encountered these things in a non- > theoretic perspective (i.e., having some condition), you quickly see that > doctors don't know shit.

That is, unfortunately, exactly why I am so acquainted with this stuff, and yeah, it is pretty frightening to have doctors tell you they just don't know. But to be fair, I'm talking about being wrong about fundamental biology, not medicine, in which massive shake ups like that are far rarer. It's also not like this stuff hasn't been studied.

> Anyways, how does what you're saying mesh with the fact that extra glucose > is stored in your body's reserves while ketones are secreted with urine and > breath?

Not sure what you mean but fwiw glucose is also secreted in urine and breath.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My wife had gestational diabetes. She had to mesure and log the values and her food. She is from the north of europe and I am from the south europe. Actually, her body gave permutated values between potatoes and pasta. In a same condition (starting G level, same plate, same quantities, same level of activity, same hour, etc), she could eat potatoes without issue, pasta (even whole wheat) was systematically making her GI skyrocket. It was the opposite for me. A tool to mesure your G level is very instructive.

<comment><USER8> So many people don't realize this. There is a lot more to it than just this sandwich has 200 carbs.

Each person is processing things differently. I'm hoping someday for a startup that makes it easy for me to track my insulin response for all my favorite foods so I can make better choices.

After testing on my own I found that the "sugar free Worthers candy" I was eating on my failing low carb diet, actually triggered the same change in my blood sugar as the non "sugar free" version of the candy. I guess this is because some artificial sweeteners act like REAL sugar for some people.

<comment><USER9> I found the same with the amount of sugar that's in a Splenda packet. Some of us are just very very sensitive to carbohydrates and live our whole lives without realizing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 2015 study finds that the glycemic index varies widely depending on the individual:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your- health/wp/2015/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your- health/wp/2015/11/20/the-diet-study-that-upends-everything-we-thought-we-knew- about-healthy-food/)

<comment><USER11> I don't see where that link says that? All I find is a remark about how GI isn't the be-all-end-all of weight loss.

Also, the GI would still be relevant even if it varies, because what you really want to know is the _relative_ GI, and the _ordering_ should at least be preserved across individuals, right? Like if watermelons have a much higher GI than nuts in the table, you're probably not going to find someone whose personal GI is higher for nuts than watermelon?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Link to the page with the article downloadable as a PDF: [https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/66/5/1264/4655967](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/66/5/1264/4655967)

(I _really_ _really_ hate web pages that take over a PDF, present a poorly- implemented crappy PDF reader experience and do not offer an easily-accessible "Download and read in a sane reader app" button)

<comment><USER13> Their PDF reader actually freezes Chrome on my phone. I was forced to kill it.

<comment><USER14> ...and Firefox on macOS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> By far the biggest contribution I've made to my health has been being aware of insulin responses, so this is awesome. People don't realise how optional that mid-afternoon slump is or how un-necessary erratic energy levels are.

<comment><USER16> I'd love to hear more about this. Could you expand on how you measure your insulin response and as a result how you avoid erratic energy levels?

<comment><USER17> There isn't an easy way to measure insulin levels today. For glucose one can use CGMs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The really crazy effect of insulin is how it interacts with aging. The link between insulin and aging is super well understood.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906894/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906894/)

If you're interested in the Ted talk version:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hi...](https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hint_of_longer_lives?language=en)

She now works at Calico, Google's longevity play. If there was one area I was going to do something besides agriculture this is what I would work on.

<comment><USER3> > The link between insulin and aging is super well understood.

This is really overstated. The paper is a paper on round worms, which is really one step above basic cellular science (which is important but only a building block of the whole picture). We do not have large scale, epidemiological studies about sugar, and the ones that we do don't point to sugar behaving differently than other calories with regards to health outcomes. The problem is _blood sugar_ not _dietary sugar,_ and it turns out high blood sugar can come from many places that are not dietary sugar, and a calorically controlled diet that is high in sugar does not result in high average blood sugar levels.

<comment><USER18> * Agreed on blood sugar vs. dietary sugar. * This paper launched a whole series of mouse studies.

<comment><USER3> If you have any that disambiguate between average and peak blood glucose levels I would be really interested in reading them! To my knowledge no one is really studying this because it is hard and if you are successful proving that knowledge we came up with in the 50s still holds isn't very attractive for most research institutes :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Why should you read this paper? Glucose and insulin are two of the most important elements of metabolism. In an oversimplified nutshell - when we consume food our blood glucose usually increases. Consequently, the pancreas secretes insulin which lowers the glucose levels back to normal. Insulin is a hormone and is often considered to be the principal regulator of fat storage in the body (this is a bit controversial, but is mostly considered correct. Read the book "Why we get fat" by Gary Taubes for more info). Therefore knowing how the foods we eat spike our insulin levels can be helpful in determining what should be eaten for weight loss."

</comment><comment><USER19> The glicemic index is basically a hoax that has nothing to do with reality simply because the glycemic response differs widely from person to person or even from one day to the next. Even more problematic is that it's getting used on food packages as a marketing gimmick.

I don't see how an insulin index could be very different.

If you care about the glycemic load, then stop eating refined carbs and sugar, it's that simple.

Note that fruits have insoluble fiber that delay digestion and feed your gut bacteria so fruits in their raw form are very different from sweets or even from fruit juice. So unless you're metabolically deranged, you shouldn't fear fruits, but you should fear fruit juice.

<comment><USER20> hmmm even if the response differs widely, wouldn't the index give an indication of the relative impact something would have? I've been reducing carbs and sugars, which aligns with lower GI foods, I don't really agree that its a hoax, it's helped me sustain energy levels throughout the day better.

<comment><USER19> No, it wouldn't be, because that relative impact also differs from person to person.

And it is more useful to just look at the carbs, sugars and fiber content.

Do you know how the glycemic index came to be? They used just 10 healthy people for the experiments. It's a hoax on the same level as homeopathy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From a physicians standpoint I am very impressed with the accuracy of the comments on this article. There are a few sticking points/arguable conjectures being made but overall an excellent discourse on a multifaceted topic such as insulin/glucose metabolism....

</comment><comment><USER22> While we're recommending food books, check this one out:

Why Calories Count by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim

[https://www.amazon.com/Why-Calories-Count-Politics- Californi...](https://www.amazon.com/Why-Calories-Count-Politics- California/dp/0520280059)

</comment><comment><USER23> I need to give this a good read.

My dad is diabetic and his doctor told him that cinnamon is good for blood sugar levels. It's not in this study though.

He was also told to avoid rice and potatoes. He manages quite well and the doctors are astonished at his low blood sugar measurements every day.

<comment><USER24> >> cinnamon is good for blood sugar levels

Medical errors are the third most common cause of death in the US. Let's just say this is strong evidence that not all doctors know how to do all that doctor-related stuff. Some of them just charge you through the nose and hope that you won't die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Fascinated to see that both white AND brown rice are more insulinogenic than white pasta.

That's one for the Mediterranean diet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Carbs cause diabetes. [https://www.diabetes.co.uk/reversing- diabetes.html](https://www.diabetes.co.uk/reversing-diabetes.html)

<comment><USER27> That's Type 2 diabetes, which is misnamed since it's a completely different than Type 1 which honestly affects more people.

<comment><USER26> [https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for- type1-diabetes.html](https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type1-diabetes.html)

You cant reverse type1 but if you cut carbs from your diet with type1 your diabetes stops being a problem.

Plus, type 1 is fairly rare. >90% of diabetes is type2.

<comment><USER27> > if you cut carbs from your diet with type1 your diabetes stops being a > problem.

Look up "dawn syndrome". Your body sometimes works against this idea.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What to do with 500M call recordings? - <AUTHOR> We have around 500 million call recordings with average duration of 1 minute in English/hindi and other languages spoken in India. Just wondering, what can we do with this huge dataset? What type of models can we create? <comment><USER3> I'd probably run it through some kind of sentiment analysis, try to get it to model as happiness/satisfaction on y-axis, vs time on x-axis.

Then you can map that to conversations and see what words increases or decreases satisfication. Look for sudden changes in the happiness contour.

You can also try to map that to customer surveys at the end of the call - <USER2> if you can improve perceived quality, by say, greeting them cheerfully early on, or if different phrases will diffuse anger better. Maybe even see if you can spot weird patterns, like if certain accents trigger anger or contempt.

</comment><comment><USER4> can they be transcribe via a free speech to text library?

Can you find a existing transcription service that you can up sell to clients?

use hat service to refine you dataaset

then you can build your own model. and cut out the service.

assuming you have it organized by client you could map it to industry. and then build an industry classifier.

run it through sentiment analysis, translation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Analyze them for quality purposes to improve whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing.

</comment><comment><USER6> Did the people consent to the recordings?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, all of these are business to consumer calls.

<comment><USER6> I'd be interested what the consent looks like. Did users agree to recording "for quality purposes" or specifically for to-be-defined-in-the-future data modeling?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ofcourse, for quality purposes.

<comment><USER7> Then you're kind of restricted by the consent they gave. They didn't give their consent for you to use them for any purpose that you could come up with; they gave their consent for _very specific_ purposes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I Burned 10M Dollars So You Don't Have To - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/reboot-leadership-resiliency/how-i-burned-10-million-dollars-so-you-dont-have-to-4e9e83754ce9 <comment><USER2> There must be something _wrong_ with the duplication detection, this same thing has been posted several times:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13090919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13090919)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13088897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13088897)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13106604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13106604)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13091219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13091219)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076597](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076597)

The URL link to medium.com appears differently ending in each of the above...

<comment><USER3> There are all different links:

      https://medium.com/reboot-leadership-resiliency/how-i-burned-10-million-dollars-so-you-dont-have-to-4e9e83754ce9#.f6ckizs5s

      https://medium.com/reboot-leadership-resiliency/how-i-burned-10-million-dollars-so-you-dont-have-to-4e9e83754ce9#.xp1acya7o

The last part of the url after the "#" symbol should be ignored for deduplication.

<comment><USER4> That wouldn't necessarily work for every site though. Some JS single-app routers default to using the # symbol as a routing delimiter instead of slashes.

<comment><USER5> JS single app routers is not the issue: these can opt for historyState instead.

The issue is normal HTML pages with anchors, and possibly with no JS.

This is a very normal age-old standard feature of web hyperlinking. It's not a weird new artifact of badly coded apps as someone commented below.

<comment><USER3> Care to explain why this is not a problem of bad anchor? I don't understand why that page should be giving unique anchored links to each user.

As far as I recall. Anchors belong to an HTML page, it should be okay to filter by the page and not each individual anchors within it.

<comment><USER5> I wasn't commenting on this particular example, just pointing out that for most caseses the use of anchors in the URL is normal and functional and not just a JS SPA thing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CEO of a Website - <AUTHOR> http://teespring.com/ceo-of-a-website

<comment><AUTHOR> It's 2010. The Social Network just came out in theaters and you're seeing it for the tenth time, no, eleventh time. Actually, you've lost count. It doesn't matter. You know the movie isn't about Mark Zuckerberg or whatever his name is. It's about you.

Fast forward to the present. You've maxed out your credit cards and convinced your parents to lend you money out of your little sister's college fund for your new startup. It's going to change the entire industry. What industry? You know, _the_ industry. You feel it in your bones. You were born for this job, and you need a shirt to let everyone know you're in charge.</comment>


New Dining Formats - <AUTHOR> https://intelligence.wundermanthompson.com/2020/05/new-dining-formats/ <comment><USER2> Seems great, but I see four foreseeable problems.

1) These greenhouses are enclosed spaces with reduced airflow compared to outside. We release respiratory droplets when we talk, cough, or sneeze, among other things. These respiratory droplets can remain in the air (if it is stagnant) for 8-14 minutes, according to one study. [1] Another study claims that SARS-CoV-2 was viable in droplets released 3 hours earlier. [2] There could be an unintended consequence here. Asymtompatic people will visit restaurants and could infect people who go inside the greenhouse after the infected person has left droplets carrying SARS-CoV-2 in the greenhouse which the next customers would inhale.

2) Many restaurants have limited frontage. Some with narrow pavements would struggle to fit any/very many of these greenhouses, especially in cities.

3) How much would these cost to make?

4) Have you sat in a greenhouse in the sun before?

Please prove me wrong. I'd love to see this work (and eat out again).

[1] [https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/12/2006874117?mod...](https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/12/2006874117?mod=article_inline)

[2] [https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2004973](https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2004973)</comment>


UN's Failed ERP program - lessons in BDUF - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/12/06/united-nations-failed-computer-system-highlights-bloat-that-defines-secretarys/

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.unumoja.net/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=5154429...](https://www.unumoja.net/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=51544298) At least they had a deploy stage</comment>


For NPCs and robots: Building character AI through machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/mit-media-lab/building-character-ai-through-machine-learning-7a3159dc4940 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, all. I'm the author of this Medium article. If anyone has feedback or questions, I'd be happy to take them here.</comment>


How we built a Super Nintendo out of a wireless keyboard (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.adafruit.com/2012/12/05/how-we-built-a-super-nintendo-out-of-a-wireless-keyboard-sifteo-sifteo/ <comment><USER2> I've been really into the nRF52832 lately, a newer chip from the same company as the nRF24LE1 mentioned in the article. It has BLE, and you can find dev boards with all of the IO pins exposed for $5 (sometimes $2.50 on sale) on AliExpress, or impossibly tiny ones with chip antennas (six fit on a dime!) for closer to $15.

I just realized that the ones I have sitting around have roughly 64x the RAM, 32x the storage, and are (VERY roughly, I had trouble finding compatible numbers) 2,000 times as powerful processors. There's so much more they could be doing!

<comment><USER3> That's funny to know every SD card have a MCU with performance of about 100 MHz on board.

<comment><USER4> It's amazing where you can find relatively powerful general purpose processors, and all the vulnerabilities that come with that reality. I like this article on the subject: [https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It wasn't a Super Nintendo, and it wasn't built out of a wireless keyboard. Quality title.

</comment><comment><USER6> The author of that article, Scanlime, is scary talented. They have a lot of videos up on YouTube that are a treat to watch.

<comment><USER7> Yep - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tQ- I_qFE0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tQ-I_qFE0c) is a good one, but you should also search for Coastermelt if you've never seen it before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It looks like the company sifteo was aquihired and the cubes software wad opensourced but the actual hardware is now scarce. Just reading this article makes me fascinated with the project and as I have a young daughter who would probably benefit from a tactile gaming system like this I wonder how feasible it would be to resume production of the cubes or even hand craft them from components. I didn't see open CAD files on the GitHub repo but I did notice a UK professor has compiled all of the software and games and modded it to work without their central server. I doubt I have the time to mess with this anytime soon but it seems like it would be a awesome project to restart as a maker/hobbyist initiative.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the heads-up. That actually makes me wonder whether it'd be worth resurrecting the hardware in some form, by building something compatible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> (2012) - Still cool though!</comment>